E-Commerce Website Search Engine Optimisation
Tips for a happy e-commerce experience
Specialist SEO techniques for e-commerce websites
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of e-commerce websites is usually vital for gaining targetted traffic from search engines. Thankfully, your e-commerce website from Intelligent Retail has a degree of SEO already built in, which means you are already off to a flying start where getting results from Google, Yahoo and MSN is concerned.
Older e-commerce websites are difficult to optimise because the structure of these kinds of sites does not conform to basic SEO principles - this means that optimising the code to enable particular keyword phrases (for instance targetting a particular product) is difficult if not impossible with older forms of e-commerce software without a substantial amount of work on the base code of the website.
With up-to-date forms of e-commerce website software such as the Intelligent Retail 'Connect' system, the base software has been designed to display 'best practise' methods to allow each page to be individually optimised to target a set of relevant terms which reflect the on-page content. This is the basis of all good SEO.
Breakdown of requirements for good e-commerce SEO
There are several areas that e-commerce websites must excel at to bring high-volume, targetted traffic from organic search engine listings. A summary of these areas can be found below:
- The base structure of the website metadata should allow for optimisation
- There should be a base metadata policy which allows the inclusion of the product manufacturer, product type and product name.
- The homepage of the website should allow modification to page content to include relevant keyword rich content.
- Each product category page should allow the inclusion of keyword rich content as well as product category descriptions.
- Each product should have a unique, keyword rich description.
Fortunately, your Intelligent Retail 'Connect' website has all of these features already built-in, all you need to know is how to manipulate these features to best use for your website.
Website structure for best SEO effect
There is a basic premise in the world of Search Engine Optimisation which says 'Content is King'. This has always been the case, and is why the worldwide web was created in the first place... Originally 'the web' was a small number of computers networked together to allow sharing of ideas and good, relevant information by a team of scientists, and despite the advances in technology and commerce on the web, each website is still an information repository. Therefore, if you want your website to gain maximum traffic and sales, you have to present useful, enticing information for your visitors.
Without getting too technical, the search engine optimisation of e-commerce websites depends upon the technique of 'keyword funneling' from the homepage (or landing pages if these have been created) to the products via category pages. The more relevant content relating to products that the 'search engine spiders' can pick up along the way, the better.
If you want to make the biggest splash in the world of e-commerce, follow these simple steps for the best chance of success:
- Most people enjoy websites with appealing graphics and photos, but remember, search engines can only read plain text, and don't understand (or have any interest in) pictures... so if you have a homepage that is just one big graphic, sacrifice some of the look and get some readable text in there!
- Do you have a deep directory structure with many levels of categories and sub categories from the homepage? If you do, think about simplifying. Not only is having a deep directory structure frustrating for your website users, it will lead to more abandoned sales and is also very bad for search engines.
- Do you have many category pages with just pictures and nothing else? Place text on this page which is unique, keyword rich and interesting to your website users. This has a two-fold effect: adding relevant content is good for the search engines and also it is providing a 'keyword funnel' through to your products.
- Take a look at your products. Do they have relevant, well structured images? A big part of converting that website user into a buying customer is getting the right impression... if you have bad images then you are presenting a 'low quality' feel and your visitor will be less likely to buy. And remember... not everyone can view images, so make sure every image has an alt tag with a relevant description.
- Do your products have images but very little in the way of descriptive text? Product level text is probably one of the most important things to consider in converting your visitors to buyers. If the text is not presenting the right image, or if (even worse) you don't have any useful descriptive text for the products you sell, you are not only reducing the likelihood of a sale, but you are starving the search engines of sought after, focussed content for that product.
Metadata and why you need to use it
Metadata includes the code that was, many years ago, used to tell primitive search engines which page to return for a particular search. Although this metadata has been over the years eroded in importance (to the point that Google now more or less ignores the metakeywords tag because of over-zealous webmasters exploiting this tag), the metadata is still very important, not only because the metatags give the opportunity to present focussed content for each page, but also because metadata allows each page to be unique.
Of the metadata tags, the title tag is by far the most important, as this is still used by search engines to determine the relevance of content of that page to a search query. Make sure that this tag contains the keywords that your on-page content is targetting and then write the rest of your metadata to mirror this.
Luckily your Intelligent Retail 'Connect' system comes with a global metadata policy which allows you to set up each page for unique, content rich metadata (metatitle, metakeywords and metadescription) so that each set of metadata perfectly reflects page content.
Uniqueness of content and why you need it
Search engines love unique content. So much so, that if you are tempted to plaigarise or copy someone elses content from the web, not only will it probably get you sued, it will also have a very negative effect on your website, and therefore your sales!
Search engine algorithms (those ridiculously complex mathematical structures used to calculate placement in search results for websites, based on relevance) cover many aspects of both website (on-page) and environmental (off-page) variables, such as how many links a website has coming into it, and from where. Where on-page factors are concerned, uniqueness of content is without doubt the biggest factor in influencing search engine results placement.
If you want top results in Google, Yahoo and MSN therefore, you have to create unique, good quality content for each and every page, sub category and product page, with balanced, content rich copy which is not only well researched but well written. Creating this type of content is a skill which does not come easily to most, which is why you should contact a good SEO company such as Intelligent Retail who specialise in creating this sort of targetted content.
.... so that's basically it as far as optimising your e-commerce website is concerned, all you have to do now is promote your website. But that's another story!
