SEO For E-Commerce Sites

[Taktical]

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. Thank you, learn a lesson mcbain!

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

- Original product desc. <-- How long is this desc?
- SES urls <-- Whats a SES Url?
- Onsite SEO keywords in (meta tags, H1, Alt) <-- For the product name or something else?
- I've found it helps to have unique Title tags. Unique from other sites. <--- Agreed, standing out helps your CTR, which in turn raises your ranking.
- keyword in file name and static, no dynamic urls i.e widget.html, mycategory.html <-- and I would use absolute URL links
- integration w/ facebook and twitter (likes) <-- I have a thread on this http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/319275-new-era-search-engine-optimization-how-use-facebook-twitter-leverage-your-rankings.html
- videos on product page to increase how long they stay on the page. <--- you make these videos yourself or take them from other places? if they're yours how do you produce them?
- 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) <--- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonica...t-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
- Best keywords in the footer
- Link to an authority site
- Speed of site is a factor in the algorithm so optimize

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

 

[str8thustler]

What e-com platform are you using taktical?

 

[Topher]

How long is this desc?
I don't have a specific length I shoot for. I have all important info at the top of the page (add to cart, price etc.) Some of my descriptions are really long. Depends on the product and how much info I can come up with.

Whats a SES Url?
Search Engine Safe. i.e mysite.com/index.php?id=34&var=4356345
Dynamic URL's are so much harder to rank. IMO the shorter the URL the better. I like for all my file names to appear to be in the root of the directory. ie. mysite.com/widget.html and mysite.com/widgetcategory.html. Some carts like to put products in a directory and categories in a directory, which i dont like.

For the product name or something else?
For the keyword of that page. If it is a product page then the product name. If it is a page for the brand, then the brand name.

you make these videos yourself or take them from other places? if they're yours how do you produce them?
I personally find them or outsource making them. The important thing is to increase the time of the page view.

 

[umaycool]

all depend what platform u use and The structure of the entire site.how to build friendly structure to search engine and user is important.and then it is your keyword and site content .

 

[Chrisss]

What say you guys?.

1) KW research is important if you make a mini-site with affiliate etc. But it's even more important when running a commercial site. If you do consultancy work for a client, then is the first thing you should do, to set up G analytic and all the tracking. You need to know which kw search phases that generates the highest profit. Do not make the mistake and believe that you or your client know your customers search pattern. Your client would use technical search phases that potential customers don't use. Be aware of what kind of kw phases that customers use when they are ready to buy. It's better to use "buy cheap small city car" rather than "car" if you are selling cars in your webshop.

2) Onsite SEO.
I can not state how important it is to get it under control. If you don't have the technical skills then hire someone to fix it for you. 95% of all the commercial site on the net suffers from duplicate content. A lot of commercial sites, don't even make a 301 redirect for www versus non-www. But the most common DC mistake is, when you can filter your search in the category section for your products.

3) Another big mistake is Laziness. A lot of commercial sites just copy-paste the product description, making it impossible to become no 1 on G. You need to take the time to make a good and long product description. But try to make the same structure for all products, so it's easier for potential customers to quickly find the information they are looking for. Making SEO work for a large commercial site with a lot of products is not a overnight project. Outline a plan and begin with the most profitable/easy ranking products. Remember to keep focus and make a plan where you can show your client a steady progress. Keep him updates every week with a small positive update on your work, and you will increase your chance to get a good long term relationship with your client.

4) Make sure that your customers reviews are on the same page as your product description. You could set up a mail system, where you send a customer a mail 2 weeks after they purchased the products. Ask if they are happy with the purchase - if they aren't then make them send you (your client) a direct mail and help the customer. If the customer has been happy, then encourage them to leave a review/feedback. Make sure to leave a direct deep link and make it easy to leave a review (no account creation or similar). You could offer your customers 5-15% discount for their next order, if they leave a review.

5) Video - helps on your onsite conversion rate and it's open up for a lot of opportunities related to backlinking. But it will also increase the time a customer is spending on each site and G will reward sites, where people are staying on for more than just 10 sec.

6) Photos - make sure that you optimize the size of every single photos and make sure all photos are SEO optimized. You can easily make a big difference here, because most commercial sites just use a huge photo, that makes the site load slow and G don't like heavy sites. If you are selling "small model trains from 1930 or other hobbies related stuff. Then consider to optimize your kw for the photo results section in G.

7) Get in control of your onsite linking. Don't waste linkjuice, by linking to irrelevant pages like "about us", "return policy" etc. But remember to use java-links for those footer links and don't make the mistake and use the no-f0llow tag. Never use that for onsite links!

8) Final words - you want to increase your traffic but you also want to increase the conversion rate. So make sure you don't make a long product description, if its not helpful for potential customers. Because this will hurt your conversion rate.

9) Use the tracking options in G analytics to show your client your progress. Because the most important thing is to get relevant customers into the webshop/commercial site and to increase the conversion rate. You want to increase the profit for your customers - this is not always the same as increasing the no of searches.

10) Backlinks - make sure to use a lot of deep backlinking and forget about ranking the front page (unless its a small commercial website). You want to give a potential customers the relevant search result. So if I'm searching for "small blue car with big tires" then would I like to hit the exact page with this product. I don't want to hit your homepage and then have to look for my "small blue car with big tires".

11) Internal search option. Make sure you have a simple and visible search field on your commercial site. Make sure that the search engine behind is working good, so when I misspell my search phase, then will I still get into a relevant page. Or if I search for something that don't have a exact match - make sure to give me a similar result.

12) By looking at all your internal search phases are you going to get a lot of useful information for your kw research. Because you get to know, what search phases customers are using.

I could go on, but I better stop here

 

[badut jenaka]

well..for me, buy TLD domain same as my ecommerce store..eg. mystore.com - my store.net - my store.org. I put the store on .com domain and make the other 2 as blog and review site. try to rank the .net and .org site and just put the store site link in it.

 

[Taktical]

What e-com platform are you using taktical?

Its for a client. Custom built.

well..for me, buy TLD domain same as my ecommerce store..eg. mystore.com - my store.net - my store.org. I put the store on .com domain and make the other 2 as blog and review site. try to rank the .net and .org site and just put the store site link in it.

Interesting tactic

 

[lablinks]

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

You try to get into any competitive eCommerce niche with limited budget without doing something shady & let me know how it works out for ya.
no reviews = no conversions, even if you get traffic they'll go & buy some place else with reviews.

 

[smartq]

I could not agree more on your points. I think if we can do all the things as he mentioned here, we definitely can get a good ranking and traffic effect afterwards. However, it definitely takes a lot of time and work.

1) KW research is important if you make a mini-site with affiliate etc. But it's even more important when running a commercial site. If you do consultancy work for a client, then is the first thing you should do, to set up G analytic and all the tracking. You need to know which kw search phases that generates the highest profit. Do not make the mistake and believe that you or your client know your customers search pattern. Your client would use technical search phases that potential customers don't use. Be aware of what kind of kw phases that customers use when they are ready to buy. It's better to use "buy cheap small city car" rather than "car" if you are selling cars in your webshop.

2) Onsite SEO.
I can not state how important it is to get it under control. If you don't have the technical skills then hire someone to fix it for you. 95% of all the commercial site on the net suffers from duplicate content. A lot of commercial sites, don't even make a 301 redirect for www versus non-www. But the most common DC mistake is, when you can filter your search in the category section for your products.

3) Another big mistake is Laziness. A lot of commercial sites just copy-paste the product description, making it impossible to become no 1 on G. You need to take the time to make a good and long product description. But try to make the same structure for all products, so it's easier for potential customers to quickly find the information they are looking for. Making SEO work for a large commercial site with a lot of products is not a overnight project. Outline a plan and begin with the most profitable/easy ranking products. Remember to keep focus and make a plan where you can show your client a steady progress. Keep him updates every week with a small positive update on your work, and you will increase your chance to get a good long term relationship with your client.

4) Make sure that your customers reviews are on the same page as your product description. You could set up a mail system, where you send a customer a mail 2 weeks after they purchased the products. Ask if they are happy with the purchase - if they aren't then make them send you (your client) a direct mail and help the customer. If the customer has been happy, then encourage them to leave a review/feedback. Make sure to leave a direct deep link and make it easy to leave a review (no account creation or similar). You could offer your customers 5-15% discount for their next order, if they leave a review.

5) Video - helps on your onsite conversion rate and it's open up for a lot of opportunities related to backlinking. But it will also increase the time a customer is spending on each site and G will reward sites, where people are staying on for more than just 10 sec.

6) Photos - make sure that you optimize the size of every single photos and make sure all photos are SEO optimized. You can easily make a big difference here, because most commercial sites just use a huge photo, that makes the site load slow and G don't like heavy sites. If you are selling "small model trains from 1930 or other hobbies related stuff. Then consider to optimize your kw for the photo results section in G.

7) Get in control of your onsite linking. Don't waste linkjuice, by linking to irrelevant pages like "about us", "return policy" etc. But remember to use java-links for those footer links and don't make the mistake and use the no-f0llow tag. Never use that for onsite links!

8) Final words - you want to increase your traffic but you also want to increase the conversion rate. So make sure you don't make a long product description, if its not helpful for potential customers. Because this will hurt your conversion rate.

9) Use the tracking options in G analytics to show your client your progress. Because the most important thing is to get relevant customers into the webshop/commercial site and to increase the conversion rate. You want to increase the profit for your customers - this is not always the same as increasing the no of searches.

10) Backlinks - make sure to use a lot of deep backlinking and forget about ranking the front page (unless its a small commercial website). You want to give a potential customers the relevant search result. So if I'm searching for "small blue car with big tires" then would I like to hit the exact page with this product. I don't want to hit your homepage and then have to look for my "small blue car with big tires".

11) Internal search option. Make sure you have a simple and visible search field on your commercial site. Make sure that the search engine behind is working good, so when I misspell my search phase, then will I still get into a relevant page. Or if I search for something that don't have a exact match - make sure to give me a similar result.

12) By looking at all your internal search phases are you going to get a lot of useful information for your kw research. Because you get to know, what search phases customers are using.

I could go on, but I better stop here

 

[xsubodh]

I use plugin for my site as well as for cart bit, but again I find ranking home page and other non cart pages much easier. However even with SEO plugin ranking cart page is certainly a huge mountain for me.
I will try your suggestion adding description onto category and see if this helps.
By the way for homepage ranking I use small description and few major keywords linked to different pages on my sites. I also use random rotating summary production descriptions about 4 roughly that goes on the home page so each time google crawls they see unique product descriptions or combination of 4 different products (about 100).
e.g.
COMBINATION 1 Product A +B+C+D,
COMBINATION 2 Product A+B+C+E
COMBINATION 3 Product A+C+F+Z and so on

each time something on the page is still unique. and if you keep updating these short description from time to time this helps even further.

BUT I CERTAINLY NEED HELP ON PRODUCT DESCRIPTION PAGE. I COULD NEVER GET THEM RANK HIGH.

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.

 

[j.v.eeckelenburgh]

@Takital - shoot me a PM i'll show you my ecommerce URLs.

Ranking 1 - 10 for all major keywords

harldy any content / and SEO work done

That's interesting, is it a competitive niche? In my experience ranking #10 isn't very hard but getting in the first 3 spots is way more tough.

 

[mapp2819]

I am using Magento as the platform for my e-commerce site.

Some great tips that i have learnt along the way:

1. Use your keywords nice and early in headers, titles, alt tags, etc. Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well. Also people that are reading your titles, etc will be more at ease to know what they are about to click on.

2. Be sure to optimize the <head> of your e-commerce pages. It is a good idea to add the canonical tag to your products to ensure that you don't run into any duplicate content problems. I use a very simple plugin to achieve this and have already seen the improvements from the webmaster tools. My duplicate meta descriptions and titles have all gone! This is good for SEO as it proves you aren't trying to spam the search results!

3. Have a good, solid robots.txt file in place to ensure that checkout pages, etc aren't indexed.

4. I use the CMS in Magento. Although it isn't fantastic, it works for me when i need to create an article and link it to my new products, top sellers, etc. I often use it to target my competitive keywords and try to rank them for an increase in traffic!

5. Speed! A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will crawl on your e-commerce site each day, is how fast and snappy your shop loads. I use the caching feature on Magento and see a decrease in loading times.

6. Make sure you have a nice sitemap and submit it to the SE when products are added. I find that it helps them get indexed quicker.

7. I "no-follow" alot of links in my template files that are linked to non-content pages such as - add to wishlist, compare products, etc. I found that this also helped SEO.

Thanks for sharing some great tips in here that i didn't know about!

 

[tzim_t]

In my experience SEF url's are very important and also the products description helps a lot the only thing that confuse me is the backlinking strategy. For example Scrapebox and comment blasts help an ecommerce site? The blog is better to be a part of the site or outside?

 

[mapp2819]

In my experience SEF url's are very important and also the products description helps a lot the only thing that confuse me is the backlinking strategy. For example Scrapebox and comment blasts help an ecommerce site? The blog is better to be a part of the site or outside?

I use Scrapebox and comment blasts on my web 2.0 properties, articles, etc rather than my main money site just to be safe!

In my opinion, i prefer the blog to be integrated with the site as linking from a blog post to a product would be much easier and visually appealing for the user.

 

[dotcomdesigns]

I wonder if having an Adwords account negatively impacts on your organic placing. Would it be in Google's interest to have their Adwords advertisers appearing at the top of the search pages? I'd drop Adwords in a heartbeat if I hit the top spot.

Interestingly my competitor which has position 2 and 3 has never had an adwords account as far as I can tell. There's a huge chain store here in the UK called Marks & Spencers - I read they have millions of keywords on Adwords and come Christmas time they outbid me on my keywords, I just can't afford to compete with them financially.

But what is interesting is their site doesn't appear on the front 2 pages of Google despite having a seriously huge authority ecommerce store and is clearly a better place to shop than my competitors crappy Actinic built store.

Maybe I'm just being cynical for the sake of it. But if a company was throwing money at me to be listed at the top, damned if I'd allow them to hit top spot and get free traffic!

 

[Chrisss]

I wonder if having an Adwords account negatively impacts on your organic placing.

That's a clear no. Your spending on Adwords does not impact SERP's.

But what is interesting is their site doesn't appear on the front 2 pages of Google despite having a seriously huge authority ecommerce store and is clearly a better place to shop than my competitors crappy Actinic built store.

Take a look at their onsite seo. A lot of big commercial sites fail and I'm only happy, because it makes it possible for new players to enter the market. A common mistake is use of Java and other heavy graphic, that makes the sites load slow and/or not able for search engines to index the content.

And big stores rarely make a solid kw analyse, and combine this with simple DC mistakes.

Just be happy that the world is full of fancy web designers that don't know what SEO stands for.

 

[Taktical]

You try to get into any competitive eCommerce niche with limited budget without doing something shady & let me know how it works out for ya.
no reviews = no conversions, even if you get traffic they'll go & buy some place else with reviews.

I didn't say "unethical". I said "illegal". As in "will land you in jail" illegal or "will get you fined $250,000 illegal".

You can get away with a few, but you're much better off pushing customers to leave real ones.

I use plugin for my site as well as for cart bit, but again I find ranking home page and other non cart pages much easier. However even with SEO plugin ranking cart page is certainly a huge mountain for me.
I will try your suggestion adding description onto category and see if this helps.
By the way for homepage ranking I use small description and few major keywords linked to different pages on my sites. I also use random rotating summary production descriptions about 4 roughly that goes on the home page so each time google crawls they see unique product descriptions or combination of 4 different products (about 100).
e.g.
COMBINATION 1 Product A +B+C+D,
COMBINATION 2 Product A+B+C+E
COMBINATION 3 Product A+C+F+Z and so on

each time something on the page is still unique. and if you keep updating these short description from time to time this helps even further.

BUT I CERTAINLY NEED HELP ON PRODUCT DESCRIPTION PAGE. I COULD NEVER GET THEM RANK HIGH.

Thats an interesting way of doing things. Is there a code or plugin for that?

@Takital - shoot me a PM i'll show you my ecommerce URLs.

Ranking 1 - 10 for all major keywords

harldy any content / and SEO work done

PM Sent

,.

 

[Taktical]

I use Scrapebox and comment blasts on my web 2.0 properties, articles, etc rather than my main money site just to be safe!

In my opinion, i prefer the blog to be integrated with the site as linking from a blog post to a product would be much easier and visually appealing for the user.

Agreed. Plus the fresh conent is good for your serps. Don't use subdomains though, Google has been treating them more and more poorly recently.

I wonder if having an Adwords account negatively impacts on your organic placing. Would it be in Google's interest to have their Adwords advertisers appearing at the top of the search pages? I'd drop Adwords in a heartbeat if I hit the top spot.

Interestingly my competitor which has position 2 and 3 has never had an adwords account as far as I can tell. There's a huge chain store here in the UK called Marks & Spencers - I read they have millions of keywords on Adwords and come Christmas time they outbid me on my keywords, I just can't afford to compete with them financially.

But what is interesting is their site doesn't appear on the front 2 pages of Google despite having a seriously huge authority ecommerce store and is clearly a better place to shop than my competitors crappy Actinic built store.

Maybe I'm just being cynical for the sake of it. But if a company was throwing money at me to be listed at the top, damned if I'd allow them to hit top spot and get free traffic!

You dont know how companies spend their budgets, maybe they haven't started SEO at all yet.

 

[Topher]

One of the things I wish I would have done when I first started doing ecommerce is, when I realize that a store is going to do well, create the same store under a different platform (cart). Now I like to have multiple carts some whitehat some blackhat some carts rank better just out of the box. That way if one site is dancing the other my still be bringing revenue. Plus it is always nice to see 3 of your stores on the first page for a keyword. When you are all over the first page it is easy to set the price and control the margins.

 

[lablinks]

you're much better off pushing customers to leave real ones.

Sure, if the store is established & working.
But how about a store that has just opened with 0 customers? Who are you going to "push" to leave reviews?