For the first of my guest posts for Econsultancy I wanted to take a step beyond the generic, oft-rehashed ‘SEO tips’ (you know, things like “include keywords in your page titles” and “create great content”) and contribute something based on my experience of working across a number of e-commerce sites.
Sales-based sites are where SEO really comes into its own in terms of return on investment, and it literally is the case that even the smallest tweaks can result in real increases in revenue.
So here are seven ways to help transactional e-commerce sites boost their search rankings...
1. Multiple categorisation
A common instinct for e-commerce site architecture still seems to be the 'filing cabinet' approach: each product is assigned one category and one category only. But of course in reality any one product may fit into many different 'buckets'. A pair of trainers might fit into ‘mens trainers’ as well as ‘Reebok trainers’, ‘white trainers’, ‘tennis shoes’ and ‘cheap trainers’.
Now you may say to me “get with it mate, usability people have been recommending this for years!” True, and you may already be using a number of 'sort by' options to categorise your products. But do those categories form their own landing pages from which to target all those keyphrases, or are they simply ways of filtering results? The key is to make sure each of those categories is linked to using a clean, HTML anchor text link.
You need to be careful, however. The arch nemesis of multiple categories on a site is duplicate content. A warning sign to look for is if your product URLs looks something like this:
http://www.myawesomeshop.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name/
All very organised, you might think. But if your CMS produces URLs like these imagine what happens when you put the same product in two different categories... you end up with two completely unique URLs for the same product. That is a no-no for SEO. The best solution is to get your developer to do some URL rewrite jiggery pokery so you end up with URLs like this:
http://www.myawesomeshop.com/product-name/
By having the product pages only one folder deep, you can have them listed in as many categories as you like and there'll only be one version of that product URL. Your doors are now open to the fun filled world of multiple categorisation. Happy days.
2. Only the First Link Counts
There have been numerous tests by SEOs to show that if you link to the same page twice from any one page, only the first link 'counts' for Google. This has an important impact on many e-commerce sites which - including Amazon! - tend to have images linking to products or subcategories BEFORE the actual descriptive text link.
Here's a classic example from Argos:
What this means is that the keyword-rich anchor text link isn't counted by Google because the first link is the image. You can use the brilliant First Link Checker tool to find out quickly and easily if this is a problem for your site.
So what to do about it? An easy fix to this would be to place the text link above the image, or not have the image link to the product page at all. But this is a bit of a usability fail: we expect to see the text below the image like a caption, and we also very much expect to be able to click on the image.
Here is a more elegant solution used by Biome Lifestyle:
The image link still appears above the text link, but if you look at the HTML code it is the text link that appears first and therefore what Google 'counts'. This is achieved using CSS absolute positioning and pushing the text link below the image. A nice workaround.
3. Dealing with pagination and duplicate content
Another extremely common scenario in e-commerce sites is that many categories contain more than one page worth of content. Rather than listing all of the items on a single page, the standard behaviour is to paginate products. Usually this takes the form of URL parameters – for example the URL of each paginated page becomes:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?page=2
This is often the cause of an almost identical duplicate of the original category page – yes there are different products on page 2, 3, 4 or 10 – but usually each of these has the same page title, headings and copy, and is almost certainly targeting the same keyword as the main category page. This duplicate content tends to dilute the effectiveness of the original page.
There are a few ways you could go about resolving this:
- Add the Robots Noindex Metatag to the duplicated pages to exclude them from being indexed.
- Use the Parameter Handling Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to exclude paginated pages from the index. This is essentially simpler (and lazier) way of achieving the same result as the Noindex tag – but just for Google.
- Use the Canonical link tag from paginated pages to ‘point to’ the original page and pass SEO value across to it.
- You might want to consider an advanced solution of using JavaScript # anchors for pagination – so all pages are loaded into one and the paginated URLs become http://www.mysite.com/category/#page=2 – since Google ignores everything after the ‘#’ what you end up with is one page with all the content in it.
A quick disclaimer! Each of these techniques could potentially create other crawling and indexation issues if not applied carefully. I would test them out on one section of a site and measure the impact before rolling anything out sitewide. However the beauty of finding a solution to this on a site with potentially hundreds of pages is the cumulative ranking benefit it can bring - well worth the initial headache if you ask me.
4. Segmented site maps
Aaah, the humble site map. That ubiquitous link in the footer of almost every site known to man, the one we've all clicked on once, thought "what’s the point of that" and never clicked on again. OK, I know some people do actually like using them - personally if I can't find what I want using the site navigation itself I'd sooner leave the site than trawl through a giant table of contents.
But aside from helping lost puppies find their way on your site, the humble HTML site map (not to be confused with its slightly more mysterious cousin the XML Sitemap) is also much loved by search engines. It's like having a 'get to the point' button on your rather talkative spouse/mother/cousin/neighbour/colleague. They're a way for search engine spiders to very quickly access and crawl every page of your site with a minimum number of links to follow along the way. They can help improve the number of indexed pages, as well as helping with rankings by increasing internal links pointing to deeper pages.
However, once you go beyond the very smallest of e-commerce sites, the classic "here's every single page on my site" one page sitemap becomes a bit useless. Once you start to go beyond a few hundred pages on your site, you either have to consider only listing categories in your site map, or you could try a segmented site map.
Here's an example from Air and Water Centre. The main site map links to all the categories, but also to a sub-sitemap for that category:
This sub-sitemap in turn links to every product within that category:
What this has achieved is the ability for a search engine spider to reach every single page on the site within just two ‘clicks’ from the homepage. And that is good SEO juju.
5. Singular keyword pwns Plurals
The most logical title for a category page is usually the plural version, which makes sense: if you're selling 'digital SLR cameras' you've hopefully got more than one of them! Chances are the page titles of your category pages look something like this:
But the overwhelming trend as far as what people actually search for is concerned, is that singular keyphrases are far more popular than plurals. After all, people usually only want to buy one camera, not a boatload. A quick bit of keyword research shows that search traffic for 'digital SLR camera' is almost double that of 'digital SLR cameras'. This applies to the majority of purchase intent category keywords that I have come across:
Now the fact is if you're optimised only for the plural versions of your categories, you probably won't automatically rank well for the singular as well. Here is a simple formula for page titles to get started on ranking for both singular and plural versions without coming up with spammy looking titles:
[Plural keyphrase]: Buy a [Singular keyphrase] at [Site name]
So using our cameras example you might end up with something like:
Just this tweak alone has brought me some great rankings for those elusive singular versions of category keywords which were previously ranking pretty poorly. Of course, using the singular version in anchor text of inbound links is the next step.
6. Freshen up your pages regularly!
Fresh updates to any particular webpage are a signal to search engines that the page is ‘alive’ as opposed to gathering cobwebs in the corner of your site. This is becoming an increasingly important factor with Real Time Search becoming the latest trend all the cool kids are talking about (or slagging off), accompanied by the fact that ‘freshness’ has been gradually increasing in importance in Google’s algorithm for some time. This principle can be applied to e-commerce sites, but is rarely done.
So, implementing some of the following could help you to get the competitive advantage:
- Including user reviews and user generated content is by far the best way of introducing freshly updated, relevant copy into your page – just look at most of Amazon’s product pages. Just make sure the text from these is actually being pulled into the page itself rather than sitting ‘hidden’ away within an iframe where a search engine cannot see it. For example Tesco’s use of Revoo for product reviews doesn’t actually help their on-page SEO because all the content sits on Revoo’s domain.
- If you have a blog on the site (and you should!), categorise your blog posts properly and have them feeding into category pages to include the first couple of lines from the latest posts. It takes a bit of implementation time but the result is constantly updated copy on your category pages every time you write a relevant blog post.
- Make a habit out of regularly reviewing and changing the copy on your category and product pages, especially on key target pages. Not only is this going to keep things fresh for your users (who by the way do occasionally read your copy you know), it’s a great signal to search engines that a page is ‘alive’ and there is often a rankings boost caused by this. This could set you apart from your competitors who generally stick to the same copy for years.
7. Build Links to Deeper Pages
Long term SEO campaigns can very easily become never-ending battles to dominate those big 'glamour' terms at the head of the long tail which are the ones that individually bring the most traffic as well as feelings of superiority. But sometimes you can spend so much time throwing all your resources to these ultra-competitive keywords that you forget about those juicy long tail phrases such as product names.
The fact is that although a number one ranking for ‘Sony Bravia KDL-40X4500 LCD TV’ won't get you as much traffic as a Top 10 ranking for ‘Sony LCD TV’, these terms do have much higher conversion rates as they are later in the buying cycle. They are also easier to rank for with a few inbound links (see Eric Enge's The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links for some science on the subject). So while your competitors are scrapping it out for those glamour terms, focus a good proportion of your linkbuilding efforts to some key deeper pages on your site.
Hopefully these tips have been of some value to your SEO efforts. If you have any other gems, or questions about the above please drop a comment below. Also, if you find that they work, please let us know!
Jaamit Durrani is SEO Director at OMD UK and a guest blogger for Econsultancy. He also (pretends to) blog for SEO Insight. You can also follow Jaamit on Twitter.
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Head of Ecommerce at Lovehoney
12:03PM on 16th December 2009
Hi Jaamit, my question is, can I not use Canonical tags to handle products that belong to multiple categories?
So for example, I sell a Chicken in Gravy Mini Meal - which belongs both in Chicken & the Mini Meals categories.
http://www.wiltshirefarmfoods.com/frozen-ready-meals/chicken-ready-meals/chicken_in_gravy_mini_meal_053.asp
http://www.wiltshirefarmfoods.com/frozen-ready-meals/mini_meals-ready-meals/chicken_in_gravy_mini_meal_053.asp
This, however is the same content. A big old nono.
However, I like the folderisation of the URL's, and Google's threat to breadcrumb links seems to point that they're wanting this too. So can I just canonical the second or third category version of that page?
Brillo article by the way!
Matt
12:04PM on 16th December 2009
Hi Jaamit,
Great work and welcome to the club!
Nikki Rae
SEO Director at OMD UK
12:17PM on 16th December 2009
@Matthew - cheers! OK I think the best solution I would suggest is getting rid of the folderisation and 301 redirecting those to http://www.wiltshirefarmfoods.com/chicken_in_gravy_mini_meal_0XX.asp. You say you like the folderisation but why? Is it really that useful for users (especially if the product fits into different categories anyway)? As for Google's breadcrumbs in SERPs, my understanding is these are pulled in from breadcrumb trails on the page itself, not the URLs. I'm pretty confident that Google won't be 'unhappy' if you drop product pages down to the root URL - in fact the opposite is probably true.
However failing that this is exactly what the canonical tag is meant for, since the pages are identical. You can go ahead and add this to point to one 'primary' version and you will see some benefit.
@Nikki - do we get a secret handshake? ;)
12:17PM on 16th December 2009
A great post, clear and usefull.
Will
12:34PM on 16th December 2009
great post, some good advice there will be followed from now on.
1:09PM on 16th December 2009
Great post, I am always looking to learn more about SEO and any info that breaks through the standard tips and tricks is good for me
Thanks
1:19PM on 16th December 2009
Excellent post Jaamit, it's refreshing to see some genuinely actionable SEO tips - awesome work.
1:22PM on 16th December 2009
Great advice on the sub categorised sitemap. Many eCommerce sites literally list every URL on the one page. Segmenting these will not only help the search eninges but this will make the page a lot more user friendly.
1:33PM on 16th December 2009
Great list, thanks Jaamit!
On point 2, a solution that would benefit SEO and actually improve usability for the 95%+ of users with Javascript enabled would be to make the whole product info area clickable.
For jQuery plugins to achieve this I found several options:
http://www.ollicle.com/eg/jquery/biggerlink/
http://www.trovster.com/lab/plugins/fitted/
SEO Director at OMD UK
1:38PM on 16th December 2009
Thanks for all the comments above guys.
A quick caveat to the "singular vs plural" keyphrase tip - the key here is to do your research, it might not always be the case that singulars pwn plurals, thats just my impression from experience! In any case the solution above covers both.
@Rob awesome, that's a really nice solution that still leaves the code clean (ie anchor text link appears first and on its own) - with added bonus of less links on the page! thanks!
Freelance Search & Social Media Consultant at ThinkSearch
1:48PM on 16th December 2009
You rock - jsut stop giving away all of our top secret methodology ;)
2:19PM on 16th December 2009
Great advice Jaamit. The combined benefits of implementing all these strategies could really sky-rocket a great deal of ecommerce sites, if only they had the guts to give them a go!
3:29PM on 16th December 2009
Looking at your first link counts suggestion, all of those tests you linked to refer to first 'anchor text', not 'first link'.. I'm not sure that anyone has tested the difference between an image link and a text link but history has shown that text links pretty much always carry more weight than image links.. So I'm not convinced jumping through a lot of css hoops is worth the effort.. Especially in some types of ecomm software..
But it may be worth the effort spent in testing it..
SEO Director at OMD UK
3:58PM on 16th December 2009
@Steve G: good point, and thanks for bringing it up. Yes it is a bit of an assumption, others on twitter have questioned this too. I would love to see some isolated tests on this done (it's certainly on my list to test but you know how it goes...) But the assumption is based on the behaviour noticed in those tests that Google's link discovery algorithm seems to strip out duplicated links first, then analyses them. In any case the CSS fix above only took a couple of hours :) - but might be a nightmare on some CMSs, you're right.
4:38PM on 16th December 2009
Great post, I am always looking to learn more about SEO and any info that breaks through the standard tips and tricks is good for me
SEO Director at OMD UK
4:49PM on 16th December 2009
Dear "SEO Service New york City", (if that is your real name), thank you for a very interesting and useful comment. You might want to check out this cool new thing called nofollow and also possibly learn how to use the link button when leaving your very nice and helpful spam.
5:33PM on 16th December 2009
Jaamit, I am a little confused by the 2nd tip on there for duplicate links.
My site appears to have a lot of duplicate links (Image above text like in your example) according to the First link Checker tool you linked but the Link Text is still good according to that tool. Are the alt and title elements ignored? If I am not mistaken the crawler uses alt text no? so if the ALT text is the same description as the below anchor text wouldn't the end result be the same?
I am still an SEO newb so maybe my thinking is wrong.
5:58PM on 16th December 2009
I love your #5 tip of using the plural and singular on a category page; very clever!
Project Manager at Infosys
6:24PM on 16th December 2009
Very insightful business oriented tips for ecom. I especially appreciate the one on Tesco/Revoo (surely that's something that both organizations should take a cue from!)
Director at Digital Sparkle
11:07PM on 16th December 2009
Jaamit: good stuff. The Mail takes an interesting approach to its images / links. It seems to use an image, a proper text link AND have a large click area. Check out the list of stories on the right hand side of its home (http://www.dailymail.co.uk).
This is the first story. I've stripped the img reference and URL out to make it easier to understand (Plus I've removed some spans that don't add to our understanding). But it's a series of links in this form:
<li>
<a
href="URL OF STORY"
style="background-image: url(http://URL OF IMAGE.jpg);"
>
<span class="pufftext">
<strong>Peaches Geldof 'almost killed' in car crash on way to Disney </strong>
Socialite Twittered about 'Speeding like never before' shortly before accident
</span>
</a>
</li>
Seems very clever, no?
12:13AM on 17th December 2009
Hi Jaamit
Great article, nice to see somebody getting outside the box and writing something useful.
I have been playing around a fair bit with canonical URLs and the search engines seem to be treating them pretty much as expected. Definitely no negative impacts from what I have seen.
Without doubt the biggest problem that I see with the majority of e-commerce stores that I look at is loads of duplicate content. In particular the way a lot of application developers rewrite the product URL to include the various category(ies) they are classified in.
Something else that still astounds me is the reluctance of e-commerce store owners to invest in creating unique and entertaining product/category content (whether it be text, video, graphical, audio etc). If your niche is at all competitive you will find that most websites are very similar and you need to spend some time and money making sure you differentiate yourself.
Keep up the good work, look forward to your next article.
Dave
7:34AM on 17th December 2009
Hi,
In your point #3, fyi; Yahoo site explorer allows you to specify parameters handling too.
Good post.
Michel
7:41AM on 17th December 2009
yup I agree although all points are needs to be taken care specially " Freshen up your pages regularly!"
Thanks
Dhiraj
8:24AM on 17th December 2009
thx for sharing,
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8:30AM on 17th December 2009
Hi Jaamit,
Excellent list. It put me in mind of a great video and interview I saw recently on the Reelseo blog. Mark Robertson spoke with SEO guru Bruce Clay about the importance of "Engagement Objects" and specifically video for ranking - I found it to be an insightful and educating post.
Mike
@treepodia
http://treepodia.com
Ecommerce Video Solutions
SEO Director at OMD UK
9:09AM on 17th December 2009
@Tyler: the ALT text of the image is counted by Google - but the common consensus amongst SEOs is that anchor text in text links has a stronger affect than image ALT text. The reason for this is ultimately transparency - much easier to spam alt text (eg a picture of a kitten with the ALT text "cheap ipod accessories"). But now that you mention it I would like to see some more testing on this.
@Malcolm: trust you to bring it back to newspaper sites eh? :) The Mail's approach of using background images definitely looks interesting. My issue with it though is having too much information within the <a> link tag - the more focused you can keep this in terms of your target keyphrase the more effective it is. I like the solution suggested by Rob Welsby above, which makes the whole element 'linkable' but keeps the code within the <a> tag simple and clean.
@Dave Beck: Good points. Re the canonical tag, you're right, its powerful, but that means its also important to implement it accurately, or it can screw you up! Totally agree with you on good copy - too often you see sites using boilerplate copy found on other sites selling the same product, or the same templated copy across their site with a few words changed. I love the copy on sites like I Want One Of Those (spent an entire evening just reading product pages on that site once, its hilarious!) and I think ecommerce sites can learn a lot from them.
@Michel: yep you're right, Yahoo does it too, in fact they did it first! I guess I focus on Google given their 90% market dominance...
@Mike: I love the stuff Bruce Clay talks about re engagement objects, definitely something that will be more and more important in the future and those who can start putting this kind of content on their ecommerce sites will stand ahead of their competitors.
9:22AM on 17th December 2009
Jaamit this is a really fresh look on SEO aspects that are completely out of the norm. Really enjoyed it and stimulated my thoughts. Great post!
10:06AM on 17th December 2009
Jaamit - this is the first article I've read all the way to the end on econsultancy this year.
Had started considering all blog posts here as pretentious, self promoting garbage. Thank you for adding value to this blog!
Managing Consultant at Firehorse Digital
10:18AM on 17th December 2009
How nice to see a post where the "sensation" promised by the title is actually born out by the content. Some great ideas and food for thought.
Re. first links. Do you think this also applies to links from sitewide navigation? (Yes I know that these should come towards the bottom of the HTML and be positioned by CSS, but sometimes that's too hard) I read some comments from Matt Cutts a while back that suggested that Google knows how to recognise nav links and therefore treat them as having a lower value than links in the body text.
Best
Rupert
12:37PM on 17th December 2009
Great article Jaamit. Interestingly we have seen the reverse of "number 5" for a couple of our clients - with most traffic generated by people searching for the plural.
But obviously, can see why optimization of the singular terms is probably going to generate the "click to buy".
1:23PM on 17th December 2009
Hi Jaamit,
Great article. About point #6: we've been looking at putting reviews on our site using exactly the iframe methodology you advise against (doh!). However, the difference being that our reviews would sit on a subdomain linking back to the relevant product page. Do you (or anyone else for that matter!) have a view on this?
I suppose we run the risk of having the review subdomain page rank ahead of the product page... not an ideal situation.
I did really like the segmented sitemap idea - good stuff, thanks!
Max
SEO Director at OMD UK
3:07PM on 17th December 2009
@Rupert: thanks! For the record the 'sensational' bit was an editorial add, not my words ;) The question about links within nav vs links in the copy is a killer one really, and something that's been stumping me for a while. I think you're talking about this video from Matt Cutts - he said in typically vague terms "we reserve the right" to treat sitewide vs copy links differently. But its not clear whether this is actually the case. How this relates to the first link counts thing is a question I'd love to have an answer to some day! Sorry that wasn't much use...
@David: yep it definitely isn't always the case and you should always do the research for your particular keywords. But this way you're optimising for both, so win/win.
@Max: I guess the main point is that copy within an iframe does not actually give SEO benefit to the page where the iframe itself sits. In your implementation you'd be creating (presumably) an additional page that could then rank for that keyword - but unlikely that it will rank competitively given its just reviews, plus would you want people to land on a page full of just the reviews of a product and then have to click a link to see the product details itself? I would much rather integrate them on the page - perhaps pulling in an XML feed and blocking out the subdomain might work?
9:48PM on 17th December 2009
Sorry to be a killjoy but this isnt a "sensational" article.
Its sound and useful and has some sensible ideas for ecommerce seo. But there's nothing here that hasn't been said many times.
I just don't understand why a post like this gets such a rocking response when the article "Seo is dead long live seo" on this very site receives such a relatively tepid response.
"Seo is dead..." is a challenging article saying something that isn't often said and badly needs discussing: how paid links are often a quicker and cheaper way to the top of the search engines than white hat seo. And how nobody tells the truth about this.
Or put it another way - not much point in worrying about parameter handling if you have 10 competitors who have paid for 1,000 links in 1,000 blog posts and who trump you in Google every time.
Are we all too much in Google's thrall to dare to point out that their algorithms are clueless when it comes to identifying a bought link in a spammy blog post?
Or are we just all snake oil salesman?
offical at new york post
3:52AM on 18th December 2009
great topic! thank you for you sharing this still to all.i think it's helpful to many many people.
http://www.topnflnews.com/
Owner at Digital Juggler
5:08PM on 18th December 2009
Hi Jaamit,
Excellent post with useful advice - will keep that for a rainy SEO day. Welcome to the guest blogging set-up, look forward to reading more from you.
thanks
james
8:44PM on 18th December 2009
Wonderful advice! I like how you picked ecommerce SEO topics that aren't often discussed, and that can be, and usualy are, overlooked by many online sellers. The multipe category advice is something we've been preaching for years, along with a flat architecture, or as close to flat as can be acheived. And I'm so glad you brought up that Google gives credit to only one link from the same page to the same destination URL. It's often overlooked and I think many people just don't know enough about how to solve these issues on their own. Your advice is very solid here, and we've tried it on a couple of our ecom sites and produced excellent results in next to no time. Thanks again for sharing. Look forward to more insights from you in the future.
4:20AM on 20th December 2009
Some concrete, actionable tips for eCommerce SEO. Great article, thanks for sharing.
Senior Developer at PureNet Ltd
2:31PM on 22nd December 2009
Hi Jaamit, @Rupert
Coming from a technical stance on duplicate links and navigation; I have always added the navigation links at the top of the HTML which is essential for accessibility. However to get around the issue of having the links as the first part of the page Google reads, and to be in accordance with accessibility, you simply add a 'Skip Navigation' jump link at the top of the HTML (hidden by CSS) which jumps directly to relevant content for the page. As I understand, Google actively looks for the 'Skip Navigation' jump link.
On the subject of multiple links on the page, as I understand, links are disregarded if the meaning of the link has changed. In the example in point 2, the meaning of the link has changed from an image to specific text and therefore the text link is disregarded. If multiple links appear on the page with the same 'meaning' doesn't this re-enforce the keywords ?
9:44AM on 23rd December 2009
Some great advice to e-commerce websites boost their search rankings. Thanks :)
12:44AM on 24th December 2009
we just started to work with several ecommerce businesses and i have picked up ton of useful information in ur article. very insightful and helpful. thank you!
9:51AM on 26th December 2009
Yes it is a bit of an assumption, others on twitter have questioned this too. I would love to see some isolated tests on this. But the assumption is based on the behaviour noticed in those tests that Google's link discovery algorithm seems to strip out duplicated links first.
11:34AM on 27th December 2009
This is great, thanks so much!
Digital Marketing Executive at EcomNets.com
10:22AM on 28th December 2009
Great Article. Thanks for sharing.......
3:41AM on 29th December 2009
All very organised, you might think. But if your CMS produces URLs like these imagine what happens when you put the same product in two different categories
12:05PM on 29th December 2009
Nice collection of information store owners should think about, even if some things don´t always apply.
I kind of disagree at least partially with the multiple category claim, as it can often pose a usability dilemma and has it´s technical problems. For one it can bloat your shop if you start putting items in several categories at the same time. Most often it only shows that you have a problem somewhere else in your concept, for example ambiguous category names. To put all products in every category where users could think they could belong does not really solve the problem.
Another problem is a technical one - how do you determine in which category the user currently views the item and how do you display the breadcrumbs (that google so gladly uses for its serps as you stated) and that users so gladly use to orient themselves in your shop?
Having a single url leaves you without breadcrumbs or a list of breadcrumbs (which in most cases is very problematic, too, since it often confuses users and gets even more problematic the more categories you add to the item) - either for all users or at least users that come to your item via deeplinking to your shop (which are most users actually).
You could rely on session data for building the breadcrumb trail - determine the path the user "walked", but what do you do with crosslinked products? And this can be confusing for spiders, too, since they spider the same page several times with different content (breadcrumbs) and which they could potentially do forever (although there probably is a limit to this). Yes, you could serve a different page to spiders, but you should better prey that they do not detect, that you are doing this ...
So while I absolutely share your worry about duplicate content being a problem - what is your practical real-life solution for tackling the problems that your short and simple urls have?
9:55PM on 29th December 2009
I am now running an online store using wordpress. Is there any free software that really suitable for selling books?
SEO & Affiliate Specialist at Kuoni Travel Group
11:56AM on 4th January 2010
The high quality I would expect from Fresh Egg, great article and so refreshing to see tips away from the norm with varying levels of implementation. Results changing info and something for everyone!
11:43AM on 6th January 2010
Jaamit, great article. Regarding point 2, the CSS solution is good, but could nofollow not be used on the image links? Would this then cause Google to count the anchor text in the text link instead (ie. see the text link as the first link to that page rather than the image link), or would this not have the desired effect?
1:29PM on 7th January 2010
@Martin - I hear that Google is planning on massively devaluing spammy links from blogs.How they will differentiate between legimitate and value added links and spam will be another matter entirely.
I completely understand where you are coming from. All of these points are valid and constructive and inherently useful, but when a competitor can take steroids, is wearing aerodynamic shoelaces really going to make much difference?
9:41AM on 8th January 2010
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9:52AM on 8th January 2010
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11:33PM on 9th January 2010
As a newbie to SEO, the ideas that you have mentioned in your article will give me some things to think about and work on. I have been reading a number of books and websites on SEO and with a new site I can see how some of your information may help me with my understanding and getting the site optimized for the search engines.
I liked the ideas for number 5, I have been using both singular and plural words in the keywords but which one trumps the other I was not too sure.
Thanks for all the clarifications in your post.
2:43PM on 18th January 2010
Hi Jaamit!
Very interesting post!
I am totally agree with you in that companies should invest more time in creating attractive contents in order to improve their visibility on search engines. However, it is not easy.
I think to the eCommerce of hi-tech products (handsets, tv, hi-fi etc.), where due to the short time to market of these kind of products, it is really hard to work on original copywriting. Then I am wondering if you can suggest me some programming tips by means I could automate the modification process of the product descriptions from the manufacturers as they looks "original" to the "search engines' eyes".
Thank you!!
Best.
1:41PM on 20th January 2010
Good article, thanks for that.
But the point with "the first link counts" you can also use the alt-tag für the right keyword als link with a short descripton too because many users want to click the descripton too.
2:02PM on 21st January 2010
Haven't exepected so many very useful informations when I coincidently landed at this post.
Good work!!
12:27PM on 27th January 2010
"make sure each of those categories is linked to using a clean, HTML anchor text link."
This is massivly important! The number of ecomm sites I have seen with poor URL is shocking
Great post btw!
5:15PM on 30th January 2010
the seo tips are very helpful thanks for the share. how much would you charge for a text link on your website?
9:17AM on 2nd February 2010
@m65 We can sell you text links for 5 packs of crisps or one of those nice M65 jackets. Contact our text link sales department ASAP to get an additional 20% off.
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9:42AM on 2nd February 2010
Some good points, but the canonical tag recommendation and observations on singular/plural search volumes are a little off
11:45AM on 2nd February 2010
Hi Jaamit
Great article, really useful tips.Sitemap is difinitely a gret little tool and I have noticed the difference of having asegmented sitemap.and having one with just links and links and loads of links.
I work on lots e-commerce sites. Most of them keep adding new products, what confuses me is "Is this not fresh content for that particular site?" I do agree that the blogs, user reviews,twitter feeds are great for fresh content, but the new additions do they contribute a bit towards the fresh content or not?
I am really impressed with this article,lots of thought has gone in it.
Thanks for sharing.
2:58PM on 8th February 2010
In the end, I'd really consider a professional web marketing firm, like Root Madison. They take a global approach to giving you a web presence, including site development, SEO, social media solutions, email marketing - they can even write and manage you.
8:18AM on 24th February 2010
I am wondering if you can suggest me some programming tips
5:30PM on 23rd March 2010
Great Post Jaamit! Thanks a lot! I am running a small e-biz website and have been wondering this lately: Does a longer product URL or a shorter one help the SEO? For example, I am thinking to change the products URLs from: http://mastermassagetables.com/montana.html to http://mastermassagetables.com/montana-massage-table.html I am so confused, is the original better or the longer one better? I'd appreciate it if anyone knows about it. Thanks!
SEO Director at OMD UK
6:54PM on 23rd March 2010
@Prachi - yes, new products are adding to the content on the site, not to mention internal links back to the rest of the site - but its a different thing to adding content to a page via reviews, or pulling in blog feeds, on to a particular page to help boost it's rankings. I guess in extreme cases where hundreds of products are being added every week, and you haven't got the domain authority to support that you might not see all those pages indexed or ranking well. Eric Enge's recent interview with Matt Cutts explores the idea of crawl budget in quite a lot of detail.
@Master Massage (or whatever your real name is) - there's no one answer to that generally - you can go too far with long urls. In that example given your site is already about massage tables and that is in your domain I wouldn't bother creating a new URL - it probably wouldn't bring you much benefit, and it's best not to set up 301 redirects unless you really need to. If you had other products on there that weren't massage tables I'd go with a descriptive URL containing the keyphrase, but keep it to as few words as possible - more than 3-4 word phrases get spammy and bad for usability.
2:03AM on 25th March 2010
hange the products URLs from: http://mastermassagetables.com/montana.html to http://mastermassagetables.com/montana-massage-table.html I am so confused, is the original better or the longer one better? I'd appreciate it if anyone knows about it. Thanks!
8:25AM on 1st April 2010
Hello Jaamit, write your article is very detailed and outside the chain on top in the end I ask you an important.
12:24PM on 5th April 2010
"Build Links to Deeper Pages"
This aspect of linkbuilding is nearly always overlooked in the chase for the #1 spot for highly competative terms.Explaining to clients the need to link to deeper pages and the benefits of this action can also be hard work.
3:46AM on 31st May 2010
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
5:48PM on 3rd June 2010
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
2:50PM on 30th June 2010
Some eccelent advice for all us E sellers. i especialy like the first point you made about catagorising your products. i think im going to have to have a tidy up.
10:42AM on 5th July 2010
What do you think about reverse product linking, building a link piramid from the worst selling to the top selling?
8:34AM on 26th July 2010
I don't agree that only first link counts. There are a few tests done but those test results showed that second link also counts. But your suggestions are great.
7:04AM on 31st July 2010
Wonderful tips, I agree on the deeper link building. This is something that most people tend to overlook but it's very important and looks even more natural to search engines when done correctly. Canonical URL's are fabulous too, they're very helpful indeed.
4:48PM on 20th August 2010
Easy, I know all this already ;) Honestly...
8:11PM on 24th October 2010
Thank you for a great article, Jaamit! I have learned a lot during my seo optimization work and found a couple of new ideas right here in your article. Thx again.
10:32AM on 27th October 2010
Hi Jaamit,
First of all your post is just superb. It's not everyday you read an "all-meat" blog post especially for e-Commerce SEO. Well done!
I do have a question regarding another version of e-Commerce sites, will these tips also apply to invite-only shopping sites? What are your thoughts on e-Commerce SEO for sites similar to One Kings Lane or sites like Gilt Groupe?
Thanks!
6:48AM on 30th October 2010
I work on lots e-commerce sites. Most of them keep adding new products, what confuses me is "Is this not fresh content for that particular site?" I do agree that the blogs, user reviews,twitter feeds are great for fresh content, but the new additions do they contribute a bit towards the fresh content or not
11:58AM on 8th December 2010
I would like to congratulate Jaamit on this great post, Highly informative. It would be nice to be able to get this complex with some of my clients but at the moment they are all busy changing their product descriptions they have copied!!!!!
12:01AM on 9th December 2010
Hey Jammit. I want to agree you on point 7 - most of people forget about deep linking. They link to the main homepage and think that google will see them as abig fisch and reward with PR7 - sorry but no. People you need to have many subpages with high PR to get bonus on a homepage. Anyway - pack of great advices there - thanks a lot for sharing!
10:39PM on 22nd December 2010
Second time I got back to this article and reminds me of some important stuff I have to do on my site. Even it's a service orientated business your information is very valuable.
11:28PM on 6th January 2011
With regards to duplicate content in different folder structures I wouldnt worry as I have done this on several websites I have developed and they are still excelling in SEO ranks.
Google likes to see good structure, and provided it really is necessary to have the same content in two differnet places this should not affect your rankings.
4:17PM on 11th March 2011
RIP Jammit
11:18AM on 1st July 2011
firstly i would like to thank you for this amazing blog post. It really helped me, though i already had imagined that trick. Still, you enhanced my optimism and taught me some of the values that go together with this comment-trick.
Continue your great work
1:01PM on 5th July 2011
Very good article, i am looking for these type of article. this is very help to me , thanks for sharing your great work...........
Search Consultant at dotSearch
3:27PM on 5th September 2011
Great article. Thanks