Optimising E-commerce Sites

Probably the greatest use of SEO is to improve traffic and hopefully sales on e-commerce web sites.  Many companies that have e-commerce website are using some form of dynamic website in which the pages are assembled from information held in a database. There are many different free e-commerce packages for developing dynamic websites. The most popular being: OScommerce, Magento, Joomla and Drupal.

It used to be the case that you would have to delve deeply into the code to get the advantages of SEO but these days many e-commerce sites can be made more search engine friendly  by the addition of plugins or packages  to fix their SEO shortcomings. Even without SEO plugins there are still changes that can be made to the content to improve your rankings.

Product descriptions  – take time to write unique product descriptions. While it is tempting to just copy and paste descriptions from promotional information, the chances are that the product descriptions are already indexed on sites that you are competing with.

Often the degree of categorisation of many product types can result in a directory structure that have many different levels. The pages standing between the home page and product pages typically do not have much content on them. This can result in product pages that are not indexed. To remedy this you should ensure there are as few levels as possible between the home page. Ideally, users should be able to reach a product within three clicks of the homepage.

Remove the session IDs for bots. The session ID is a string of random characters appended to a URL to track and identify visitors to an e-commerce site.  It is possible on some ecommerce systems, usually to a bug in the software, for robots   to be given a session ID when they crawl the site. By the time they bot comes back to reindex a page, the session will have expired and the crawler will be given a new session ID. The new session ID creates a different URL,  but the same content which can cause duplicate content problems.

Titles are one of the most important aspects for identifying the subject matter of a web page. Each title should be unique. The words at the beginning of the title carry more weight than those at the end so each product should be the first thing in the title, then the category or company name.

One of the features common to many e-commerce sites is the ability to order products by keyword, price, availability and relevance. This is another cause of duplicate content because you have different URLs leading to the same page of content.  Such duplicate content is often difficult to resolve but use of nofollow in links can mitagate the damage in most cases.

Duplicate content may also occur when a product appears in two categories.For example:

• widgets/green/widgetA.htm
• widgets/blue/widgetA.htm

It would be better if the products went to the same page. A single directory for all products rather than have friendly URLs which display the category and product. So in our example: green and blue widgets would point to /products/widgetA.htm

Deep link to individual product page. The home page is usually the most powerful page for a website. Any PageRank that is gained from this page is passed to pages coming off these pages and this is further distributed to pages via links within those pages. Individual important product pages can be given a greater degree of prominence by linking directly to these pages through products. For example: a featured products on the home page can link directly to individual products. Deep linking from external links is also important.

That is it for now but there will be more to come.  In part II of this post we will look at more ways of improving e-commerce sites.