SEO eCommerce Programming – Questions To Ask Your Web Designer
SEO eCommerce Programming – Questions To Ask Your Web Designer
Most eCommerce software our company modifyes (when taking on a new eCommerce SEO client) is built well; just not search engine friendly. Most programmers are not SEM Experts nor do they perform common/elementary SEO tasks on a daily basis. So this next section will teach your programming staff what is needed for an SEO Expert to promote your site; do this ahead of time to save money.
Does my eCommerce website have…
- Modify .htaccess for SEARCH FUNCTION
- Editable Category Names, Page Titles, URL’s, Breadcrumbs, H1 Tags
- Editable HTML Category Description
- Head Editor
- Tracking Code Editor
- Update / Create XML Sitemaps
- Easy Way To Add Anaytic Code
- Robot.txt Editor
- Data Feed Management / Export
- 301 Re-Direct Editor
- Correct Category Anchor Text
Have programmers modify .htaccess for SEARCH FUNCTION
Duplicate content is never good. If your search results show up in the search engines that is also not good. Here is a video explaining how we changed this for Pinnacle Cart’s eCommerce Software.
Editable Category Names, Page Titles, URL’s, Breadcrumbs, H1 Tags
To save the website owner time many eCommerce programmers & shopping cart software takes a category name and defaults it to the page title, URL, breadcrumb, and H1 tag. This saves the website owner time & ensures each element is optimized correctly; atleast in the mind of the programmer.
But usually there is limited space in the left hand category menu. (or wherever your categories are listed) What if you want to change your page title to include other relevant & searched keywords? What if you want to change your H1 tag to a more compelling phrase? You can’t if your web development staff didn’t program those aspects to be editable.
You should be able to log securly into your eCommerce admin area and create a different category name, page title, URL, breadcrumb, and H1 tag. Obviously, you should be able to modify your meta-descriptions and meta-keywords but that matters very little anymore for SEO.
Editable HTML Category Description
eCommerce software should allow the admin to type in a description to each product category. As basic as this sounds many custom ecommerce software programmers do not build this option. Beyond the basics, this category description should also be HTML enabled.
What are the benefits of having an HTML enabled category description? The most important reason is that with an HTML editable category description you can internally link pages together. An eCommerce category page carries a lot of link value, which means links from that page will also carry decent link value; helping you rank for many keywords.
Many great analytic, reporting, and management tools exist that allow an eCommerce owner to track the progress of their online marketing efforts. For example, let’s look at 2 great free tools from Google; Google Webmaster Tools and Google Website Optimizer.
Google Webmaster Tools allows you to submit your sitemap, check the crawl rate, view statistics from Googlebot, generate robots.txt, and other valuable tools. Many times, an SEO expert will view this account if there is something wrong with indexing of your eCommerce site.
Google Website Optimizer allows a website owner to determine what web page designs & marketing methods are creating the highest CTR or closing ratio.
But how do you get Google Webmaster Tools set up? What if multiple people are working on optimizing your website and all want access to this data? How do you set up Google Website Optimizer? How do you continually run multiple tests without the help of a programmer?
Well, Google makes it easy for webmaster to use their tools. For most of their website tools they will give you a code and then say, “Copy the meta tag below, and paste it into your site’s home page. It should go in the <head> section, before the first <body> section.”
Those instructions seem easy, but how do you paste that code into your home page’s <head>? Where do you go to do that? This is why your programmer should build in a “Head Editor” so you as the website owner can easily paste this information in without having to pay your programmers to consistently do this.
This programming feature is very similar to the ‘head editor’ spoken of above. But instead of allowing you to paste code in the <head> section of your home page your programmers want to allow you to paste code on the ‘Order Completion’ pages of your shopping cart.
What code goes there? Well Google Conversion Tracking, comparison shopping sites’s tracking codes like Shopping.com, NexTag.com, Shopzilla.com, BizRate.com, and other sales tracking code.
When running & promoting an eCommerce website you will find you are constantly trying new marketing mediums. You need to be able to easily add new tracking code to your shopping cart to ensure your marketing efforts are producing your desired ROI.
Not only does this save you time, it will save you money by not having to pay your programmers for mundane programming tasks.
Although you can update Google with your XML site map other search engines need to be informed of your XML site map. If you are not familiar with these terms please read our article, The difference between a HTML site map & XML site maps.
It would be time consuming to have a programmer update your .XML site map every time you add a new product or a category to your eCommerce site, would it not? Each new product or product category would require new lines of code needed to be added to your .XML site map.
A great alternative is to have either a (1) automatic .XML site map generator (2) a button you manually click every time you want to update your .XML site map. This is not hard programming and can be easily integrated into any shopping cart platform.
Any analytic software is going to ask you to copy and paste the code segment they give you into the bottom of your content, immediately before the </body> tag of each page you are planning to track. How are you to perform this simple task? Does that mean you have to manually add it to each product page yourself?
It shouldn’t, your programmers should have built an easy administration function for you where you can simple paste the analytic code, and press submit. This is becoming close to being standard; don’t let your programmers slip on this.
Every eCommerce website should have a robots.txt editor. This is where you tell search engine what to crawl and what not to crawl; especially since eCommerce websites have advanced search capabilities. If you are not familiar with what robots.txt files are please read our article called, What are Robots.txt Files?
Data Feed Management / Export Product Info
Have you ever wondered how online stores manage to have their products on Amazon.com, Shopping.com, Google Shopping, Yahoo Shopping, and many other popular websites? It is because they have some form of what is called a “Data Feed Manager.”
What is a data feed? A data feed allows a person or website to receive updated data from data sources. In other words, it allows those websites listed above to receive product updates from your eCommerce website.
New eCommerce websites are building in data feed managers that either allow a website owner to (1) export their product information into a .TXT format so they can create a .CSV document (2) export product information in a certain format required by a popular comparison shopping site (3) publish their data feed to a central and public location where comparison shopping sites can access.
Does your eCommerce Software have this capability? It saves a website owner an incredible amount of time & money. If not, we suggest you view our data feed management section.
If a brick & motor store were to remove a product line from their shelves they would fill the empty retail space with another product line. What happens when you remove a product or an entire product line from your online store? Does Google automatically know you have removed it and similar products are a “shelf over?”
No, Google will not recognize that you discontinued a product line or simply removed a product from your website unless you tell them. In fact, the next time Google spiders your website and they see pages missing the originally indexed, they may penalize you!
What you want to do is re-direct old or discontinued product pages to new products or product lines on your website. Google recommends you do this with a permanent 301 re-direct. If you can access your FTP and know how to add a 301 re-direct to the .htaccess file of your site you can easily set this up, but chances are if you are reading this article you don’t know how to do that.
So what you want to tell your programmer is you want them to create you a section in your admin area where you can easily add/edit/delete 301 redirects. Then, all you have to do is paste your old & new URL in and press submit.
Many know links & anchor text is Google’s #1 determining factor in search engines. What people forget is that it is just as important on-page than off-page. Here is an example of a client’s old anchor text:
UNfortunately, no one searches for “HW-133 – Synthetic ..” No one searches for that. It should be ‘ HW-133 – Synthetic Half Wig & Ponytail in 1″ Why? Because it will (1) add text to the page (2) Google values anchor text. This will help rank each product page for its keywords.
Avoid or fix session IDs in URL’s
Many shopping cart platforms create unique session IDs (cooikes) in the site URLs. That means the more people use the site the more URL’s & duplicate pages are created for the search engines to crawl. Tell your programmer to (1) either avoid your software from creating session IDs (2) to read Google’s new advice on dealing with it here: about rel=”canonical”
Besides the overwhelming case studies supporting that product reviews increase conversion rates, they also have an SEO benefit. You will want your programmer to add product reviews to ensure you always have unique & fresh content on your website!
Here is an even better secret about SEO friendly product review software. Have your programmer create the product reviews on a separate URL.
/product-name
/product-name-review
Then allow others to click “if the found this review helpful” next to each review; now you have a review system set up within a review system. Then, have your programmer display the top 5 most helpful reviews on the original product page. This is what Amazon.com does, it works for them and it will work for you.
But how does this relate to SEO? First, you now have created a second page that can rank underneath your product listing in the search engines. Second, you just created a second page that links to your product page. Third, you just created another page for people to link to. Fourth, new unique content will keep your results high in google.
Lastly make sure you read our new article on the correct way to code product reviews.
With product images now can be included in regular SERPs & people searching in Google Images, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the Header H1 or Page Title can create a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
