Ecommerce SEO

Over the years ecommerce websites have managed to get good listings from having vast amounts of pages and content from the supplier. Things have changed and ecommerce SEO need cleaning up. This article is designed to give you a point by point list of what you need to check/do to optimise an ecommerce site. You will need knowledge to be able to implement most of the changes (or understand what I am writing about) but what it allows most ecommerce site owners to do is check with their developer or SEO consultant to see if you have issues. If you do then please give me a call, even if you just want your site checked to see why you are not ranking I am happy to discuss this with you.

Ecommerce SEO check list;

• Change you mind set to that of a user and expect quality
• Are you URL's (page addresses) easy to read or do they have symbols and numbers in them? They should read well and be meaningful / for example www.mywebsite.com/yellow-shoes.aspx and not www.mywebsite.com/123$-sdkk.aspx
• Make sure every page can only be accessed via one url. For example your home page is a typical example www.mywebsite.com/ and www.mywebsite.com/index.asp (it also counts for https and / and upper case etc etc. every change is classes as a different page)
• Is your content unique to your website? Did you create the content or the supplier? If the supplier did then there will be multiple other websites with the same content and duplicate content is a no.
• Make sure all your code is valid
• Do you have unnecessary re-directs? Links on your website pointing to redirecting pages which go to the landing page.
• Can you access you pages via uppercase and lowercase urls? And to make things a little worse do you link to pages in both uppercase and lower case?
• Are all you meta descriptions, titles, h1's, alt tags and author tags completed for every page?
• Do you have multiple h1 tags on any page?
• Do you have navigation pages cached in the search engines? Most ecommerce sites have navigation pages that lead to the product pages. Generally these have little content or value to an end user in the search engine. These dilute the quality of your website. (If you noindex them but allow follow then they don't get indexed but your end product pages do)
• Do you have pages on your website with no value, don't need to be there, are out of date etc? These again dilute the quality of your site.
• Do you allow people to comment on your pages and interact socially? This is a great way to add value to the pages.
• Do you have 404 pages set up correctly so if an unknown or old page is hit the search engine gets the correct server code?
• Is your site hosted in the same country as your made trade? It should be.
• Is your website down often? This is not a good sign to be sending to the search engines.
• Are your pages focused on what the people will search for or are they just loaded from a database without to much thought? The correct information needs to be placed in the correct location.
• Have you over stuffed keywords into pages to up your density for your main keywords? This is a bad thing and won't help.
• Do you regularly check your website log files to see how the search engines see your pages? You may have old pages that are sending a 400 server code when it should be sending a 404, or a 200 when it should be a 301 etc.
• Do you have more than 100-150 links on a page? If you have that is to many and you need to revaluate your navigational structure.
• Do you have dynamic content that is generated on request? You pages need to be already generated and available to load for two reasons. Firstly to increase load time which helps with your rankings and secondly Google does not like it.

The ecommerce SEO list goes on but I have tried to highlight the most common issues I find as a starting point to help you improve or recover your search engine listings.

Due to the size of most ecommerce sites search engine optimisation does not come cheap as a consultant needs to trawl through your site to find opportunities to improve. What I can add is that if you don't do it then you will not get the sales you need through organic search engine optimisation and you may end up spending £5000-50000 per month on pay per click.