SEO in ecommerce site
This is up till now another subject that deserves a book to be written on it. The problem is that I can not suggest a book. Actually, this industry changes as quickly as Google tweaks their algorithm it is easier said than done to determine what the most important factors are. On the other hand, I will try to point out those that very few people will dispute as the big ones.
There are two major types in SEO. There is on-site SEO and off-site SEO. Usually, everyone will begin with the on-site SEO since we want Google to identify what’s our ecommerce site is about. If they do not, then how are we ever going to rank for a keyword? These spiders that crawl on our ecommerce site will be looking at several different attributes on each page to resolve where it needs to go and how applicable it is to specific searches done at Google’s ecommerce site.
One more note worth mentioning: What is a keyword? A keyword is fundamentally a complex name for what people might search for when trying to find our ecommerce site. Let’s use a motorcycle ecommerce site as an instance, so I’ll continue to do that. People could search for “motorcycle”, but they might also search for “new motorcycle”, “black motorcycles”, “and Harley Davidson motorcycle for sale”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases. Yet, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note beneath that almost all on-site SEO has to do with is placing good quality keywords throughout our ecommerce site where Google’s robots, spiders, or software might be able to determine what is our ecommerce site is about.
On-Site SEO Factors: The Title of the Page, The keywords used throughout the text on the ecommerce site, What keywords are used in H1 tags, Keywords used in our domain name, Keywords used in the URL of a webpage, Meta Keywords.
Links Pointing to our Ecommerce site
This is without a doubt one of the keys to having our ecommerce site listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about our ecommerce site to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a unique motorcycle, and we have it for sell, they may link to our ecommerce site with “unique motorcycle” as the text that people would click on to get to our ecommerce site. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for our ecommerce site to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as back links.
Quality of the Ecommerce sites linking to our Ecommerce site
Those linking to our ecommerce site should also have some form of importance. For example, there are lots of ecommerce sites with loads of outgoing links to many ecommerce sites. Google does not want to give these ecommerce sites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Harley Davidson’s official ecommerce site or something along those lines.
The Age of our Ecommerce site
I listed this as an off-site related issue but truly it doesn’t fit in either category. This is an easy issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most vital factor, but several older ecommerce sites will naturally rank higher than new ecommerce sites that have more back links. I am not sure why this occurs, but a lot of people would say that it does. Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this than Google does.