Product Pages And Search Engine Optimization

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 18 of May , 2008 at 5:29 am

Search engine optimization for product pages is not that difficult particularly if you follow a few guidelines.

To get the most out of your search engine optimization program for your product pages you need to concentrate on three aspects. Your site structure, your internal linking, and the product pages content.

Your site structure should be fairly simple and easy to follow. We wrote a post in February, The Best Internal Link Structure For Your Website, about tiering your pages. I suggest a quick read of that post before continuing here. This post also discusses some search engine optimization linking options. Another post included this paragraph on internal linking which is quite appropriate to repeat here:

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.

With a good site structure and smart internal linking, that only leaves the content to create. Content could fall into two main streams, product description and product reviews. Search engine optimization strategies have as a core component, unique content. Don’t duplicate what is on another page or another site.

Many web owners fall into the trap of simply copying information from the manufacturer or from the product handbook. Be creative and create your own product descriptions. They often sound more authentic particulalry as many products are now imported from overseas and the English - well not quite English. Writing your own product descriptions enables you to concentrate on the dual search engine optimization keys of targeting keywords and providing user focused content.

Reviews can written by yourself, or better yet, by consumers. Encourage feedback from consumers and use some of their content in the form of reviews. This can act as a type of recommendation particulalry if the reviews are user generated with web or blog URL’s that can be tracked back. Blogs with blog comments are ideal for this type of user generated input and are a useful search engine optimization tool in themselves.

Optimizing your product pages for search engines is not a difficult task particularly if done from day one. Good structure, clever internal linking and optimized content are the hallmarks of a good search engine optimization strategy and high rankings.

Category: SEO

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