Prayagasoft - web designer India, Ecommerce developer india, Ecommerce design

Creating Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Websites

The fundamentals of search engine friendly design apply to all types of sites, including e-commerce catalog sites. The beauty of the dynamic e-commerce catalog is that generating search engine friendly e-commerce catalogs is easy. This document will give you a walkthrough of a typical e-commerce store, from its homepage to its catalog pages and from a product page to a brands landing page, explaining how to optimize each page to leverage organic search engine traffic.

The format is similar to navigating through a typical e-commerce website. We will start with the homepage, travel to the category pages, then move on to the sub-category pages and then down to the product page. We will also touch on the brand pages and the site map.

Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Web Sites

The typical e-commerce homepage has the company logo, some company specific information at the top, side bar navigation at the left, more prominent navigation in the middle of the page and featured products and sales on the right side of the page. I created a typical screenshot of the various pages to provide clarity throughout this document. The homepage will typically look like this image. Lets pick apart each section of the homepage from a search engine optimization standpoint.

Header

The header, which is typically an include file on each page, contains the company logo and top bar navigation. The logo should be a link to your homepage, and contain an alt tag and possibly a title attribute in the link tag. The remaining top navigation can be in nicely formatted text links. There is no real reason to make these top navigational links graphic buttons like many e-commerce sites currently do. Instead, use simple text links and format them with cascading style sheets to make them look nice. Another tip is to dynamically change the alternative text tag for the company logo for each page to represent the same text you have on the title of the page. This way, when you conduct an allinurl:www.domain.com site:www.domain.com lookup in Google, it will display all the pages of the site and not give you that annoying message that they omitted results because they looked to be duplicate. Google currently does not use alt text within their ranking formula, so there is no current benefit to change the alt text for ranking purposes. For usability and credibility reasons, you always want to include the store's phone number in a location that is clearly visible on each page. Thus many sites include this information in the header file.

Left Side Navigation

The beauty of the left hand side navigation is its ability to solve two common e-commerce issues. The first solution is usability; having a well defined lefthand side navigation bar will provide a level of clarity to your website. Website visitors will know how to easily navigate throughout your site as long as you keep the navigation consistent throughout each and every page. The second solution is search engine visibility; having a mini site map on the left side of each page makes it easy for search engines to crawl and then index your webpages.

Since this document is mostly about the search engine friendliness of your e-commerce shop, lets discuss the second point in more detail.

Crawlers, by nature, need a method of locating your pages. Many sites that exist today make it hard for crawlers to locate these pages on your site. For example, let's say that your lefthand side navigation is designed in Flash. Most search engines have a hard time finding the links within Flash files, so the search engines will not be able to locate the pages behind the Flash files.

Homepage Content Area

For most new e-commerce sites, having content on the homepage will have an impact on your search engine rankings. After all, it is the content that the search engines look for when determining what your page is all about. Of course, links to your site play a huge role; but in our case, we are talking about a search engine friendly e-commerce site and not the "off-page factors". For search engine friendly design, content is a very important factor. As you can see on the homepage, I have added an area for content on the page. The content should read well and contain your targeted keywords. Keep in mind that when your homepage ranks for a specific keyword, Google will normally use the content on the page for your description in the results page. Keep this content clean, easy to read and catchy.

The content I used for my Search Engine Friendly Web Shop's homepage reads as follows:

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