SEO Friendly Ecommerce

Optimizing your online store for search engines is not a task to be taken lightly. There are a number of things to be done to make an e commerce website search engine friendly and to position it organically among the top of search engine results.

Here are a few tips to help you with search engine friendly SEO.

1. Unique title tags for each page. I cannot count the number of web pages I have come across with the infamous “Untilted 1” as the page title. All of your page titles should be unique, keyword rich and descriptive.
2. Static product pages. Take a look at the following URL’s. They are both for the same product, but which one do you think is more easily indexed by a search engine and makes more sense?
   1. http://ecommercewebsite.com/display.asp?id=442
   2. http://ecommercewebsite.com/computers/laptops/HP_Pavilion_dv6z/
3. Descriptive ALT tags using keywords. Your ALT tags are designed to give people with disabilities the chance to understand the web page as it was meant to be. Your ALT tags should accurately describe the image, but you should be able to find a way to add some of your keywords as well.
4. Proper use of heading tags. Using header tags properly helps the search engines understand your pages content. Using the H1 tag in a product name indicates to the search engines that the page is about that product.
5. Bread crumb, header and footer navigation links. Your website visitors should be able to get to each page of your website in no more than two (2) clicks. Having text based bread crumb and footer site navigation can help with this.
6. HTML sitemap/Google XML sitemap. Every website should have a HTML sitemap as well as a Google XML sitemap. Providing a “road map” for search engines to follow allows you, to a certain extent, to dictate how the search engines index your website.
7. Shopping Search Engine feeds. Providing a feed of your products in XML or as a text file allows hundreds if not thousands of people and websites the ability to show your products on their website. These feeds are also used to power the results of some search engines.