The Ultimate Guide toSEO for E-commerceWebsites

| whitepaper

www.| Search

Your WebSite

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesINTRODUCTION 1

Introduction

Organic search represents an important source of traffic for

any website. This is why the main role of SEO is to use

common search phrases related to a specific subject to rank

your website among those top results.

SEO has become so important and pervasive that the

website that doesn't utilize its techniques is destined to fail.

Basic SEO can be done by anyone, although for a top

Google ranking, it pays to work with an experienced SEO

service.

97%

of users pick a resulton the first 4 results onthe first results page

So What Does SEO Mean!

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is the process of driving more traffic to your website from search engines. Search engines help

people find information on the web by matching their searches with the most relevant, best

quality results.

SEO is about improvinga site's organic, or naturalranking.

How many of your Google search result pages do you typically look throughbefore choosing a result? Almost 97% of the population click on one of thefirst 4 results on the first page.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search queries - the words that users type into the search box

are of extraordinary value to a successful SEO strategy. An important aspect of SEO is making

your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Even though search

engines have become increasingly smart, they can't understand a web page the same way a

human does. SEO allows engines to identify what each page is about, and how it may be

useful.

Your Website

Keyword

button

Why does your website need SEO?

Although social media and other

types of traffic can generate visits to

your website, the major commercial

search engines—Google, Bing and

Yahoo!—drive the majority of web

traffic.

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesWHY DOES YOUR WEBSITE NEED SEO? 2

Traffic Sources 51% Organic Search

34% All Other

10% Paid Search

5% Social

Source: Brightedge

- Selecting the best keywords on which to establish each of your pages

- Communicating to search engines that your page revolves around those keywords

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What is On-Page SEO?

IMPORTANT!

Any salesman knows that sales are about numbers. You might only sellone product for every 30 people who visit your website, but if you're bringingin 100,000 unique page views per month, the sales potential of your SEOefforts becomes clear.

12

- The title element of a web page creates value in three specific areas -

relevancy, browsing and the search engine results pages - by providing an accurate and

concise description of a page's content. This element is critical to both user experience and

SEO. Google increases the font size of result titles from 16px to 18px and removes underlining,

while keeping the overall container the same size. As a result, the title tags become cleaner

and easier to read. At the same time, increasing the font size reduces the number of characters

that appear before truncation.Look at the following search result both before and after the

new implementation.

The Title Tag

On-page SEO refers to factors that optimize a website or a web page such that it becomes

friendlier to search engines. This technique includes the optimization of texts, images, tags,

URL structures, internal links, headers and other forms of content. Basically, on-page SEO

means:

SEO efforts are critical to the success of the online marketing. Search engine ranking factors

can be divided as follows: On page & Off page factors

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesON-PAGE SEO 3

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The title on the top (old design)is presented in full, while afterthe redesign (bottom), the titlehas lost a crucial 9 characters.The challenge is to create a newset of guidelines for title taglength.

- If the title is kept under 55 characters, you can

expect at least 95% of your titles to display properly. Over the years, the most common advice

was to keep title tags under 70 characters. After recent changes, however, it has been

established that title tags are best kept under a width of 512 pixels, which means 55 to 60

characters. Google search results use the proportional Arial font, so that thin characters, like 1

or I, consume less space than fat characters, like 5 or M. Google always uses pixels, but the

character count is an easy way to understand conversion.

Here are the basic best practices for title tags:

- Keep your title tags under 512 pixels in width, generally 55 to 60 characters

- Use your keywords as close to the beginning as possible

- Make your title tags readable

- If you include a brand in the title tags, place your brand at the end of the title tag

unless it is a well-known brand that people seek out

- Make your title tags unique

Optimal Length for Search Engines

IMPORTANT!

The page title is one of the most important objects evaluated by Googleand other search engines in order to determine what is on a web page.Put your keywords or phrases in the title, and keep it as short aspossible.

- Meta descriptions present a major opportunity to separate

yourself from the competitors and convince searchers that your page is worth navigating to.

Having a relevant, compelling meta description can mean the difference between a searcher

who clicks through to your page and one who clicks elsewhere. By writing a compelling text,

you can increase the click-through rate for your organic search results. Also, it is

important to use a short “call to action” in your meta description.

Page Meta Description

Search Results

An Important Title Tag Goes Here In Full

An Important Title Tag Goes Her..

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesON-PAGE SEO 4

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Once you've had keywordssuggested to you, and you haveoutlined your informationarchitecture and settled onkeyword targets for a page, youcan receive intelligent ad textsuggestions for a set of keywords.

An Important Title Tag Here

Meta Description lines that should contain

your keywords or a set of keywords.

theweblink.com/ - Cached - Similar

Search Results

We cannot simply use a list of targeted keywords as our meta description, but in creating meta

descriptions, these keywords are a good indicator of what people will be searching for. We can

now use the same language as the searcher in crafting our meta description.

Google and other search engines bold keywords in the description when they match search

queries. Take this into consideration in order to maximize click-through rates on search engine

result pages.

- In its most basic form, SEO is about tinkering with your content to make it

attractive to search engines. That's why page content is an essential factor for ranking in search

engine. The first step is selecting the right keywords—the words or phrases that people are

most likely to enter into a search engine if they are looking for your content—then using them

throughout what you write. When Google indexes your website, it detects the keywords you've

used and how you've used them, and ranks your content (in part) on that basis. That ranking is

what determines if your content shows up on the first page of Google results from keyword

searches, or on the fifty-first.

Relevancy, search volume and keyword difficulty are vital when it comes to optimizing the

most important pages of a site. Search for keywords that are highly relevant to your brand and

products.

Do not use keywords that are too broad or too competitive. Broad keywords can result in a

high bounce rate and low conversion rate because visitors may not find the specific

information they are looking for. Also, using keywords that are widely used or competitive

makes it hard to achieve a high ranking.

Page Content

TIP:

Over-optimization doesn't work!Keyword stuffing is a surefire recipe for SEO disaster.

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesON-PAGE SEO 5

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General statisctics for keywords

keyword

search volume

results

competition

keyword difficulty

trends

seo tools

45%

10.100

medium

62%

+

free seo

81%

150.000

high

70%

-

April May June July August Sep... | | | | |

01000

10000

100000

200000

|

|

|

|

|

-8k

Trends for free seo

Keywords should not be repeated over and over in the content of the page. Using keywords

unnaturally in the content does not increase rankings. The main goal of creating relevant

content is to meet the expectations of the searcher. The quality of your content is why they

clicked through to your page, so don't assault them with “over-optimized” content.

One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is to use keywords for which users might

be searching. This is how you can attract potential customers that are using Google, Bing or

other search engines.

Check out your competitors. Create a list with keywords that your competitors are using with

their SEO Strategy. Also, check their Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authorities (PA)—you

can do that by installing the free Moz Toolbar. Higher DA's or PA's among your competitors

suggest that focusing can help you identify keywords with a higher success probability.

- The header text, or H1 text, is usually the title of an article or some large,

bold text at the top of your page. Search engines put extra importance on the keywords in the

H1 text. The H2 tag is a subheading, and should contain keywords similar to your H1 tag.

H1 & H2 Tags

- Keywords in the image names and in the alternative text that

appears when the mouse hovers over an image offer more opportunities to help the search

engines understand what the page is about.

Consider the 'search image' feature in major search engines like Google. Images are an

important part of building a successful ecommerce business, most notably for attracting

shoppers searching Google images to reducing site load time. Reducing the file sizes of your

images improves time to load, but you should maintain the quality of the image as well. Most

customers wait about 3 seconds for a website to load on a desktop or laptop, and images

count for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page. Google uses page load time as a

factor in their ranking algorithm; this is why loading time is an important aspect of SEO.

Image optimization

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesINTERNAL LINKS 6

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- are links that go from one page to another page within a domain.

Use internal link building because:

- it allows searchers to navigate a website

- it helps establish an information hierarchy for the given website

- it helps spread link juice around websites

Internal links

IMPORTANT!

Don't use internal links for all your pages! Google will see this assuspicious. Place internal links as naturally as possible and use a varietyof anchor text.

What should internal link building look like?

- the anchor text should include keywords that are relevant

to the content.

Create relevant anchor text

Best Practices

- Anchor text should be used both internally and externally and should

be built using a wide variety of words. Try to make those words as natural as possible—they

could be generic (click here); branded (eSkill online skills testing); or generic, with a keyword

(click here for eSkill online skills testing). Try to keep a mixture of these types and cover a large

range of keywords when linking to other sites, or your site's inner pages to avoid getting an

unnatural link warnings.

Use Anchor Text

- provide an in-depth explanation of the linked keyword or phrase

on the destination page of the link. To get the most out of internal linking, you can select one

relevant page for which you're trying to rank in the SERPs, and always link to that page in your

internal links.

Link to strong pages

IMPORTANT!

SERP = search engine results page; is the list of results that a searchengine returns in response to a specific word or phrase query.

Depending on the number of web pages that contain a particular word or phrase, a SERP

might show anywhere from zero (in the case of no matches at all) to millions of items. For

example, entering the phrase "complex-number admittance" into the Google search engine

yields few results. In contrast, entering the single word "hurricane" yields millions of results.

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesINTERNAL LINKS 7

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In most cases, search engine users will look at only the first one to three pages of hits (results).

Web designers and site owners use SEO methods to make their sites and pages appear at or

near the top of a SERP

IMPORTANT!

Be engaged in your linking: Be consistent in your efforts to rank for aspecific keyword or phrase by linking to the same page. If you continuallylink to different pages, your link becomes half as useful.

- crawlers read the anchor text and the words

around it. Provide relevant, naturally flowing keywords near the linked copy to optimize search

engine results.

Place relevant content around the link

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSITE ARCHITECTURE 8

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IMPORTANT!

It is essential to organize products in an ecommerce store by categoryand sub-category, based on topics and sub-topics, in a way that isreflected in your URL hierarchy.

Site architecture is a critical component of an ecommerce site and shouldbe a priority from the beginning of your SEO developments.

Site Architecture

This involves designing a site that requires as few clicks as possible from your home page to

your product page. By creating a flat architecture for your website, you'll allow your link

juice—or, authority from your homepage—to be passed to your product page via internal

links.

The process of providing an effective site architecture for an ecommerce SEO project begins

with organizing your URL structure and the manner in which products are categorized and

organized in your ecommerce store. If you don't have a site architecture strategy and your

structure has products arranged in a haphazard manner, as opposed to logical categories or

sub-topics, your link structure will not be effective from an SEO standpoint. Burying products

within multiple sub-categories makes the site both tedious to navigate and hinders search

engine crawling.

Using flat site architecture brings two main advantages:

- Revealing the most relevant content for users and reducing the

number of times they have to click to find it allows you to keep your

potential customers engaged on your site.

- Make potential gains in indexation metrics, such as the number of

pages generating search engine traffic and the number of pages in a

search engine index.

IMPORTANT!

Link juice is a colloquial term in the SEO world that refers to the poweror equity passed to a site via links from external or internal sources. Thispower is interpreted as a vote of recommendation toward your site and isone of the most important factors in determining your site's search ranking.

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSITE ARCHITECTURE 9

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Search engine optimization requires good site architecture. It offers the possibility for both

users and search engines to easily find content throughout your site. Using logical categories

or sub-topics will allow you to link pages to other pages on the same topic.

On the one hand, with a good structure, your effective content and your site's structure can be

used to spread some of that “link juice” to the other pages on your site. The key is using the

quality content you've written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages. On the

other hand, creating the right URLs for the pages within the site architecture help people

remember your URL and link to it. This increases the ability of your site to rank more in the

search engine.

A challenge that ecommerce sites encounter is managing the number of levels within the

product catalogue. A balance should be kept between a short-intuitive click path and the

depth of category classification that can allow users to easily find the needed products.

While ecommerce sites with a small product range can more easily find this balance, large

ecommerce sites that have thousands of products require more strategic knowledge. Next we

will take a look at the influence of site architecture.

Homepage

Main Section

01

Main Section

02

Main Section

04

Main Section

03 AC

01 02 03 04

B

C

AB

index page

site index

content

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSITE ARCHITECTURE 10

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IMPORTANT!

Create a flat site architecture that requires no more than3 clicks to reach the deepest level!

Flat site architecture brings

some important advantages:

- It has been proven that pages buried deep in

the architecture are not able to receive enough link juice when ranked by a search engine.

Creating a flat site architecture means increasing the number of links on each page and

reducing the number of clicks to the deepest level of content.

Better strategy: flat site architecture

To get all the way to the end result, users and

search engines are expected to embark on a 6-

click descent. This represents poor site architecture.

Pages that are deeply buried in the architecture are

more likely to:

- have fewer internal links

- be less visible in search engine results,

and regarded as less important

- be low indexed

Poor strategy: deep site architecture Authority 1

Authority 2

Authority 3

Authority 4

Authority 5

Authority 6

Authority 7

0 / homepage

1 / page 1 / page 1 / page

2 / section 2 / section 2 / section 2 / section

3 / content 3 / content 3 / content 3 / content 3 / content

- boosts site ranking

- ensures pages remain in the search engine index

- strengthens the homepage

- allows quick access to any page

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSITE ARCHITECTURE 11

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- Infinite scroll is a functionality that loads content

automatically as the user scrolls down. The page expands vertically until all products are

displayed and the page ends. Pages with infinite scroll are often appreciated by users but not

so much by Google spiders. The problem is that search engine spiders cannot scroll to the

bottom of a page in response to users' habits when searching for more content.

Infinite scroll will by default serve the search engine spider the first page of results, and nothing

more. This becomes an issue when lots of great content may never be indexed by a search

engine, as there is no other mechanism to serve as a path to that content. The site that uses

infinite scroll has content that is simply not seen by search engine spiders and therefore will not

make it into the respective search engine results listings.

Infinite Scroll Search Issues

IMPORTANT!

Create an infinite scroll page and a series of pages that go along with theinfinite scroll page so search engines can crawl individual items linkedfrom the page. Each component page should contain a full URL that canbe accessed individually.

Infinite Scroll Page 01

The infinite scroll pageis chunked intocomponent pages

Page 02

Page 03

| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSITE ARCHITECTURE 12

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- Stagnant and keyword-rich URLs influence their website's search

engine results, so it is important to have an ecommerce site that supports them. Modify those

URLs for better SEO and brand identification.

SEO-friendly URL

- URLs should have keywords in them, and exclude

numbers and punctuation marks. Search engines are looking for keywords in URLs—it's a

known ranking aspect.

Make your URL meaningful

- The sitemap provides search engines with a list of files that assist them with

successfully crawling your website. The search engines can then classify content on your site

that they may not have found on their own. Sitemaps are available in multiple formats serving

different types of content, including video, images, news and mobile.

In not-so-short terms, a sitemap is a page that lists and links to all the other pages on your

website, often providing metadata about each URL. There are two types of sitemaps:

- The sitemap.xml is a complete list of pages on your site that helps Google and XML

other search engines to easily read, crawl and index your website. It also allows you to

crawl your new pages instantly.

- An XML Sitemap should not be confused with an HTML sitemap. The first is for HTML

search engines, while the sitemap.html is designed for users to get information about

your site's pages.

Sitemap

- Utilizing standardized markup for your HTML can provide your ecommerce

website with the microdata needed to facilitate the information on your web pages more

effectively so they can produce results that are relevant to users' search queries. Utilizing

Schema.org frequently will assist in developing a standardized markup strategy, which will align

with your optimization efforts and your traffic goals.

Schema.org is a powerful method of optimization, but the least often used. It can help your

ecommerce site to increase the click-through-rates and provides additional information within

the search engine snippet.

Schema.org

IMPORTANT!

This concept was created at the initiative of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.They collaborated and created standards in website coding which enablesdevelopers to provide additional information to search engines under the form of code.

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSITE ARCHITECTURE

An Important Title Tag Here

Meta Description lines that should contain

your keywords or a set of keywords.

theweblink.com/ - Cached - Similar

Search Results

The essential benefit of Schema.org is that it extends what you're able todescribe to search engines using structured data markup, especially thingsin the realm of ecommerce.

- schema markup on your website doesn't mean your site will automatically rank better;

it makes it easier for search engines to interpret content and, therefore, become more

likely to be included in the search results for a related query.

- Websites that use schema markup will rank better in the SERPs than companies

without markup. Marking up your pages with schema microdata can be used to define

and display rich snippets of your content in SERPs. Relevant rich snippets can result in

higher click-through rates, as users can quickly and easily determine whether the

content on your site is what they're looking for.

- schema markup makes it much easier to find important information on websites and

point it out to search engines so they can more easily understand what pages on the

website are about.

- it can increase your visibility.

- schema microdata can be used in conjunction with social media tags to provide

search engines with even more detail about a page's content.

What does Schema.org bring for you site?

Video Title About Search Engine Optimization

24 Aug 2011 - 4 min - by UserName

Meta Description lines that should

contain your keywords or info about

the uploaded video.

theweblink.com/

Video Results

video duration

title

video description

thumbnailimage

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSEARCH ENGINE-FRIENDLY NAVIGATION STRUCTURE

- Duplicate content is a big SEO challenge, and is usually the result of

poor planning, careless information architecture and non-intuitive website structure. When

there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to

decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. Unfortunately, most

ecommerce websites tend to have every attribute that typically results in duplicate content.

When it comes to ecommerce sites, many of the products are essentially the same, which

means their product descriptions might be more similar to each other. For this reason, it's

important to understand that analyzing all pages of your websites and identifying ways to

reduce redundancy is crucial. This should be a regular practice.

Google doesn't actively penalize most duplicate content. The worst that can happen to your

ecommerce site, if it suffers from these duplicate content issues, is that the duplicate pages are

ignored by the search engine. This means that your site will suffer rankings and traffic loss, and

the search engine will not provide relevant results.

Your ecommerce site can deal with both issues:

- internal duplicate content

- external duplicate content

Duplicate Content

Content Page

Spain

travel

Content Page

Spain

travel

Content Page

Spain

travel

I’m not going to list all ofyou. I need to figure outwhich one is the original

- There are a few reasons for internal duplicates:

- Different URLs with the same content

This issue can be solved by using canonical tags. “Canonical” means “preferred”

and you should pick a canonical URL when search engines identify duplicate

pages on your site.

Canonicalization refers to those web pages that can be easily loaded from

multiple URLs without creating a duplicate content error. It is a common

problem, especially when multiple pages have the same content, but different

URLs. This is what Google considers duplicate content.

Issues with internal duplicates

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSEARCH ENGINE-FRIENDLY NAVIGATION STRUCTURE

Canonical URLs are extremely important in the case of tracking URLs, where a

tracking code is added to the end of a URL on the site. Ensuring that the

canonical URL is the same as the base category URL will prevent search engines

from indexing these duplicate URLs.

- One and the same page is available at several URLs

The main solution here is using 301 redirect—this is how you can redirect an old

version of the page to the main one. This is how the link juice form the

redirected page is passed to the chosen one.

Now that’s a page that canrank!

Version 2

PageRank 3

3 inbound links

Version 1

PageRank 5

11 inbound links

Version 3

PageRank 3

2 inbound links

Version 2

301 re-direct 301 re-direct

- Cookies

When we are talking about ecommerce sites, some websites tag each new

visitor with a tracking parameter. Sometimes, it ends up in the URL and gets

indexed. This can easily add many duplicate pages to your index. Remove the

session ID from the URL or store it in a cookie to prevent this from happening.

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSEARCH ENGINE-FRIENDLY NAVIGATION STRUCTURE

- WWW vs. Non-WWW URLs & uppercase vs. lowercase URLs

Search engines consider http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com

different web addresses. Therefore, it's critical that one version of the URLs is

chosen for every page on the ecommerce website. 301 redirecting the non-

preferred version to the preferred version is the recommended solution to avoid

these technically created duplicate URLs. Uppercase and lowercase URLs need to

be handled in the same manner.

- Shared content between products

It's easy to take shortcuts with product descriptions on ecommerce websites,

especially with similar products. However, consider that Google is judging

content of ecommerce websites similarly to regular content sites. Sharing short

paragraphs, specifications and other content between product pages increases

the likelihood that search engines will decrease their perception of a product

page's content quality and ranking.

- Category pages

Category pages on ecommerce websites typically include a title and product

grid. This means that there is no unique content on these pages. The common

solution to combat this is to add unique descriptions at the top of category

pages (not the bottom, where content is given less weight by search engines)

that describes what types are featured are within the category.

This session ID URLs createmultiple versions of the samepage

Web Page

Title

button

http://www.example/webpage?SESSID=123

Appending a sessionID to the URL createsduplicate content

Web Page

Title

button

http://www.example/webpage

Session IDstored in acookie

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesSEARCH ENGINE-FRIENDLY NAVIGATION STRUCTURE

IMPORTANT!

Intro descriptions on category pages offer a great opportunity to builddeep links to related sub-category pages, related article content thatmay exist on the site and popular products that deserve attention andlink equity.

- Homepage duplicate content

The homepage typically has the most amount of incoming link equity, and this

helps the page rank in search engines. Usually the homepage's descriptive

content is used in directory submissions and other business listings on external

websites. Ensure that unique content is provided to these external websites

instead. If this has already been done to a large extent, rewriting the home page

descriptive content is the easiest way to fix the preexisting issue.

- There are two main reasons for this issue. The first is

when you create a new website and don't pay attention to deleting or blocking from indexing

in the old version. The second is when competitors are copying your content without mention

you as a source.

In order to avoid external duplicate content, you should:

- Be original

and pay attention to content. If you need to describe your website in the other

platform, do not copy the description from your homepage. Spend a few

minutes and create an original one using specific keywords for your site.

- Create a canonical tag

When you have several domains with similar content, you should create a

canonical tag. Choose which URL you want to be the source and redirect the

other URLs to that one.

- Work with the webmasters

to fix that problem if you don't own the domains, then educate your affiliates

and mention your site as the original source if you decide to syndicate part of its

content.

Issues with external duplicates

IMPORTANT!

The solution is ensuring that product descriptions fed to affiliates aredifferent than what is found on your ecommerce website. It'srecommended to give the description to the affiliate shopping websites,and write a more robust, unique description for your own ecommercewebsite.

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesPAGE ERRORS

- Syndicated content

Ecommerce websites that syndicate marketable content to other websites can

result in external duplicate content. If the syndication partner has a higher

authority (according to its inbound link profile), then it's possible that the content

on the syndication partner's website will outrank the original content on the

ecommerce website. There are a few different solutions to prevent this:

- Ensure that the syndication partner canonicalizes the content to the

URL on the ecommerce site that it originated from.

- Ensure that the syndication partner applies a “noindex,follow” meta

robots or X-robots tag to the syndicated content on their site.

- A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. If you are

deleting pages, perhaps because you have a large range of products that remain out of stock,

301 redirects allow you to retain visitors who are unable to find those deleted pages. 301

redirects can be used in the following ways to protect your ranking:

- When a site is moving form a domain to other domain and you do not want to lose

customers and do not want to make the transition so visible;

- In situations when a home page can be reached in multiple ways. You can transform

one URL as principal (canonical) and use 301 redirections to send traffic from the

other URLs to your canonical URL;

- When you have permanently moved or replaced pages;

- When you are dealing with 404 pages errors and expired content;

- When you replatform your website—301 redirects help handle content migrations

and URL changes.

301 Redirects

301 & 302 REDIRECTS

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesPAGE ERRORS

- 302 redirects tell search engines that a web page has been temporarily

moved, but does not pass any page rank or link juice to the new location. It merely acts as a

diversion to an appropriate location, protecting users from broken links and 404 page-not-

found errors.

302 redirects are typically used by ecommerce sites who may have products that are seasonal

in nature or temporarily out of stock, or for putting your site into maintenance mode. By using

a 302 redirect, the site can direct customers to similar products of interest, as opposed to

sending them to a product page where they cannot place an order.

The value of the 302 redirect is that it tells search engines that the requested content is

temporarily offline, but that they should keep the page rank and link juice of the page intact

and not pass it on to the new URL. When the product, or page, again becomes available, the

302 redirect can be rescinded and the original page's value will remain intact.

302 Redirects

IMPORTANT!

The difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect is subtle, but theyare not interchangeable. Mistakenly using a 302 redirect instead ofa 301 can strip a content page of its value, and can result in the lossof your hard earned SEO juice.

- 404 page errors occur when a page was deleted or moved to another

directory, and inform users that the page they are looking for cannot be found. This may be

frustrating for users, and cause you to lose them.

404 errors are common issues for big ecommerce sites because, in general, there is a wide

range of products that is constantly changing. The most suitable solution is to identify all the

broken links and create a 301 redirect or 302 temporary redirect to the correct page.

404 Page Errors

IMPORTANT!

To retain users, create a custom 404 page with a list of suggestedpages based on the URL of the page the user was looking for.

404NOT FOUND

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesPAGE ERRORS

- Site speed refers to the time your website takes to open. Customers appreciate

a website that can be quickly and easily accessed. Websites that take too much time too open

will hurt your visitors' experience. Customers may navigate back to Google to find a faster

website—which is likely to be a competitor! To avoid this, check the loading speed of your site

using a free tool like Pingdom.

Site speed affects your visitor experience, the duration of time spent on your site and ranking,

among other considerations. Avoid excessive use of images, JavaScript, frame, flash file or

irrelevant links to easily increase the speed of your site. Buying more server space and using a

different CSM such as Magento or Demandware are additional options.

Site Speed

An optimized page shouldload in 2 seconds or less.A slower load means losingpotential customers, andmoney.

Page Speed Test

0

1

23

4

5

6

loading speed

enter your web-address test speed

IMPORTANT!

To avoid losing users, check the loading speed of your site usinga specific free tool!

For example, large ecommerce sites can outgrow the capabilities of their existing platform.

Replatforming can have a massive impact on organic search traffic, ranking and sales.

Changing or upgrading ecommerce platforms can have a much higher cost than anticipated

when the impact on search engine optimization is overlooked.

Here are the objectives for creating a successful SEO migration strategy:

- Maintain / Improve Search Rankings

- Maintain / Improve Search Traffic

- Maintain / Improve Link Connectivity

- Improve User Experience

Search engines should receive exact instructions as to where to find content. By using 301

redirections, search engines have the possibility of identifying link metrics that point to the

original URL to the new one. Failure to have an SEO plan while replatforming can lead to lost

ranking and traffic, as well as frustrated users who had previously bookmarked the old location

of the content, or who try to find it through existing links. Therefore, it's important to set up

301 permanent redirects from old pages to new ones in order to help search engines and

users understand where the content has moved.

To understand how such a move can affect SEO, consider the following experience of a major

online specialty retailer that migrated its existing commerce site to a new one built on an

industry-leading ecommerce platform. Google does not perceive the moved website as being

as good as it was before replatforming. Several errors can arise that cause ranking issues. It is

possible that the new website appears much lower in search ranking results than before.

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesREPLATFORMING ECOMMERCE SITES

Ecommerce replatforming usually happens because there are someirreparable issues to solve.

Replatforming Ecommerce Sites

Platform 1 Platform 2

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesREPLATFORMING ECOMMERCE SITES

Canonical errors and 404 errors are most likely to appear as the new site is being created,

particularly when content is being generated dynamically. Dynamically driven content will

sometimes cause pages with the same text to appear in multiple places across a domain, which

is known as duplicate content. Google discredits duplicate content and will penalize any site

that doesn't incorporate the correct use of canonical tags to indicate which page Google

should attribute value to.

On the other hand, 404 errors will occur when pages are created on the website without a

corresponding update on the site's .xml sitemap. This is a particular issue for online retailers

with a very deep inventory, as they are much more likely to leverage product feeds to drive

content to their site.

There are several processes that can be implemented throughout the design and development

phase to ensure search value, and therefore brand equity, are maintained after the new site

launches. Maintaining specific link equity across the site's entire URL structure is essential, as

well as avoiding critical errors like duplicate content and 404 issues.

As a replatforming process is executed, ensure that the old linking structure has already

rectified any errors, and that it translates across to the new website accurately. Any URL

changes will require a redirect strategy as a matter of necessity.

IMPORTANT!

301 redirects allow developers to connect the dots when it comes tonew URLs. This ensures that the authority attributed to the old pagesis transferred to their new equivalents.

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesOFF-PAGE SEO

- Building online authority—trust and reputation—for your website.

- Defining by the quantity, quality and relevance of links to your website that establish

your SEO authority and ultimately influence your search results ranking.

1

What is Off-Page SEO?

2

Google, in particular, uses links into your site as tools for popularity. The quality and the

quantity of links that are coming from other sites into your own site is how search engines

decide which of two pages should rank relative to one another. So, the site with more links and

better quality links will rank higher.

Often called content marketing, this cornerstone of off-page SEO is in identifying quality,

related external sites that are willing to link back to your web pages. This is a procedure called

“link building.”

Content marketing's purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating relevant

and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an

ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on

owning media, not renting it.

SHARE

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesOFF-PAGE SEO

- A few years ago, video wasn't a widely used internet marketing tool, but now it is

one of the fastest growing strategies for high search engine rankings. Websites like YouTube

and Vimeo are making it easier than ever for ecommerce businesses to post short promotional

videos with a short description that links to their web page. These video channels allow

potential customers to link back to your site, and the search engines rank video content on

their own, which can get your brand on the first page for targeted keywords even before your

site ranks.

Videos

Google, in particular, uses links into your site as tools for popularity. The quality and the

quantity of links that are coming from other sites into your own site is how search engines

decide which of two pages should rank relative to one another. So, the site with more links and

better quality links will rank higher.

Often called content marketing, this cornerstone of off-page SEO is in identifying quality,

related external sites that are willing to link back to your web pages. This is a procedure called

“link building.”

Content marketing's purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating relevant

and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an

ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on

owning media, not renting it.

An essential part of SEO, link building is the process of connecting with other high-quality

websites to ensure search engines see your site as authoritative. While these links are integral

to any SEO, consider off-page optimization as part of a content marketing strategy. This holistic

outlook allows ecommerce sites to combine quality link building, social sharing and creative

content marketing to ensure your site is seen as the authority within its industry and

recognized by search engines for being remarkable. Since the content is specific and relevant

to your business and it is what prospects are looking for, content marketing is also great for

search engine optimization. As the content is shared on social media and referenced by

others, it becomes a great tool for generating links back to your website, filling the off-site SEO

void.

There are so many techniques for link building and at the most simple level. Here are some

useful strategies that work effectively:

Videos BLOGS SOCIAL ARTICLES

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesOFF-PAGE SEO

- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other social media sites are invaluable

for developing strong SEO. These allow you to network, gain a following, and connect with the

millions of people who visit these sites each and every day. Posting a link on your Facebook

Page and Twitter Page that points back to your content can be helpful in building a following

and increasing the popularity of your pages.

Social Media

- Articles are one of the easiest methods for giving your website targeted backlinks.

Strengthen the quality of your inbound links by submitting article directories and using that

domain. Links that come from respected, aged domains count for even more points.

Articles

- It is an advantage to have access to traffic statistics

for your site, to track your audience and measure the quality of your page rank. The most used

and effective tool is offered by Google, called Google Analytics. By using a code in the HTML

of your website, you can view incoming traffic, pageviews, search phrases, individual pages

viewed and more.

Implement Ecommerce Tracking

- Blogs can be used to direct back to your website. There are two ways to use blogs:

create your own or comment on other blogs. You can create your own blog by using platforms

such as WordPress or Blogger. Then, create a series of short blog posts using keywords as the

anchor text linking back to your site. A blog brings fresh content constantly to your site and

you have consistent new information to share within your social platforms. This strategy brings

more inbound links to your website, raises your authority and boosts search engine ranking.

Leave engaging comments on other blogs that receive a lot of traffic, also with links back to

your site.

Another strategy to drive traffic and grow your brand is using guess posts. Post articles on

relevant sites and it will help with your overall site authority. If you want to obtain links from

high authority blogs you'll have to:

- Write high quality content that actually interest the reader.

- Avoid using anchor text that is not relevant.

- Link to your own website only when it is relevant and helps the reader.

- Link out to other sites, including your competitors, if it helps the reader.

Blogs

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| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesWEBMASTER TOOLS

Webmaster Tools - is the most used SEO tool by ecommerce marketing

professionals. It is offered by Google for free, and helps marketing professionals to identify

issues with your site and check your indexing status. GWT is a source of information that can

guide webmasters to improve your Google traffic. It shows traffic for each keyword separately

and it gives more information about website performance according to Google search query.

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)

- is another search engine that offer free tools that provide valuable

information to use and address potential SEO issues. Bing Webmaster Tools automatically

generates SEO reports every week for improving your website. Other than checking the

reports for what should be looked at or worked on, there is nothing to do, as the Bing

Webmaster system takes care of scanning all pages (that appear in our index) and reporting

automatically.

Bing Webmaster

- Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics

and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization and marketing purposes. It is a tool

that can be accessed by anyone through a Google account.

Google Analytics features include:

- Data visualization tools including a dashboard and motion charts, which display

changes in data over time.

- Google Analytics ecommerce reporting that can track sales activity and performance.

The ecommerce reports show a site's transactions, revenue and many other

commerce-related metrics.

- Integration with AdWords – online campaigns can be reviewed by landing page

quality and conversions. Conversions might include sales, lead generation, viewing a

specific page or downloading a particular file.

Google Analytics

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27| - The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce WebsitesCONCLUSION

Conclusion

The main goal of any ecommerce site is to sell. Unfortunately, traffic growth is not a sign that

your site has good results. The important fact is that your traffic converts into sales. To review,

take the following into account:

Your SEO strategy should

get your content to rank for

targeted keywords. Also,

track your site's rankings for

the specific keywords on a

monthly basis to measure

the progress you are

making.

Rankings

Visits are only valuable if

they produce calculable

results. Google Analytics

allows you to track the dollar

sales of visitors who entered

by searching on a specific

keyword—the true measure

of your ecommerce SEO

success.

Sales by keyword Your SEO should be driving

traffic to your site. Google

Analytics allows you to

measure traffic generated

by specific keywords, and

this is where you can really

gauge the effectiveness of

your campaign.

Website visits

Experienced marketers are using these tools every day to generate real interest and

measurable returns on their companies' ecommerce investments. But at the heart of each of

these strategies is the deep consideration of the nature user habits. Set forth with this all-

important consideration in mind and carry these tools with you for a truly successful

ecommerce website.

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