SEO For E-Commerce Sites

What if we promoted articles instead and drove those to the money site? sort of like a faux review or information page and then it says "to purchase this product click here"

you think that would work?

I continually build a network of blogs/sites that are tangentially in my niche (i.e. if your product is furniture, then sites about home decor or buying a new home, or family, etc.) and then I post a "review" of my ecommerce site, along with other, non-competitive sites (It helps that I do SEO work for other sites, so they end up paying the cost/time) I work to get these sites some heft in SERPS so they're passing good link juice. But most important is that when customers search for <your site> review, all of these come up. Works great when you're selling have high ticket items.
 
Do you guys use alternative sources of traffic instead of Google? such as stumbleupon?
 
Yea I do use informational page as well. And for alternative sources try google base, ppc obviously, nextag.
 
mcbain2279 -
- keyword in file name and static, no dynamic urls i.e widget.html, mycategory.html <-- and I would use absolute URL links

@taktical, can u elaborate on this a bit? in ur experience have u found a difference between using absolute and relative links?

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.

anyone else find benefit from putting all urls at root level as opposed to just products and then having root/primary category/secondary category/?
i am in the middle of doing some work on something similar to this and trying to put together all pros and cons of both ways. one thing i noticed is most sites which feature category links under the listing in the serps have the category pages stepped down from root level (ie as my example above). would love other opinions! :)

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!

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.

this is another interesting topic, i have seen debate over this as well, some think that no-f0llowing internal links can have a negative impact as being almost too over optimized or seen as link juice hoarding. i am also thinking about NF or atleast nocache those types of pages (about us/terms/privacy/etc..), interested to hear if anyone has any experience either way with this?

Great topic and plenty of food for thought (or reminders!) ;)
 
just to ad an observation here

my product pages are named like this

Code:
www.mysite.com[URL="https://www.visitcairns.com.au/store/Product.aspx?ProductID=f4ad5302-4fc6-404b-88f4-4be56b3424a7"]/store/Product.aspx?ProductID=f4ad5302-4fc6-404b-88f4-4be56b3424a7[/URL]
on the relaunch a few months ago I painstakingly set up plain english url's for them eg
Code:
www.mysite.com/productname.html
only to find no ranking differences at all.
I'm not trying to say that you don't have to do it - only that I didn't see any positive results by doing it

I run a travel agency site with currently over 500 products.

I have had some success with good old fashined doorway pages. I group 6, 9 or 12 common products together and fill a page full of relevant content. I do make this page accessible from some other deep page and let google find it itself.

These doorways are then given to linkpushing and then blasted to hell with scrapebox and xrumer
 
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@taktical, can u elaborate on this a bit? in ur experience have u found a difference between using absolute and relative links?

Yes, not huge, but yes.

The absolute links are important for the consistency of the internal and external linking structures.
 
Would joomla work for this man?

Just found this thread and i love the information in here.
The timing is perfect, because currently i have a local referral client which shop i should optimize. The bad thing is, he is using a "CMS" which is basically a shitty and poor coded third party client, which would require ages of coding to adjust all the permalinks and seo optimize all the website. I wrote the support a message if their "CMS" supports anything seo related from something simple like meta tags or absolute urls (currently it is like 8273%27382.html), but of course, no answer.

The main thing i wanted to do now, is to create a "magazine" in blog style for the ecommerce site like "http://shopname.com/magazine/", in which i would write some keyword researched and optimized articles and push the with the all the seo i use for my other affiliate websites.

However, i dont know if the work is worth it, because i want to grow that ecommerce site big, the seo and the usability of the other ecommerce competitors suck and im pretty sure i could beat them when i would create a normal MFA.

So what im asking is, should i try to to make the client buy a new CMS like xt:commerce or something? I already pointed to that option, when i was talking to him in the beginning, but he did not like that idea that much, because he has like 1000-3000 products in his shop and would have to redo the website again (it is pretty new, he switched to this new shitty CMS some months ago and his sales dropped by 50% compared to the previous one, which was some free CMS).

What CMS would you suggest for an ecommerce site which has a large potential, and could be optimized with plugins (wordpress style) and not much elementary coding required?

And language pack for non english should be available, though if this is not the case, letting someone translate it should not that huge problem.
 
Taktical, I have been managing the SEO for an e-commerce site for over 2 years now. Drop me a PM, we can have a chat.
 
The main thing i wanted to do now, is to create a "magazine" in blog style for the ecommerce site like "http://shopname.com/magazine/", in which i would write some keyword researched and optimized articles and push the with the all the seo i use for my other affiliate websites.

Use wordpress.

However, i dont know if the work is worth it, because i want to grow that ecommerce site big,

Use Magento.

So what im asking is, should i try to to make the client buy a new CMS like xt:commerce or something?

Magento is free and quick to set up if you are familiar with the system. Pick a system where you are not locked to one provider/hosting company and choose an option that you can scale up = Magento.

I already pointed to that option, when i was talking to him in the beginning, but he did not like that idea that much, because he has like 1000-3000 products in his shop and would have to redo the website again (it is pretty new, he switched to this new shitty CMS some months ago and his sales dropped by 50% compared to the previous one, which was some free CMS).

I do understand your clients frustration. But fact is that he picked the wrong system. He will save a lot of money if he change his system asap. Ask yourself and client the question: How much will it cost him in adwords and extra SEO work, because he's ranking bad, based on a system that has bad onsite SEO?

You might be able to import the products into Magento, depending on the format you can export the products in. But in worse case, then does it not take that long to create a full working magento shop with 1000-3000 products. You are probably forced to SEO optimize every product and category page anyway, so why not just do it all in ones?

What CMS would you suggest for an ecommerce site which has a large potential, and could be optimized with plugins (wordpress style) and not much elementary coding required?

Magento and integrate wordpress so you will have the same layout for both CMS systems.

And language pack for non english should be available, though if this is not the case, letting someone translate it should not that huge problem.

Not a problem. You can find all that on Magento's official website.
 
Lets say I have a e-commerce store and I want a seo project with 10 keywords I want to rank for. 3 of them are big product categories (like computers, laptops, ...) 7 of them are specific products. The onpage SEO is ok.

How would you handle building links? What kind of linkbuilding structure will work?
 
Lets say I have a e-commerce store and I want a seo project with 10 keywords I want to rank for. 3 of them are big product categories (like computers, laptops, ...) 7 of them are specific products. The onpage SEO is ok.

How would you handle building links? What kind of linkbuilding structure will work?

I'd have to assume the same basic linkbuilding structure that works on all sites. I dont think Google expects different links.
 
I am surprised that it hasn't been mentioned more here, but I've seen cases where having Google Checkout as a payment option really seemed to help (at least it did a couple of years ago).
 
1) KW research

Also watch out for terms that your site is being served but not clicked on in analytics (usually because you are too low) - found some unexpected keywords here.

Make sure that your customers reviews are on the same page as your product description.

If you use google merchant then make sure they can leave stars too, the more ratings and higher your average rating helps with those shopping results.
Also respond to the reviews yourself using the store name or something like "management reply" to help control your keyword density. If the customer leaves a review and mentions "organic carrot juice" three times, you can water it down, likewise you can increase it.
Regular reviews encourage regular crawling too.

I found that increasing page speed (it was 62/100) when I built the site using Joomla and hikashop to 90/100 gave an immedaite benefit in SERPs, although we should be doing that for all sites anyway it can be overlooked with js and large images on an ecommerce site.
 
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Matt Cutts announced back in 2010 that site speed would be part of the ranking algorithm.
Code:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/

I'm not sure how much of a factor it is but it is best to cover all your bases. Plus your customers will appreciate it.

How to speed up your site:

First you need a benchmark. Go to
Code:
http://gtmetrix.com/
to have your site analyzed. It is free.

1. Turn on gzip Compression
The server compresses your pages by zipping them before sending to your visitors. Therefore the file size is smaller and loads faster. This only works on linux/unix servers

2. Minify your css files
Same principle here. Find a tool online that will compress your css file. Basically all it does is take out all of the whitespace. Take the compressed code and replace and save.

Each time you do something re-benchmark it.
 
Matt Cutts announced back in 2010 that site speed would be part of the ranking algorithm.

That's what I meant when I said page speed - it is part of the firebug add on for firefox and is also free.
 
I have a couple ecommerce sites. My biggest frustration is the pathetic shopping carts. Currently using CRELoaded and CS-Cart, both have their ups and downs. I want to set up more sites but would like to find a better shopping cart. My preference is Wordpress, but it's not really built for ecommerce. Some of the shopping cart plugins have come far since just a few years ago but I don't think they've come far enough especially if you're hosting hundreds or thousands of products.

Certainly, curious to hear anyone's point of view about a cart they use now that they really like. I agree with some points made earlier about navigation and the checkout process being keys to success.
 
I used to use CRELoaded a lot, I hated it... a lot.
All of the OSC based carts suck.

X-cart is horrible (and expensive)

I have used wordpress, but not for ecom, it just doesn't "feel" robust enough for me...
although I am ready to try out the shopperpress theme as an experiment for one site.

I have used Joomla with a few different cart extensions and had great results. - this is what I usually recommend to people who need a simple site (ie: under 100 products, nothing crazy config-wise) I usually use the VirtueMart extension, you have to make a few fixes and it works great, simple checkout and very extendable.

Magento is great for larger sites (more than 100 products or complex products), but it's involved to customize it. (not worth the work for smaller sites)
 
Anybody ever tried PopShops for data fed affiliate ecommerce sites? Had any success with SEO on those?
 
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