SEO friendly Ecommerce
SEO and Ecommerce are not terms that fit together well.
This is strange when you consider that in order for Ecommerce businesses to succeed they need to be found on the web. This seems even more strange when you consider that the vast majority of Ecommerce sites use online shopping systems built from standard software products and shopping cart systems.
The problem arises when extensive use of dynamic scripting is implemented without any thought towards search engines. This type of system is easily recognised by the parameters in the URL string - for example www.yoursite.com/products?catid=23&prodid=573&mkt=uk.
Previously URLs with more than one or two parameters have been totally ignored by search engines. This is not the case nowadays but it is still not very friendly for search engines.
Read our tip on removing Session IDs from your URLs.
Something such as www.yoursite.com/keyword1-keyword2/ would be much better. It actually includes the keyword in the file name - so it must be relevant right?
But my shopping cart needs to use those long URLs to make it work I hear you say. Yes thats right and so do most! Most Ecommerce solutions now have a plug in to integrate with the system and make dynamic URLs into search engine friendly ones. There are now even some Ecommerce solutions that are designed with SEO in mind from the outset.
In the event that your Ecommerce solution is not very search engine friendly we can make use of the mod_rewrite module in apache web server. This lets you rewrite long dynamic URL strings to more search engine friendly ones. This is great and is the point where most people sit back and think great!
This is great, don't get me wrong, but there is plenty more that can be done to make a more search engine friendly Ecommerce site.
For starters, all of the main product categories should have direct text links from EVERY page on your site. This should serve as your main navigation, which should be in the form of a SSI and use standard HTML links rather than javascript.
All links should use - (minus sign) as separators rather than _ (under scores) as a - is seen as a separator where as an _ is just another ASCII character.
A mistake that many Ecommerce stores make is to use very little textual content. Search engines love content so give them some. A description of about 200 words per category and a 100 word individual product description using the targeted keywords will make much more sense to a search engine when compared to "product ID 546 $699.99 order now! best deal etc".
Some Ecommerce stores use a selection of drop boxes to search for and filter products until a desirable match is found. This is actually a good usability feature, just make sure it is implelemted using CSS and light DHTML rather than a flash or java applet or a code heavy Javascript function.
Include a site map as this will help the search engines index a site much more easily. Also include a Google XML Sitemap. You can get plug ins and Ecommerce solutions that dynamically generate all of your product entrieds into an XML file. This is great for telling search enignes about all of your pages. Especially when you consider they might not be able to find them otherwise!
On some of your major category pages, include a random product selection box. (Created with server side processing) This will help the search engine index new content all the time. Another good idea is to include frequently updated special offers.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is a good idea to use topic resources that are not solely aimed at selling products! Why bother you ask? Well it all comes down to relevant information - which is what search engines are looking for. This is why maintaining a blog or using forums or RSS data feeds are such a good idea. Once you have a reasonable amount of relevant info linking to your site you will find that your SERPs increase.
I don't doubt that almost everyone in the SEO industry agrees that the power of linking is an important factor in getting high SERPs. This is why whole industries have sprung up around PR and link exchanges etc. Some of these ideas where not too honest and have since faded away. But I don't think that anyone would doubt that a link from a site with relevant information is a good thing.
Depending on the strength of the site linking to you it can have quite a beneficial effect. So using anchor text relevant to your site and keywords make sense. The trouble is you don't have a huge amount of control over it. What you do have a large amount of control over, though, is internal links within your site. I have decided that this is a good effective method although it does not give huge results it is beneficial.
By linking relevant phrases and text within your body text rather than just your navigation you can create a huge linking path to lots of relevant information. A link from any page (regardless of which site it is on) to a relevant page will give a slight increase (no matter how insignificant). So by using relevant anchor text on relevant pages throughout your site you open up a whole new area for optimisation. Couple this with one of these pages being linked to by an external site and the search engine sees this as even more relevant that it would have without your internal content linking.
This practice is nothing new and does not have profound results but it is sound ethical SEO that far too few people pay attention to. In an age where there is huge competition and uncertainty in search engines stability can you afford to be missing out on even the smallest details?