Amongst the many online marketing channels, search engine optimisation is the most cost effective and most accurate way to drive qualified web traffic to your e-commerce site. Unlike other marketing channels, for example display advertising, web users who click on your search result are actively looking to make a purchase (hence qualified) and best of all, it won’t cost you a penny (hence cost effective). Now that you understand how important seo is for your e-commerce site, here are a few tried and tested tips for 2010.

1. Get Singular Keyword Vs. Plurals Right – If you’ve red a bit about seo for e-commerce sites you know that every page (and in particular product pages) must have unique page title and page description which includes your keywords. The search engines use this information to determine how relevant or not the page is to the user search query. Despite this, most e-commerce sites miss the connection between singular and plural when choosing the keywords and optimise around one or the other. My tip is to include both terms in your metadata, based ‘product title [singular] order product title [plural] at store name’ e.g. ‘blue iphone cover – order blue iphone covers at store name’.

2. Use HTML and XML Product Site Maps - For many e-commerce sites, especially sites with many product SKUs, the battle is sometimes getting all the products into the search results index. If the product is unique for your site and isn’t blocked from the search engine crawlers, there’s no reason why it should not appear in the index. Unless the search engines could not find the product when visiting your site. To ensure all the products are accessible and found by the engines, consider using two sites maps. HTML site map which is placed close to the root, for example www.sitename.com/sitemap.html will ensure it will be found. While XML site map will require you to submit it via Google Webmater tools, which is a simple and free service from Google.  

3. Intelligently Deal With Out of Stock and Discontinued Products - Unless you know better, in most cases you’ll take those products off the site and web users reaching the page will receive an error message. The missed opportunity is that those pages have some seo value, maybe some back-links pointing to them and possible high ranking. To save some of the value from those pages, consider redirecting them to a more appropriate product page. To maximize this, use a 301 server header from the old product to the new product so the seo value will be transferred from one to the other. Here’s a useful how-to redirect guide.

4. Always Rewrite, Refresh and Reinvent Content - Great content is an essential long term seo strategy. Content in the shape of product descriptions, products guides and even products reviews will include your keywords which will go hand in hand with the keywords in the page title and page description making the page appear even more relevant. Quality content will also make the page more sharable thereby increasing the likelihood of sites linking to the page and fresh content will ensure the page gets crawled more often by the search engines. For e-commerce sites, getting new fresh content is easy by simply encouraging customers to leave reviews.

5. Don’t Forget On-Site Optimisation -  This type of search engine optimisation relates to on-site improvements which will contribute to the seo mix. e-commerce sites should pay extra attention to:

A. Image naming – use the product title as the image name to gain web traffic from Google image search.
B. Image alt text – populate the alt field for all your images, in particular for product images.
C. Title as H1 – turn the product title into an H1 HTML tag.
D. Link internally – Link between relevant products to increase their relevancy.

I hope you find my e-commerce optimisation tips useful. Good luck for 2010.    

—
Guest article by Michelle Strassburg, head of sales and marketing at hardwood flooring store Wood and Beyond. The online store which was re-launched in 2009 offers timber products from worktops to decking.