Fundamentals are key to optimizing an e-commerce website- Part 1
The busy October-December shopping season is a highly critical time for most online retailers, for whom a significant part of business happens during this time of the year. Invariably, this is the time when paid search marketing costs get higher as competition intensifies; keyword prices are known to even double in the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year. Therefore it is all the more important for marketers to keep a very close watch on profitability of their paid search marketing in the rush to acquire traffic and boost sales.
One of the best ways for online retailers to ensure that they are making the most of the peak holiday shopping is to acquire high volumes of traffic from organic search results. But organic search engine traffic is not something that can be acquired overnight; it is the culmination of a lot of consistent effort keeping in view the ultimate goal.
Now this is something easier said than done because a large number of e-commerce sites are often so search “un-friendly”. We look at some of the most common problems we have observed with several of these online shopping websites and what can be done to make them search-engine friendly so that all the key pages on the site are indexed and will rank well as well. A lot of these observations apply as much to simple, static HTML sites as they do to the dynamic, catalog/database-driven ecommerce sites.
In this first part of a two-part series, we focus on making an e-commerce site accessible to the search engine spiders.
Ensure accessibility of all the database-driven product pages
The first and one of the most important criteria for web pages to be ranked well for appropriate keywords is to be found and indexed by the search engines. Very often, sites are programmed to be a function of so many variables and attributes (these can be easily spotted with those mile-long URLs with multiple question marks and other symbols in the URL string) that it becomes very difficult for search engine spiders to crawl deep into the site and index these pages.
Granted that all the search engines have become a lot smarter at indexing dynamic pages and things aren’t as bad as they used to be; in fact, the level of complexity that these engines can handle will only go up. But why take a chance when things could be planned for and done in a simpler fashion?
Ideally, the technical aspects that govern accessibility—for example, how the product catalog or database is queried and the information retrieved and displayed—are taken care of while the site is being planned and developed. If they are not, the subsequent SEO effort may also involve significant re-programming (depending on how complex the site is programmed to be), which is cumbersome, tricky and expensive.
Taking care of structure/ navigation
Besides the underlying technical foundation of the site, it is very important that a lot of thought is given to the structure/ navigation. The use of appropriately labeled “bread crumbs” (as the user interface specialists are wont to say), and cross linking to other categories and products will ensure that the search spiders manage to “deep crawl” the site. We’ve seen numerous e-commerce websites with absolutely no cross-linking of the various product categories. A little bit of advance planning, particularly with an eye on making the information architecture of the website scalable, will not only be immensely useful but imperative in the long run. The sooner marketers realize that SEO is a long term game, the better.
Site map
The importance of a site map in determining accessibility of a website for search engine spiders is quite well known. It becomes even more important for an e-commerce website that could pose its own set of accessibility problems. A very detailed site map that is linked from the home page of a website and literally includes all the links in the site is an absolute must.
External links to inner pages
Another way to get the inner pages of a new e-commerce site indexed quickly is to have some external inbound links pointing to some of the inner pages. Typically, we find that most link building efforts focus on getting links to the home page only, which is understandable; however, when it comes to getting dynamic pages crawled and indexed quickly, one should certainly consider getting links straight to the inner pages.
If you are building a new website, then it helps to set the specifications upfront for the dynamic pages to be created like static pages, with a well-ordered, linear URL structure.
Continue reading “Optimizing an e-commerce website”
0 Responses to “Optimizing an e-commerce website - Part 1”