In order for your ecommerce website to be found by users searching in the search engines you must ensure you have an SEO friendly website both structurally and from a content perspective.
Search engines like Google have automated programmes called bots or spiders which crawl a website, indexing pages as they work through the site. When a user types in a query the search engine crawls through its index to find the pages that are most relevant to that query and then brings them up in the Natural Listings.
In order for the spiders to pick up the pages of your site they must be fully optimised for SEO with keyword rich content and a structure that the spiders can easily follow.
Obviously the main objective of ecommerce websites is to sell products, which usually involves having pages with lists of items and little content and therefore little for the spiders to crawl. There are several strategies you can adopt to combat this problem and ensure that the various pages of your site to get indexed by the spiders.
The first strategy you should adopt is to create content rich landing pages which then feed into your individual product pages. These content based landing pages should have keyword friendly links which also feed out into the product pages.
Another method of improving your rankings in the search results is to include pages which focus on ‘selling’ your products, explaining the various qualities and benefits of the products your company has on offer. Like the landing pages, these pages can also be fully optimised with the keywords you want your site to appear for and contain keyword rich links that then link out to the product pages.
The structure of your website is also crucial. Our ecommerce platform MotiveShop™ can create SEO friendly URL’s which will enable the pages of your site to be easily picked up the search engine’s spiders. The software can also dynamically generate keyword rich meta descriptions and page titles – all working to ensure the spiders are finding and indexing the pages of your website.
