seo for ecommerceIn order to ensure that you get steady rankings, or climb those rankings, you have to continuously nurture your SEO strategies for your e-commerce website. Ya, like you didn’t have enough on your plate already… Well, let’s take a look at 20 ways in which you can improve on your Ecommerce SEO anyway:

1. Separate Your PPC and SEO Strategies

PPC is a highly beneficial way to drive traffic to your site, but many people view all traffic as equal and that just isn’t so. Typically, your organic pages provide a much lower bounce rate and higher conversion rate. Your PPC and organic landing pages are two completely different animals and should be treated very differently. The most important thing to note is that you have to build and maintain these two strategies independently.

2. Be Consistent In Your Strategy

Search engines are now basing much of their optimization on the quality and consistency of content on your website. This is to weed out dead sites and those sites that are scams or cheap imitations, which consumers don’t want to see in their daily searches.

3. Don’t Double Up On Content

In the same way that you want to keep content relevant and well-read, it should also be original, which means that duplicating content will get you a quick ticket to the bottom of the SEO list at ranking time. One problem that many ecommerce sites face is that phrases and entire paragraphs are often repeated through product descriptions and lists. It’s surprising how often I still see this even after a site has been penalized by Panda.

4. Avoid Copy And Paste For Products

Product descriptions not only create a problem with duplicate content but they can also pose an issue in regards to manufacturer style descriptions. Write all of your own descriptions using keywords that are relevant to your brand and are search engine-friendly terminology. I can sense many store owners saying, “well that’s great advise, but how do I create a unique product description? I mean the product is what the product is, right?” If you haven’t heard of Woot.com, please go check it out. Woot has done a great job in creating a unique strategy to build their brand. This site has probably the most creative content strategy that I’ve ever seen.

5. Consider Videos And Images

Consumers want to see what they’re buying and they love visual aids, especially on the internet, so add related keywords and ALT tags to images on your site and try to keep such content original as well.

6. Reviews And Ratings Go A Long Way

Included in the SEO requirements for relevant and real information, ratings and reviews from customers can make a great marketing tool and optimization aid as it gives your site more credibility. Customer reviews posted on an ecommerce site give an air of honesty and make your business seem much less biased and more real.

7. Get To Work On Individual Meta Descriptions

One major area where website creators go wrong is leaving one standard meta description for every page on their site. This can be a problem as it brings in less traffic and makes your site seem a little less inviting to humans. Leaving standard meta descriptions can also create a problem with duplication in your meta data. Make sure to check your webmaster tools to see if you have any duplicate meta data.

8. Increase Your Product Page Ranking

Deep within your website’s linking structure there are likely a few hidden gems that consumers really have to search to find. This is not where you want your products page to be as it can make it difficult for people to find when using a search engine. Create its own space so that it shows up better during searches.

9. Anchor Text For Links

It’s simple to use the same old “click here” for every link you leave on your website, but this can leave a lot to the imagination and make it more difficult for search engines to determine what content this will lead to. Instead, use the keyword that the link refers to in order to better represent the next page. It’s a good idea to make sure that your anchor text profile is fairly diverse.

10. Use Coupon Sites

If you choose to promote your business or products with coupon codes, you should think about using a coupon site for ultimate exposure. This gives your site more traffic through links back to the service or merchandise that the coupon represents. Here is a quick list of some of my favorites:

11. Choose A Domain That Represents Your Brand

Your search engine ranking can be affected by your domain name, and while it used to be true that a keyword-based name would quickly gain you access to the upper levels of Google, this isn’t the case anymore. Focus on finding a domain name that really represents your brand message.

12. Use 301 Redirects

Linking URLs can be risky business if you’re not able to check up on their direction for updates or dead links. A 301 redirect will guarantee that your audience gets a fresh link every time.

13. Keep Bots Where You Want Them

While it might be impossible to keep bots off of your site entirely, and you do want some search engine robots to be able to crawl through specific areas, you can use the Robots.txt tag to keep sensitive data private or keep them from crawling weaker pages that could be dragging your site down.

14. Use Your Heading Tags

Using heading tags like H1, H2, etc. can make it much easier for search engines to know what each page is for throughout your website build. This is also more convenient for consumers who are viewing your site as they will be able to navigate more effectively.

15. Make It Easy To Share

Social networking has become popular among consumers of all ages. By placing easy-to-use links for site visitors to share information with their family and friends you’re creating more traffic with little cost or complication.

16. Take Advantage Of Google Analytics

This tool can be very useful for tracking your sites effectiveness, and whether you have a small or big company, this can be very beneficial as a whole. You can get numbers for page visits and many other free advantages that can help you better manage your ranking.

17. Create A Blog

To stay on top of the competition, it could be worth your while to invest in a blog. If you have a blog then try giving yourself a set number of blog articles per week and have them in around the same time each day that they are posted. You can check out a recent article about blogging for ecommerce here.

18. Create A Customer FAQ Page

By putting all of the most relevant information that a consumer might seek in one area you make it easier for them to resolve issues without additional help and in a timely manner so that purchases can be made quickly. It also helps with SEO ranking for a more organized site.

19. Customize For Local Use

Of course, you want your site to be used on a global level but by thinking locally and including contact and destination information for customers in your area you can better affect local search results as well.

20. Offer On A Global Scale

It can cost money to reach out globally with your products but if you want to test the waters before expanding, there are sales portals you can use to list your items for sale before dedicating this kind of resource on your website. In fact, I highly recommend testing the waters with Amazon.com for any new Ecommerce site. You might be surprised to find how many sales sites like Amazon can drive compared to your own newly established ecommerce site.

There are countless ways to improve your Ecommerce site for SEO, but these 20 will probably keep you pretty busy for a little while.