Ecommerce and SEO; SEO best practices for E-commerce enabled web sites

With the shopping season on, online shopping sites are perhaps the busiest in terms of traffic. I wonder how many such sites have successful conversions.

Even though many web sites are well designed and they manage to persuade visitors to buy from their site but unfortunately many of these ecommerce sites face what is known as abandoned cart phenomenon. It can be extremely frustrating for webmasters to have to face this situation.

Here are some tips from the SEO perspective and other basic tips that might help the situation –

1. Make sure the URLs are not generated on the fly, you can customize URLs so that these URLs can be indexed easily.

2. You might consider having adequate relevant content on each page so that visitors do not feel lost and get guided easily through the process. Providing unique content for every product will be useful.

3. Consider having unique Titles and Descriptions for each of your product page.

4. Consider linking well internally. This will help in passing PR values and search engines will be able to index pages faster.

5. Make sure your website’s content is exactly what it promises to be and is SEO optimized.

6. Have a “help” link in all the e-commerce pages and display the toll free number, if you have a chat option that too should be clearly visible. The idea is to reduce as much stress as possible and make the buying experience a pleasant one.

7. In the final pages where the visitor has selected the product and wants to check out, please do not make it mandatory for the person to register. If the visitor find site helpful to register, they will come back and register for sure.

8. Don’t get over persuasive and force products on to their shopping cart. Let them buy without too many distractions.

9. More importantly, do not have some options ticked in by default, sometimes visitors end up buying a product because they were forced to or did not have an option since that option got pre-selected, and most people miss it. This irritates people no end; visitors will probably not come back to your web site ever.

10. After they check out and go on to the thank you page, make sure you have helpful links on the “thank you” page directing them to relevant products and other important sections of your web site.

It is important that you create a positive impression the first time; they will come back for more that is for sure. Consider going through your web Analytics reports to optimize your ecommerce pages.