Search engines are vital for e-commerce sales and the need for search engine optimization will keep on increasing as the battle for eyeballs continues to heat up. E-commerce relies heavily on organic traffic resulting from search engine queries by users; a study reveals that as many as 44% of all online customers begin with looking up information in a search engine. Because of the vital importance of SEO for e-commerce, adopting the best practices is the ideal way of boosting sales. Some tips from expert online marketers:
Make Product Page Title Tags Unique
Many developers of e-commerce sites make the error of not having page title tags that are unique as this considerably helps the search engines to crawl and index the pages. Finding the title tags is very simple; you just need to press CTRL + U when on that page in any browser.Creating unique title tags may be quite difficult especially when the products are from the same manufacturer, it may be better to use keyword phrases and not just keywords to differentiate. This will help in getting better visibility as title tags will not be truncated by the search engines when displaying the results.
Use Permanent 301 Redirects for Defunct URLs
When you have an URL that no longer points to a page, you need to inform the search engines about the page where the earlier content has been shifted to. This is very easily done by using a permanent 301 redirect. The advantage of doing this is that all the juice of the old page such as Page Rank, traffic value, page authority, MozRank, etc. automatically flows to the detour page. The earlier page is automatically removed from the Google index and replaced with the URL of the new page. Failure to use permanent 301 redirects will result in a 404 Not Found display when visitors click on the dead URL and this will lead to frustration, and loss of traffic and page juice.
Use Keywords to Optimize the Category Pages
As is evident category pages are higher in the hierarchy than product pages and therefore need to be optimized in such a way that they show up first in the search engine results page. Individual pages should only be optimized for the product it deals with and all the product pages should be linked to the category page. By doing this you will be able to prevent the individual product pages from competing with the category page for the same keyword. To attract more traffic to the category page, you can insert the relevant keywords in the file name as well as the image ALT and the H1 tag. The page description, as well as the page content, should also feature the keywords.
Conclusion
The e-commerce environment is intensely competitive and relies heavily on search engine visibility and organic traffic generation. Proper SEO is vital and can make all the difference between success and failure.
Author Bio: Maria Jones is the chief digital marketing manager of leading sports good manufacturer. she has reported a substantial increase in e-commerce sales after getting her platform optimized by Tayloright, a reputed SEO company.