SEO Best Practices

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.

The SEO basics for small businesses are just the same for any global business, barring a few focused changes. The below-mentioned SEO best practices can help small business owners attract visitors to their websites: -

1. SEO for Web page title optimization; you can check out this post that I wrote specifically for SEO title optimization. When optimizing a business that has a local presence, it might be a good idea to mention the name of the place that the business caters to.

2. SEO for Description Meta tag title; you can check out this post that I wrote specifically for the SEO description meta tag optimization. Since description allows 2-3 lines of descriptive text, make sure you define your business, the market it caters to etc. Any unique items etc, your USP should get clearly defined here.

3. You can check out my post on SEO tips for an overall optimization effort.

4. You can consider submitting your website to directories, especially local directories. Here is another post that I wrote on search directory submission that might help.

5. Submitting your website details like postal address phone number, URL to Google and Yahoo local will certainly ensure that your site will show up on searching.

6. Get linked: You can check out my earlier post on “Linking for users”. This will help you get an idea of who to link with.

7. Find out who your competitors link to and who links to them. This will help you zero in on a list of potential websites who might want to link to your website.

8. Search for websites that are very popular local destinations; it might be a good idea to write to them requesting them to add your business to their website; it might be of value to their target audience.

9. Register with Google Web analytics, it will give you a lot of valuable data. You can optimize your web site even more once you have an idea about the visitors.

10. You could try out Google AdWords for a short time, just experiment, if it does not work out, you can turn it off. Just keep your budget moderate so that you do not end up spending a whole lot of dollars without any returns. AdWords helps if you want to reach your audience instantly and you have offers that have special discounts, seasonal discounts etc.

This is not an exhaustive list, but this will certainly get you started. This list of SEO optimization is affordable for Small business owners. One suggetion would be to keep looking for ways by which they can have coverage through all the local directories, blogs, portals etc. Practicing local business SEO is key, and will most definitely help your SEO efforts.