Stop Giving Out Incomplete SEO Advice

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.