Best practices for marking up product pages on eccomerce site (SEO noob)
-
After analyzing the code on various competitors eccomerce sites I wanted to seek advice on best practices for marking up individual product pages for keywords and descriptions. My competition is all over the map as far as utilizing keywords and descriptions, some have few keywords while others have many and vice versa for descriptions.
What is the best method for marking up product pages on an eccomerce site for keywords and descriptions?
In addition, is it okay to utilize the same keywords for multiple products that may be under the same category? or is this considered duplicate content?
Thanks for the help, if you have any resources for SEO and eccomerce sites I would greatly appreciate the guidance
best,Michelle & Blake
-
Fred,
Indeed, we are using magento
Blake
-
Sorry for the confusion, my question was which software are you using for your e-commerce ? magento ?
fred
-
Hi Fred,
Right now we are utilizing the basics for SEO like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Ubersuggest and of course all the MOZ tools.
Do you have any resources or tools you might suggest to help guide me along the SEO journey for optimizing an eccomerce site?
Thanks for the response,
M & B
-
Thanks for your response Peter,
To sum it up I should make sure the site is properly themed or "siloed"?
I'll shift focus on writing for my audience and providing descriptions that leave no stone unturned, as for keywords I think I will follow your advice as less is better.
Thanks for the helpful response,
M & B
-
Hi Michelle & Blake,
You should tell us a bit more about the tools your using for your e-commerce website. With many major e-commerce applications, you have a huge amount of tools to help you with your setup and easy the best-practice learning curve.
Good luck,
Fred
-
Hi Michelle & Blake
SEO has been changing a lot, especially over the last few months in particular. I would encourage you to optimise your product pages with clear structured categorised titles. They will inevitably incorporate keywords, but don't focus on the keywords as such, focus on clearly explaining the products to your site visitors in the subsequent product description.
In the future, sites that use multiple keywords per product are not going to gain an advantage by doing that - in fact it may even have a negative impact. SEO needs to be about writing for your audience, your site visitor, and making sure the content of your pages answer the questions they may be asking about your products and perhaps what related products you have.
It may hep your SEO in future to use structured data markup with your products (see http://schema.org/) but at this stage focus on getting your pages right as they are.
Using the same keywords for multiple products under the same category will be fine, but just distinguish them by using other words that describe them. For example, red sofa, black sofa, white sofa all repeat the word "sofa" but they are different.
Duplicate content will only come into play if you repeat a large proportion of the content of a page across two or more other pages on your site. If you focus on providing good clear descriptions for each product, you won't go far wrong.
I hope that helps,
Peter
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Optimization for Sales Page
Hi, I am new to eCommerce. Traditionally I have run a couple of semi-successful websites relying largely on Adsense revenue and affiliate income. So I have a bit of experience with on page and off page SEO. This time around I am creating a membership site and also sell eBooks as bundles that non members can buy. My question is, should I SEO optimize the sales page for my eBook or use another content page that links to the sales page. For example, if I am selling an ebook on Dog Training and targeting the main KW "Dog Training Tips", should my sales page be optimized for "Dog Training Tips"? The reason I ask is because typically Sales pages do not provide a lot of useful information but are more geared around selling the product. The other option would be to create a helpful information page targeted for "Dog Training Tips" and lead users to my sales page through contextual links, banners, popups (I hate popups), etc. This would be the approach for the other LSI keywords anyways. Any thought would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | dwautism0 -
Image naming best practices?
While I have found many good sources of information for naming images for SEO purposes, I'm having trouble finding an up-to-date, exhaustive and authoritative source for image names, alt tags, etc. For instance... Max characters for image name? Max hyphens? How descriptive should you be? "ice-cream-flavors-icon_._jpg" or "ice-cream-flavors.jpg" or simply "ice-cream.jpg" How similar should the image name, alt text and page title be? At what point are you overusing a keyword? Rules to follow? So much more, but you get the idea! Anyone have a good reference or an answer to all things related to images and SEO? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | OSD0 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
When it comes to duplicate page content how do I deal with correcting it. Its a dynamic e commerce site.
I am under the impression that with ecommerce sites this happens often and that there's a plug in or just simply not worry about it since queries will often find similar conent.
On-Page Optimization | | Wayne_c0 -
Is reported duplication on the pages or their canonical pages?
There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites: http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
On-Page Optimization | | Safelincs
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=true Each of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively. These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are: Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored? or Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report? I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas? Thanks0 -
How do I best SEO optimize a landing page that is mostly graphics?
I have a social networking website built on a SocialEngine platform. All of the pages (except the home page) are password protected for members only. My web designer wants the home page to be primarily graphics - not text. It looks nice, but with no substantial copy on the page, can I still get the page to rank well with just meta title, description and keywords (even when those keywords aren't actually on the page?) What's the best way to handle this? Kim
On-Page Optimization | | KimCalvert0 -
Best information organization for a new site?
I'm launching a new stain removal website, and wanted to know what would be considered the best way to organize the content? Since most articles will roughly involve "removing X from Y" or "how to remove Z," I can see two ways... 1. Organize articles by Stained Items, Stain Agents and perhaps Cleaning Detergents. 2. Spread the categories out more, to try and group stained items according to categories... E.g. Hard surfaces, delicates, fabrics, ceramics etc. Any thoughts on which of these two might be the best way to organize the site, or are there any better suggestions? Not sure what the main considerations are here... Either of these two seem equally user-friendly.
On-Page Optimization | | ZakGottlieb710 -
On-page optimisation for CMS based sites
With so many sites being based on a CMS, and with so many hundreds of different CMS out there, as SEO consultants how do you recommend dealing with on-page optimisation for a client where you discover their site is built with a CMS you have not previously used (or even heard of!)
On-Page Optimization | | bjalc20110