SEO For E-Commerce Sites

[Taktical]

I want to start a discussion here.

We do a lot of talking on this forum about how to rank pages that we create. A lot of them are usually some form of blog. This is what we mean when we say "add new content" and having "rich and unique content" on your pages that rank.

We also talk about having articles with keyword densities and such.

But what do we do when we want an e-commerce site (sort of like Amazon) to rank? We want the category and product pages to individually rank for lots of keywords.

E commerce sites rarely have articles, and the content on category and product pages are thin at best. Even worse, e-commerce sites are rarely updated with fresh content. Sure the company may add new products now and again.

Seems to me like some serious backlinking is in order. And probably the need for rich product descriptions. An having solid internal linking structures, especially for huge sites that have several hundred pages.

What say you guys?

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[mark9510]

I currently have an E-commerce website and they have wonderful SEO due to their usually large size. The amount of pages I have ~1000 greatly helps SEO even with minimal work. I must say though that blogging can greatly affect the SEO and and amount of spiders that your site encounters.

I would really like to see how this discussion goes

 

[xsubodh]

well opened chapter. I would also be keenly waiting for help / suggestions on this section. Considering I find difficult to rank especially product description pages,, hardly rank most of teh times!! Not sure why though

 

[xsubodh]

Dear Mark, what pages would you have beside product descriptions?? will that not be distracting customers away from your targeted sales pages??

I currently have an E-commerce website and they have wonderful SEO due to their usually large size. The amount of pages I have ~1000 greatly helps SEO even with minimal work. I must say though that blogging can greatly affect the SEO and and amount of spiders that your site encounters.

I would really like to see how this discussion goes

 

[mark9510]

Tons of pages, hence the reason that I talked about blogging, my website will soon be rolling out an in depth analysis of how some products that I sell work and why they help you etc,etc,etc.

Anything you can think of can have its own page and gain its own popularity to help you in the long run

 

[Narrator]

Depending on the cart you may need a SEO plugin. For Zen Cart I use Ultimate SEO, it rewrites all the urls to make them search engine friendly. Magento is good for SEO right out of the box.

I write a unique description for each category. I also make sure the meta codes are different for each product/category, sometimes the cart will try to use the same tags and titles by default. I also outsource, to rephrase the description for each product, so my store doesn't have the same stock descriptions as every other store online.

The hardest part is the homepage because it is hard to reach 400+ words with a welcome message.

 

[Taktical]

I currently have an E-commerce website and they have wonderful SEO due to their usually large size. The amount of pages I have ~1000 greatly helps SEO even with minimal work. I must say though that blogging can greatly affect the SEO and and amount of spiders that your site encounters.

I would really like to see how this discussion goes

Agreed. Blog posts are a great way to generate link bait and to link internally.

Depending on the cart you may need a SEO plugin. For Zen Cart I use Ultimate SEO, it rewrites all the urls to make them search engine friendly. Magento is good for SEO right out of the box.

I write a unique description for each category. I also make sure the meta codes are different for each product/category, sometimes the cart will try to use the same tags and titles by default. I also outsource, to rephrase the description for each product, so my store doesn't have the same stock descriptions as every other store online.

The hardest part is the homepage because it is hard to reach 400+ words with a welcome message.

Absolutely. Each product page should have its own micro niche being targeted. Images and videos help as well.

Its also important to have an "about us" "privacy policy" and "return policy" page in your XML sitemap. links to these pages should be "nofollow" to protect linkjuice, but google give you points for having unique ones.

 

[imth3one]

Has anybody seen preferential treatment from Google in SERPs after submitting XML feeds to Google Products?

 

[mark9510]

Has anybody seen preferential treatment from Google in SERPs after submitting XML feeds to Google Products?

I have not yet submitted my products to google Base but i am 99.9% sure that it will positively affect your rankings and allow a secondary source of traffic to your site which is always great

 

[Narrator]

Has anybody seen preferential treatment from Google in SERPs after submitting XML feeds to Google Products?

I tried submitting my feeds but they require a sku number for each product to be listed. It would be too much work for me, since my products have a different sku for each attribute.

 

[mark9510]

I tried submitting my feeds but they require a sku number for each product to be listed. It would be too much work for me, since my products have a different sku for each attribute.

Depending on the platform your running, there should be a plugin that exports any and all products from your store into a datafeed with a single click

 

[lablinks]

Has anybody seen preferential treatment from Google in SERPs after submitting XML feeds to Google Products?

I get very few clicks from this on new stores. Unless your store has age & high PR, you get very little from this compared to organic searches.

 

[lablinks]

Online stores is what I work on the most. Content for them is not a problem, you can have plenty of content, that's why there is a thing called "reviews"
The rest is the same thing as you would do with any large website.

 

[mcbain2279]

Ran an ecommerce site that sold mass market appeal items. Had 140k products and about 143k pages. Each page was seo friendly every page unique. Was low price on maybe 30% of items on amazon, ebay, google shopping, etc 30K uniques a month to the site. It was a full time effort 8 hours a day to keep it ranking for top products. Its no easy task. Not sharing any of the techniques but if your on BHW you know how to do some stuff.

 

[mark9510]

Just a note for anyone making a new E-commerce store

Create an SEO checklist for yourself that you need to complete on-page SEO and carefully create highly optimized on page SEO from the beginning because when your site is running it will take much longer to redo the whole process which will be very annoying

 

[dotcomdesigns]

I have an ecommerce site for my product which I make too. I find ranking a nightmare because of the reasons already outlined. My products don't vary much, they're all basically the same apart from colours, sizes and a few small design differences. It's damned hard writing about 100 products that are basically the same!

It's probably why I hate Google so much. They keep telling us, content, content, content and I have a site selling 200 widgets and I have to write in length about a blue widget, about a red widget, about a 20cm widget in blue and a 30cm widget in green!

I can't bloody do it and it drives me crazy. And without Google I don't have a business. You know, their algorithm must pick up an ecommerce site and not penalize it surely.

I've a blog set up on a sub domain for the site, plus I have another blog with an EMD too. It's a product for Christmas so I just write articles about Christmas all the time! I've managed to get to #5 but can't seem to crack the top 3 which has wikepedia and a poxy .gov school talking about Santa LOL

The good things is all my competitors are in the same boat.

 

[Taktical]

Online stores is what I work on the most. Content for them is not a problem, you can have plenty of content, that's why there is a thing called "reviews"
The rest is the same thing as you would do with any large website.

Good point. But remember, fake reviews are considered to be "astroturfing" and is illegal.

Ran an ecommerce site that sold mass market appeal items. Had 140k products and about 143k pages. Each page was seo friendly every page unique. Was low price on maybe 30% of items on amazon, ebay, google shopping, etc 30K uniques a month to the site. It was a full time effort 8 hours a day to keep it ranking for top products. Its no easy task. Not sharing any of the techniques but if your on BHW you know how to do some stuff.

Mcbain, thanks for not sharing any techniques and being a real helpful member of the community. I'm sure everyone appreciates your leeching behavior. :spank:

.

 

[Topher]

mcbain2279 - "Not sharing any of the techniques" You get a lot from BHW, why not give back. That is sort of the F'n point of this thread.

I have several ecommerce sites. These are somethings that help me rank well.

- Original product desc.
- SES urls
- Onsite SEO keywords in (meta tags, H1, Alt)
- I've found it helps to have unique Title tags. Unique from other sites.
- keyword in file name and static, no dynamic urls i.e widget.html, mycategory.html
- integration w/ facebook and twitter (likes)
- videos on product page to increase how long they stay on the page.
- blog w/ related articles that link to the product page.
- product reviews. beg for them. they are fresh content and are keyword rich.
- No duplicate content within your site (canonical tags)
- Best keywords in the footer
- Link to an authority site
- Speed of site is a factor in the algorithm so optimize

 

[Taktical]

I have an ecommerce site for my product which I make too. I find ranking a nightmare because of the reasons already outlined. My products don't vary much, they're all basically the same apart from colours, sizes and a few small design differences. It's damned hard writing about 100 products that are basically the same!

It's probably why I hate Google so much. They keep telling us, content, content, content and I have a site selling 200 widgets and I have to write in length about a blue widget, about a red widget, about a 20cm widget in blue and a 30cm widget in green!

I can't bloody do it and it drives me crazy. And without Google I don't have a business. You know, their algorithm must pick up an ecommerce site and not penalize it surely.

I've a blog set up on a sub domain for the site, plus I have another blog with an EMD too. It's a product for Christmas so I just write articles about Christmas all the time! I've managed to get to #5 but can't seem to crack the top 3 which has wikepedia and a poxy .gov school talking about Santa LOL

The good things is all my competitors are in the same boat.

Being behind wikipedia isn't a bad thing. But if you are behind wikipedia, you're probably not targeting a very good keyword for sales as wikipedia comes up on infomation searches.

Use AdWords to do testing on conversions, and see what comes up.

 

[str8thustler]

Some other things to consider for an ecommerce site, not so much for SEO but for traffic. Look into nextag, google checkout and other price comparison sites. They usually rank very well for products and you can have your products inserted into them.