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The Importance of Using Ecommerce SEO to Get Your Store Noticed

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Ecommerce SEO Intro

Search engine optimization aka SEO is a term that cannot be ignored if you already have an ecommerce business or plan on selling products online. It refers to a technique that is used by webmasters the world over to achieve better ranking and higher organic traffic in the search engines. There are many different facets of SEO and it can be pretty comprehensive, but you will find that using SEO tricks to tweak a little here and there on your online store can have a huge payoff.

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Ecommerce and SEO

There are two different ways for your e-commerce business to be listed on the top of major search engines, paid search and organic search. Paid search refers to advertising your online store on Google, Yahoo and Bing, your advertisement will show up in the designated advertisement sections of the search results page. Organic search refers to the results that naturally display as a result of the keywords a person uses to search for what they want. Ecommerce SEO uses free organic search methods to get your online store to rank well in the search engines.

SEO is used on all kinds of websites, but unfortunately e-commerce sites are one of the most difficult sites to optimize for. E-commerce websites are typically not ranked very well in organic search results. The reason for this is due to the fact that they provide too little original content. Words are what usually helps search engines determine relevance when they find websites to display on their search results page. E-commerce sites rely heavily on images to do all the talking, consumers are more willing to buy a product based on good images than based on detailed descriptions. In fact, most of the time online stores provide rather short descriptions of their products and a majority of them even use the generic manufacturer description. There is no unique content on any of the product pages and not a whole lot of thought goes into improving web usability. There also seems to be a relatively poor internal linking structure. On top of that, a lot of online stores use shopping cart software to create listings for their products. The problem is a shopping cart software's main focus is on the back end, they are too database driven and often neglect important on page factors that help a website become more search engine friendly. With all that to consider, ecommerce SEO is quite different from the SEO techniques used for content rich sites.

Does My Store Need Ecommerce SEO?

The answer is yes! Having a well optimized e-commerce website will help you dramatically improve your ranking in natural search results. This will position you way ahead of your competition. Remember that SEO is not a a quick fix, it is a time consuming effort, but it's cost effective and the results will have long lasting benefits for your business. With ecommerce SEO, you will find your traffic increasing gradually as your ranking starts to move up in the search results. Once that happens, even a small boost in traffic will have the potential to increase your revenue.

Meta Tags for Ecommerce SEO

Meta tags are used throughout a website to help search engines better categorize the information on there to be able to provide relevant search results for their users. There is debate about just how useful they actually are due to changes made throughout the years in search algorithms. One thing is certain though, it is definitely better to have meta tags than to leave it out. Meta tags are pretty much the same for ecommerce SEO as it is for regular SEO. These tags can only be seen by the search engines, and you have to write out meta titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords that pertain to the products or information on each individual page. Make sure you are able to articulate to the search engines exactly what is shown in great detail.

A good e-commerce service or solution should have the capability of auto generating all of the necessary meta tags based on the titles, descriptions and keywords that you enter when you add a new product listing. Sometimes however, what you want to appear on the page is not necessarily what you want the search engines to see. This is often the case, so they should be versatile enough to allow you to create custom meta tags for particular product pages, category pages and content pages if need be. All you really need to do is spend a little time going over the meta tags when you add new products or content to your online store and that right there takes care of a huge part of the ecommerce SEO.

URLs for Ecommerce SEO

The way that each individual url is displayed on your e-commerce site will help determine how well your pages rank on the search engines. You will need dynamically generated static html pages with clean urls for all of your products, your categories and other content. Ideally urls for individual pages should be descriptive but not too long, it needs to contain keywords that are relevant to the products, categories or information on the page. An important part of ecommerce SEO is to make sure to use canonical tags for your online store urls. This tag will help eliminate any duplicate content in the eyes of the search engines due to the creation of multiple versions of the same page. This type of situation is readily found on e-commerce sites, because it is common to have category urls or session id urls or print only urls showing identical content as the original page. The best solution is to use an e-commerce service that will automatically eliminate this problem.

Key On Page Elements for Ecommerce SEO

There are several elements on the page that can and should be optimized for the search engines. Here is a list of things you can work on to improve your on ecommerce SEO and increase your chance of online success.

Header Tags - these tags are usually used for page titles and is one of the first things the search engines look at to determine the topic of the contents on the page.

Keywords - use relevant keywords to describe your products instead of useless product id numbers as that does nothing to help you rank in the search engines.

Write Unique Descriptions - when you enter a description for your products, try to create a unique detailed overview of your product instead of using a generic manufacturer description.

Use Alt and Title Tags for all Product Images - doing so not only increases your keyword density, it also increases the chance of having your product pages found through image search.

Other Important Ecommerce SEO Tips

There are a number of other ecommerce SEO tips that you can apply to improve your search engine ranking and boost your traffic. Here are two that are found to be very helpful for an e-commerce site.

Use Breadcrumb Navigation - breadcrumbs are typically text navigation that can be displayed on a product page showing the site hierarchy that led to the page. For instance you can clearly see that the product page came from a subcategory of a category in that order. This has significant SEO benefits, because it increases the internal linking that so many e-commerce sites lack.

Google XML Sitemap - this is an XML file that shows Google all the pages that are on your website. It is important to have, because it alerts Google of any changes so they know to crawl your website again to make sure all of your web pages are indexed.

Ecommerce SEO Solution

Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy for your e-commerce business, one that cannot be ignored. There are a few ways you can go about integrating SEO into your online store. You can hire an SEO consultant, but that will cost you on top what you have to pay for the hosting and shopping cart services. You can do all the work yourself from scratch, but you will need some basic technical knowledge. Or you can subscribe to a full service e-commerce hosting/shopping cart solution that will take care of most of the basic SEO for you.

Ecommerce SEO Video

Ecommerce SEO Tips for an Online Store: by elogichick1 | video info

2 ratings | 423 views

Go to http://trycorecommerce.com for an e-commerce online store free trial. SEO is an integral part of your e-commerce success. Find out the different SEO tricks you need to use to make your online store traffic soar. For more information on ecommerce SEO, check out http://www.squidoo.com/seo-e-commerce If you enjoyed this video, you might also like the other videos in our YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/elogichick1 Ecommerce SEO Tips Video Transcription: SEO, which is short for search engine optimization is a technique used by webmasters to get more organic traffic by improving search engine ranking. It is just as important if not more for an e-commerce site to have good SEO. Most online stores are not optimized very well and therefore are ranked pretty low in serach engine results pages. There are many reasons for this, the main ones inlcude too many images and not enough unique content, short generic descriptions, poor internal linking structure and heavy use of manufacture codes and product numbers instead of relevant keywords. An e-commerce site must have the following basic SEO elements in order to improve its ranking. Search engine friendly URL's that are dynamically generated for each product, category and content page, meta titles, descriptions and keywords to help search engines find out what each page on your site is about. Image alt and title tags to let the search engines know what your images are about. Product specific keywords should be in the header tags as well as throughout all of your product and category pages. Increase internal linking by displaying breadcrumb navigation throughout your site. Finally a sitemap is needed to alert the search engines of new pages that need to be indexed or page updates that need to be crawled. Even if you plan on using paid sources to promote your online store, it's critical not to overlook organic search. Although you may not see the benefits of using this method right away, having potential customers find your site by way of search engines will have a long lasting effect on the success of your business. What you need is an e-commerce solution that takes care of your basic SEO needs, such as automatically creating dynamic search engine friendly URL's with canonical tags to avoid duplicate content, have the ability to auto generate or provide easy ways to add meta, image and header tags to all pages, have a Google XML sitemap built in for proper indexing and have the right validation to ensure your e-commerce site is correctly formatted for the serarch engines. Let Core Commerce handle the basic SEO you need to get your store ranking high in the search engines. With design tools to set up your store in minutes, a full list of growing features at your disposal and superior support, it's no wonder they are rated one of the best e-commerce solutions. Try it absolutely free for 15 days without giving them your credit card information.

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zentech Dec 21, 2011 @ 6:27 pm | delete

nice theory of explanation , e commerce seo is now a tool for all businesses like
printers ink ,
printer ink cartridges & many others . helps a lot for all seo persons or business men

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Sep 1, 2010 @ 6:17 am | delete

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McKinley Media Group- Sterling McKinley Jun 10, 2010 @ 8:27 am | delete

I love your post. SEO is a great tool and I can see why Ecommerce is a great fit.

Great post

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