eCommerce SEO
The basics of eCommerce SEO are simple; :
eCommerce SEO 1. If this is a new store, register a keywords rich domain name.
Even if you are an established business and make widgets, consider something like www.WidgetsDirect.com for your store because that will help search engines to link you to widgets keywords and customers to remember you. This is not critical but small extra scores like this helps to keep you ahead of your competition.
eCommerce SEO 2. Use SE friendly file names for your products and categories.
The simplest way is to use category and product name in the URL. For example, instead of
http://www.YourStore.com/store/home.php?cat=32
use
http://www.YourStore.com/blue_widgets.html
This is a simple change in most modern e-commerce systems and does not require you to do anything – URLs will be automatically converted from a product or category name. Just make sure you enabled this feature in the store.
eCommerce SEO 3. The keyword phrase(s) in title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about.
Put the main one or two key phrases in your title tags and make sure these tags are different for each page. Always use the title tags which make sense for people – you want your link to be clicked or there is no point to be on top of the search results if people will see some rubbish and do not click. Use a free tool in your Google Webmaster account (you do have one, right?) to scan your store for the duplicate title tags.
eCommerce SEO 4. The other meta tags are Keywords and Description
You want to put some work into them as well. For example, Description tag is used by some search engines to display what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines, like Google, use a part of the description tag with part of the main body text around the keywords on your page. Keep the description tag short (25 to 30 words) and “descriptive”. Try to use your secondary keywords in your description tag.
eCommerce SEO 5. Watch your keyword density.
Each search engine has its own preference to how many times a keyword phrase should appear on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (to help the search engine to understand what the page is about). 5 to 8 per cent is a general guide for the optimal level. Don’t overdo it or it will be considered spam or keyword-stuffing.
Use your keywords in the tags H1 and H2 (for example for product or category title). This looks complicated but it’s not if you are using the right tools. For example, we can build you a custom report which will show you exactly how many time you need to use the specific keyword phrase in your page title, keywords, description, content and etc. Such monthly report is included with our VPS Enterprise package at no charge, just send us the URL and search phrase to test.
eCommerce SEO 6. Good linking is extremely important for SEO.
Search engines will score the importance of your web pages by the number and quality of the incoming links from other sites. Avoid link farms – this will only lower your score. Two fastest and the most economical ways to get quality backlinks are submitting informational articles and submitting videos related to your products. We already discussed this in the previous article so I hope you paid attention because this is the fastest way to the top of the search results.
eCommerce SEO 7. Include your most important key phrase in the anchor text of the links from the other sites.
This is crucial to search engines to figure out the relevance and importance of that link and your site. The inbound link from the other sites should look something like this:
<A HREF=”http://www.YourStore.com”>Your keyword phrase here</A>
Also work on getting reviews posted on your website.
Hope you found this information useful and let us know if you have any questions.
To your success!
Anton Pachkine
and your FinestShops team
TOOLS OF THE MONTH
Check your page size (at least for the home page). Some time ago Google included page speed result into the page ranking. Faster pages score better:
http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Check if your site has compression enabled – this can lover your page size and increase loading speed:
http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Memory Audio Program by David Farrow
Dave’s site looks a bit cheap for my taste (more like something from get-rich-quick universe) but it was recommended to me by a respected mentor and the program is excellent. Techniques are easy to use and my teenage son was able to remember some amazing things at school the next day after listening this program in the car. Highly recommended.
FINESTSHOPS NEWS
X-cart released a new version 4.4 with some major improvement in control panel design and usability, one page AJAX checkout, site map and Google site map. You can find more details about new version on this page: http://www.x-cart.com/news/xcart-440-released.html
Pinnacle released a new version 3.7.5 with some major improvement, including built-in product feeds to post all or selected products to eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google Product Search, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, NextTag, Goshopping and others and MailChimp integration.
If you want more information about switching or upgrading to a new version, please contact sales 1(800)675-0162 ext.1 or sales@finestshops.com
Please do them a favor – forward this article to them.
