The ideal SEO e-commerce site
-
Hi All,
I am currently writing a spec for moving our current e-commerce website and it got me thinking from an SEO perspective.
We are all usually restrained by the current website set-up / CMS and there are things it can never do despite how hard we push for the changes. If you had the chance to start from a blank canvas (like I do currently) what would be on your wishlist?
-
Stephen,
Can you offer recommendations on another solution?
-
I would be interested to hear peoples views on this also. We have a mid size product catalogue, about 5k products, which we are looking at transferring to Magento.
-
Magento is apparently very restrictive and pretty slow. OK if you want the out of the box functionality with a small catalogue, but tough if you want to do something different
Anyone else have a experience with Magento?
-
Yeah, definitely.
Another thing related to this is canonical url implementation - ideally you want a CMS that automatically adds these and, even better, gives you control if and when needed (such as canonicalising to a 'view all products' page for a category).
-Matt
-
Thanks Matt.
The URLs are a great example of something which is easy to do when switching to a new system so have the freedom to specific them but trying to change them on an existing site can sometimes prove a nightmare!
-
Some of the most important things:
- Product Feeds: Most of our sales come from Google shopping - forget this at your peril.
- Search engine friendly URLs (i.e. /blue-widget/ or /categories/widgets/ instead of ?productid=5 or ?catid=10)
- Make sure your CMS works for you - it should help you match the URL, Title Tag, alt tags, H1 and body content with the product targeted on that specific page)
- Social Media integration (a service like addthis will make that easy to implement)
- Ensure that pages load as quickly as possible - use as few js libraries as possible, combined css, etc)
- Not related to your cart but... Use a blog to post good, interesting content and then market it to other blog owners.
I'm sure there're loads more but that's a starter
Matt
-
We are speccing our new site based on Magento.
The main reason behind this is because we need full control but with the option of quickly bringing in external help for advanced developments.
Other than that I believe the SEO features are very strong and the results on sites built on it can be extremely good.
-
I read the other thread and am still wanting to know the community feeling on the best eCommerce platform. If you were to build a new site, what would you choose and why?
-
Hi,
Thanks for pointing me to your thread. I will have a read now.
-
Hello Man,
I already ask this a couple of weeks ago and some guys bring a cool tips about ecommerce SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-for-e-commerce
Hope it helps.
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
-
What do you use for test rendering your dev site?
I'm redesigning our company ecommerce site and need to test render an infinite scroller to ensure that it is as SEO friendly as possible. My problem is that I cannot view it in Webmaster Tools since I am blocking the site from crawlers using robots.txt. I know I could simply unblock Google temporarily but I really would rather not make my dev site available to search engine crawlers.
Web Design | | bearpaw0 -
Is having copy above the fold still beneficial for SEO
Many sites nowadays are approaching a section based approach with copy further down the page. Is it still valid to keep copy above the fold now for SEO. Will it impact on SEO if you have to scroll down the page?
Web Design | | vortexuk0 -
Thoughts on our Agency Site
Hi all, We'd all welcome opinions on our digital agency site http://www.newbrandvision.com/. We are in the planning stage of launching a new site; and we'd welcome any UX or SEO thoughts. It's a strange one but our agency has been around since 2002, and we operate in the heart of London; however we don't rank anywhere near the first page for "digital agency in London" or any long-tail /semantics around this. We feel that it's pretty clear from search and when landing on the site what we are; but would welcome any general thoughts as to why we aren't ranked that highly. Much appreciated!
Web Design | | Tangent0 -
Is this a good WP template for this site?
I need some advice, please. My cousin wants to take his site; http://www.gaport.com/ and move it to this wordpress theme http://themeforest.net/item/elvyre-retina-ready-html5-template/6639095. I have two reservations about this, but before I say anything I'd like the community's feedback, please. 1. It's a brand new theme. It's not even out for two weeks. That strikes me as a giant red flag. ** Just to clarify, i's not a new theme; it's new for WP. 2. It only costs $15. I can't tell what's wrong with this theme, but "you get what you paid for" is a cliche for a reason, and that price seems way too low for something quality. Are these legitimate concerns? Do you all have any recommendations for a theme that might suit him better? I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Optimizing a Wordpress Blog For SEO
Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog. In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.
Web Design | | GKLA0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0 -
How WP Themes work with Navigation Structure for SEO and JQuery Headers?
I am trying to find the best WP Theme for our company. I noticed most of them do not offer a left hand side navigation on the home pages, and usually are on the right side on the inside pages. I always thought that Home Page links were very important for SEO. Currenly we have a left drop down navigation with all of our product catagories, keyword optimized. The structure follows for all the pages. Is this not as important to Search Engines anymore? Is it better to have a products link, to all the products and then the inside pages, have just a navigation bar, for that particular catagory? This seems to be very common on all the templates i am seeing. I also noticed, and really like the JQueary Tabs. I would use this for displaying, PDFs and Specifications Charts. Also, some home page images are using a jquery slider with some text, linking to a page. Is Jquery the new javascript and do search engines see what is in the code? I also noticed they all have footers that have links and some other information. Is this a SEO must have?
Web Design | | hfranz0
