In the first part of this article, we discussed accessibility of all pages of a site in detail, one of the most important factors to affect search engine rankings. Yet accessibility is only the first step that will ensure that your site pages stand a chance to get ranked; actual rankings will be dictated by various other factors—some simple tips to increase the probability of getting ranked high are given below.
Provide adequate product & category content.
In numerous shopping sites that we have seen, the lack of detailed, descriptive content describing the products being sold is strikingly obvious. We’ve heard various reasons for this. Some examples: “well, the picture tells everything that the user needs to know”; “the products are too similar to write separate descriptions for each”; “these are very common, commodity products; there’s nothing much to really write home about”. While there may be some merit in each of the above reasons, a bit of additional effort and thought can make a world of difference to how search engine spiders read and rate those pages. Equally importantly, if not more, site visitors will appreciate the additional information that helps them make a decision in selecting a particular product.
Add the appropriate meta tags.
The debate on the value of meta tags rages on, but the simple fact is that incorporating the right meta tags can only benefit and certainly doesn’t hurt. Also, the prevailing wisdom is that the title tag continues to be extremely valuable in determining search engine rankings. However, we find innumerable cases where online retailers ignore optimizing the meta tags of the individual product pages. Just adding in customized title and description tags incorporating the most apt keywords for each of the product pages is bound to make a positive impact to SEO efforts for the site.
One reason for ignoring the meta tags for the inner pages could be that the store itself might be quite large with a catalog comprising hundreds or thousands of products. But this is a not an insurmountable problem— individual meta tags could automatically be generated by putting in a script. In such a case though one needs to ensure that a lot of thought is given beforehand as to how/ what the script will pull into to fill in the title and description tags.
Take advantage of the images.
Product images are often the underutilized element in SEO. Typical online shopping sites have lots of product images that offer great potential to be used in SEO efforts, with the best part being that it doesn’t take a lot of effort either. First, name the image appropriately, preferably with a keyword in the file name. Secondly, ensure that you have an Alt Text tag for every image again with an appropriate keyword. Obviously, care must be taken that there is no scope for these keywords to be deemed as keyword stuffing.
Besides adding to the keyword density within a page that have a bearing on regular search engine results, the image file names and Alt text descriptions contribute to better rankings in image search results. The significance of this is that some search engines (particularly Google) show results from its image search index at the top of the regular search results. Being found right at the top of those results increases the probability of driving traffic to the website.
Don’t bury the product content in a maze of code.
The main product-related content in many shopping sites tends to get buried in multiple tables. Even if the content of a page is dynamically generated from a database, the page can be made more search engine friendly by having some static content on the page with the right keywords as well ensuring that the dynamically-generated content is not buried deep in a maze of tables.
Leverage user-generated content.
This is the era of user participation and user-generated content and online retailers should take advantage of existing traffic to boost their SEO efforts. Probably no other site does it better than Amazon.com. Not only does user feedback on specific products help other users in their decision making process, comments added to a page serve to keep the page fresh and updated; if users include a couple of keywords in their reviews all the better.
Use Google Base.
Increasingly, Google is pulling up a couple of results from Google Base and displaying those right at the top of a search results page. Therefore marketers trying to get more search engine traffic from Google should create and upload an optimized feed to Google Base to maximize the probability of getting shown right at the top of Google’s search results. Imagine what that could mean in terms of meeting traffic generation objectives.
