|
|
 |
| |
By Joost de Valk
Expert Author Article Date: 2007-04-23 A friend of mine was adding a shopping cart to his site, and wanted some advice on how to optimize his shopping cart. I thought: why not give the advice I gave to him to all my readers as well? So here we go, a complete article on shopping cart SEO. Step 1.: Make sure your inventory is spiderable Most standard shopping cart modules start failing right at the beginning of SEO: they either use links which can't be spidered, or URL's with a zillion parameters which don't make any sense to a normal user. Starting with the latter: there's some real value in making sure your shopping cart URL's are easy to remember, not only for the search engines, but for your users too. For the search engines, I'd advise you to include categories, product and brand names in to your URL, and nothing more, keeping them nice and short… For the javascript links or other ugly methods your shop software might be using to link to it's inner pages: replace them all with clear, clean links. But before doing that, don't forget to read on. Step 2.: Reduce duplicate content A lot of shopping carts give the ability to add products to multiple categories, in essence, nothing has to be wrong with this. Unless productx can be found with the exact same content on example.com/category1/productx and example.com/category2/productx. This is what we call duplicate content. It has al sorts of nasty side effects, but the most important one for now is that you're throwing away link equity. A simplified example of what might happen: three people link to the first URL, and three other people link to the second. Your competitor has one page for this product, and four people link to his product page. Your competitor might now outrank you for this product, because he has more links to his single product page then you have…. Another place where duplicate content often appears in shopping sites is when 3-4-5 products in a row, all end up in the same two categories. These category pages might now look totally the same, except for a few titles here and there… Step 3.: Know what your clients are searching for! There are probably dozens of reasons in the offline world why you'd want to name an expensive piece of furniture something else than a chair. In the online search world, things are different… People search for words common to them, so if your product is in essence a chair, use that word to describe it! If you're not sure, get a specialist to do your keyword research for you, as it's one of the most important aspects of good SEO for a shopping cart. One thing is very important though: people will search for brand and models names and numbers, so be sure to include them in a proper way in the title and headings of your page. If you've done this keyword research, use it to write good copy for your site, name your product and category pages better and, if necessary, restructure your shopping cart. Step 4.: Get your onpage SEO in order Some hints for this in semi-random order: * be sure to make proper use of the title tag (including the product and brand name and model name and number)Step 5.: Start linkbuilding All of the above was centered on what you can do on your site. However, for search engines to find you and rank you, you need links, and you need lots of them. This part is where you can use your keyword research again. You've probably picked a few top keywords, now search for them. Every single page in the top 100 for that keyword is a good place to get a link from, which, if possible, should point to your category for that keyword. How you do that? You e-mail the website owner, kindly asking for a link and why you think it would fit well on his page and that it would be a good link for his visitors. Do consider that not only the amount of links is important, but the anchor text used is important as well. Try and get the site owner you're mailing to include your top keyword in the anchor text for the link you're trying to get. Got any more tips for the people reading this? Leave them in the comments! Comments About the Author: Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters. |
 |
| Newsletter Archive | Submit Article | Advertising Information | About Us | Contact |
