Search Engine Optimization Strategies for eCommerce Sites

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, April 7, 2008

Develop a strong search engine optimization strategy for eCommerce sites can be difficult. ecommerce sites are generally driven by product rather content and as everyone will tell you - content is king.

Product driven sites survive on low traffic and high conversion rates. If you can get a conversion rate of 20-30 percent then an extra 100 visitors would result in an extra 20 to 30 sales. For this reason, being able to get your search engine optimization strategies right can prove to be very popular.

There are several site design strategies that can help with search engine optimization. The first is to have a content based landing page that feeds into your product pages. With this strategy, links need to carefully thought through and fully optimized with good keyword strategies.

Another site design strategy is to include pages with content that describes and sells your products. These pages can be optimized using standard search engine optimization strategies. Links are again important including external links and good internal linking strategies.

If your site is a pure eCommerce shopping cart style site then your search engine optimization strategies become a little limited - but not totally. Links become the important issue along with keywords. Being able to control the flow of internal links becomes much more important.

Which ever site design strategy you use, controlling link juice becomes very important. You need to determine which pages really need the flow of link juice and which pages can do without. Use of the ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ tags become important parts of your search engine optimization strategies as they are used to control the flow of any link juice and page indexing.

Areas such as “My Account” “Your Cart” “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” do not need the flow of link juice nor would they really need indexing by the search engines. Your search engine optimization strategies should concentrate on pushing as much link juice to the pages that you want yo have appearing high in the search engine results pages.

eCommerce take a little extra work when it comes to search engine optimization, however the results can be very profitable.

                      Category: SEO                      

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