18 Killer Ways to Make Your e-Commerce Website SEO Friendly

It’s time to adopt something exceptional and dynamic for e-Commerce owners, especially if they are looking to make their e-Commerce business on the top of the search engine. Running a successful e-Commerce business in this competitive market is not as easy as it sounds; owners need to spend their precious time on researching perfect solutions that make their e-Commerce site successful. With such high completion in the market, it becomes pivotal for business owners to make their e-Commerce websites SEO friendly so that they always stay ahead on the web.

However, owners would find a spectrum of solutions to adopt, but it is essential for them to adopt such solutions that work well for their e-Commerce site. When it comes to make your e-Commerce website highly interactive and flexible, you should look for some SEO friendly features to make your e-store successful. No matter whether you are running a small online store or a complete shopping mall, you need to consider the SEO friendly features that I have listed below.

Choose Brand Domain Name:

When it’s time to choose a domain name for your site, you should choose a brand domain name so that your customers can easily find you on the web. Many owners select keyword based domains, which are not as effective as you think. They need to select a brand domain name, because their decision affects their search engine ranking. It used to be that keyword based domain names quickly got ranking in the popular search engines, but after Google’s EMD updates, it’s simply not viable anymore.

In the above picture, you can see the brand domain name: caredom.in. This is more effective than BuyPetsProducts.com (see in the below image).

Domain Hosting:

Domain hosting is also an essential point when it comes to develop an SEO friendly e-commerce site, as you need to make sure that your domain does not expire in small time period. Such types of domains are not considered as very trustworthy. Opt for long-term based domain hosting. Getting a targeted domain extension is a great idea. For example, if you want to target your website in UK, then you should use the co.uk extension.

SEO-friendly URLs:

It is important for e-Commerce owners to have an e-Commerce site that supports stagnant and keyword-rich URLs, as it affects their website’s search engine results. Those URLs can be modified for better SEO and brand identification.

In the picture above, you can see that ebay has SEO-friendly URLs, whereas in the below picture, Amazon does not. These types of URLs are not permanent URLs. They’re also hardly crowded by search engines.

301 Redirects:

It is highly important for you to make your e-Commerce site 301 redirects; however, there are many e-Commerce websites that are changing and deleting their pages. 301 redirects allow you to redirect your customers to new page. In short, we can say that 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to the other. This will ensure that you will not lose link juice and visitors from deleted pages.

Canonicalization:

Canonicalization refers to those web pages that can be easily loaded from multiple URLs without creating a duplicate content error. It is a common problem, especially when multiple pages have the same content, but different URLs. This is what Google considers as duplicate content.

Canonicalization accurately indexes and rank content which can be easily viewed with the help of different URLs.

Here are some examples:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/

http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.html

http:/yourwebsite.com/

http://yourwebsite.com/index.html

With the help of <link rel=”canonical” href=”" />, you can easily tell Google which URL is your chief URL. Through this concept, you can easily shun duplicate content issues and get link juice to your main URL. It is important that your e-Commerce site makes use of canonicalization, especially if any of your pages have same content.

SiteMap.xml

SiteMap.xml plays a very significant role in making your website crawlable. It is the complete list of pages on your site. It is one of the easiest ways to give search engines information about pages of your site. Mainly, there are two types of sitemaps, such as sitemap.xml and sitemap.html.

Sitemap.xml is for search engines, while sitemap.html is for users to get information about your site’s pages. Through sitemap.xml, you can help Google and other search engines to read, crawl and index your website easily without any obstacles. It is also helpful for you to crawl your new pages instantly.

Robots.txt

Through robots.txt, you can easily specify the URLs and directories of your website that you do not want that robots to crawl. Use this tag to keep some important and sensitive information private.

Here’s an example:

Make sure you use this tag to keep your customers’ personal information private.

W3c Validation

W3c validator is one such validator that checks the markup validity of website pages and shows you all the errors your website has. By clearing the mistakes and errors, it will be easy for search engines to crawl you site.

Google Webmaster Tools authentication:

By using Google Webmaster tools, you will get a code to confirm your website with Google. These tools help you to find errors and malware in your site and help you solve these errors. Google lets us use this service for free.

Here’s an example:

This tool allows you to get a complete idea about the errors, indexed status, and search queries you have.

Site Speed

Site speed means how much time your website is taking to open. It is highly important for you that your website has very high speed. as it is a must that your site can be quickly and easily accessed by your customers. Websites that are taking too much time to open will affect your visitors’ experience.

Site speed affects everything like visitors, visitors’ experience, duration of time spent on your site, ranking, and etc. You can easily increase speed of your site by avoiding lots of images, JavaScript, frame, flash file, irrelevant links, and etc.

Meta Tags (Title and Description) attractive and example from image…

Meta Tags are an important part of your website that provides information to the search engines about your site. Through these Tags, e-Commerce owners can easily provide complete information to their clients about their products. E-Commerce owners can add Meta Tags to the <head> section of their HTML page and make it easy for search engines to understand their site. It’s important to make attractive meta tags and titles that grab the attention of their users.

In this above picture, you can see that I have searched for “buy clothes” and Myntra.com has an attractive Meta tag. ‘Buy clothes’ is in the title and can easily grab the attention of potential customers.

Heading Tag (H1, H2, H3 etc)

Headings tags are highly important for your website as these H tags are used to give the page structure of what the page is about. Through heading tags in your website, it becomes easy for search engine, as well as for your visitors, to know that what the page is about.

By using such headings on your page, your visitors and search engine will understand the pages of your site in a better manner. This will help to boost your ranking in the SERPs.

Image Alt Tag

We all are using different images in our website, so it is pivotal for us to include an ALT tag within the IMG tag so that the image provides a clear text alternative of the picture for screen reader users. It is also important to show search engine that what this image is about. If you do not use Image Alt Tag, it will be difficult for search engines to understand your images.

Product Page & Content Optimization:

Content plays a very significant role. Search engines are considering your site’s relevancy and importance based on both Meta tags as well as content. There are various points that you need to consider in order to optimize your content and pages efficiently:

• Price: To greatly optimize the page of your e-Commerce site, make sure to mention price on the product page so that your customers can easily get price information.
• Content: To optimize the product page as well as content of your site, provide accurate and perfect content on your site and product page. (Like details, product reviews and overview about the product.)
• Related Products: Providing related products on the product page is a great idea for you as your customers can look at your other products. Who knows, they may like them and decide purchase.
• Bold Keywords: Bolding keywords is extremely important as it shows search engines that particular keywords are more important for you.
• LSI: LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and it determines the words, sentences and phrases that are related in the content of a document. Search engines are using LSI as search analysis. Here’s an example: if you are searching for the term badminton, search engines must decide which websites and documents are more relevant to your term and display them in the search results.

Search engine Friendly Navigation Structure:

To make your e-Commerce website SEO friendly, it is important that your site has a search-engine friendly navigation structure so that your customers will find it easy to navigate to different pages of your site. Navigation structure is highly important part of the search engine optimization process. If you have an easy navigation structure, search engines find it simple to index all your web pages. e-Commerce merchants should give importance to the logo, sitemap, avoid image links, exceptional site navigation and more.

Schema.org Markup:

Schema.org offers a complete set of schemas such as HTML tags and more that webmasters can easily use to markup their pages in ways that are recognized by major and popular search providers. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and more are relying on this mark up in order to enhance the display of search results. However, Schema.org makes it easy for search engines to recognize two different pages with same meaning.

As an example:

Through schema.org, websites can provide their customers huge information like rates, price information, product overview, author mark detail and more. Here in this above given image, you can see that ratings, price details and product information are given. This helps customers find the details of the products and other stuff before visiting that page.

Social Sharing Buttons:

For e-Commerce merchants, it is highly important to have social sharing buttons on their website so that their customers can share your product and services with their friends.

Make sure to have those social sharing buttons in a perfect place on your site so that your visitors and potential customers find it easy to share information with their friends and other people. Twitter’s Tweet buttons and Facebook’s like button have gained huge popularity in the market. Make use of social sharing buttons on your website to boost brand awareness.

Google Analytics to Track:

For monitoring and tracking your website’s effectiveness, Google Analytics can be a helpful tool that works exceptionally well. It doesn’t matter whether you have a big or a small business, Google Analytics is extremely useful, as it provides statistics on the number of visitors to your site. You can also get complete information about the number of visitors, information related to page views and more. The best thing about this tool is that it’s completely free of charge and works extremely well for small and big companies.