Just been reading a blog post about 13 things you can do to optimise an ecommerce site and am astounded by how paper thin the advice is so I took it upon myself to flesh out the issues with some real meat.
Check the original post and then view my comments below (sorry you’re going to need 2 monitors for this lol)
1. Meta descriptions have naff all to do with your rankings, best to make sure they support your point of sale message as they’re not much use for anything else
2. In the real world ecommerce sites have a hard time generating any useful content, most cant even be bothered to create a unique product description. What you can do here is perform some simple keyword research around your subject matter and add them to a blog (hosted on yoursite.com/blog) making sure that the terms targetted dont detract from your product categories i.e. don’t have a blue widget category and then blog about blue widgets!
3. There’s more to optimising images than having alt text and a file name. when ever possible have your image surrounded by descriptive text i.e. have something written before and after the file, this will help you with google image search.
4. Don’t you mean domain canonical issues? the simplest solution for this is telling google how you want to be indexed www. or non www. Secondly don’t link to index.php or whetever, just use the raw domain http://www.domain.com the same goes for folders.
5. Folder structure wont hurt your sites serps, in fact, it could add context i.e. widgets/flexible/red.html when it comes to navigation thing about common groups of products, this may be different to how you catalogue products. In addition if a product needs to be linked under multiple categories dont duplicate them, instead have both category listings link to a centralised product page.
6. Great advice but don’t forget to link singluar and plural terms and remember that it’s the first links anchor text on a page thats going to carry the ‘weight’ so optimise for this, the rest can be anything.
7. Loading times is far too big a topic to add under a simple bullet, things like caching, compression, use of sprites, whitespace and carriage return removal can all help.
8. If people need to use a sitemap page then your site is too hard to navigate so look there first, it is a great idea to get all of your products listed in some form of directory, just dont go mad as google doesnt like a single page with 1000’s of links on it, its just going to ignore most of them and stop after its got bored, if your navigation is 3 or 4 levels deep then consider categorising your site map and flattening the cats into a 2 tier system
9. Recent tests (check SEOMoz) show that H1 etc tags dont effect SEO, theyre great for semantics and do help if it contains a link, so use them for this and not for any seo reason as they don’t give extra weight.
10. Google Webmaster Tools is better at finding 404 links as it also shows internal and external links that are faulty. Also consider that your product inventory isn’t going to remain static, so make sure your ecommerce solution 301’s removed products to the parent category.
11. Yes encourage review, but for SEO purposes try and get them on 3rd party websites, if you use froogle you can quickly see which sites google rates for product reviews so this would probably work best if incentivised through after sales email marketing or a competition or something. You can always post the results on your product pages with a healthy ‘independent’ review validated by the 3rd party website.
12. Great tip and one I use all of the time… think about your order complete page and add some widgets, banners and cut and paste code for use in facebook, blogs and twitter and don’t forget to PROMPT them to use it!
13. Sounds like good advice but you just have to jump in sometimes as it can take a week or so for a change to be picked up by google and even longer for you to be able to get any metrics from it. My advice is to progressively work forwards with an eye on what youve been doing which can quickly be reversed via SVN and worked forwards methodically should something bad happen.
At Click 4 Beds and Distinctive Chesterfields we’re rapidly approching the cut off time for deliveries to arrive in time for Christmas its time to think about the next big sales period, the January Sales. Even though most retailers have pre-christmas sales, January’s offerings are still a big draw for many customers seeking to fill the post Christmas void with some bargains… And we all want a healthy slice of that Pie.
So, how can this be achieved? Well, some quick tinkering with your sites title tags and a few well placed blog posts are a good place to start and if you act now you should be indexed in time for the Janrary sale season. Heres a few tips to optimise your site for this season:
Add in motivators such as the terms ‘January sale’ and ‘January sales’ into your title tag
Change your Meta Description to reference January
Get new voucher codes distributed to your coupon network
Create a nice splash banner highlighting some of your more prominent deals
Blog post about key deals
Send out PR highlighting key deals
Update your prices
Contact your affiliates and provide new banners and other materials
All in all this should help you optimise your potential (if you can do such a thing) and get the most out of january sale sales.
I have a quick question as I’m new to the SEO world. I think I’m getting a handle on things but I’m curious about those city based directories full of useless information. For instance, doing a search for Oklahoma Graphic Design, the first few hits are directories (pasted below).; How do you compete with those? They are full of keywords, often in the domain.
My SEO Advice is:
There are a few things you can do to dominate here (tho the traffic is really low for this term!) the first thing is to use the term "Oklahoma graphic design" in your body text, this is a hard one to squeeze in there, but having references to this term across your website is a must to be relevant to this term a technique i often use is to tag the term as a strap-line to your identity i.e. ‘mark rushworth – oklahoma graphic design’ which you can use as text under your logo and on your footer as part of the copyright statement (gets you 2 impressions) you should also <strong> these to give emphasis…
Use the term in your title tag
And lastly, get links to your website using the term as the anchor text… if you create websites and put a footer link as a credit consider changing these links from ‘web design by company name’ to ‘oklahoma graphic design by company name’ (and just link the target term)
For some quick linkage, start some free blogs on blogger.com and wordpress.com etc and try and get oklahomagraphicdesign.blogspot.com and oklahomagraphicdesign.wordpress.com and create some articles reviewing the works of your peers tell them you’re critiquing their works in an email… they may link to your blogs which helps you get some relevancy which you can pass to your main site just put a sitewide link to your site using the anchor on these blogs.
Going to the extreme you can buy oklahomagraphicdesign.net, put your site onto it and set all your links to absolute paths using the full http://www. path to the new domain and tie up all the cross domain canonical issues to migrate your site to a non branded domain.
I’m a massive advocate of never working for free. No pitches, no free samples, no work on spec.
And heres why…
If you’re a website designer youve probably experienced all of the above as clients try to buy a Farari for the price of a Scoda. I’m not hostile to customers, its just that with so many agencies and studios willing to work for free on the promise that they maybe possibly might get the job (at 1/2 the projected budget) it just makes no sense to me for our industry to keep doing this.
ive had a site with both www. and without www. indexed so its rather a mess.
Ive decided to keep it without www. did a 301 on htaccess, and put it to preferable in webmaster tools.
Now my question is the site comes up on page 4 with a specific keyword, but its indexed with www. if I remove all indexed sites with www. from Google and submit a new sitemap to Google without www.
How will my placing be on those keywords that i use to get some results with, will it be gone completely and will have to wait a few months to see some new results, or will it just replace the existing www. sites ?
My Advice is:
I wouldnt remove any URL’s, by correcting the canonical issue with GWT then you’re in good stead
It will happen at the same rate as your re-crawl so anything from a few days to a few months. 301 is a good interim workaround and you’ve done the right thing by using webmaster tools.
It’s also beneficial for you to do an inbound link check and make sure your IBL’s are using the correct www. address to link to you! as this is probably the only thing that could maintain your duplication issues.
The site is www.andrewlitten.com and to be honest I think he’d be pretty happy just to be on page 1 with the term ‘Andrew litten’. I wouldn’;t have thought that would be too hard – but alas six months on and I’m still not getting anywhere with this one.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
My Advice:
As you’re not after a majorly competitive term it shouldnt be too hard. Here’s what I recommend:
Try and get the words Andrew Litten in the body copy of this page (possibly a copyright statement at the foot of the site) and anywhere else that isn’t a link currently the only reference is the <h1>
“I’d say go with multiple sites, just make sure they’re on different class C’s that way you can cross link them and pass juice.”
Can you clarify this part? What are different class C’s?
Also had a question I had about keyword domains – does the order of the keywords matter – I’m guessing it does, but how much? If lots of users search for “tech widgets,” is widgetstech.com valuable at all?
My Advice
I’m working on moving our hosting at the moment. Basically if you have 2 sites on the same IP range (a block of IP’s purchased in one go by the ISP) then should the sites interlink, Google will see them as a family of sites and down grade the link juice passed across. talk to your host about hosting your sites on different C Classes, they should have some free up and down their IP ranges as customers come and go they leave holes which is ideal for this purpose!
Regarding keyword order, yes its preferable, but if you cant get it then the strength of anchor text on inbound links can be used to push Google to rank you for a de-jumbled keyword string… just as with any domain.
its the difference between searching for
key term
“key term”
hope that helps.
BTW if your in the UK and need different class C’s then try hotchilli.com and speak to Dave who seems on the ball (I’m not sold yet tho lol!)
Thanks for this btw. Just read through the posts and you have answered most of my SEO questions. Much appreciated dude!
however I have a couple.
I heard that img Alt attributes take less precedence than text for SEO? EG, if I was to use an image as my h1 as oppose to text. Is this true?
I saw you directed a few people to your blog about certain things and one debate I raised before was this : http://www.qbn.com/topics/571586…
How would this effect SEO?
My Advice:
Yes alt is marginally less ‘weighty’ than anchor. anyhoo why’d you put an image in a h1, it doesnt make semantic sense?
Regarding content first – if you accept the following statements to be true then you’ll understand why this is best practice:
Google gives more weight to links with good anchor text
Google gives more weight to links surrounded with on-topic text
Google only attributes weight to the first link to a page in your content (sometimes it uses the second but thats rare)
So as a result having your content first gives you the oportunity to use better anchor text from links that are inside paragraphs of content that override the links in your menus i.e. intead of ‘products / services / about your links would carrt more weight as you coudl link ‘ our range of widgets’ / ‘ learn about our wodget finding’ / ‘company name is…’
If you are using jquery (or any other framework) tabs / accordians to dynamically show/hide content is the content that is initially hidden indexed?
I’ve had discussions with web planners and marketing types about this and they are adamant that tabs hurts SEO.
My research shos that the spiders read the content and don’t give a shit about display:none or hidden and index the content normally. The only possible exception is if display:hidden is inline, this could cause problems, but if it is in class then there is not really any issues.
What’s your take on hidden content and SEO?
My Advice:
As long as the tabs content is written to the page i.e. not generated on the fly then yes it will be indexed by Google. I believe Googles guidelines state that if you can justify the content being hidden to one of your competitors then its valid. Tabbed menus are 1 example of where I believe this is justified as at some point it is intended to be read by the user.
I'm happy to answer any and all SEO, web design, development and Internet Marketing questions you may have (and give you some free exposure for your projects). Just email your questions to markrush@gmail.com and I'll take a look through your site and post the answers here.
Mark Rushworth.com is a Do Follow Blog
All Comments are Do Follow and monitored so don't even bother using a keyword as your name or dropping links into the comments (unless appropriate).
