As search engine behemoth Google has updated their algorithm used to find and place search queries, it is time for any owner and operator of an eCommerce site to update their Ecommerce SEO for better results. More rankings mean more traffic to your site, which means more sales of your product or exposure for advertising content. Some simple, yet quite effective tips can boost your page.
Ecommerce SEO – Get Every Page In
There is an upper limit eCommerce SEO. If you have only a few dozen items that you sell, then you can easily complete and update SEO for every page and every product. If you sell a few thousand items, on the other hand, you are sure to have a few pages go wanting. The more pages you have, ultimately, the more hits you return from the countless searches that take place each day for an individual item.
Page Hits, Page Hits, Page Hits
The more pages you have standardized, the better your returns are. This means that the product name is in the title of the page, immediately apparent in the body text, within the URL and/or image source of a picture. Have different pages for minor differences when necessary — the people who look up a search item like “Chevy Mustang” will also look up “red” and “black” in tandem with the information. While it can be hard to pack each page with individual information, the more description you can get in, the more hit returns you get by customer interaction with the content.
Create A Site Map
When a customer or potential customer logs into an eCommerce site, they will spend time clicking around if they have a personalized experience. Indexing your website in order to direct traffic to and from different sections, whether your site requires registration or not, creates an easy map for users to follow. New traffic can read introductory information while returning users get insight on updates, facilitating a flow of customers. This allows Google to get new items and updates in your site easier than it would from a standard directory. Sites like Craigslist that have a “smartmap”, with neither an index nor an archive, necessitate a Google algorithm spending more time looking around on your page. You want that algorithm going through every page it can before it moves on to the next server.
Link In, Link Out
The connections that you make with other websites are extremely helpful to both pages. Being able to have customer spending overlap due to mutual services or opportunities can keep many different eCommerce sites up and running within a larger network of online retailers. Try to minimize the links that only lead back to your own page and maximize outbound links that lead to productive, authoritative, and informational pages. Since a customer as well as a Google algorithm reads through the material, it needs to benefit them.
Put It Out There Only Once
When Google looks through your site from top to bottom and finds redundancies and duplicate content, it does not bode well for your search returns. Often times an eCommerce SEO will struggle with duplicate content, since there are only so many ways to describe one product that has a dozen different pages. The best way to minimize redundancies is to create a canon domain, which will be the archetype of the page that you want your customers to see. If you sell ice cream, set a canonical link for the chocolate ice cream with a coding text. This will inform the algorithm that the canon link will be what all future URLs will refer to. This streams all content with the keyword through the “preferred” page rather than showing up as duplicates.
Take The Road Less Traveled
In the same sense that duplicate content sinks an eCommerce SEO score, the ways that you get to your eCommerce pages can also affect rankings. Using the code of a 301 redirect keeps all pages from veering too far away from the central page, whether it is the canon page, the homepage, or the check-out page. The 301 is available on any page that needs to be linked to it, pulling search engines through the rabbit hole as well as customers.
Tell Google What You Want To Show Up
eCommerce SEO is not about guessing. You can specifically tell Google’s AdSense what you want to show up. Parameter Handling will let you set the standards for pages that should be ignored if they are not up to snuff or have pretty poor click rates. Trim the fat when needed and you’ll get great results from your eCommerce SEO efforts.