The ideal SEO e-commerce site
-
Hi All,
I am currently writing a spec for moving our current e-commerce website and it got me thinking from an SEO perspective.
We are all usually restrained by the current website set-up / CMS and there are things it can never do despite how hard we push for the changes. If you had the chance to start from a blank canvas (like I do currently) what would be on your wishlist?
-
Stephen,
Can you offer recommendations on another solution?
-
I would be interested to hear peoples views on this also. We have a mid size product catalogue, about 5k products, which we are looking at transferring to Magento.
-
Magento is apparently very restrictive and pretty slow. OK if you want the out of the box functionality with a small catalogue, but tough if you want to do something different
Anyone else have a experience with Magento?
-
Yeah, definitely.
Another thing related to this is canonical url implementation - ideally you want a CMS that automatically adds these and, even better, gives you control if and when needed (such as canonicalising to a 'view all products' page for a category).
-Matt
-
Thanks Matt.
The URLs are a great example of something which is easy to do when switching to a new system so have the freedom to specific them but trying to change them on an existing site can sometimes prove a nightmare!
-
Some of the most important things:
- Product Feeds: Most of our sales come from Google shopping - forget this at your peril.
- Search engine friendly URLs (i.e. /blue-widget/ or /categories/widgets/ instead of ?productid=5 or ?catid=10)
- Make sure your CMS works for you - it should help you match the URL, Title Tag, alt tags, H1 and body content with the product targeted on that specific page)
- Social Media integration (a service like addthis will make that easy to implement)
- Ensure that pages load as quickly as possible - use as few js libraries as possible, combined css, etc)
- Not related to your cart but... Use a blog to post good, interesting content and then market it to other blog owners.
I'm sure there're loads more but that's a starter
Matt
-
We are speccing our new site based on Magento.
The main reason behind this is because we need full control but with the option of quickly bringing in external help for advanced developments.
Other than that I believe the SEO features are very strong and the results on sites built on it can be extremely good.
-
I read the other thread and am still wanting to know the community feeling on the best eCommerce platform. If you were to build a new site, what would you choose and why?
-
Hi,
Thanks for pointing me to your thread. I will have a read now.
-
Hello Man,
I already ask this a couple of weeks ago and some guys bring a cool tips about ecommerce SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-for-e-commerce
Hope it helps.
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
-
On Page Local SEO
What do you believe is the best approach when it comes to Local SEO for businesses in 2013?
Web Design | | BlueRockDigital0 -
Build New Site Without Losing Rankings
Good morning SEOmoz community. I have a question which I am pretty sure I already know the answer to, however i thought I would reach out to my fellow experts to see if anyone had some great advice. I would really like to give my website a makeover. i have two thoughts on this, one is to scrap the site completely and start fresh, the other would be to only change it visually, but keep all the content and on-page optimization. I am terrified of losing my rankings. I am ranked position 1 and 2 for highly competitive terms and have another 15 - 20 keywords on page 1. Any advice would be tremendously appreciated!!!
Web Design | | WebbyNabler0 -
Optimizing a Wordpress Blog For SEO
Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog. In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.
Web Design | | GKLA0 -
So apparently SEO moz will get us de-indexed according to a SEO company!
Each and every day i get called up from an SEO company who promises to get me top spots in Google rankings if i quickly get on their special offer they have today normally i would say "no thanks and put the phone down" but i had a bit of spare time so i indulged the guy and we got talking. After the introductions and speal about his company he was showing me what his company does and how they go about it to get me top ranks (they don't get me ranks but create a website they own which then passes leads to me- kinda clever since they could then start charging me per lead or my competitors) We continued to talk and i mentioned i used SEOmoz to check my rankings and back links etc and he told me that Google are cracking down and anyone using these types of software/websites will get their websites de indexed. This struck me as BS but i wanted to get your thoughts on the matter, i personally don't believe Google would ever do such a thing as this since it would be so easy to get your competitors websites taken down (i.e. negative seo) but its certainly a talking point.
Web Design | | GarethEJones0 -
Testing your code and site
I’ve got various WordPress websites with the Share This social plugin for WordPress. I have been using Firebug and http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso to do general checks on the site and the code. And used W3C validator too. Due to the way WordPress appears to work we never seem to be able to get all the firebug/ website optimization tests to pass and the W3C validator passes everything on HTML 5 apart from 7 errors with the Share This social plugin. How do you test your code/websites? Should I stop be a perfectionist and just be happy?
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
Does changing nameservers and a new site design affect SEO dramatically
We are about to change nameservers and upload a new website design design, completely rebuilt website to that new hosting, will this effect our seo efforts previously and have an effect on our SEO rankings?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
SEO ethical practice in question
A family friend asked me to take a look at her website. www.designsbymaida.com First thing i noticed is what seemed a 301 redirect or a forward to http://funktionaldesignstudios.com/dbm-old/ So her site is hosted with what it looks like, in his site(funktonaldesigns). What does this means in terms of how google sees her site and in terms of SEO. My thought is that he is boosting his domain name. He is getting the link juice. Thanks for the insight and help.
Web Design | | QualityHosting1 -
HTML5, semantic web & SEO
HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web. I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?" Is content found in semantic sections like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like, or ? </aside> </nav> </footer> </header>
Web Design | | TahoeMountain400