What is the best SEO way to categorize products on an ecommerce site

[Kuhliff]

What is the best way for SEO to set up categories for an ecommerce site selling beauty products.  I have currently built my product categories so that if a person looks under the hydration category they find our body lotion, but also if they look under the body section of products they also will find the same body lotion.  Is this a problem for SEO?  I think it helps the customer find the product.

[sarahwalsh]

When it comes to an E-commerce SEO, if you want to get on the first page of Bing or Google, the most important things is that you will need high-quality do-follow and no-follow back links.

Read the moz help section, to learn more about why links are important part of seo.

also when it comes to e-commerce SEO, make sure that all of the product descriptions are very well written, and white hat, so we mean by that is, don't use duplicated text, instead, write the product descriptions in a white hat way.

We worked for a business, which sells log cabins, we got that business on the first page by building quality backlinks

[MickEdwards]

.../category-green/some-product.html
.../category-brand/some-product.html
.../category-widget/some-product.html

.../some-product.html clean URL should exist and the canonical tag within the top three URLs should be pointing to this clean product URL. The 3 above can be crawled and indexed, but the canonical is assisting Google in understanding which is the correct product URL.  A product can rightly exist in multiple categories.

If the platform is such that a clean product URL is not possible (urghh!), then a strategy needs to be developed to choose one of the category/product URLs as the canonical.

My preference though is to have a category structure and all product links coming from those category pages are clean product URLs in the first place, with self referencing canonicals.

[Kuhliff]

Thank you for that answer.  If I understand you correctly, as long as the category is not in the URL path, then just make sure the category  is optimized and the product is in the right category.  You are suggesting it should not be a problem to have the same product in two categories using this method?  But if the category is in the product URL path, then it would not be good to  have a product in multiple categories, right?

[MickEdwards]

The way I prefer is to have multiple optimised categories that a product rightly sits in, but the actual product URL is clean with no category in the URL.  The page canonical is then self referencing.

If that is not possible and the product URL/s contains the category path, like on Shopify for example, then it is ok to have the product URL canonical set to the clean product URL without category structure.  But that only works if that clean URL actually exists (in Shopify it does).