Very often, ecommerce website owners underestimate the SEO importance of product pictures. The product image is not just about enhancing aesthetics or providing visual information about the product, although they are important. Images can unlock extra potential for your business website by attracting additional traffic towards your website. Many people use the image search function in google now for research and to shop online.

This can be achieved by
• Supporting your product images with appropriate unique descriptions containing your keywords.
• Use keywords in your file names.
• Include product and brand names in the alt text which will help to optimise on Google image search.

An example could be a website selling original art where quality images are crucial to getting conversions on the website. We would recommend using descriptive key phrase rich text such as “Painting of a Tiger in Watercolour” for the alt text and on-page text description adjacent to the image, plus having a filename painting-tiger-watercolour.jpg. This would be much more effective to perform well for an image search that a filename called image1.jpg and no key phrases used at all.

The next ecommerce seo tip will outline the benefits of creating a resource centre on your website.

Ecommerce content optimisation is one of the most important factors to getting the on-site optimisation right on an online shop – Seperate targeted, HTML pages of unique content for each of the products will help the site to rank for many more keyphrases.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Getting large numbers of products ranking in the search engines is a crucial component of e-commerce SEO. However, do not be tempted to copy the product specifications from the manufacturer’s website – if you do you will run the risk of duplicate content issues. Remember that duplicate content is a big problem on your own site, so if a product comes in 4 different sizes and you have 4 product pages with exactly the same descriptions apart from the one element of size, this will look like duplicate content to the search engines.

To get around this problem, rewrite the product description in an interesting and easy-to-read format. For increased SEO traffic, master the art of writing keyword-rich product descriptions and link your product pages with similar products. This strategy helps you to tap into long-tail keyword searches. You can also utilise blog posts to promote and sell your products.

If you must have repetitive content that appears on every page, place it in an iframe with an invisible border. This ensures that search engines do not penalise you for duplicate content.

Use Keywords or phrases in your Anchor Text

Use appropriate and highly targeted words for anchor text – these are the words that form the text in the hyperlink to another page. For instance, when you connect a product category page to its individual product pages, ensure that the anchor text is not limited to “View” or “click here.” Such vague terms do not help the search engines understand the theme of your website.

Our next blog post will be all about optimising pictures and images for SEO traffic; another important factor for ecommerce website owners.

Over the next few days we will be posting a series of blogs to help ecommerce website owners with their SEO strategies:

Planning your Ecommerce SEO strategy

Effective SEO strategy planning is vital prior to designing an ecommerce website. Unfortunately, many companies overlook the SEO element while designing an ecommerce website. They start thinking about SEO feasibility only after developing a beautiful website. As a result, they can end up with needing a significant site redesign to fulfil the SEO requirements.

Always design your website after planning your ecommerce SEO strategy. This will save you valuable time and money, and help your website reach and maintain those coveted top Google positions. Don’t forget though competition is fierce, and you still need to keep a visually appealing site with first rate functionality to secure those sales conversions! Here are some factors to bear in mind:

Ecommerce SEO tips part 1 – Choose your Ecommerce and shopping cart software wisely

Today, the vast majority of e-commerce websites are designed with open source or low-priced shopping cart programs. Such software can adversely affect a website’s search engine-friendliness if you are not familiar with the functionality you need to make SEO work. Even popular shopping cart software, such as Miva Merchant* and OS Commerce, require third party add-ons to implement SEO-compatible features. Low cost ecommerce solutions, although profitable in the short run, can have an adverse effect on your business in the long run.

While developing an ecommerce website, companies should remember that customers depend on search engines to find products to buy. Hence, to attract increased volumes of SEO traffic, companies need to use search-engine friendly ecommerce software. While choosing software, ensure that it is designed to boost the display of your product pages in the search engine results pages (SERP) when a visitor types in a relevant search query.

Several ecommerce software systems use session IDs (without cookies) in website URLs. This can cause search engines to crawl through an unlimited amount of duplicate content which of course causes them a problem and means your site can’t be indexed properly. To prevent this, use an alternative method that helps connect URLs to Google’s spider, without the requirement for session IDs.

Avoid using long query strings in the URLs of your product pages. The URLs should only include the necessary keywords and should not be populated with unwanted IDs or other characters. If you are not willing to use software to rewrite all URLs, consider minimising the number of variables used in the URL.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Andy from West Florida Components (see comment below) for pointing out the mistake in the article. I’m afraid a draft version of the post was published by mistake before it had been checked fully. We do apologise to all for the error.

*MIVA Merchant 5.0 DOES have built-in SEO features including search engine friendly URL’s.

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When millions and millions of searches are performed each day its probably surprising to find that 85% of the search terms entered in the search engines are unique. These unique search terms are gold for ecommerce websites and good optimisation will target the broad range of unique searches as well as the shorter more popular terms. The aim of a long tail search engine optimisation strategy is to increase conversions by being in front of visitors at the point they are ready to buy.

How Consumer Search Behaviour Works

Let’s take the example of Jason who wants to buy a lawn mower and consider his search behaviour as an average online consumer. First Jason might search for “lawn mowers” to research the options that are available. “Lawn mowers” is a popular search term and it would be great to hold that number 1 position for that search term but its most likely that Jason is not ready to buy yet, he is just researching. He won’t just look at one website, he will look at at least 2 or three sites and he’s looking to gather information in order to refine his search.

His next search might be to add another word to his search such as “electric lawn mower” or “petrol lawn mower” and he may be looking for reviews at this point. More and more consumers are turning to user-generated content in the form of reviews and recommendations in order to inform their decisions. Jason’s research leads him to favour a particular brand and so his search term becomes “Qualcast electric lawn mower” so that he can consider the different models and which would best suit his needs.

The final stage of Jason’s search is when he has decided exactly which model he wants and this is the most important search because now he is ready to buy. His search term is “Qualcast Suffolk Punch electric lawn mower”, this is a long tail search because it contains more than 3 words and is not a popular search term that is used often – it is gold to the supplier who comes top of the search engines for this term at the point Jason wants to buy.

Think about your own search behaviour, isn’t this fairly typical of what you do yourself?

Steps you can take to optimise for the long tail:

As a site owner, whether you have an ecommerce website or a brochure site you can benefit from your long tail visitors. Your ecommerce sites should have every level of pages optimised including the deep product pages – ensure you have a mix of specific and generic search terms and that your titles and descriptions are unique. On-page descriptions should also be meaty and interesting with lots of relevant information and benefits and of course a competitive price.

At Strategy we research the “money phrases” for your site because this is where you will make most money. We want to get you increased traffic at every level of your site and above all increased conversions – check out our Pay-Per-Results Search Engine Optimisation Services which include usability studies to increase sales.

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In search engines results pages (SERPs) a single listing for a popular phrase will bring you traffic if it ranks high enough. However, having a second indented listing just under that main listing doesn’t just stand to bring you 100% more traffic, it could bring you as much as 200% more traffic. Its all to do with the way that people view the search results, fixate on ceratin points and click through to your website.

Studies of indented listings using heap maps show that where the primary listing is popular the indented listing is more popular, it gets more fixation points and more clicks than the primary listing does. You don’t have to have a number 1 primary listing in order to get an indented listing, you can get this listing at positions 8 & 9, at positions 4 & 5 or positions 23 and 24, it doesn’t make a difference where your primary listing appears. You want the highest possible listing, of course you do but my point is that you don’t have to be number one to achieve an indented listing.

An added bonus is that double listings can also help to increase your ranking positions and push you up the search engines results pages.

How do you get a double listing?
The primary listing is the page on your site that is deemed most relevant to the search phrase and the second listing is the page that is deemed second most important – the key is to find out which is the second best page for that phrase. Double listing’s only show when both pages are ranked on the same SERPs page so – SEO TIP – change your preferences on Google to show 100 results in the SERPs (the default is 10 per page), use the ‘find’ function to locate your website and see if you have a double listing showing. If you do then the second URL is the one you need to work on to strengthen the optimisation for the search phrase you are using.

Use the comments box below to ask any questions about this strategy so we can clarify them.