SEO For E Commerce - Internet World 2010

SEO For Ecommerce Sites
By Paul Spreadbury
SEO Manager
Just Search Ltd

About Me
Who am I ? - Paul Spreadbury
Position – SEO Manager
Company – Just Search Ltd
Expertise
Search Engine Optimisation
Pay Per Click
Ecommerce SEO
Website Architecture , link building
Experience
Main SEO Consultant for www.sportsdirect.com
Main SEO Consultant for Ultralase
Manage all On Page SEO work for JS UK and France
Twitter.com/paulspread

Learning Objectives
Learning Objectives
Why have an ecommerce website
Keyword Research for ecommerce sites
Analysing competitors
Site Taxonomy
Internal link structure
Common SEO ecommerce issues
Further Ecommerce SEO Advice
Link Building for ecommerce websites

Why Have an Ecommerce Site?
Almost instant changes to
Structure and Pricing
Marketing including promotions
Ability to sell your products online
Level playing ground.
Open 24hrs a day 7 days a week
Eliminate costs , Secure online payments
UK Online ecommerce spending statistics
UK Spend Aug 2008 - £3.8 billion
UK spend 2008 - £43.8 billion
**Figures from IMRG**

Problems?
Too much choice.....
Which Platform should I use?
Each system has adv/disadvantages :
Support
Access
Duplication
Search Engine Friendly URLs
Hosting
Taxonomy

Planning
Plan the following
Keyword Research
Review Competition
Site Structure
Fundamental part of SEO
Building Blocks of SEO
Helps provides rankings
Look for larger sites
What are they doing
It works for them
Taxonomy of site
Find long tail pages
Internal linking

Keyword Research

Keyword Research
Most fundamental part of any SEO campaign
Start with
Brainstorming - Discover top 10-20 terms
Think – Customers think differently to you
Survey your customers
Ecommerce sites have hundreds of keywords
Use tools
Take your time and research keywords

Keyword Research Tools
Great keyword tools available
Google Adwords Keyword Tool (www.google.com/sktool)
- Related terms, search volume
- Shows competition, free
Wordtracker(www.wordtracker.com)
- Paid tool, great for long tail keywords
- Great for ecommerce websites
Keyword Discovery Tool (www.keyworddiscovery.com)
- Paid tool, lots of data (36 billions searches +)
- Looks at spelling mistakes, provides seasonal trends

Create Keyword List
Export the data to Excel. You will have 3 types of keywords:
Competitive keywords
Niche Keywords
High Traffic less competitive keywords (important)
Filter keywords by:
Create separate keyword lists for different categories
Remove really low search volume terms
Be realistic
Duplicates
Use SEOMOZ Keyword difficulty tool
Manually remove irrelevant terms
http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty

Competitor Analysis

Review Competitors
You should now have a list of keywords
Time to review your competitition
Pick a selection of important keywords
High traffic, low competition
Search term in Google
Home Page or inner page ranking?
Review site architecture
How many internal links does that page have
How many external links does the page have
Is the content optimised?

What to Look For
Age of the domain
Architecture of the site
Content on the landing page
Overall content on the site
Internal/external Links (Yahoo Site Explorer)
Document Structure (H1, H2 etc)
Taxonomy
Discover Niche areas
- High traffic - Low competition
- Poor optimisation

Site Taxonomy

Decide on Site Taxonomy
Review Site taxonomy
Review Traffic data
Plan site structure around search terms
Optimised pages don’t have to be bolted on
Now map your keywords to pages

Poor Site Taxonomy

Map Keywords to Pages
Match keywords to pages in Excel
Review existing traffic data
Rules of thumb are:
5 terms on home page
2-3 terms on category pages
1 term on the product page(s)
Think about taxonomy
Think about relevancy
Main keyword first
Keyword map example

Internal Link Structure

Plan Your Internal Link Structure
More internal links = more strength
WEB PAGE
(PR 1)
PR 0.2
PR 0.2
PR 0.2
PR 0.2
PR 0.2
PR1 from 5 PR0.2 links
Important pages linked in template
More links to important sub categories
Clever site designpasses strength right places

Implement Dynamic category linking
Stops page flooding with links
Example: www.sportsdirect.com
Main template contains links to top level categories
i.e. premier league teams
Click on premier league teams
Opens up secondary navigation
Shows other league teams
Stops the template being flooded with links
Useable for customers and search engines
<150 internal links

Sub Categories with High Traffic
Add more Internal links to the page
Link within main site template
Use main anchor text
Push more popular categories
More PR passed to the page

Example of Strong Internal Linking
Find it quick section on www.ideasbynet.com
Useful for customers and search engines
Only keyword links
High search volume keywords
Provides each important page with more internal links

Common Ecommerce SEO Issues

Duplication Due to site structure
Common Problems with ecommerce sites
Each Product can appears in different categories
- TV can appear by size, type, brand in the sale etc
Filtered results
- Filter by size, colour, style etc.
Paginated results
- Paginated results over more than 1 page

Resolving Duplication Issues
Duplicate products
- Flatten product URL
- www.website.com/productname.html
- Only 1 URL to link to
- More relevant
- Redirect duplicate pages to main page
Pagination and filter issues
- Noindex, follow these pages
- Block pages in robots.txt (add a view all page)
Code Examples
Noindex tag
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, follow”>
Robots.txt
Disallow: /?page=*Disallow:/?colour=*

Duplicate Product Descriptions
Some products are very similar
How to Fix
Rewrite all the product descriptions
Implement a review system
- Internal
- External - www.feefo.com
(Improves conversion by 30%)
- Needs a large site
- Need to reply to negative feedback
- They email your customers
http://www.feefo.com

Example from Amazon.co.uk

Further Ecommerce SEO Advice

Pushing New Products
To push new products
Create a blog about the new product
Write some unique content
Your blog post gets the credit
Wait for product to be released
Redirect blog to product page
Product page gets a boost in the SERPs
Blog page
301 redirect
Product Page
Blog page

Using Multiple Sitemaps
Indexing Issues, Use multiple sitemaps
Look at number of pages indexed by type
By Level of the site
Helps diagnose issues

Using Site Search
Discover your Internal search data
Great for ecommerce websites
Need lots of traffic for actionable data
To enable site search simply do the following:
Login to Analytics
Edit profile
Select do track site search
Enter query parameter
On play.com it is ‘searchstring’
http://www.play.com/HOME/HOME/6-/Search.html?searchstring=shutter+island&searchtype=allproducts&searchsource=0

Using Site Search
Site search enabled in Google Analytics
Review data and act on this
Change landing pages
Bid on the niche keywords in PPC
Add top searched products to main navigation
Change content on the home page
Look for searches that return 0 results
Update product catalogue
Act early to beat your competitors

Link Building ForEcommerce Websites

Reviewing your link portfolio
What types of links to build
High PR? more authoritive? trusted links?
Use Tools to analyse competitors link portfolio
Discover data trends
Act on this invaluable data
Search term ‘32 inch LCD TV’
http://www.richersounds.com/products/home-cinema/lcd-and-plasma/lcd-tv
http://www.directtvs.co.uk/32-39_Inch_LCD_TVs/prod.asp

Link Profiling
Go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org enter URLs export data to Excel
Add a count column to the end of each row
Create a pivot table from this data, pivot by:
Page Authority
Count

Credit to Patrick Altoft from Branded 3

SIMPLES
Other Metrics to review include:
Domain Authority
MOZ Rank – Domain and Page
Yahoo Links
Moz Trust - Domain and Page
Majestic SEO links
Number of root domains
Internal/External Linking pages
Discover where your page is lacking strength
http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape

Ecommerce Link Building Tips
Now know what types of links to build
Top heavy with external links
Target links to inner pages, traffic orderBuild from the following links
Press releases
Review Products
Use mini sites
Forums – post about your new products
Social Media, Videos
Contacts

Conclusion
Planning
Carefully plan keyword research
Review your competitors
Plan site taxonomy
Keyword map inner pages
Technical
Plan your internal linking
Add a review system
Create flat product structure
Solve filter and pagination issues
Link Building
Profile links against competitors
- Build right type of links
- Build appropriate amount of links
Link build to inner pages
**Only a taster of what is required**

Question / Debate
Stand – E2100

http://www.slideshare.net	41
http://www.justsearching.co.uk	33
http://www.crazyaboutseo.co.uk	17
http://www.justsearchseo.co.uk	8
http://www.justsearch.co.uk	4
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	3

SEO For E Commerce - Internet World 2010

by Just Search on Apr 30, 2010

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SEO For E Commerce - Internet World 2010 — Presentation Transcript