6 crucial SEO tips for your e-commerce site

This week's journal entry has been contributed by Claire Jarrett, who runs an AdWords and SEO Agency, based in Bristol, UK.

Do you own an e-commerce site?  Then SEO needs special consideration. Here’s a brief guide:

Homepage

Optimise your homepage for more general terms such as “gift shop”, “online gifts” etc.  This means you will need to create metatags including a title tag, metadescription, and keywords.  Your title tag should include the main couple of keywords and usually includes your company name.  Separate these using a pipe - | .  The metadescription should be a full sentence written to include the main keywords but also to entice visitors to click on your website – as it will appear under the name of the website in the SERP results.  The keywords will be the keywords you are optimising the page for – these are less important these days due to spamming a few years ago.

Categories

Separate your website into categories that reflect the products.  For example, split by “glassware”, “china” etc.  You can also split by brand as well.  Ensure the category is called an appropriate name that includes keywords, and is not called “categoryid25” or something unhelpful.

You will again need to create metatags for each category page – see above.

Products and product descriptions

Every product needs a unique product description to ensure Google ranks it highly.  Do not just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s site, but write the description yourself.  Do take the time to do this step properly, and remember the description is what will make people buy.  Hire a copywriter to do this if you do not have the time, or if your written English is not great!

Link Building

You will need to build links back to the homepage, the category pages and the product pages.  Don’t just build them back to the homepage.  Consider links via article submission and social bookmarking as well as traditional link building methods.

Social Media

Build in the ability to have people “like” products, as this will attract additional visitors through Facebook, curious about their friends likes.

Google Base

Google Base is the shopping results that appear when people search for a specific product.  Ensure your ecommerce website has the ability to output to Google Base, and then output your database to Google on a weekly basis.  You will appear more often in the results if your website is highly ranked by Google.  It’s unlikely a brand new website will have its results appear in Google Base immediately.

I hope you found these tips useful!