How to rank an E-commerce site?

A blog for an ecomm site isnt a bad idea. Your product pages will have places to drop in content. Fill out your category pages as best you can.

Understand The SEO Impact Of Information Architecture & URL Structure
Recognize Causes For Duplicate Content & Find Solutions
Implement E-Commerce Tracking
Traditional SEO Is Still Relevant To E-Commerce SEO

jfoawn said:

I'm confused as to the way I should approach SEO on an e commerce site. There really is no where to drop an article unless you do excessive descriptions of the product but even then there is too much product under the same category to know where to target the back linking.

The site is clothing/merchandise about specific comics.

Categories breaks down by comic/superhero(or character)

so should the SEO strategy be to creat a blog within the site and focus on ranking each article for specific character example "Spider-Man shirts" and then link the article to the specific categories of the actual shop?

Im simply not interested in ranking one product and then hoping the user will browse the site.

Best bet would be to have some sort of overview over the specific category on top of all the products related to it?

Click to expand...

I do strictly ecommerce sites. You'll want unique product descriptions on all product pages. They don't have to be novels, but try to stay away from 5-6 point form sentences as your product description. instead, write a good 200 - 300 word description for each product. This will take time, but it's worth it.

As for getting things to rank. Post articles ON your site. Talk about a specific product, write a story about it. Look for videos of people using it / wearing it if its clothing, and talk about them and put your videos on the site. You can do this in a blog section of the site, and then link out from the blog post or article tyo specific product pages or categories.

You want to have content. Products themselves rank, but better if you can build links to not only the root domain, but you'll want to link to product pages and category pages as well from other sites. Don't make the mistake of using generic descritions and title / meta tags for all of your products, as this won't help at all for rankings.

jfoawn said:

I'm confused as to the way I should approach SEO on an e commerce site. There really is no where to drop an article unless you do excessive descriptions of the product but even then there is too much product under the same category to know where to target the back linking.

The site is clothing/merchandise about specific comics.

Categories breaks down by comic/superhero(or character)

so should the SEO strategy be to creat a blog within the site and focus on ranking each article for specific character example "Spider-Man shirts" and then link the article to the specific categories of the actual shop?

Im simply not interested in ranking one product and then hoping the user will browse the site.

Best bet would be to have some sort of overview over the specific category on top of all the products related to it?

Click to expand...

jfoawn said:

But how could I effectively rank the sites for all this hundreds of keywords without the right on-page SEO, I would be making my job a lot harder.

Click to expand...

jfoawn said:

but how would that make sense for 100 different items that classify under "spiderman shirt" you can't really optimize like that. If you target the top category yes but not each item under it?

Yes optimize them all for the keywords but the off-page is the main thing at question. Focus each campaing for each keyword to the category?

Click to expand...

Here is how you do it, you either optimize a specific product page and link to that or create a blog and create unique content and link to that with a link to the product page.

I dont care if you have a super high authority I dont believe your root domain will rank for spiderman shirts if you offer 500 other shirts. The spiderman shirt page has the best chance for ranking.

What you can do is attach a blog to the site write articles about spider man shirts throw some links at the article pages and the artilces all have a link to the page that actually sells the spiderman shirt.

In effect your site would be telling Google/Bing/Yahoo that it contains many articles or important info about spiderman shirts but of all the pages on your site about spider-man shirts that THIS ONE (the one selling the shirts) is the most important.

I run a very large E-commerce site inside of an 18+ niche with some pretty fierce competition. I have managed to rank number 1 for every keyword in my niche quite easily by targeting wide range keywords. If I were to rank for a specific thing on my site it would get me no where, So i rank for category keywords, and use seo practices to push traffic to individual items or sub categories that are more narrowed down. This combined with an intelligent link structure, proper domain, title, and meta info, and decent content will get you in the right direction.

I use magento for my CMS and couldnt be happier. But this niche is also a product that we manufacture, warehouse, and distribute. So magento provides me with a bit more of a solid foundation than I feel I would get from Wordpress in a shopping cart setting.

The biggest killer of Ecommerce sites in my eyes are the following.

Duplicate Content - If you sell a lot of similar products it may be easy to copy and paste or duplicate items. In reality, multiple variations of similar items gives you a good opportunity to focus on common keywords for the entire group. For example, my website has 1 product with 200 variations and 5 different sizes. This has afforded me MANY extra pages to create tailored content for the over all niche, without being penalized for duplicate content.

No titles, or default titles - Many people seem to stick with one generic or defaulted title, I see this a lot in my competition. Titles are a big factor to ranking. Try to keep a common schema for how the titles should be laid out so your website has a general flow on each page. This will help you organize your SEO efforts and wont confuse your customers when they see it.

No meta data and poor descriptions - Out of sight out of mind, It seems many people dont mess with this on Ecommerce because of the sheer amount of pages a eCommerce site can have, However, each product on an ecommerce site is essentially an article on a blog, that someone can buy. Treat it that way, and design both the meta description and product descriptions to inform both the customer and the search engines about the product and you will sell more, and get more traffic, win win!

Images - Ecommerce sites have more images than most other websites, and this is probably one of the most over looked areas. Each image should be saved as keywordoptomized.jpg and you should take advantage of alt tags, image captions, and image names. Each one of these images can rank just like a page can. And if your image pops up on an image search before an competitor, you will most certainly get the click.

I hope this helps, I am by no means an SEO expert, probably exactly opposite. But I feel sharing my thoughts and experiences, allow me to learn from community feedback, and may also help someone else by providing an idea they can work off of, or for building constructive conversation. Thank you guys for reading!

Thanks for the informative post mystic.

Same thing you do for every site. Make sure it's easily crawlable. Implement a good design. Make sure your page titles lead with your KWs. Create useful content on each page, that is better than the pages you are trying to beat.
After your site is set-up nicely, build some links from the top down (Homepage and Top Level Categories). If the KW difficulty is low, you should be able to rank fairly quick by having a strong domain and an optimized title tag for a page with good content.