After much delay and anticipation, we’re pleased to present you with the second piece to our three part Ultimate Ecommerce Reference Guide series: Search Engine Friendliness. In Part 1, we detailed the various ways through which you can maximize your store’s usability in order to provide a smooth and intuitive shopping experience.

In this post, we will review a few things that you can do to increase search engine visibility and, in turn, draw more relevant traffic to your site. It’s important to remember though, that as you develop your ecommerce marketing plan, you should conduct as much in depth research on your target markets and the competitors as possible. You want to have a solid idea of how users will want to use your site, the various ways in which they will try to find your product, and how your competitors have succeeded or failed at this.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Avoid using variables like, product_id=6, in your URLs. An example of this type of dynamic URL would look like the following:

http://www.mystore.com/index.php?product_id=2223&category_id=4

There are several reasons that you’ll want to avoid these variables in your URLs. For one, they indicate to Google that you have a dynamic site and, as a result, the crawler is less likely to index your products. While Google has recently announced that they are improving their ability to understand and index these dynamic URLs, other search engines are not yet as advanced.

Variables in the URL also make links harder to share and are more prone to mistakes while copying and pasting. A friendly URL such as:

http://www.mystore.com/pants/blue-jeans

is makes much more sense to the user and is much easier to share. Additionally, using these sorts of descriptive words in the URL will also add a few targeted keywords to your page. Google doesn’t put heavy emphasis on this factor, but every little bit helps.

Pro Tip: If you use Apache as your web server, mod_rewrite is a very popular module that allows you to create these search engine friendly URLS. Here’s a pretty helpful guide explaining how to use mod_rewrite.

Cross Link Your Products

Cross linking your products or implementing a product recommendation system can be helpful to both visitors and search engines alike.

From a user standpoint, presenting intelligent alternatives can increase product discovery and additional sales. From a search engine’s perspective, cross links intertwine your products, allowing internal links to pass “link juice” to each other.

Unique Product Content

This may seem somewhat obvious and natural, but it’s important to differentiate your products from each other. If Google thinks the content on all of your product pages is the same, it will be less likely to index all of the products in your store. Since each product has the potential to be a targeted landing page, you want to be certain that every page gets indexed.

This can be done by adding unique product descriptions, reviews, product specs, etc., as well as, unique meta descriptions and keywords.

Eliminate Duplicate Content

It is also important to ensure that the architecture of your store does not produce duplicate content. For example, if there are multiple ways that your product can be found, make sure to use the proper tags on the less relevant cases so as to avoid penalization from the search engines (see the next section for more information on proper tagging).

An example of this kind of duplicate architectural content would be if you have a product that can be found through multiple URL paths, say - by brand, category, or price, e.g.:

• http://www.store.com/bose/3-speaker-system (Yes! We want to index this!)
• http://www.store.com/speakers/3-speaker-system (apply NoIndex tag)
• http://www.store.com/low-to-high/3-speaker-system (apply NoIndex tag)

Use Nofollow, NoIndex and Robots.txt file Properly

Using nofollow, noindex and robots.txt tags properly will make a huge difference when dealing with a large scale ecommerce site. These tags will help you tell the search engines which pages to index and which ones to ignore.

Doing this properly ensures that you have control over which pages end up in the search engines and which pages are merely for your visitor’s convenience.

Add a Sitemap

Having a sitemap helps search engines crawl the complex organization of your website. A sitemap can be a simple HTML page that contains links to all of the pages in your website, or an XML document, formatted to meet standard search engine specifications.

Some shopping cart ecommerce packages come with built in sitemap generators. If you don’t have this feature, you could also use Google Sitemap Generator or a similar service.

Once a sitemap is made, you can submit it directly to Google using their Webmaster Tools. Once submitted, Google will schedule a time for their crawler to explore the sitemap and begin indexing pages.

Search engine visibility won’t get you everything…

Ultimately, these structural changes should help visitors find what they’re looking for. Whether that be by making your site and products more discoverable by search engines or by making products more accessible from within your ecommerce application, it should be easily and intuitively accomplished through application of the above tips.

These changes can make a big impact in the amount of relevant traffic coming to your site, but often times that’s not enough to maintain a business. That’s why we’ve broken this post up into two MetaParts - Part 2.0 (this post), looked at making structural changes to increase traffic; Part 2.5 will look at the various marketing tactics and additional site features that can be employed to draw more visitors.

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