Practical Ecommerce Web Marketing

This ecommerce SEO guide will help you avoid disaster when it comes to optimizing an online store for search engines. By doing one point a day, your site can be much more optimized within a month.

Ecommerce SEO can be an entirely different beast as search engines often don’t take kindly to online stores; even including “search engine optimized shopping carts.” There are many unique challenges both for the merchant and for the search engines. This article covers the most basic stuff, up to the more advanced stuff to consider for ecommerce search engine optimization.

For example, how do you label products, all of which are nearly the same, so that they are optimized, but do not look spammy to the search engines?It does not cover all aspects of search engine optimization such as how to find a good domain name, how to find the ideal keyword density, etc…. Not planning ahead, or not understanding some of these steps can lead to disastrous results. If you launch a site without TITLE tags, or TITLE tags that are all the same, and try to fix them later, you can still get stuck with poor rankings for a long, long, long time. And like always, feel free to see our glossary as needed.

In no particular order, here they are…

Sections

• Content is much too overlooked in ecommerce
• Dealing with lots of items without accidentally spamming
• Search engine accessibility (they are blind too)
• Technology challenges specific to ecommerce
• Linking factors
• Really cool things you may not have thought of
• +1 - This is where you come in

Content is much too overlooked in ecommerce

• 1. Rich content outside of your product/category pages
  CONTENT IS CRITICAL !!! I mention “rich content” on at several points in this list, and overall, it is probably your best bet to good rankings, so please take the time to create the highest quality content you can muster up. You probably will not want to depend completely on your product catalog for good rankings around your most important phrases. It is best to create an additional resource for your primary keywords. This may include articles or a blog that you write, with the goal of creating unique, authoritative, and compelling content. The more interesting and compelling, the more likely people will link to it from their website, thereby getting you better rankings. I always say “write the type and quality of content for your own website, that you would want to find yourself, if you were searching on the search engines.” No software in the world will automate the writing of good content for your online store. Most merchants I see are not doing this vital step. Perhaps because it requires the most creativity, ongoing work, time, requires that merchants really know their stuff, and requires them to be able to express it in writing acceptable to the majority of their site visitors. Create an awesome blog that covers your industry. Write articles and publish them on your site. Attract both search engines as well as real visitors. Hire someone if you must, but get your content up as if your website’s life depends on it.
• 2. Never use generic manufacturer info for product descriptions
  This can be a real killer for many ecommerce sites. The problem is that your product page would then appear nearly identical to that of your competitors or manufacturer’s, and Google for example, hates duplicate content, so it will choose to only index one website. Chances of your site disappearing from the search engines, or at least those pages, are quite high. You may include manufacturer info, but you will need to add significant content to make it unique, including the TITLE tag if you can. How much different you ask? I would say, shoot for at least half. Some of this can be accomplished through things such as adding customer reviews to each product. This leads me on to the next point.
• 3. Content that can drive long-tail traffic
  This may include the manufacturer’s name, product specifications, how the product may be used, dimensions, product manuals and brochures (even in PDF format if that’s all you have), model numbers, SKU’s, UPC codes, serial numbers, etc… I discovered that simply listing another dimension to a piece of clothing really helped a few more people find that clothing in their size, via the search engines. I also have seen one of my sites which had really great rankings start to spike by an additional 10% in traffic per month for a few months after I got the roughly 75 product database indexed (previously it was not indexed).
  
• 4. Avoid products/categories devoid of content
  I estimate that at least half of new websites that I see get created get created with products and categories that have too little content—more than a sentence or two. And definitely do not overlook your category pages. Try to aim for a couple hundred words as a bare minimum, otherwise search engines may not index that page. If you have a page with little content, then search engines see little value in this. Humans visiting your site may also find it difficult to make an informed purchasing decision as well. A recent study by Forrester showed that the number one complaint from shoppers in making a purchase decision was lack of product information, so think about real people too when adding content.
  
• 5. Include the keyword multiple times in the product/category description
  Not only do you need content for your product/category pages, but you need to use the key phrase in the content as well. Simply having it appear only once as the product name really does not give it a lot of weight to make the search engines think that is what that product page is about. This can be challenging, but definitely workable, even if it is something creative like “buy product xyz today” and “product xyz specs.” Be sure the key phrase appears early on in the content (e.g. product description) as this follows the general rule about proximity, which I will briefly cover for newcomers in my next point.
• 6. Buying guides
  One strategy that is often overlooked is creating buying guides on your site, such as “how to buy Italian leather shoes,” “How to find my shoe size,” “Are Italian leather shoes right for me,” “Finding comfortable shoes that fit,” etc… This really comes in handy as not only does this create rich content, but it also gives your shoppers power. There are plenty of people online that are no where as near knowledgeable as you are about your own products, and countless people searching for this information online. One of my clients that sell diamonds has single-handedly accomplished some fairly unthinkable results by himself in probably some highly competitive phrases such as “diamond ring” and “diamond engagement ring.” He has done this through lots and lots of “how to” and “buying guides.” Ebay ranks in the top 25 on Google for “diamond” but what is important to note is that it is for their buying guide.
  

Dealing with lots of items without accidentally spamming

• 7. Relevant & focused phrases for product/category names
  If you sold “Italian shoes,” you would not want to have your page just called “shoes” and you would obviously not want to call it “cars.” You would want to call it “Italian shoes” since it is accurate and precise. Having phrases that are too broad (e.g. “shoes”) means that it will be more difficult to get high rankings for, as well as less likely to convert to sales. Category names can often be tougher in this aspect, but you can still apply the same principle in many cases. Using keyword tools such as Google’s keyword tool and SEO Book’s keyword tool can prove invaluable to finding the perfect phrases.
  Be prepared to spend a decent amount of time doing good research to understand what your product is and how to differentiate it from similar products; as well as finding phrases that are just the right size to take on. The last thing you want to do is launch your site, and thing change it all around cause you weren’t targeting the right key phrases. The thing that makes it more difficult for ecommerce is shear volume of phrases that you might be optimizing for; e.g. you have 10,000 products. Category names can become the focus here, but time should be spent on specific products especially for mass market items. Anyone want to guess how much time Amazon spends maintaining millions of pages ?
  
• 8. The proximity rule as it relates to content
  In review for some of who that already know this general principleThe earlier a key phrase appears, the better. This applies to everything from TITLE and META tags to file URL’s and product descriptions. Although proximity is a general rule to SEO, I mention this because people all too often forget that this applies to product descriptions, names, title tags, file name, and anything on the product page (categories too of course). Several shopping carts and/or websites that I have encountered do not seem to notice this factor very much.
• 9. Unique, well-structure TITLE tags *

  It is not uncommon to see ecommerce websites and dynamic sites that use a single TITLE tag throughout their site. I have seen numerous very well know businesses suffer from this. The TITLE tag should also follow the proximity rule for your product name first. Not having TITLE tags from day 1 of your online store launch could mean your storefront could get stuck with poor ranking for a long time. I will cover ecommerce structure in a latter point. The TITLE tag is essential to getting people from the search engine to click into your site. Let your products be detailed, and let your main topics, categories be more broad in their TITLE’s. As a refresher, TITLE tags serve three purposes

  1. To tell search engines what your page is mainly about. This is one of the most important elements to search engines.
     
  2. In the search engine results, you will notice that each result is made up of a link, and a short description. Coincidentally, this TITLE tag is what search engines use for the text of that link.
     
  3. When shoppers browse a website, the TITLE tag is the text they will see at the top of the browser (the blue bar). It also shows up for their bookmarks, and history, so make is easy on shoppers by creating a unique TITLE tag for each page. This can really get annoying on ecommerce sites that use all the same titles for all pages.
     
• 10. META tags
  For the most part, META tags are on their deathbed, however, smaller search engines such as MSN and Yahoo are still influenced by META tags to some degree. The META tags should only include words that can also be found within the content of the page itself to avoid penalties from the search engines. Again, remember the proximity rule.
• 11. Product and category identification structure which reduces spamming effect
  This is one of the most overlooked aspects mainly because it’s a very tough topic. Lets say you have a shoe site where all you sell are shoes. Let’s also suggest that you have several sub-categories. The question is, should every product and every category include the word “shoes?” the short answer is, probably not if you have lots of products. It may work if you have a few dozen products, but the problem is, if you had 1,000 shoes and 20 categories, including the word “shoes” on everything may look a little spammy to the search engines. My experience has shown that it can often be helpful to use the word in the category names, but not in the product names. Then in the product description and the TITLE and META tags. This might also mean that the TITLE tag (which contains the main theme keyword) has your category name included with it.
• 12. Duplicate content descriptions or names for products
  I have seen on occasion where a merchant will have 20 items which are basically the same name and thing, with the only differences being a color or size choice. In this case, you will still want to create unique titles for each. Search engines such as Google will only index one of those pages otherwise. I have seen large ecommerce sites have this “problem.” What I mean is, this is a grey area in that it may be best not to have 10 nearly identical pages in the first place, unless you do not mind that only one of them will get indexed. Using attributes on your products such as drop-down menus, radio buttons, etc.. to have several similar products instead of a unique product page for each, may be a better solution if it is feasible. Here is an example taken from Walmart.com.
• 13. One primary target phrase per page rule applies
  As you may already have heard elsewhere, trying to cram lots of keywords per page is not a good idea. Each product should have one focus. If you must come up with other variations, save it for your articles or blog, and point it back to your main product page. As for plurals, try to pick the phrase that you believe shoppers would use (shirts vs. shirt). This usually means singular form of the word (e.g. shirt). I also like to work in different spellings of the words in to my content.

Search engine accessibility (they are blind too)

• 14. Well designed homepage, with keyword emphasis
  A common mistake I see is ignoring their homepage, when the truth is, the homepage is your single most powerful page in the search engines’ eyes. This mistake usually includes people naming their home page “Home” or, “”My Business | Home” which is really bad. Pick your main key phrases, and use them instead”Affordable widgets | My Business name.” Whether you use your business in your title tags is a long debate. Your homepage should have a lot of rich content with your main key phrases.
• 15. Making your categories/products accessible from the homepage
  Fewer steps to get to products/categories is better. The deeper the links, the more slow the search engines seem to take them in, and the more diluted it gets. On the other hand, you don’t want 100+ links all on your homepage. If you have 25,000 items for sale, then you might need three levels or more, but good planning is needed. Having 15 – 25 categories per level is ideal for shoppers. More than that that can be overwhelming for shoppers, and less than that can be mean that you have too many sub-categories if you have lots of products. The number of items per category is less important from a shoppers perspective, as long as they are easily navigable and viewable. For example, you could fit 100 items on a page if that meant small compact images, or easy layouts. Using a “sort by price, popularity, alphabetical, etc…” feature or “filter products by price, brand, color, etc…” can also help shoppers find what they want. I cover usability in other articles, but it goes hand-in-hand with SEO.
• 16. Other tools for search engine accessibility
  If possible, and especially for larger sites, include a sitemap for human visitors as well as one for search engines (each engine is different, but XML is sort of the universal format at the moment). Get an RSS feed going for your most popular categories. If you have the ability, perhaps you can even make one that lets shoppers track a search results page like eBay does. Internet savvy people that visit your site will find the RSS helpful as well. I also have seen cases where a merchant is submitting their products into a shopping feed engine which in turn helped bring up their rankings quick in Yahoo. Another simple way to get #1 rankings in Google is to submit your products to Google Products (which is free). Google often shows these results between the paid listings and the organic listings. Talk about free, prime placement advertising.

Technology challenges specific to ecommerce

• 17. Search engine friendly URL’s
  Long dynamic links like http://www.mysite.com/product.asp?productsku=123&color=black can be really difficult, if not impossible for most search engines to index. Some big ecommerce sites still suffer from this as it’s not a quick fix in most cases. Instead, product-123-color-black.html is better. Apache users can use mod-rewrite to do this (advanced skills required). This is one of the best things you can do, but one of the more difficult ones because most fair sized ecommerce sites are managed by a database program, which typically uses the format of the “?” and “&” characters.
• 18. Optimized file names and locations
  Also one of the more important points, the URL would best be named after your product name. Using the previous step as an example, http://www.mysite.com/swanky-italian-shoes.html would be much better than just using the product id, or SKU. Try not to get excessively long with the names as this can be a negative point in more than one aspect (users think it looks weird or even scary). Proximity factors in here as well. You would want the keyword to appear immediately after the domain name, and not in a deep sub-folder like thishttp://mysite.com/folder1/folder2/product.html. Using hyphens or no spaces at all tend to work best (as opposed to underscores).
• 19. Semantically correct content
  I hope you are at least using H1 tags for product names and category names. Add emphasis to your keywords as they appear in the content, bulleted lists, etc… You know, stuff you would expect to find in a website coded by a professional web designer, or at least a helf-decent one. Quite often, out-of-the-box shopping carts do not do this as all because they were built by programmers and not skilled web designers. This also includes things like ALT and NAME tags on your images—no, do not use the same ALT tag on all your products. This also means that your webpage is best built using CSS, preferably from a design company that codes it all by hand, since most programs like DreamWeaver and FrontPage (Expression-Web) add a lot of unnecessary code.
• 20. Dynamic HTML pages
  Some debate that many search engines really like pages that end in extensions such as .html and .htm as opposed to .php, .asp, and other languages. I have done limited tests where a few pages on a site were not getting indexed apparently because they had unusual file extension names. I have also encountered other sites built with a common extension such as .asp, but they did not get good indexing until that switched to .html—I just like to say “results may vary” on this topic. Ideally, your html pages are dynamically generated as well; what I mean is that most higher-end shopping carts and ecommerce software generates pages dynamically from a database, but some will let you publish static pages. The risk here is that a page gets outdated, or is not published properly. Some shopping cart software will generate dynamic pages that end in .html giving you the best of both worlds.
• 21. Eliminate session ID’s common to dynamic applications
  Session ID’s within your product/category pages can be detrimental. These are long numbers that appear in your address bar when you are visiting a website, common to many websites today. Their purpose is so that each shopper that comes to your website gets a unique ID do that software can track them separate from every other user on the site. The problem is that each time a search engine comes to your site, it gets a new ID, and the search engine thinks they are completely new pages each time since the link looks new. A search engine optimized shopping cart will not display these ID’s for your category and product pages (at least to the search engines). On occasion, cookies can do funny things to the engines as well.
  
• 22. Avoid other inaccessible on-site elements common to ecommerce
  Including JavaScript category/product menus unless there are alternative versions for search engines—I have seen this on sites past such as Lowes and Amazon. The problem is partly due to massive online stores with countless products. For example, CSS menus can help here (CSS and frames are something your web designer should know about I would hope), instead of image buttons and javascript menus; problem is, these are still up and coming in many plug-and-play shopping cart platforms. Avoid frames—yes I still see several sites in frames still. I also still see lots of ecommerce sites that depend primarily on Flash and images without lots of content, probably because they are depending more on site cool-ness factors and branding than they are concerned about search engines. Other problems can exist, but exceed the scope of this article such as temporary redirects, duplicate content, etc…

Linking factors

• 23. Internal linking
  All too often, this factor is overlooked in ecommerce, but easily accomplished. Create links from product pages to other pages, and vice versa. When you write your blog for example, link to product pages in your article content (not just links in the footer and such). One way this can be accomplished easily to some degree is to use your shopping cart’s cross-selling (a.k.a. related items, recommend products) feature . Avoid having cases where one page (e.g. page A) has two virtually identical links on it that point to one other page (e.g. page B) within your website. Of course, it is expected that you are using the link text (a.k.a. anchor text) in your links. E.g. “check out these Italian leather shoes” is much better than “Check out this product” it is best of all to make the links within the description of the product. The all-too-common “more info” link on products should be renamed/removed, or use the nofollow tag.
• 24. When building inbound links, link to deep category/product pages
  Be sure that when you are able to control the inbound links to your site, that you take the time to link to specific categories and product pages, using appropriate anchor text of course. All too often, I see ecommerce sites limiting themselves by only linking everything to the homepage, or, to a few internal pages. Also be sure that any page you link to, such as a dynamic product page, that they are going to be permanent for the most part; or, if you must move a page, use a 301 redirect as needed. When linking back to the home page, use the full domain name (and never index.html); also use the keywords or business name in the link, including breadcrumbs “Shoes’ R Us Home”
• 25. Breadcrumb navigation
  Always a plus point for search engines as well as human visitors. This gives a slight benefit to improving internal linking. Many carts include this, many other carts don’t.
• 26. Invite users and site visitors to link to specific product pages
  On each of your categories and product pages, you can create a ready made link for visitors to use. This does not increase rankings directly, but does make it easier for people to link to your site when they find a page they like. Maybe offering an incentive though can help foster the likelihood of your customers/visitors to link to you. Again, anchor text is what counts.

Really cool things you may not have thought of

• 27. Tags
  There are not many existing ecommerce platforms that have ecommerce tagging abilities built in (see Amazon.com for examples of product tagging in action), but you can still often do it the gold ol’ fashion way (by hand in the product description); or as an ecommerce plug-in. These tags would be other ways of labeling your products. Use in moderation and carefully. You don’t want to dilute your main keyword too much as each additional keyword on the page potentially dilutes the power of the main phrase of the page. Anywhere between 5 and 20 phrases are probably acceptable.
• 28. Review and publish on-site search data
  If your online store has a search tool where your shoppers can search for items, you should review this on a regular basis. This can prove invaluable for you as it differs from search engine traffic, and paid advertising traffic in that it can keep track anything people might be looking for. On more than one occasion, I have found phrases in there that I did not expect at all, and have since used that data to find new products to carry for my online store. The other thing you can do with your data is make a short list of “the 25 most popular searches” on your site that are otherwise not to be found on your site, and link them to their respective categories/products. This can assist shoppers to find what is popular, especially for products that can be named or identified in more than one way. For example, maybe they are searching for “Italiano leather shoes” The word “Italiano” is the Italian spelling of “Italian.” You may consider using this in conjunction with the tagging mentioned previously. If you some more examples I have seen this occur in a variety of ways including certain fashion trends that resurface often will go by different names; what one person may call “rustic” another may call “country;” sometimes a common spelling was multiple variations.
  
• 29. Using nofollow links for all non-important pages
  (very debatable) Using the “nofollow” tag on your internal links to tell search engines to ignore certain pages is a strategy used by some online retailers. You use the “nofollow” tag to tell the search engines to not count the link in its rankings. You would use this on useless pages like your legal policies, shopping cart page, etc… Doing this can help funnel, or focus the links that are important. For those that understand what PageRank is, this can help funnel your internal pagerank.
• 30. Other commonly overlooked items
  I won’t cover everything about SEO, but I will say that a lot of common easy tweaks include redirecting non-www to www version of your site to reduce potential issues with canonicalization issues; making sure your dynamic pages are not being spidered accidentally (use the nofollow to stop duplicate content here). The words that make up your domain name is very powerful to search engines, but as a warning, you can get a domain that is based on your #1 keyword, but you lose the potential to create a unique and memorable brand, as well as expand your SEO to other phrases. I am aware of very few successful sites based purely on a keyword phrase such as http://www.italian-leather-shoes.com. Sometimes fitting in your single most important phrase is not a bad idea, such as in http://widgetmania.com. But if you start selling anything else, it can limit you as you might have guessed.

+1 - This is where you come in

I will take the best suggestion from the comments below and make it this final point, complete with credit and link back of your choice.

Now, I pose a question to you if you want to comment about something - how do the search engines feel about multi-homed products, or products with filters as navigation. A classic example of this is Newegg.com. You can see how Google ranks a given product numerous times, but what are the specific pros and cons to this approach? This type of navigation can include standard link menus, or drop-down menus. Part of the challenge is dealing with TITLE tags, and the biggest issueduplicate content. Please respond in the comments below.

I can tell you these strategies work in the real world*. I look forward to your comments for improvement and suggestion from great SEO’s out there, and from users with proven results.

For those wishing to delve headfirst into SEO, see Aaron Wall’s site (see Blogroll links to the right)— he has some of the best quality free SEO information on the web, and also writes the SEO Book which is great reading for those serious about learning all aspects surrounding SEO.

* Items with the icon are for Veracart shopping cart software to indicate to them that the shopping cart does this step practically automatically for you (for the most part).

** How do I know? I have many clients who rank #1 and do very well in terms of making a good living primarily off of search engine traffic. Additionally, I rank #1 for all of my main keywords on Google, and have done so for over a year. These phrases are rated “very high advertiser competition” according to Google Adwords, as well as very heavily searched