E-Commerce SEO Tips

If you run an [tag]ecommerce site[/tag], then you know that it's crucial to make sure that your products surface in the Google [tag]organic search results[/tag] ahead of your competitors. This is especially true if your competition is selling the same products. Now, optimizing your ecommerce web site for the search engines can be tricky at times, so let's examine what's really called for to get your products to rank better than your competitor's products in the organic search results not just in Google, but Yahoo, MSN, ASK and others smaller search engine and directories.

Optimizing an ecommerce site isn't terribly different from optimizing any other type of web site. However, in order for a page to rank well in the organic search results, the page needs a few things that you must consider. A good title tag that includes the keywords you're targeting like the product name and good content on the page that includes the appropriate keywords, and links from other web pages to that web page. In order for the page to remain in the search engines indexes, the page can't be a duplicate of any other page on the internet.

The pages must be search engine friendly and easily crawled by the search engines without being restricted by cookies, redirects, session IDs, and long URLs with lots of parameters in them. To find out if your site is already search engine friendly, go to Google and perform site:www.yourdomain.com search. If you know you have 100 product pages on your web site and Google is showing all of them, great. However, if Google doesn't appear to be indexing all of your product pages then there's a reason for concern and most of the time there are issues with the site that can be fixed.

If you have a shopping cart on your web site then you're likely using one that can be changed to be more search engine friendly. The URLs of your site should not include variables, parameters, or session IDs. If you have question marks in your URLs and/or if you have page URLs that change every time they're visited, then your really need to correct that.

One of the most common search engine "unfriendly" issues is a redirect from a web site's real home page to another page on the web site. The real home page of your site is www.domain.com. The mistake or "problem" is when a visitor goes to www.domain.com and it redirects to another URL. There should never be a redirect fromyour home page as it IS your home page. In fact, all web server software has some way of "telling it" which page is the default home page for the site. When you go type in www.yourdomain.com it shouldn't redirect to anything else ever, with the possible exception of the sites that prefer being found without the prefix www. in which case it is acceptable but ONLY if you want your home page to be YOURDOMAIN.COM and not WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM. Your real home page (www.yourdomain.com) is your most powerful page, especially because more people link to your real home page and not your "other" home page (ie., www.yourdomain.com/homepage.html). If you never allow anyone, or any search engine to get to your real home page, then you're literally shooting yourself in the foot and you're not taking full advantage of the "power" of your real home page, the one that has all the links going to it.