SEO For E-Commerce Sites
- Thread starter Taktical
- Start date
TomasBlackhat
Junior Member
- Sep 15, 2009
- 150
- 26
For the first month, yeah.
But question still remains: is the key to ranking a PopShops to write product descriptions for every product you sell?
GeorgePappas
Newbie
- Jan 28, 2011
- 19
- 2
What about if you wrote quirky, fiction paragraphs for each item. john is stuck in the pouring rain shivering, what he needs is his trusty Mason umbrella. Or maybe in the check out cart there can be a little link saying, do you want to know more about the history of umbrellas. just thinking out loud, maybe it will help you think of something better.
paper_chase
Regular Member
- Oct 17, 2008
- 440
- 64
Looking to start an eCommerce site selling contact lenses.
SEO strategy is to have a wordpress blog at mystore.com/blog which links to product pages on mystore.com. I will start blogging a few months before the store is even up so I can build some trust and authority with Google. Once the store is up I can start linking to products from the blog, as well as doing article marketing for each specific product page using the product name combined with buying keywords as anchor text. Those articles then get hit with social bookmarks, comments, and xrumer profiles. Homepage of the site gets hit with articles, press releases, and high PR blog posts to build trustrank and domain authority using anchors such as contacts and contact lenses. All on-page SEO will be optimized. Unique meta tags, description, reviews, etc.
What do you guys think of my proposed strategy?
What CMS do you guys recommend? I'm an intermediate PHP developer and good web designer. Is Magento pretty good? Is it really search engine friendly out of the box?
Thanks so much!!
SEO strategy is to have a wordpress blog at mystore.com/blog which links to product pages on mystore.com. I will start blogging a few months before the store is even up so I can build some trust and authority with Google. Once the store is up I can start linking to products from the blog, as well as doing article marketing for each specific product page using the product name combined with buying keywords as anchor text. Those articles then get hit with social bookmarks, comments, and xrumer profiles. Homepage of the site gets hit with articles, press releases, and high PR blog posts to build trustrank and domain authority using anchors such as contacts and contact lenses. All on-page SEO will be optimized. Unique meta tags, description, reviews, etc.
What do you guys think of my proposed strategy?
What CMS do you guys recommend? I'm an intermediate PHP developer and good web designer. Is Magento pretty good? Is it really search engine friendly out of the box?
Thanks so much!!
Taktical
Elite Member
- May 15, 2011
- 1,641
- 3,343
I like this idea. Quirky, but effective. I think it depends on if the culture of the webpage suits it.
This could work assuming the products you're selling are interesting or complicated enough to warrant someone clicking through a blog post about it.
paper_chase
Regular Member
- Oct 17, 2008
- 440
- 64
The high PR blog posts and articles are strictly for SEO purposes. If I actually got any traffic from them then it would just be a bonus.
I've used a similiar strategy to this for my coupon code site and its been working wonders.
The biggest thing I learnt from working with a large e-commerce client is that your focus with SEO should be on lead gen, not sales (upfront, that is). When we made a shift from trying to sell people as soon as they hit the page to just collecting their email addresses we saw some fairly dramatic results.
Linkbait is key to your success. Our 2 biggest pieces of linkbait were a product 'quiz' that would help you identify the best product for your needs, and a celebrity linkbait section - basically "what X does <celebrity Y> use?"
We started out going after specific product names but found it was really difficult to outrank the manufacturers for those types of keywords. We did a shift to long tail and focused on 'buyer' keywords, basically targeting people who have their credit cards out already and are just looking for a reason to spend money. People looking for '<product> reviews', '<product> coupons' - and landing pages for people searching '<product> vs. <product>'-type queries.
We found a lot of queries with decent traffic and fairly low competition, typically looking for '<product> sample' and would use those pages for purely lead-gen. We built a huge auto-responder series and did bi-weekly blasts for our latest deals and slowly tweaked that until it was as optimized as possible.
We offered instant 10% off coupons for signing up to our list - and towards the end we were testing 10-15% off instant coupons for sharing your purchase on Facebook/Twitter and liking/following us.
Of course after a few months on the contract there was a big management shift and they canned me thinking I was useless to them. I made a lot of friends there and got weekly updates about sales tanking and reports of search traffic starting to fall after a few months. I realized I needed to start charging more for my services
Linkbait is key to your success. Our 2 biggest pieces of linkbait were a product 'quiz' that would help you identify the best product for your needs, and a celebrity linkbait section - basically "what X does <celebrity Y> use?"
We started out going after specific product names but found it was really difficult to outrank the manufacturers for those types of keywords. We did a shift to long tail and focused on 'buyer' keywords, basically targeting people who have their credit cards out already and are just looking for a reason to spend money. People looking for '<product> reviews', '<product> coupons' - and landing pages for people searching '<product> vs. <product>'-type queries.
We found a lot of queries with decent traffic and fairly low competition, typically looking for '<product> sample' and would use those pages for purely lead-gen. We built a huge auto-responder series and did bi-weekly blasts for our latest deals and slowly tweaked that until it was as optimized as possible.
We offered instant 10% off coupons for signing up to our list - and towards the end we were testing 10-15% off instant coupons for sharing your purchase on Facebook/Twitter and liking/following us.
Of course after a few months on the contract there was a big management shift and they canned me thinking I was useless to them. I made a lot of friends there and got weekly updates about sales tanking and reports of search traffic starting to fall after a few months. I realized I needed to start charging more for my services
stgermain
Junior Member
- Apr 29, 2011
- 127
- 26
What about creating and linking to a Facebook page on the homepage of this e-commerce site?
You also could create a shopping cart system in their FB page and when they check out they land on the e-commerce site itself.
Doesn't this influence the SERP too?
You also could create a shopping cart system in their FB page and when they check out they land on the e-commerce site itself.
Doesn't this influence the SERP too?
A couple of items I don't think I've seen mentioned in the thread:
1. the power of interlinking of pages. Use the existing power of your site to send power to your key pages. Much better if these links are in-context links.
2. Use on page copy (category and product descriptions) to target some longer tail phrases. It's amazing how you can rank from just page copy with no anchor text links at all. Think about some keyword modifiers that someone might search on that your competitors aren't thinking about. Qualitative terms work great here - i.e. "best blue widget for kids". It's amazing how many folks search using qualitative terms. They think Google knows who's the best.
3. One thing I noticed is that most folks posting in this thread seem to be selling non-unique products (i.e. drop ship items), which definitely are tougher. Two thoughts - one, if you're are indeed selling unique items, then do not market them as if they are commodities. Two, if you are selling non-unique items, then figure out a unique selling proposition (aka point of difference) that you can market - i.e. best service, fastest shipping, largest inventory, cheapest shipping, money back guarantee, price guarantee, etc. - so that you are no longer selling a non-unique product.
what do you mean by #2 "Use on page copy"? I am not sure i follow, I am currently using magento
I work with four ecommerce sites and I have only had the chance to take a look at hte first two pages. PLus its like 1AM here and i'm tired as fuck. I do fairly well, the way I rank and this may seem kind of redundant but with products that can be split into multiple different products. Like um a desk that can also have an attachment to it to make it an entertainment center or something. This adds pages of relevance to the website. The more pages the better obviously. My prices are also pretty low but what I have done is build a squidoo lens for most of my categories. Then I list amazon listings ( we sell on amazon too) which i get extra commissions from. I also write articles and submit them to ArticleBase Ezine etc...then I also make a Youtube Video about the product and put a link in the description. I then XR blast the squidoo lenses, web 2.0s, and main site (domain is 4 years old). I rank and pull in over $100K of sales a month per site. Simple kinda guide there. I link to the inner pages, category pages, product page. Whatever it takes to make the linking seem natural. Of course I have FB and Twitter accounts linking to the main site as well. My platform automatically updates into Google Base daily. This used to bring us a lot of traffic I do not think it still does because quite honestly, I do not know how to rank on Google Shopping.
- Mar 13, 2011
- 129
- 34
It definitely does stgermain. Look at this bead company on the first page of big G dominating 7 out of the 10 of the first page. I know I am giving up a huge niche but this is for all of us to learn from. I really don't care about this niche.
Go to Big G and type in Art Beads... and look at the very first company named ArtBeads Dot Com Sorry I cannot post links yet.
I am about to implement this into my e-commerce site.
I just wish I could get over this stupid learning curve. I am working on my first website/e-commerce site and I am in a market that has 2 physical products that I sell 1 of them have 3 different sizes and I am ranking easily on the 2/3 pages. I have honestly no clue how in the world I am going to ship all of the orders out when I rank in the first page for my primary keyword but I will manage I guess. I really need to let someone build me a website but I really don't know who to turn to up here.
Taktical I am going to use the strategy you mentioned earlier about writing articles and leading the reader back to my website to buy the product. I will let everyone know how it goes for me. It should go pretty well especially after I checked out a good amount of the competition which websites just happen to be lucky enough to rank for the keywords. I am trying to figure out a lot of this website building stuff it is really frustrating, but I have managed to get 27 of my webpages indexed by big G. Currently I am using a free blog theme and have integrated Shopsite into it which needs a lot of love. If anyone has any suggestions how to doctor it up and make it look pretty I would appreciate the suggestions. I am very frustrated because I know I could easily dominate my niche and be well taken care of $$$ but I am held up with all of these cosmetic/knowledge lacking issues.
I have had most of my graphics outsourced and all of my content is written all I need is a blog setup on my site so I can start focusing on ranking for the other keywords I have in mind. My website is a blog/e-commerce hybrid I guess you can say. I am trying to see how this structure will work out for me. Like I said I am new to building websites/e-commerce store so forgive me for not knowing all the lingo. Sorry so long.
I would definitely say make sure you do your keyword research it is probably the most important after all. If you have a keyword that gets less than 1K exact searches sometimes it is not worth it to try to rank first page. I would definitely do what you are doing to try to get people to visit by blogging about your products. I first started SEO doing that but I have moved on to my other tactical plan which i posted up there in that messy paragraph^^
ventureman
Registered Member
- Jul 10, 2011
- 63
- 44
content is always good the most important ting targeted articles for long tail products, also I recommend to work real hard on product descriptions and make sure there are 100% unique and 100 optimized for the right keywords, that the way I work...
for images I always use the ALT function to input keywords
and tabs would be considered under the same url