Smart On-Page SEO for Product Pages

Usually the success of an ecommerce website in terms of SEO vary depending on the amount of items on sale. There could be thousands of searches for every product and if you have 100.000 items in stock you can be found by much more visitors than a small website with just a couple of products.

But it’s not enough just to have these product pages, you need to be proactive and optimize (US English) them properly. Here are the most important ideas you can implement:

Product name in Title. Obvious but missed so many times!
Product name in text. Try to add to product name keywords, that people use frequently with products (i.e. “Here you can buy [product name] with free delivery.”).
Product name in an ALT of the product picture.
Product name in URL. Do it at least to craft sweet-looking snippets in search results.
Different pages for different colors. You can’t imagine how many searches people run each day searching for, let’s say, “iphone 4gs black”
Don’t forget about local keywords. Consider arranging your content in a way to try to target local keywords (i.e. “city + product name”). Usually you can do this via adding a tab with delivery information and mention here the most important locations for you in terms of traffic.
Diversify content on product page. It’s hard to create unique products descriptions for thousands of items. But adding an opportunity for users to leave a feedback not only increases user experience, but also improves the content and drives long-tail traffic. Don’t miss this opportunity.

Internal Hyperlinking and a Project Structure

Sometimes it’s possible to improve significantly rankings reconsidering project internal structure. Here are two basic tips:

Categories are based on searches. Users demand goes first! Try to take in account users’ intentions during categories and subcategories planning. Let’s say for a website selling watches online it’s worth to analyze (US English) search demand and create categories for man, woman, kids; elite, sport, fashion etc.; Swiss, Japanese etc.; Golden, Silver, Stainless etc. etc. etc.
Keyword-rich internal links. Use internal power of the website for your categories and product pages. If the first link pointing to your category is an image, insure that this image has an appropriate ALT text.

Website Indexing

Would you like to start selling new arrivals immediately? It’s worth to implement these advices in order to improve new products indexation:

Direct link to a “New Arrivals” section from homepage or even better sitewide link, let’s say from footer. “New Arrivals” is a search results “quick enter” door for all new items you have. It will be easier for Google to find new items this way than to dig your products directory, because homepage usually is the most spiderable.
Sitemaps and “Smart Sitemaps” implementation. Take a look at 123people.com and their “noindex, follow, noarchive” sitemaps http://www.123people.com/name/COM/a-index.html. Why do they use such a strange meta-tags? Each time Googlebot visits your website it has quite limited time allocated for your site. Try to persuade the bot to visit (“follow”) as many pages as possible without wasting the time “noindex, noarchive”.

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