Best Search Engine Optimisation Tips For E-commerce Web Shop Owners

By Author: Lucy Newman
Total Articles: 25
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SEO has been a buzzword among online shop owners. The reason behind such hullaballoo is the challenges erupted out of complexities of all existing E-Commerce Applications. It would take hours to place all these complexities in our discussions, so we would limit the discussion to certain points related to SEO. It takes a substantial period of time (even years of R&D) to develop a user-friendly application. During this course of time, it is obvious to expect various complexities creeping into the application. This is one of the established procedures of developing an application. Features those make an application a successful are flexibility, expansibility and usability. There must be scope for up-gradation of an application as it is expected to improve the performance level to deal with the ever changing technological scenario. Let's find out what are basic complexities of E-Commerce Applications in recent times:

Technical complexities

In comparison to static websites (i.e. .html websites), dynamic websites powered by E-Commerce Applications are large sites and have the capacity to generate up to tens ...
... of thousands of web pages. So it is really a tough most task for a single person to understand, implement and manage an e-commerce website. On the other hand, a poor understanding of such an application yields bad ever worse results for both e-commerce store owners as well as store users.

Business Complexities

Lack of technical understanding of an e-commerce application affects the website's profitability. Person or team that manages the e-commerce website faces really gruesome tasks ahead to meet the business objectives. As we consider communication and sales as two basic strengths of a business are hampered severely.

An e-commerce website should satisfy the above two complexities in order establish itself as a user-friendly one. So far we have discussed the general complexities of an e-commerce application. But Web has its own complications and has been doubled by the growing popularity of search engines. It does not make any sense, whether you have a great looking e-commerce site with thousands of popular products in your inventory. The matter is buyers must find you online easily. So, do potential buyers find your web store easily online? If your reply is affirmative then your business gets a huge boost. But a negative reply can be devastating for your business. Search engines have their own web page standards and strictly follow them. Here follows the Quality Guidelines from Google:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don't send automated queries to Google.
* Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don't create multiple pages, sub domains or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans or other badware.
* Avoid doorway pages created just for search engines or other cookie cutter approaches such as affiliate programmes with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate programme, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
(Courtesy: Google.com)

So far as E-Commerce website is concerned, a lot of things one web store owner can take care of for search engine ranking improvement. Search Engine Ranking (acronym is SER) is very important for those who operate online business through web stores, because more than half of the internet users use search engines for finding information. If your web shop is not available in search engine result pages, then you lose the chunk of traffic from search engines. There are around 101 points can be implemented to make an e-commerce website search engine friendly. Here go some of the most significant points that you must prioritise. I've distributed all the points under three broad categories that will give you a better understanding of SEO points: On-Page Optimisation, Site-Wide Optimisation and Off-Site Optimisation.

What you think about your business may not be similar to the users' views. So consider terminologies that your web store users would type in the search boxes to find web pages similar to your website. Always ensure that your website really consists of those terms within it. So the bottom-line is a good Keyword Analysis required to find out some relevant key phrases to target for the site.

1. Distinguish between user end and admin end web pages.
2. Target one unique key phrase per web page.
3. You can use the key phrase in your web page's file name, meta-elements (i.e. Meta Title, Meta Description, Headers)
4. Substitute dashes (-) with underscores (_). You can rewrite the URL Structure Rules in the available .htaccess file in your website root folder.
5. Try to use the targeted key phrase number of times in the content, reasonably.
6. Make sure your content is for users, not for search engines.
7. Key phrase stuffing is a sin in the process of search engine optimisation. Don't stuff the key phrases everywhere on a web page.
8. The major problem of an E-Commerce web store is that it generates number of duplicate pages with exact content. You can do this away with Canonicalization.
9. Do not hyperlink action words like Click Here, Enter and so on as these hyperlinks may confuse search engines.
10. Add a blog tool to your website and regularly update with useful articles, product reviews and HowTos. Some of the popular blogging applications are Wordpress, LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger and so on. Wordpress is a great blogging tool which can be hosted independently.

Follow the above SEO points for your E-Commerce Web Store and adopt best industry SEO practices for quick search engine ranking improvement and targeted traffic with better ROI.