Optimizising Ecommerce Websites Part II

In part I of this series we covered optimisation of ecommerce websites. There is such a lot that can be done that it is deserves a second post.

One of the persistent problems with content on e-commerce site is duplicate content and this can be caused in many ways. One particularly common way is where you have several products that are only slightly different, if your product is available in different colours for example and you want to get the benefit for keywords.

Nofollow

No-follow values  can be assigned to particular links within the page. If you have one basic product or many products that are similar. These pages can be filtered from the search engines results. It may be useful to use nofollow to prevent all but one copies of the page being indexed.

Nofollow can also be used to distribute  PageRank more efficiently by no following the least important links. Any PageRank will be shared the important page links on the page. This can be useful for orphaned pages as they would not pass PR to any other pages. So pages such as the about us, privacy information, terms and conditions should be highly visible on the site but not take away PR from the more important product category pages. PageRank sculpting as is useful for distributing any PageRank that a page has. If your pages have a low PR then this is not going to do anything.

Canonical

Near duplicate pages can be declared using the canonical tag. (It is actually a value or setting of the rel attribute but if we talk about canonical tags everyone knows what we mean.) This acts like a 301 redirect in that it passes any PageRank from the product page to the declared URL in the tag. The canonical tag is placed within the head section of the HTML code and the link it points to is the page that you want any accumulated PageRank to go to.

Improving Content

Content on the pages – consider 200 words as a  minimum. Put as much information as possible about your product on the page. It will get more pages indexed and result in long-tail searches. For individual product pages go for the long-tail search by including as much relevant content as possible, including pdf documents, product codes, materials, technical specifications anything that would help a specific product be identified by a very specific search.

Not only is this good for searches, but it is good for you visitors. A buyer will not usually just buy a product but has the whole internet to be able to research the products they are interested in. Price is obviously an important factor but  another common reason for buyers not buying a product is that there was not enough information for the buyer to make the decision to buy.

Breadcrumb navigation

Good to include helps visitors find their way in a site especially important if visitors find their way into the site from a search engine.

Related Products

Many stores have hundreds of products. It may be impractical to apply these optimizations to every single one.  In this case you should optimise your best selling products first. Related products  are another good way to give information to visitors about products that are similar to products they are looking at. Such dynamic content is very good for increasing the content on a page and also can give visitors more choice.

Product Reviews

Product reviews create content for the site. However such user generated content is difficult to generate on smaller sites with less traffic. Short, simple instructions and an invitation to write a review can be added to confirmation email details.

Analyse Searches

Most e-commerce sites have the ability to search for products by keywords. Searches can be stored and reviewed periodically. Compared to the keyword searches on Compare search data on Google Analytics to see which terms are driving traffic to the site and which terms visitors are searching for. There may be a discrepancy which can be used to modify your targeted keywords.

Deep Linking

Article Martketing for creating deep links to individual product categories rather than just the home page work well because they are targeted at a small group of products. Articles on a particular type of product or reviews of a product are easy to write and will generate links from multiple domains, which add to the diversity of your link profile. If you run a blog on your e-commerce site this information is also creating additional content.