SEO For EcommerceBY: Jim Whitesell
You've set up your online store, bought some pay-per-click advertising, but are puzzled why your site isn't doing better in search results. Google and the other major search engines are focusing more on quality than they ever have before. Here are the top ten things you can do to make your online store do better in the search results: 10: Remove unneeded comments: smaller pages load faster, so you want to remove all the stuff that isn't needed in the page source. Remove all comments and blank lines to move the unique content higher to the top of the file. 9: Use www only: Did you know that search engines consider sitename.com and www.sitename.com as completely different web sites? If you are using a Linux server, you can use a file named .htaccess to force www on all your pages. This avoids duplicating your site between both versions of your domain name. 8: Use image alt tags: image ALT tags are a great place to include keywords specific to the product on the page. Be sure to use different keywords on each page of your site. 7: Create Unique TITLE tags: Be sure each page has a unique title tag, preferable the name of the product shown on the page. DO NOT include your website name in the title tag, as this increases redundancy across all your pages. 6. Use META DESCRIPTION tag: Create a short sentence or two that clearly describes the product found on the page, and include this at the META DESCRIPTION tag. This is normally used by the search engines to show what the page is about. 5. Use H1 and H2 tags: Put the most important keyword on that page in a single H1 tag, and the next most important keyword in an H2 tag. You can use CSS to make these tags appear the way you want. 4. Place content specific to the product close to the top of the file: Design your pages so the stuff that is the same on all pages (like a navigation bar) appears AFTER the unique content in the page source. Your goal is to get the unique part of the page (usually the name and description of whatever you are selling) as close to the top of the file as possible. You can use CSS to place your page elements where you want for proper display. 3. Use a site map: It is vitally important that search engine spiders can find all your pages easily. A site map is the most direct way to provide clean direct links to each page. Be sure to design it so there are no more than 100 links on a single page. 2. Use static links to product pages: If your online store is built dynamically using a database of products, use MOD REWRITE to create static URLs for all your pages. Search engine spiders will index static pages more quickly and completely that URLs with variables (? and $) in them. If your store can't do this, do a Google search for "search engine friendly shopping cart" to find some that can. 1. Build inbound links: The single most important thing to do is to build quality links coming to your website. All other things being equal, search engines still give a lot of weight to sites that are popular, and the number of links coming in to a site is a sign of popularity. While these tips are short by necessity, they should give you enough information to research and implement these steps.
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