SEO factors for E-commerce Sites

All e-commerce websites should be designed with search engine optimisation in mind. You need to make sure that your site gets results from the word GO.

This blog post aims to help with the above so if you want to take your e-commerce website more seriously, or are just starting a new e-commerce website, this blog post will help you through some SEO factors to consider and implement on your e-commerce site.

Product page requirements:

• Meta information – Are your title and meta descriptions unique and describe exactly what your product page is about? This can be time consuming but really worth it in the long run!
• h1, h2 and h3 tags – Is your page SEO friendly and structured well with one h1 tag?
• Images and any video optimised with keywords on pages. e.g product images automatically have ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags when uploaded by a backend user.
• Social share buttons.
• Search engine friendly URLs – Are your URLs search engine friendly? e.g http://www.some-website.co.uk/shop/products/6836177-golf-bag-in-yellow.html should be http://www.some-website.co.uk/golf-bag-in-yellow.html. The shorter the URL the better, aslong as it says exactly what it is.

Category page requirements:

• Meta information – Are your title and meta descriptions unique and describe exactly what your category page is about?
• Do you have high quality content on your category pages? Describe the category and exactly what is in this category. This content could be used for internal linking and
• Images and any video optimised with keywords on pages. e.g product images automatically have ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags when uploaded by a backend us
• h1, h2 and h3 tags – Is your page SEO friendly and structured well with one h1 tag?
• Images and any video optimised with keywords on pages. e.g product images automatically have ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags when uploaded by a backend user.

Plugins to consider:

• Google Merchant Export – A plugin to export all the website products quickly so that we can upload to Google Shopping easily. Needs to be updating once a month on Google Shopping Merchant but we normally do this once a week or if a large group of products has been added in one hit.
• XML Sitemap generator – to export and update the sitemap.xml easily. May also be worth looking into setting sitemaps up for brands and one for products.

Other:

• If you are re-designing an e-commerce website keep the product and category page URLs as similar as you can to the current ones.
• We need to be able to edit the meta title, description and keywords for any page on the website.
• Look at the SEO packs from Yoast. These guys do some great plugins for WordPress and Magento SEO.
• WWW resolve – Be sure that www.some-website.co.uk and some-website.co.uk are not running in parallel. Google sees this as two pages so a redirect for the non-www URL will need to redirect to www.some-website.co.uk.
• Website search – We recommend using a faceted search functionality as this is great for users to narrow down what they are looking for and we can also use these terms for SEO purposes.

301 Redirects

Your website may have many pages indexed on Google already. Re-directs for these will need to be setup so that if a user goes to an old URL they shouldn’t be shown an error page (404 page) and re-directing the user to the new page.

Payment Methods To Consider:

• PayPal
• Google Checkout
• Credit Cards – Maestro, Master Card, Visa and Visa Electron.
• SagePay

E-Commerce Platforms We Recommend

Magento

Magento is an open source ecommerce web application that was launched in 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc..

Who uses Magento?

• Northface
• Fred Perry
• Harvey Nichols
• Winterson
• The Watch Gallery

Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows individuals and businesses to create online stores. The platform currently hosts over 20,000 online retailers.

Who uses Shopify?

• Foo Fighters
• Evisu Jeans
• Siren London

Want us to add your site to the list above? Get in touch and we will check the website out!