10 Essentials for a successful online store
6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Don't leave this as an afterthought.
If you're store is database driven (and it should be), chances are your visitors are going to be seeing the same page just loaded with different content. While this gives you some benefits, it can also impact on your Google rankings.
Make Google Your Friend
- Make your page titles rich with keywords that reflect the content being shown on the page - category and products names.
- Have a Google sitemap installed and registered for your site to tell Google what pages you have so they can list them.
- Make sure your sitemap is connected to your product database so it's updated as soon as a product is added.
- When your images are displayed they should contain approriate name data in the html that reflects the product name.
- Avoid URL's that contain variables like www.somedomain.com/products.html?category=22&products=widgets, search engines don't like this and won't often follow these links when scanning your site.
- Even though you may be re-using the same page to show different products, your URL's should also be keyword rich, there are some great ways to make this happen and allow you to add what can seem like hundreds of pages to Google while in reality you are only showing the same page over and over again.
The content and words in your URL have a major impact on how your site is listed in search engines. Basically, if your web team can't do this, find someone who can.
