Ecommerce websites and online shopping are the latest trend these days. You can find large ecommerce stores selling hundreds of products to small ones selling a few products. Your ecommerce website can get desired results only when you implement the right SEO for ecommerce and have a site design to enable on-site SEO work. There are three ways to do SEO for ecommerce: On Page, Off Site and Site Wide. On page SEO involves those SEO activities that are implemented on the website like adding meta tags. Site wide strategies include paying attention to the linking structure and navigation of the site to make the site more user-friendly. Off site or Off page SEO for ecommerce includes those activities that are implemented on other places excluding the site like link building. This article discusses some tips to enhance your ecommerce website.
Product Buttons & Buy Buttons: To encourage the users to find and buy products, make sure that buttons or links to products are easily visible or noticeable. To close a sale, you must create a simple buying path and then guide the users to follow the same. This involves brainstorming but the results are immense. Whether it is product information, price, product comparison or product reviews, everything should be easily accessible along with Buy Now button.
Minimum Clicks to Buy: Pay attention to the buying process and ensure that the user needs to click minimum number of clicks in order to buy online. If the process is too complicated, the consumers might feel frustrated and might change their mind. Maximum number of clicks from the product page to the final payment page should be four — the lesser the better.
Professional Design & Clean Layout: Online users don’t like to spend time on sites that are cluttered and present information in a confusing manner. So, ensure that your website layout and placement of all elements is such that the users instantly come to know what you are offering. The design must be enticing and use of colors and backgrounds must be done suitable. Product images must be clear and if they come with Zoom option, that would be great.
Page Titles & Meta Descriptions: You can benefit immensely in search engine rankings by using keyword-rich unique titles and descriptions in home page, category pages, sub pages and all product pages. Make sure that the meta description guidelines are being followed in terms of number of characters to be used. These tags inform the search engines and searchers what those pages are about when they appear in search results. For keyword research, you can use tools, such as Wordtracker, Overture Suggestions, and Google Keywords.
No Follow Tag: The “nofollow” tags can be used in many ways. You can use them to avoid the link juice or benefit flow to any external pages it is pointing at. You can also use them to determine where the link benefit will flow within the site.
In an ecommerce website No-follow tags can be used in certain links on a page. Let’s say you have one main product and other similar products, by using no follow tags on the main product page, you can stop search engines to read those pages and give benefit to the main product page. This will ensure that the main page is indexed. Also, by using Nofollow tag you can ensure that the PageRank is not distributed among the less important web pages like terms & conditions, etc.
The no follow tag (rel=”nofollow”) has also been used by all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major and minor search engines as a way to fight spam. The no follow tag was at first used by bloggers who were receiving spam comments including web links. By using no follow tags the search engine could get the message not to consider that link or give advantage. Then links with no follow tags are not considered worthy by Search engines and hence won’t benefit. The use of no-follow tags when combined with the right meta tags helps reduce the effectiveness of spamming in search engine optimization. Thus, it enables ecommerce sites benefit from quality search engine results by preventing spamdexing.
Use URLs that Contribute to SEO: This is one important aspect about SEO for ecommerce – that you should create a search engine-friendly URL with meaningful identifiers. Usually, ecommerce sites are database driven. Moreover, shopping carts are not generally SEO friendly too. The purpose of site design to enable on-site SEO work should be to reduce navigational inconveniences especially in the product pages.
Use Session IDs: This is one of the important requirements of ecommerce websites. Session Ids are used in ecommerce sites, to track users for security reasons. It is a long URL with a combination of characters added to the main URL. To Google the session id URLs are duplicate content and creates problems while indexing. To solve the problem, you can either block session Id URL using robots.txt or change navigation dynamic URLs to static URLs.
More Tips for Your Ecommerce Website:
- Don’t update your site if you are not confident of doing so.
- Don’t Add Video unless it is useful.
- Avoid Flash Animations if don’t serve a good purpose
- Add Web 2.0 Components if possible, such as blogs, user forums, reviews, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools. These improve the stickiness of your website.
- Implement Content Management System for easy management of products.
