How to incorporate SEO into your e-commerce site web design   by Mark Ellaway

in Web Design    (submitted 2012-02-07)

Increasing your rankings on Google can sometimes be a bit of a headache and e-commerce sites can be particularly difficult to optimise as they have their own particular SEO fences to jump over.

We all know there are two main elements to SEO - on-page and off-page. On-page is all about using relevant and authoritative keywords carefully and cleverly within your content, images and other elements of your page to improve your rankings and off-page is about building back links to your site from relevant and authoritative (very important words!) web sites to do just the same.

A challenge of optimising an e-commerce site it that there is generally very little content on each page which can make finding places to insert keywords a bit of a problem. To try and solve the problem writing a short unique product description is a good idea and don't forget Google is a fan of original content - so no clicking copy and paste!

Look carefully at your keyword research and how your products fit into different categories - do people tend to search for a broader term within your product listings. For example 'digital radio' rather than 'sony digital radio'. If this is the case see if you can categorise your products and create specific landing pages for each category which will improve the relevance of your page and therefore the rankings.

It sometimes passes people by but interlinking your pages with good anchor text will really help to optimise the pages for the keywords you use in the link and as an added bonus helps search engines to find and index other pages on your site.

Another area occasionally forgotten about is the URL, one of the most important places if possible to put your keyword. This is especially important when optimising for different landing pages - make sure that keyword is prominent in the URL.

And now to off-page, this can be a little more time consuming but well worth it. Backlinks are king of the off-page world and there are a variety of ways you can get them. Writing articles for example, setting up a blog, finding guest blogs to post on or participating on forums - it's time to get creative!

And finally good old social media. Installing social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ on pages and products is a great idea. It gets more people talking about your site and hopefully leads to more visitors, and although not confirmed the chances of Google+ and search working together must be quite high.

As you can see from these tips, SEO shouldn't be an afterthought to your web design but something that you plan and put thought into. Off-page SEO may come later but on-page should be well built in to your web design.

About the Author

Mark Ellaway is writing for Big Fork, a Norwich web design company who specialise in implementing high quality content management systems into their clients' websites. They feel it is very important for clients to be able to manage their own websites quickly and without complications allowing them to update content, pictures or insert pages at a click of a button.