SEO For E-Commerce Sites

[Dan Da Man]

I really wish there were more threads like this. This is when the pros come out to play lol. Thanks PHP

 

[socio]

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

We already saw benefit from the submission of our feed but Identified top competitors in different niches especially our own.

The key factor was data stuffing.

Data stuffing follows that initial model in SEO of stuffing keywords in a page except that it is a legitimate practice in Google feeds.

For products it should be brand/model/variations
This should appear in the title and in the first line of description. If possible in the image alt text but in our case we use Amazon s3 for the images so it does not apply.

 

[socio]

I discovered something HUGE last year, a complete game changer for all of my e-commerce clients - inexpensive to implement and absolutely invaluable, well actually it could be valued, it was responsible for a HUGE spike in ROI on every clients site. Unfortunately, I can't say what that was until I work out a way to get paid for cluing people in.

Would be interested in something like this for serious

 

[Dan Da Man]

I have another question. Say you have keywords that you want to rank for and you want to rank a category page for those keywords. These are long tail keywords so it doesn't really make sense to make a whole category for it. Or do you just create a category for it and hide it from Nav bar?

Example. Your have a category targeting home decor items. The long tail keyword it cheap decorative items. Imagine you have hundreds of keywords that are all different.

I think I asked this question before but I see some e stores do this but it seems time consuming. But what other way is there to do this? Do you just target a category that makes sense but it seems like it will be much harder to rank that category for that long tail keyword without having keyword on the page, in the title, or in the slug.

Throw a bunch of anchor text links at that page??

 

[supremeboxtee]

I have another question. Say you have keywords that you want to rank for and you want to rank a category page for those keywords. These are long tail keywords so it doesn't really make sense to make a whole category for it. Or do you just create a category for it and hide it from Nav bar?

Example. Your have a category targeting home decor items. The long tail keyword it cheap decorative items. Imagine you have hundreds of keywords that are all different.

I think I asked this question before but I see some e stores do this but it seems time consuming. But what other way is there to do this? Do you just target a category that makes sense but it seems like it will be much harder to rank that category for that long tail keyword without having keyword on the page, in the title, or in the slug.

Throw a bunch of anchor text links at that page??

yes

i sell automotive parts for certian makes and models, so there are tons of variations in model names, right? i'm not going t make a 1994 nissan maxima se page, a 1995 nissan maxima se-r page, etc.. so i throw backlinks (mass amounts of them) about 20% at the category/page i want to rank for, and the rest go to a blog post on wordpress or from my blog.storename.com blog, so the juice flows inward to the ecommerce site

if this doesnt make sense PM me ill help you

 

[ozone100]

SEO for eCommerce sites is very difficult for all the reasons you previously mentioned. Honestly unless you have a big budget for dev and graphic design you are probably not going to get natural links to your category pages and product pages. You will have to do black hat or manual link building. I won't write about black hat link building but as for white hat here are some suggestions to getting links to category pages:

• Use myblogguest to find bloggers in your niche and write an article on their site with a link back
• Send bloggers free product in exchange for a product review
• Answer questions related to your categories on Q&A sites with a link back to the category page

Even if you are getting most of your links to your homepage or blog, they will still strengthen your domain as a whole and thus making all your pages rank a tiny bit better.

 

[Dan Da Man]

I hear some people talk about over optimizing your site. Could some one elaborate a little more on how you could over optimize a site? Say you have 80 categories on your site bar all targeting keywords, could that be over optimizing?

I mean, if it makes sense for your visitor to have a page designed for them, why not go ahead and create a category page that is exactly devoted to what they searched right?

 

[phpbuilt]

I have another question. Say you have keywords that you want to rank for and you want to rank a category page for those keywords. These are long tail keywords so it doesn't really make sense to make a whole category for it. Or do you just create a category for it and hide it from Nav bar?

Example. Your have a category targeting home decor items. The long tail keyword it cheap decorative items. Imagine you have hundreds of keywords that are all different.

I think I asked this question before but I see some e stores do this but it seems time consuming. But what other way is there to do this? Do you just target a category that makes sense but it seems like it will be much harder to rank that category for that long tail keyword without having keyword on the page, in the title, or in the slug.

Throw a bunch of anchor text links at that page??

There are two ways to tackle a keyword. One is to SEO a category, the other is to make a post that represents the top 5 or top 10 products within the category.

From a conversion point of view, category pages rock. If someone is looking for energy efficient microwaves and they stumble upon your category page for energy efficient microwaves ... wohoo, they have everything right at their fingertips they'll probably buy one.

Then sometimes keywords don't match perfectly to the category ... maybe the longtail you're looking for is more specific and if people arrive at your category having searched for that longtail, its not what they're looking for.

In that case you just make a "top 5" or "top 10" post and list only products specific to that cateogry.

It is easier to do SEO for top-5 or top-10 pages, because you write them 100% unique.

It is more difficult to rank category pages, because ...

1) It's too easy to "over optimize" the page. Most category pages consist of snippets of the first paragraph of that product description, and when you have 20 products nearly exactly the same, its easy to get insanely stupid with keyword repetition.

2) The category page changes all the time, because every time you enter a new product in that category it pushes an old one out the bottom and adds a new one at the top. You could be ranked perfectly for on-site SEO and get top 10, then your page changes and it messes up or Google dances.

3) By default, category pages are 100% duplicate (snippets of actual posts). You have to enter in a ton of content as a category intro. By default wordpress doesn't allow html or links in category intros so you got to find a plugin that lets you do that ... pain in butt.

So ... if I have a category that nearly matches the keyword I want to rank for (a 1k+ exact match) I'll SEO the category for it. If I think it will be too difficult, that the keyword doesn't closely enough match the category, I'll make a new page for it.

To give an example, today I SEOed my "double dildo" category on my sex toy site for "lesbian dildos" as well as "double ended dildos" (and non plurl keywords too)... because lesbian dildos are double dildos are double ended dildos ... you can do several keywords to one category or top 10 page, I typically group similar types of keywords all to the same category.

And for that all I did both my category and I made a top-5 post ... and when I did my web2.0s and my AMR blasts, I used 2 URLs and one was my category and one was my top 5 post.

 

[Dan Da Man]

There are two ways to tackle a keyword. One is to SEO a category, the other is to make a post that represents the top 5 or top 10 products within the category.

From a conversion point of view, category pages rock. If someone is looking for energy efficient microwaves and they stumble upon your category page for energy efficient microwaves ... wohoo, they have everything right at their fingertips they'll probably buy one.

Then sometimes keywords don't match perfectly to the category ... maybe the longtail you're looking for is more specific and if people arrive at your category having searched for that longtail, its not what they're looking for.

In that case you just make a "top 5" or "top 10" post and list only products specific to that cateogry.

It is easier to do SEO for top-5 or top-10 pages, because you write them 100% unique.

It is more difficult to rank category pages, because ...

1) It's too easy to "over optimize" the page. Most category pages consist of snippets of the first paragraph of that product description, and when you have 20 products nearly exactly the same, its easy to get insanely stupid with keyword repetition.

2) The category page changes all the time, because every time you enter a new product in that category it pushes an old one out the bottom and adds a new one at the top. You could be ranked perfectly for on-site SEO and get top 10, then your page changes and it messes up or Google dances.

3) By default, category pages are 100% duplicate (snippets of actual posts). You have to enter in a ton of content as a category intro. By default wordpress doesn't allow html or links in category intros so you got to find a plugin that lets you do that ... pain in butt.

So ... if I have a category that nearly matches the keyword I want to rank for (a 1k+ exact match) I'll SEO the category for it. If I think it will be too difficult, that the keyword doesn't closely enough match the category, I'll make a new page for it.

To give an example, today I SEOed my "double dildo" category on my sex toy site for "lesbian dildos" as well as "double ended dildos" (and non plurl keywords too)... because lesbian dildos are double dildos are double ended dildos ... you can do several keywords to one category or top 10 page, I typically group similar types of keywords all to the same category.

And for that all I did both my category and I made a top-5 post ... and when I did my web2.0s and my AMR blasts, I used 2 URLs and one was my category and one was my top 5 post.

Awesome man! So, if you have a top 10 post about cheap energy efficient microwaves, where do you send them from that page? Obviously we do not want to send them to a category page that is just "energy efficient microwaves" because that wont be that converting.

I am assuming you just have the pages just like a category page. THey click buy now and it goes to a product page?

 

[Gamboloyd]

Dan Da Man and the others, thank you for taking time and asking some pertinent questions, and a big thank you to PHP and all the others too for giving the time to answer them as wholly as you do. There is some great information being passed back and forth and I for one am gleaning some valuable tit-bits. Priceless

 

[phpbuilt]

Awesome man! So, if you have a top 10 post about cheap energy efficient microwaves, where do you send them from that page?

Buy-now button that is filtered through redirect.php ... redirect.php having Google banned from loading it via robots.txt and nofollowed. Redirect forwards them to the added to cart and they can either check out, or click "continue shopping".

 

[Chaosguy]

I'm helping some friends, who are ceramic artists, to make an e-commerce website using Zen Cart. The information I just gained from this thread will be very useful! Naturally, I have additional problems / ideas that I want to ask about.

All of the site's products are handmade one-off pieces of ceramic artwork. This is great for getting unique tailored content for the product pages (e.g. what glaze, firing method, etc. was used to make that ceramic artwork). Once that single piece of artwork sells, how do I continue to take advantage of the SEO work for that page? What other issues have others seen with one-off products?

After reading this thread, I plan to put more work into optimizing my Zen Cart product category pages and implementing the Ultimate SEO module. I now realize (and should have before) that SEO for the categories and shopping cart home page are one good way to ensure SEO work isn't lost.

I'm using testimonials rather than specific product reviews. I'm assuming I'll get about the same traction as I would with product reviews, while avoiding locking in to a specific product that eventually will be sold. Has anyone has experience that confirms my assumption?

I've turned my Zen Cart manufacture pages into pages about the artists. That still needs more work, but I want to have detailed pages about the artists that they link to from their facebook, linkedin, etc. I'm thinking that will drive some traffic from their existing customers.

Should I also redirect traffic back out to articles the artists have written that mention this site? I'm tempted not to do that... but I want to see if others agree that this would overall reduce my retention of visitors.

I've a few articles about different kiln firing methods (history, process, and a description with photos of the artists doing this method). The end of the articles have a link to encourage visitors to go look and buy products made using this method. I'm getting traffic from these articles by submitting links to them onto social websites (digg, stumbleupon, etc.). I'm now thinking I should also post these articles onto high PR art oriented blogs to get traffic from those sites.

The site has only been up a short while. About 300 unique visitors the first month and more recently a day with 75 unique visitors... No sales so far, but some return visitors that are certainly attracted by specific pieces. Basically I've a long way to go before this really starts gaining a customer base.

I would certainly be interested in thoughts about how only having one-off unique products would change the dynamics of how you would do seo for an e-commerce site.

Thanks!

 

[phpbuilt]

I would certainly be interested in thoughts about how only having one-off unique products would change the dynamics of how you would do seo for an e-commerce site.

Thanks!

There's things people buy when they weren't expecting because its cute ... and there's things people buy because they set out to buy it.

My concern with a site like that would be a bunch of little nicknacks that people aren't searching for. You need to do some major keyword research into what kind of ceramic stuff is being search for, and then build the product line around that (not vice versa).

Once you're huge and you have 1k+ visitors a day who are visiting your site through SEO ... then you can monkey fart around with nicknacks that nobody searches for, but you think would buy if they only saw it. Stick icons for those products at the bottom of your main SEOed products and as people shop, they'll buy them.

 

[thinhduc144]

Point of this situation is how to make rich content for a website which is sell/buy.

 

[dioric]

Keep it up.....

 

[Chaosguy]

My concern with a site like that would be a bunch of little nicknacks that people aren't searching for. You need to do some major keyword research into what kind of ceramic stuff is being search for, and then build the product line around that (not vice versa).

I've been looking at keywords, I still need to do more on that. There is some encouragement I can give to make objects that hit on good keywords.

Currently all the products are unique artwork... They may hit on good keywords, but they aren't what I would call a product line.

I'll also try to convince the artists to make some molds, so that there would be a few "product lines" that could be replenished. The shape would be the same the firing process would make the glaze (e.g. coloring) for each one look a bit different.

That said, I am suspect that encouraging and convincing artists may be like herding cats. =)

Thanks!

 

[Chaosguy]

Point of this situation is how to make rich content for a website which is sell/buy.

Yes! =)

 

[dubcorp]

i have a pretty large e commerce site thats been put on hold due to my discouragement and was wondering if anyone is willing to do some paid consulting for me?

PM if interested

 

[phpbuilt]

i have a pretty large e commerce site thats been put on hold due to my discouragement and was wondering if anyone is willing to do some paid consulting for me?

PM if interested

No need for paid, shoot me the URL and I'll give you some recommendations.

 

[vegasbound]

KUDOS AGAIN ON THIS GREAT THREAD

Fed up EX-eBay seller here who is looking for a saner alternative. I'm a complete newb when it comes to SEO or any sort of technical side of creating a website, however I'm great with creating original content.

Just last night I signed up for 3dcart but was letdown when I started seeing that many segments of are not SEO friendly (from what I've gathered on this thread ). Are there any SEO friendly turnkey carts that you fine folks would recommend?

Thanks in advanced