Forest Software

Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business

Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:24 pm

Having just been involved in the launch of an e-commerce site for a new online health food business I thought I’d pass on a few of the basic SEO tips that came to light.

Many of these tips are the same as for any site, no matter if they are informational, lead generating or sites that actually sell items but there are one or two that are much more likely to occur in an e-commerce enviroment.

The common tips are :-

  • Make sure that your site loads quickly – slow loading pages not only turn off your visitors but can also affect your search engine rankings
    • Don’t have images that have a very large file size if all you are doing is displaying thumbnails – remember not everyone has super-fast internet connections
    • If you are using a standard shopping cart have a look to see if it can cache pages for you, this saves database lookups on typical pages
  • Make sure that the navigation works and that there are no missing pages
  • Try to get the site set up so that you can get from any one page to any other in 3 clicks or less
  • Test the navigation with people that are new to your site and see if it makes sense to them
  • Make sure that the title and meta description matches the page content and is unique for each page.

There there are the elements of SEO that are more likely to be relevant to e-commerce sites :-

  • If you can make sure that every page has unique content – don’t have lots of pages with the same content other wise the search engines may only pick one page to show.  Say you are selling handmade dragons and your store has a page for each dragon – don’t have the same page content of “This handmade dragon is 2 inches tall and weighs 50gms, to buy this model click on the buy now button below”.
  • Try to make at least 50% of your product description different to other product pages.
  • Make sure that each product page doesn’t have what Google calls “shallow content” – Try to put at least 250 words of unique product description with a minimum of 100 words.
  • Following on from the first tip in this section, if you are a retailer/reseller please don’t copy the product description from the manufacturers website.  Remember that Google and the other engines like original content so if you and the dozens (or hundreds) of other resellers are using the same product descriptions what do you think the engines are likely to do?  That’s right, they are going to ignore your page so you will never feature in the search results.
Remember, to really feature in the search results in Google you need to be what Google calls a high-quality site (more information about high-quality sites is in the Google blog here if you want to see what Google counts as a quality site).
With a little bit of work this is achievable for the typical e-commerce site, and if you are running such a site surely putting a little bit of work and being successful is much better than doing nothing and failing.
If you run a e-commerce site I’d be interested in hearing from you if these tips have been useful and if you implement them how successful they have been for you.
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