Optimize your eCommerce Site for Search Engines | How-to Guides for running your business from Business.com

Optimizing an eCommerce site for search engines poses some unique challenges. While most blogs rely on SEO tactics such as link-baiting, few if any blogs will link to your individual product pages. Instead, eCommerce SEO focuses more on site-wide and on page SEO methods. In this guide, I've gathered my top 20 SEO E-Commerce tips.

Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It's tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer's website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID's or other parameters. If you don't have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories.
Unique Title Tags: While it's debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.”
Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn't directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don't stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren't relevant to the specific page they are on.
Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers.
Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won't bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don't tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you'll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.
Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border.
Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I've found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don't allow spiders through. If you're stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don't rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can't follow them.
Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I've found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. title="keywords here">) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.

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