SEO for E-Commerce
-
Hello Guys, First of all, I wanna say that I just have some 1-2 years experience in SEO, I´m not a GURU or expert ok? So, take it easy... I have one costumer which wanna develop a E-COMMERCE focusing SEO and best pratices of web development. What care should I have? I mean the most important issues... From the coice of domain name to very specific point. What is the main mistakes SEO made at develop a E-COMMERCE? Thanks so much
-
Don't forget Google merchant center (the old google base)! It can easily increase sales by 30%.
-
Hey man,
sorry i didnt catch what u mean the front-end dev and designer, so far i knew they're different job positions and porpuses, no?
Our competitors all have the design of last century...
So, probably we're going to try something much more cooler than them.
thanks for your comm
-
Dont use a designer to design it, use a front end developer
Design everything to be modular, with the intention that every thing can be tested once live. Design to test.
-
Thanks for your explain.
It's a market niche ( dance products ). like, ballet slippers, some dance cloths... this kind of products to be sell only trough ecommerce.
About the platform, we're going to develop it from begining don't like the idea to use something available in the internet is better the make your own, regarding im in charge of the SEO not all the process...
Thanks fellow!
-
Hello, thanks for your answer buddy! I'm considering in develop some in-page nice stuff, such as consumer review, score (based in the consumer review) this kind of stuff... I belive might help well our rankings for those unique pages...
-
I worked for about 3 years in the mid 2000's on an ecommerce site with great SEO strengths. Enough can't be said about choosing the right ecommerce platform. There are quite a few to choose from, and choosing the wrong platform can create an uphill battle for SEO from the start. The platform we used was X-cart.. it was amazing and had a lot of features and add-ons that made SEO a breeze... the draw back is that it's very expensive. Magento IMO is a fantastic alternative to X-cart and fixes a lot of legacy issues that have crept up over time. If I were you, I would avoid zencart and oscommerce, but once again that is just my opinion.
As for straight up SEO tips
- organize URLs to display categories and products correctly.
- enable caching to speed up website load times
- dont forget the alt tags
- avoid dupe content issues (best advice would be to never copy and paste descriptions on anything, always rewrite)
- enable reviews
- send product feeds to amazon, google, etc.
a few other tips on usability
- imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Fortune 500 companies have amazing budgets to figure out how to sell products, check out their pages for inspiration.
- look at popular ecommerce sites online, see what they do right. amazon, tigerdirect, victorias secret, etc. You'll find that simple is often the best way
- make the buying decision easy. depending on your product, make the price and purchase button green. that may be my best tip for you.. we saw about 15% higher conversions just by changing those two things.
- respond and interact with your customers ASAP a la woot.com
hope this helps.
-
- Place user reviews on your site. This should help.
- Ad David said, do not use product description which is duplicate.
- Category pages should have content on them rather than just images and links.
- Titles of webpages should be keyword focused.
- Build as many deep links as possible.
- Have an XML sitemap generator and submit the sitemap file to Google.
-
Thanks David... great points about the product descriptions. You do have to get creative to stand out!
-
Nice one, John.
Also specific to e-commerce sites, often they have the same product description copied from the manufacturer as thousands of other sites. Unique product descriptions and UGC, such as ratings and reviews can help make product pages unique.
-
We have gone through this experience and lived to tell the tale;
1. Choose a domain name with keyword included. Your client is unlikely to become the next google or amazon, therefore domain name is important for two reasons; user understanding and SEO friendliness. A perfect example is overstock.com. So, if your client is selling riding jackets then get a url such as ridingjackets.com or ridingjacketsshop.com or a hyphenated version at least.This will make your SEO work easier and also increase ctr on organic results.
2. Choose an SEO friendly ecommerce platform. We chose osCommerce which although it has some SEO modules was a mistake and for more reasons than just SEO. Magento is probably the best choice.
3. Follow good onsite practice, relevant title tags, urls, meta descriptions (ex SEO guru Danny Dover's SEO Secrets explains most of this). Avoid Duplicate content and write as much original material as you can. Seomoz crawl diagnostics is perfect to keep you right on these issues. Write good meta descriptions. Perhaps avoid meta keywords
4. Submit to Directories
5. Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product..............................
-
You're in the right place for SEO help... most folks in here really want to be here, so no worries about ego bashing.
What are you planning on using for a platform to develop the site?
Tricky areas to watch out for on e-commerce sites include handling of duplicate content on category (list) type pages vs. actual product pages, particularly if they are nested and search result pages. You will definitely want to use your rel="canonical" tags.
As for the domain name, it's certainly helpful to include keywords, but it's not the end of the world if you don't. You're really developing a brand. Think of ebay or twitter even. Clearly, no keywords to be found.
If you're talking about the rest of the URL, then yes, make sure you work with a platform that has good SEO support: search-engine friendly URLs, meta title & meta description support, and a place to enter descriptions for your images at the very least.
That's a start... certainly ask if you have other questions!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does changing/shortening a url hurt SEO?
Hi all, I am in the process of making small optimization changes to my site. I noticed Moz identified quite a few URLs that could be shortened. I intend to shorten these URLs and create 301 redirects to ensure website users land on the right page. My question is, will this change in URL damage rankings and engagement(assuming the URL remains content relevant)? I have read in some places that when creating URL redirects for a change in domain, people saw a dip in rankings and engagement. I, however, am not intending to change the main domain of the site, but rather the URL slug. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | annegretwidmer0 -
Favicons - favicon.ico having any SEO Benefits?
Hi all, I was wondering about favicon.ico and it's presence on the website. Is it important to have favicon.ico and there any SEO benefit of it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | vendrocks0 -
SEO before products on ecommerce site
Our company plans to quickly launch an e-commerce site to sell religion themed banners (religionbanners.com). We'll have our products up on the site in about a week. Should I block Google from accessing the site during this period? Is there anything wrong with starting simple SEO tasks such as submitting the site map on Google Search Console prior to us having the products on the site?
On-Page Optimization | | art_litho0 -
How updating a post can influence seo
I have just read this great post from moz blog: http://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor But I haven't found nothing about updating post date. If I edit an old great post (now ranked 2nd after several months in 1st serp position) does it be better if I also update the date of the post in the wordpress post edit page? Thank you very much and sorry for my poor english. Bye, Dario.
On-Page Optimization | | Italianseolover0 -
Homepage SEO
Hi I have designed my site with about 10 pages which focus on my main keywords. My question is what should I do about the homepage? Do I focus on a keyword on just my brand name? The homepage is a showcase of all my services and a bit about us. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | TIG990 -
I'm planning the structure of a Car Parts e-commerce site and...
Hi all, As the title says, I am redeveloping a website for a client who sells car parts. The market is saturated with competition and 9 times out of 10, www.eurocarparts.com appears within the top 5 SERPS when searching for the same things that my clients' website sells. Now I know it will be very difficult to compete with the likes of these sites but given time (plenty of time) you never know so I have dissected Euro Car Parts website for many hours to look at their internal link structure and so my question is related to this area. My site only sells car parts for 4 car manufacturers. The left hand "shop" navigation menu will list the categories in which the shop sells products for e.g: Air Filters
On-Page Optimization | | yousayjump
Break Pads
Coilovers
Dampers
Suspension etc. When you view one of those pages, there will be a form to allow the user to filter down to their particular make/model of car etc. Now when I search for "Air Filters" in Google, the results come back as nearly 40 million. If I prefix that search term with a car manufacturer name i.e. "Audi Air Filters" the number drops down to 8 million - quite a difference!
So my thinking was to do the following but I wanted to see if you guys think I am barking up the wrong tree or if this is a good approach: Create pages for my 4 car manufacturers for each "shop category" listing all the products I have in those categories for the manufacturer along with well written unique, relevant content, ie:- Audi Air Filters
Audi Break Pads
Audi Coilovers
Audi Suspension ... this would allow me to target the slightly long-tailed version of "Air Filters" as I now have a page for "Audi Air Filters". This would then mean when users click the "Air Filters" link from my left hand category menu, I would need to ensure that those pages were not indexed by the search engines as they would essentially be showing the same subset of products but with the title of the page being "Air Filters". I hope I have explained myself enough for you to understand my question. Ultimately I want to know if my approach is a typical one when knowing that even attempting to target "air filters" with a new website is going to be a lost cause - I need to try and get some of the lower hanging fruit. Thank you for reading.0 -
Re-naming pages without affecting SEO
Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as: brand.com/page/pagename/number I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as: brand.com/pagename First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?
On-Page Optimization | | maxweb1 -
SEO Site Planning Tool?
Does anyone know of a good SEO Site planning tool? I see that SEOBOOK has something that looked interesting but they want $300/mo! Thanks in advance! Andy
On-Page Optimization | | MaxOtto0