SEO For E-Commerce Sites

I have a Wordpress e-commerce site with roughly 800 products and use Shopp. Most of the products have 4 variations and Shopp handles those really well. So far I am pretty pleased with it. I initially set up the site using WP e-commerce. I had nothing but problems with it and the support is nonexistent.

Thanks for starting this thread. It sounds like I have a lot of work to do on product descriptions.

Lots oaf great info being shared here. Product reviews have been huge for me.

imth3one said:

Has anybody seen preferential treatment from Google in SERPs after submitting XML feeds to Google Products?

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Haven't seen any difference on my end...submitted a few.

Taktical said:

What about when you have a image slideshow, should we be optimizing those images for SEO as well?

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The image slideshow is going to be delivered by flash or javascript. Either way it will most likely be ignored by googlebot. It won't hurt to do it anyway as it only takes a second to put in the keywords in the alt tags.

Figured this would be the best place to start back up some conversation and tips since I'm also in the ecommerce. I do have a question that I'm wondering if anyone can help me out with. I currently run a fairly big site and there are some extra long tail keywords as well product keywords I'm looking to use and target through a blog.

Would it be more beneficial to start a blog on the actual ecommerce site and have it a hybrid giving more pages and content etc. Giving it more authority and having it link to the inner product pages orr would it be more beneficial to the site to have a separate blog (whether on free or another domain) and have that be linking to all the content pages and home page etc. and being able to blast that one even more than I could with the ones on the main site with 2.0's and stuff seeing how it wouldn't be directly on the main. Of course with the separate blogs have the goal getting them to the main site.

Did want to clarify there are already a lot of products being ranked in fairly high positions and the blog pages - if on another site, I would be using to link up to them and rank them higher than they are in their keywords as well.

One thing I am going to get started doing is creating a split test, test out a couple of ecommerce platforms with different product description, design etc
What are you thoughts on split testing ecommerce sites?

My primary income is from an ecommerce site and I've been struggling w/ this issue.

Lately, I've been making some headway through blog/article/web 2.0 article marketing.

In term of on-site SEO, I added an "additional details" section where I describe the product in detail. My motivation for this is really to increase the amount of text/words on the page and add more keywords. To preserve the aesthetics/layout of the page, it's one of those "click for more info" link set ups, where the text is only shown to the visitor if he clicks that link.

I try to make my site's footprint grow organically, which is a bit difficult w/ an ecommerce site. To do this, I track all my inbound google search terms. Once a certain term exceeds a small threshold (e.g. 5 searches), I dynamically create a page for it.

I've also done some other small tricks to increase my site's footprint w/ relevant content. For instance, my products are related to corporate strategy, so I scraped a ton of business strategy and financial terms/definitions; and created a definitions section for the site.

One of the best threads by far I have ever read on BHW!! Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Dan Da Man said:

One of the best threads by far I have ever read on BHW!! Thanks to everyone who contributed!

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totally, nobody talks about these issues in other threads. its always about adsense blogs...

I dont know where to find the exact answer for this question??? I thought i can get here...

This topic is discussed in depth. Well I want to say content content is not great problem. You have to make sure that you search engine friendly url. You can make links of your product details that will also make a very good content.

Know that google use some statistical method to learn good website from example. Who are the good examples of e-commerce site. Do some research and learn the site proprieties. Try to make the common things and shape to your site too. Not copy paste I mean know what I meant. That will make google to recognize you and your purpose more efficiently.

I had an e-commerce site which I sold in 2009, and the new owner tripled the number of products. I had 300, and now they have close to 1000. He has told me that the traffic also tripled. He did other things too, but he feels that increasing the number of products was very helpful in terms of SEO.

Taktical said:

totally, nobody talks about these issues in other threads. its always about adsense blogs...

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Haha I know right? E commerce is an amazing way to go. I think the initial set up is harder and more time consuming, but once you have it down, it really is a winner. All i hear is adsense this and adsense that

Also, do you think there is an issue with creating a dynamic page for a keyword which gets a good amount of searches. Obviously you cannot make a page for every single keyword, but does this have any effect on SEO? I was thking of doing this and not having it show on homepage

Dan Da Man said:

Also, do you think there is an issue with creating a dynamic page for a keyword which gets a good amount of searches. Obviously you cannot make a page for every single keyword, but does this have any effect on SEO? I was thking of doing this and not having it show on homepage

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It does help I usually put the main keyword in the category page. But you should optimize for both. For Ecommerce I can not stress the importance of on site seo....I;ve had a site I had built backlinks to forever for a 22K exact search term. Then one day I realized my meta and title was off. I added the main Keyword first and used variations

Keyword One,Variations Keyword One, Soap Keyword One

Thats how i format the titles for my category and home pages.

But after changing the title i went from page 2 to page 1 #7.

liquidx said:

It does help I usually put the main keyword in the category page. But you should optimize for both. For Ecommerce I can not stress the importance of on site seo....I;ve had a site I had built backlinks to forever for a 22K exact search term. Then one day I realized my meta and title was off. I added the main Keyword first and used variations

Keyword One,Variations Keyword One, Soap Keyword One

Thats how i format the titles for my category and home pages.

But after changing the title i went from page 2 to page 1 #7.

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Great thanks. The only thing I am confused how how to create canonical tags for your category pages. Anyone shed some light on this issue?

Dan Da Man said:

Great thanks. The only thing I am confused how how to create canonical tags for your category pages. Anyone shed some light on this issue?

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If you're trying to avoid duplicate content on an ecommerce site, canonical isn't going to help much.

Canonical is for when your ecommerce CMS (for instance, osCommerce) does something totally retarded and sticks the session ID in your URL, giving Google the impression that multiple versions of your product page exists (exactly the same).

Then the canonical might sometimes be used for categories. Never for tags. Tags will give you a bazillion duplicate content pages and there isn't anything you can do about it (except nofollow tags and noindex/follow tag pages), and canonical won't fix it. This is when you tag a product with 3 different tags and each of the pages those tags represent suddenly get a snippet, exactly identical, for that product. Canonical won't fix that.

Canonical won't fix categories when assigning a product to multiple categories.

Canonical WILL fix your category page when your category page happens to have various methods of sorting (sort by price highest to lowest, sort by price lowest to highest, sort by reviews, etc.), if your ecommerce CMS is retarded enough to index a different version of the category page for each method of sorting, but this shouldn't be common. Don't even bother with this unless you specifically see your category page for a certain product indexed with several variations of sorting.

Category pages are huge on duplicate content ... in fact they typically consist of nothing but duplicate content. You should either type a big unique intro to each of your category pages, or you should "noindex/follow" them. You want to noindex them when they are nothing but duplicate content ... but keep the follow.

Even though it is particularly difficult, I like to SEO category pages because its the category that represents the keyword I'm chasing after (I usually don't try too hard for product names). Either that or I make a big long post representing several products in that category where that page could technically almost qualify as a category page, and rank it for the category keyword.

Most CMS should handle canonicals presented by categories (most would nofollow the several methods of sorting so they shouldn't get indexed). Some (like osCommerce) are just plain stupid and stick the session ID in the URL thereby screwing up your product pages by making duplicates ... you need to focus on those.

Dear Friend,
Great to hear about this topic which u bought to the discussion, well my friend blogging is the best option for any type of website and the most important thing is on page optimization of web page.
I like to know more about SEO during this discussion!

meens said:

Dear Friend,
Great to hear about this topic which u bought to the discussion, well my friend blogging is the best option for any type of website and the most important thing is on page optimization of web page.
I like to know more about SEO during this discussion!

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Dear Friend,
Great to hear about your irrelevant spammage which you brought to the discussion, well my friend spamming BHW isn't the best option for any type of account and the most important thing is posting relevant to the thread for your first post.
I like to know how long your account will last until banned!

Ecommerce is my main gig. This is the way I do it.

I deal with a company that gives me a brandable but essentially duplicate content website, I point my domain to them and they give me an online store ... 100% similar to 1000s of other stores through the same affiliate setup, minus a very limited amount of customizable features (change the header, etc.)

I stick that on a subdomain. I do not SEO it, I try to hide it from Google (in fact, on my biggest site, I went into Google tools and just deleted the subdomain out for fear of being penalized by duplicate content).

I make the main domain a blog. My store has some 100k products ... and has hundreds of viable keywords to chase after which represent 1k+ exact searches.

I take each keyword, one by one ... that represents a 1k+ exact search ... and I write a really good article about it. The keywords I chase after represent the category of the products I want to promote ... and the post I make will typically feature 5 to 10 similar products, the best products that qualify for that category.

Then I will make 5 to 10 separate pages, each representing one of the products represented in the main keyword page. Each of those pages link back to the main post I'm promoting.

So after I've nailed a 1k+ keyword ... I've got from 6 to 11 new pages on my website if you're following me (posts, not including tags, categories, etc pages).

If I really want #1 or close to it on that keyword, I'll make dozens of web2.0 posts all pointing to the main page. Then I'll do an AMR blast that gets me 350+ article directory posts to each of the web2.0s, as well as the product posts (not the main post).

The reason I do this is AMR is a slightly more crappy method of getting backlinks and can push a page to be over-optimized fairly easy. I don't want my main post over-optimized. I don't care if my product pages are though, or my web2.0s (because I'm not trying to rank them ... product pages are particularly hard to rank anyways).

So what I end up with is 1 main post that has at least 25 web2.0s pointing to it that represents a 1k+ keyword. Then I have 5 to 10 product pages that each get 350+ article directory links. My web2.0s get 350+ article directory links.

Then I rinse/repeat chasing after the next 1k+ exact keyword.

All content on my main website is unique. All content on web2.0s and AMR are badly spun articles scraped from article directories.

Once someone gets on my blog ... my only goal is to get them to my duplicate content subdomain store ASAP. Thats because the store does crap for SEO, but converts extremely well. I have a huge graphic navigation menu at the top of my blog (takes up 2/3 of the screen) tempting people to click through to my store. All outgoing navigation is through image map and I honestly believe Google doesn't even know its there (its nofollowed even though image map technically isn't nofollowable). It doesn't show up on the heat map in Google analytics as being an area that people click.