November 03, 2010, Posted by Arturas Kvederis

03 nov Posted by Arturas Kvederis

Recent research done by Internet Retailer shows that for 47% of retail businesses, more than 25% of their web sales come from search engine marketing and these marketing budgets have been increasing steadily over recent years. Simple SEO mistakes might lead to drastic negative consequences for retail businesses – drop in search engine ranking, traffic decrease or even search engine ban from index in some cases.

Here are 11 common SEO mistakes ecommerce websites make, that should be avoided:

1.  Duplicate content – yes, there are still a lot of websites out there that rely on product descriptions provided by the manufacturer, not realizing, that they are duplicating content and it negatively affects SEO efforts. There are plenty of useful tools like e.g. Copyscape to check if your website content is unique. Invest in your website content, it will pay off.
2. Crawlability issues – search engine spiders love static pages, period. If you have session IDs in your pages or if you use dynamic variables within your page URLs you are risking that spiders will simply ignore your page and it will not get crawled and indexed.  You could try storing session IDs in cookies instead of URLs and if you must use dynamic variables, try to limit them to one or two.
3. Internal link structure – internal links are still important, a lot of ecommerce websites fail to understand that a correct internal linking architecture helps significantly on SEO rankings for targeted long tail keywords as well as it increases user experience. Use your homepage to funnel PageRank to pages that are deep within your website structure:  “Hot Products”, “Best Sellers”, “Favorites” etc.
4. Title and meta tags – this can pick off where we left on no. 1: make sure you have unique, descriptive title and meta tags for all your pages, do NOT duplicate them across all of your pages.  If your ecommerce website is very big, consider how you can automate this process, but again, make sure they are unique and descriptive.
5. Robots.txt file - the first function for utilizing robots.txt is to allow or disallow a search engine to visit some or your entire website, providing you the control what pages on your website will be indexed. One incorrect line of code could block your website from crawling, so do not use it if you are not sure what you’re doing.
6. Information architecture – often ecommerce websites have poor website architecture, thus making the website hard to crawl and index for search engines, no PageRank distribution and it hurts overall user experience. Any page should be reachable within 2-3 clicks. Remember that presentation and layout of content within your website is very important.
7. Over optimized home page – do not try to rank your website home page for all your possibly targeted keywords. If you are stuffing your home page with 10s or 100s of keywords it will not help, it can actually hurt your rankings as you will be losing relevance. Best practice is to target 3-5 keywords per page, so within your home page focus on your brand name and a couple keywords that describes your business best.
8. Focus on traffic – still a common mistakes, when the effectiveness of SEO efforts is measured by the total increase in website traffic. Measure your ROI, any decent website analytics software package allows conversion and goal tracking. Focus on the quality of the traffic and not the quantity.
9. Wrong targeted keywords - the first thing before starting any actual SEO work on a website, you must conduct a detailed keyword research and competitor analysis. Targeted keywords along with optimized respective landing pages significantly increase chances of conversion.
10. Poor link building strategy - don’t bother building links from websites that have little relevance to your website, avoid link farms, banned sites, link directories. It is better to invest in quality unique content that people will want to link to, also check how your competitors gain links.
11. Haste - SEO requires a long term strategy and long term approach. When starting on a new SEO campaign for ecommerce website, don’t expect instant results. It takes time for SEO efforts to meet expectations. Do not change your search engine optimization techniques until you receive and analyze the results of your previous SEO efforts.

While the above tips by no means represent a complete list of common SEO mistakes for ecommerce websites, they will definitely help you in avoiding potential problems with search engines. Almost every online retail business in engaged in SEO and it is very hard to achieve the desired rankings, so make sure you are doing everything right, just a few precautions can go a long way in helping your website rank better, also you can check our ecommerce SEO services. Has your business experienced any SEO pitfalls? Feel free to share them in comments below. 

 

Arturas Kvederis

Ecommerce expert / Marketing Manager, SysIQ.Inc

Ecommerce and marketing expert with hands on experience in ROI and conversion-oriented Internet/online/web marketing, including search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC) campaign management, web analytics and reporting and an understanding how to integrate all these different channels to drive revenues and decrease acquisition costs.

Posted by Arturas Kvederis