SEO the Secret Weapon in the E-Commerce Wars - page 2

by Dylan Downhill, 1/16/2006

For an e-commerce business, a PPC-only strategy is a short-sighted solution that has known pitfalls, too. As competition increases, PPC ad prices also increase, which erodes profit margins and forces the e-commerce business owner to increase their PPC budgets just to keep up.

Many experienced SEO practitioners have problems optimizing for online retail sites because they lack the necessary programming skills to optimize dynamic pages from shopping cart software. Un-optimized dynamic pages are often invisible to search engines. To compound the problem there are hundreds of different types of shopping cart software, each of which has different optimization requirements.

The Solution

To successfully optimize an E-Commerce site for search engines requires specialized techniques and processes that are above and beyond regular optimizations performed for non-commerce sites. These include:

Development of web server output filters that enable Title and Meta tag reconfiguration even if the shopping cart application doesn't allow it. These filters can be applied to PHP and IIS with amazing results.
Implementing sitemaps that allow search engines to index the entire site, even when cookies are required to access certain parts of the site.
Optimizing product and page titles and descriptions to match the phrases that consumers actually search on. For example an online store in Thailand was selling Kaw Kwy statues. After research it was found this phrase was not a popular search term. Further investigation found a more common search term for Kaw Kwy - 'Fake Ivory'. After changing the product names, titles, and descriptions, the client started being found for his products and selling them.
Develop product feeds to the major shopping engines such as Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, and BizRate to ensure maximum exposure for the products at prices far below current PPC ad prices.
Undertake usability research and analysis so you know how people are really using the site and where they are abandoning the site or your shopping cart.
Implement analytics to understand traffic, reporting and visitor conversion patterns.
Implementation of other SEO tools such as paid inclusion (including Yahoo's SiteMatch) to increase the frequency of spidering if there is a constant stream of new products to your E-Commerce site.

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