How to SEO ecommerce Website

Ecommerce website posses an inimitable quality designed to escort the visitors to make an online purchase. Ecommerce Website design and Search engine optimization for e-commerce websites or eCommerce Marketing is equally a difficult task as e-commerce web development. It is unlike other website development as it requires to be eye-catching, well-ordered and apply the right colors that matches the website character. Both the web designer as well as the search engine optimizer requires judging an array of online promotion ethics while designing and optimizing an ecommerce website for Search Engine Rankings.

Some important guidelines for optimization of ecommerce websites are:

1. Title and Meta tags : Every page of a site should contain appropriate metadata based on the keywords one is trying to rank for. The page title should be unique and limited to 70 characters and the page description to 150 characters in order to optimize a site for major search engines. 
2. Optimize Product descriptions : Contents of a site should be given precedence as Search engines give importance to excellent quality content which is ought to be considered as an enduring SEO approach. Addition of editorial product reviews, how-to pages and guides to complement the products should be taken into consideration.
3. Optimize navigation : The thought behind Optimizing navigation is to keep product pages and category pages close to the core source. This will aid search engines discover and index the Product pages faster.
4. Improve internal linking :  Linking wittily among products and categories can facilitate the SEO Traffic by giving additional power of certain pages. Breadcrumbs are helpful to link from product pages back to the category page, however also linking from the FAQ section to a product or even between products helps.
5. Website loading time : The time taken to load a webpage is important for SEO and for increasing conversion rates. To test how quickly (or not) your pages are loading and to view helpful suggestions use a page analyzer tool.Seo friendly website architecture is extremely important in ecommerce Web development.
6. Sitemaps : An HTML site map and XML site maps facilitates both latent clientele and search engines. The XML site map is helpful in indicating to the engines which pages are accessible on the site and to guarantee as many as feasible get into the index. The HTML site map is used to let the clientele to locate product and category pages swiftly.
7. Amalgamate homepage versions: Some e-commerce websites contain numerous versions of their homepage and the outcome of it is inferior performance. In order to check the existence of a number of similar versions, one should use content duplication checker. It will lend a hand to reduce plagiarism of the contents.
8. Web Hosting : It is very essential to have superior web hosting as bad web hosting averts the existing as well as the latent customers from finding the site and might put a stop to it from receiving and staying totally indexed in the search engines. The online reputation might be at a risk of getting ruined entirely.
9. Customer Support: Do consider implementing a live chat software at the Time of eCommerce website development. A live help & Support may encourage buyers who are confused to ask for Help. Live help software and Good customer support Help in closing more sales. 
10. Importance of Images in Ecommerce Marketing : The Importance of images or Product Photos in generating sales and lead has been well known in General marketing but exact product picture becomes extremely important when there's no physical product available for potential buyer to see properly. The Images in e-commerce website alone have to work to convey the real look and feel of your product.

Search engine optimization for an E-Commerce website is a lot more difficult, prolonged and costly process than optimization of other type of websites. Nevertheless a properly designed vibrant optimization setup is an incredible way to get incremental traffic for definite searches, particularly higher converting long-tail product queries.

Best of Luck for your Sales!

Search Engine Ranking Factors for Seo

Search engine ranking is like the ruling entity in SEO world. SEO ranking measures how high a website is listed in search engines. The better your site is ranked, the higher you are listed and the more traffic you will receive. Visitors believe in search engine results, higher ranking in search engines is a parameter of website quality. If a website is ranked higher in search engines it truly deserves the position.

Search Engine ranking is important because most Internet users only check the first 3 or 4 pages of search engine results for the information they are looking for, if you are ranked 147 (page 15 in search results) you cannot expect to get any traffic at all.


There are various Search engine ranking factors for SEO determining your website position in the search engines display results.  Here is a complied list of search engine ranking factors for SEO :

Keyword Factors for Search Engine Ranking

The following components relate to the use of the user’s search query terms in determining the rank of a particular page.

1.    Keyword Use in Title Tag

Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.This title tag has consistently been the most important on-page search engine optimization factor for the past few years. It is believed to be the most powerful HTML tag.  A good title tag can help a little; a bad title tag can ruin a page.

2.    Keyword Use in Body Text

Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense.  As engines get more sophisticated, it’s not just the targeted keyword phrase that counts, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.

3.    Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)

Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords Using semantically related terms allows you to help associate your page with other topical pages and helps your page rank for many long tail keywords.

4.    Keyword Selection in H1 Tag

Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase.Depends on the topic of the site and the word in the tag.  Having a site about industrial washers with a 'Britney Spears'

tag is not going to help.

5.   Domain Name Search Engine Optimization

Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com.Using a keyword in the domain name is only helpful if you separate the words with hyphens.  General speculation is that too many hyphens might trigger a trust issue with the domain, so more than one or two hyphens are not recommended.  A good brand name is always better than a keyword-filled domain.

6.    Keyword in Website URL

Including target terms in the web page URL.Not weighted anywhere near as much as an exact match domain name, but helps improve CTR (and thus relevancy if CTR factors into relevancy scores) and some people will link to pages using the URL as anchor text.

7.    Keyword in HTML TAGS in H2, H3, H(xc) Tags

Placing targeted terms in the H2, H3 headline HTML tags.Second most important on-page criteria (weight changes every now and then and it can happen that h2/h3 have the same/higher importance than h1.

8.    Keyword in Alt Tags and Image Titles

Using target keywords inside Alt HTML tags and IMG title tags.When an image is used in place of anchor text, the Alt acts as anchor text.  Alt attributes for linked images do have some importance when it comes to SEO.

9.    Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags

Positioning keyword in HTML text with strong/bold attributes.Bolds are for markup, strong is for emphasis.  If used strategically can have impact on search engine rankings.

10.    Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag

Utilizing keywords in the meta description tag in a web page HTML header. A good description can help influence users to click on a listing.  The meta description is still used as the site description for many smaller directories and engines.

Page Attributes for Search Engine Ranking

The following elements comprise how the Google interprets specific data about a web page independent of keywords.

1.    Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure : Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page.The internal link popularity will become an important factor in ranking deep content pages.

2.    Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages : Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages? Quite important for new websites

HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards)

Validation of HTML page code as per the W3C consortium, an authoritative body on the standards of web-compatible code.Bad HTML tags could possibly lead to a bad indexing.

Domain Factors for Search Engine Ranking

The factors below contribute to Google’s rankings based on the site/domain on which a page resides.

1.    Global Link Popularity of Site : The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity) Individual web page assessment is the most important.  The Page Rank mechanism will arrange that global link popularity will be automatically distributed among web pages on the website.

2.    Age of Site : Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of index able content is seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership)

3.    Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site : The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword One of the most important aspects of external linking.  One should take two high quality links from thematically connected sites in the same community, over four links from sites of equal stature in unrelated communities.

4.    Rate of New Inbound Links to Site : The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain

5.    Historical Performance of Site as Measured by Time Spent on page, Click throughs from SERPs, Direct Visits, Bookmarks, etc.Metric of click-through-rate, time spent on a page/site, direct navigation via bookmarks, etc. that Google may be measuring through use of their toolbar, free wifi , Google analytics, etc.

Inbound Link Factors for Search Engine Ranking

These pieces affect Google’s weighting of links from external websites pointing to a page.

Anchor Text of Inbound Link : Anchor text plays a role as does the text adjacent to the link.

Global Link Popularity of Linking Site : The link popularity of the linking page and site is probably the most important factor when deciding on a link.

Last but not the least AVOID SEO WORST PRACTICES !

SEO friendly website architecture

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is exactly – the process of making a website search engine friendly. Many commercial websites are designed and set up by people who know little or nothing about Search Engine Optimization. How to give the search engines what they want to see when they index your site? Visually appealing websites can only generate casual hits for your website but for global presence you must be able to please search engines. Here are some key factors to be reviewed in order to make websites search engine friendly:

Coding Style (Table and Div)

Table verses div is an old debate to be still going on but now it has been converted to standards vs. nonstandard. Divs are usually recommended over table by most of the webmasters today. The major advantage of using divs over table is that it enhances the search engine crawl ability for a website. As search engine spiders look for higher volume of content and less coding on your actual page divs style coding helps your website to be indexed.

Java scripts and Active Client Based (Browser based Scripting)

Java script enabled web pages should be minimized as much as possible. By creating your own external .js file and linking to it from within your pages page loading time can be decreased at a certain extent and improves web usability. External .js file can be linked by placing the following code in your page head.

If you are using Java script for the entire page many search engines may not index it properly, either. Make sure to use No Script tags to define what was in the JavaScript to users with that feature disabled.

Keep File Size Small and Specify Image Details

If your files take long time to load users will simply click on back button and say goodbye to your website. As very few of us are aware about the fact that back button is the most used button on web browsers. For quick loading its best to specify image sizes on the page so the text can load before rendering the image. It’s a good idea to minimize number of images, image quality or image size to minimize page load time.


SEO friendly Content Layout

Using an external style sheet will keep many of your design elements on a single common page. Pages never look uneven due to slightly altering layout specifications from one page to the next. As it keeps layout code separate from content it will decrease page loading time. When users navigate from one page to another there is no need to reload the design elements of the page again since the style sheet will already be in their cache. So the pages will be downloaded within 8 to 10 seconds at the max. The longer a user have to wait for a page to be downloaded the lesser his interest becomes in your website.


Dynamic website v/s Static Website

There are two different types of websites, those with static content and
dynamically generated content websites.

Dynamic Websites

Dynamic websites are database-driven Web sites, or Web applications), in which page content is generated based on some information usually stored in a database or resulting from processing the inputs provided by the Website visitor. The pages are called “dynamic” because their content is generated “on the fly” each time a page is requested by the Web site visitor. Dynamic website development may work if you have to generate thousand of Web-pages using the same static content and design layout.

Static Websites

In static websites each page is unique in itself fully constructed by the web designer based on the HTML code. Any changes can be made only by the web designer; the content can never be changed dynamically.

URL Rewriting for Dynamic Websites

Search engines are quiet dubious about dynamic URLs so they are not loved by search engine spiders. Static URLs typically rank better in search engines as they are considered to be more genuine. All the major search engines except Google don’t like to index URLs having question mark or equal signs in them. Content of dynamic pages are known to be slowly indexed as compared to static pages. Users also are more comfortable with the static URLs as they are easy to remember and understand as well.

URLs of dynamically generated pages often contain question marks (?), percentage signs (%) and other symbols (&, + and $) or text (cgi-bin) making up the “query string”. Search engines find if difficult to read that’s why dynamic URLs can be rewritten creating a file called .access and simply copying the code in the web directory.

W3C Compliance

W3C consortium was established in 1994 to set universal web design standards. More than 90 W3C standards are there to ensure cross system compatibility for web sites. Languages like HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML etc. all have W3C standards. W3C standards are recommended in order to maximize your search engine ranking etc. W3C standards are not mandatory to follow, they are totally optional, that’s why known as W3C recommendations. W3C web site has a number of validator tools for various languages that validate your web page or document, by simply entering the URL. W3C validators are:

• W3C Web Page Validator, (HTML, XHTML, SGML etc.)
• W3C CSS Validater
• W3C Web site and other W3C Validators

W3C Compliance and Search Engine Optimization

Your search engine ranking does not totally depend upon W3C compliance but it definitely effects. If your page is coming with 100 of errors it’s certainly a problem. Search engine bots find difficult to crawl a website with coding errors. Strong CSS and XHTML coding is the best way to achieve your Search Engine Optimization goals and W3C compliance has to be seen as a reassuring sign of quality.