The Starter’s Guide to On-Site Ecommerce SEO

If you want to get more traffic and sales to your ecommerce website, then on-page SEO is a critical first step.

There are multitudes of how-to articles and tutorials on the web offering general SEO advice but far less that specifically address the needs of eCommerce entrepreneurs.


Competitor Research

If you have no clue where to start with on-site optimization for your ecommerce site, then your competitors are your best bet. Larger competitors especially have probably already put in the legwork for optimizing their website, and you can learn many of their secrets on their website itself.

Keywords are the thing you need to focus on. Particularly, you’ll want to analyze the keywords on their homepage as well as their top product pages.

How can you tell if a website is optimizing for a particular keyword? You can start by using the Moz browser extension to see the SEO title and description your competitors use in their title tags.

Don’t stop your research with keywords. Check out your competitors’ landing pages too, so you can see how they use the specified keywords to optimize those pages.


Homepage SEO

The homepage is typically where most businesses focus their SEO budget and energy. While it is definitely one of the top pages of your website to optimize, it is by no means the only one you should focus on.

That said, you do want to optimize your homepage well. The key things you want to include and optimize are as follows.

Homepage Title Tag – The SEO title tag is one of the most important element of on-site search optimization. It should include your business name along with the main keyword phrase you are targeting. You should write this title tag in under 70 characters and in a way that is appealing to search visitors, as they will see it in search results.

Homepage Meta Description – While this is not important as far as keyword rankings, the meta description for your homepage is a 160-character description of your business that will also show up in search beneath the title tag. Write it in a way that encourages people to want to visit your website.

Homepage Content – The content on your homepage should help visitors learn more about your business and the products you have to offer in a clear and concise way.


Site Architecture

As you are adding products and categories to your store, remember that site architecture plays an important role in search optimization. Particularly, you want to have a distinct hierarchy of navigation, from your homepage to product categories to the products listed within them.

Search engine bots will discover your pages and products on your website based on a clear internal linking structure that is easy to follow — and not too deep.

The rule of thumb for search engines and visitors is to have everything within three clicks. So think about how people come to your homepage. They should only have to make a maximum of three clicks to get to any product on your website.



Product Page Optimization


Product pages are the lifeblood of your business, so you will want to focus a lot of your energy optimizing them. Here are the specific things you want to work on.


Product Name

The name of your product is important. In most cases, it’s also used in the SEO title and URL of your product page. This is why you may want to consider adding a common search term or keyword phrase to your products.

For example, if you are t-shirts, be sure to include t-shirt or tee in the product name. That way, the keyword also ends up in the SEO title and URL.


Product Description

An important element in on-site optimization is the meta description, and Google will usually take your product description and make it the meta description for the page. While the meta description doesn’t help you rank for keywords, it does (in most cases) show up in search results.


It also shows up when people share your product on Facebook and Pinterest, which makes it essential.

If you have a long product description, consider making the first sentence the main summary and selling point so that search engines and social networks will display the most important (and converting) information about the product.


Image Optimization

Images are an important part of your product page. Stand in your customer’s shoes for a moment. Are you more likely to buy a product from a site that clearly depicts the product from as many angles as possible, from a site that has no image at all, or from one that is small and illegible?

Not only are images important for your customers, they are important for search optimization.

To properly optimize your images for search, start with the filename. Don’t add images named IMG0010.jpg to your product pages. Instead, use the product name and main keyword such as eastcoast-skinny-jeans.jpg.

If you have alternative views of your product, include keywords that people would use if they were searching for those images in search.


Video

Help your customer feel more confident about their purchase by also adding video to your product page. The video can be basic information about your product (like a commercial), a how-to video on ways to use the product to get results, or testimonials from people who have used the product.


Reviews

Reviews are another way to boost customer confidence in your product, so if you have a good product, be sure to allow them.

Bad reviews aren’t always a bad thing either. Think about it – if you have a higher priced item that has great reviews, and a lower priced item with so-so reviews, then people will be more likely to choose the higher priced item, resulting in bigger sales for your business.


FAQ Content


Do people ask questions about your products? Of course they do. Having product-specific FAQ content on your product pages is a key to conversions.

Why? If customers have questions that you don’t answer, they’ll go somewhere else to find those answers — and likely buy from the source that answers the questions.

Having a general FAQ page on your website is also a good idea. Answering basic questions about your website’s security, shipping, and return policies can increase buyer confidence, leading to more sales.


Article Source: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/09/12/on-site-ecommerce-seo/

Some important steps to reward high quality sites

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we're not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change: 

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition: 

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live

The fifth confirmed release of Google’s “Penguin” spam fighting algorithm is live. That makes it Penguin 5 by our count. But since this Penguin update is using a slightly improved version of Google’s “Penguin 2″ second-generation technology, Google itself is calling it “Penguin 2.1.” Don’t worry. We’ll explain the numbering nonsense below, as well as what this all means for publishers.

New Version Of Penguin Live Today

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, shared the news on Twitter, saying the latest release would impact about 1 percent of all searches:

Source: http://searchengineland.com/penguin-2-1-and-5-live-173632