E-commerce and SEO < The Organic SEO

E-commerce and SEO

19 Sep 2006 at 08:38 by Eric Morgan

Having an E-commerce website leads to additional SEO challenges. Here are a few tips to make the most of an E-commerce website.

Almost all E-commerce websites are database driven, which provides some challenges for SEO. You may have repeated content, difficulty providing unique title and meta tags, or trouble structuring useful urls.

1. Remove repeated content if possible: Having thousands of pages with the same content will do you no good as far as SEO is concerned, in fact it can even hurt you. Although any large e-commerce or database driven site will have some repeated content try to keep it at a minimum. Most repeated content will come from search queries or related categories. For example you may be a camping outlet website selling tents. A tent made by 'rugged gear' may come up under the 'tent' category as well as the 'rugged gear' manufacturer category. Think of the most common categories your users will be looking for products and keep it to those top categories, this will also help the user be less confused when visiting your website.

2. Provide unique title and meta tags: Sometimes the only way to do this will be to have a field in your database where you can enter in such information for each product or category. Another option would be for the webpage to pull in the first few lines from the description and put it in as the meta description, and so forth for the other tags.

3. Provide SEO friendly URLS: Even though this will take some extra effort from your programmers having a search engine friendly URL is very important. Instead of having a url such as http://mycampingsite.com/products.php?product=4 structure the url something such as http://mycampingsite.com/tents?tent=4persondomebyrugged, an even better option would be to have a static url but this is rarely possible because of the nature of E-commerce websites.

If you have any other suggestions or comments feel free to post them.

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