Just having an e-Commerce website alone will not meet the objectives of your online retail business unless you have a noticeable amount of targeted traffic on your online store.
As an SEO Consultant in Singapore, I have come across many e-Commerce websites which are extremely excellent in terms of design & images used but they fail to attract desired traffic due to which the expected sales are never met. Therefore, it’s very important for e-Commerce websites to get promoted over search engines in order to increase the targeted traffic and expected sales from it.
There are lots of online marketing channels through which you can open the floodgate of visitors which include SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing or Pay Per Click as widely known), Social Media Marketing(mainly Facebook Marketing), and others.
Being an SEO expert in Singapore, I would not like to mention here which activity is best for your business because each advertiser/webmaster has their own budget, resources, and priorities. But in this blog, I am going to share a few fantastic tips for promoting your e-Commerce website through search engine optimization (SEO).
Let’s start with On-page Optimization first. Here are a few handy yet important tips for taking care of on-page optimization of your online store:
On-page tip#1: URL Conventions
URL Conventions are one of the most effective & quick ways to rule search engines because they get an easy hint about your webpages from the URLs that you specify for your webpages. The best URL conventions for an e-Commerce website are below:
- Category Page: Website.com/category/
- Sub-Category page: Website.com/category/sub-category/
- Product page: website.com/category-sub-category/product-name/
On-page tip#2: Optimized Meta Tags
We all know how important are meta tags for the SEO of any website and the same is the case with any e-Commerce website. We also know that title tags should be between 10 and 60 characters for the best results & description tags can be longer – up to 200 characters.
During my practice as SEO Provider Singapore, I came across many webmasters who think that optimizing each product page for meta tags is not that helpful for SEO but I always correct them and would like to point out here also that it is very likely that an e-Commerce website may have a lot of duplicate meta tags since there are generally hundreds of webpages in an e-Commerce website.
Having duplicate meta tags can affect badly the SEO of any website and therefore webmasters must make sure that each product page must have unique meta tags.
On-page tip#3: Optimized Images
Image optimization is an essential area of any eCommerce website because generally there are lots of high-resolution images that are used for online stores in order to encourage users to buy products that are really good. But at the same time, webmasters must also think about image optimization on their e-Commerce websites.
Be sure to save your images for a web-optimized format which can be done through image editing tools like Photoshop. Generally optimizing any image for SEO is quick & easy to do but many webmasters fail to do so just due to the lack of proper knowledge about the problem that heavy images can cause to SEO.
On-page tip#4: Robots.txt
Robots.txt file is very useful for eCommerce websites because through this file, a webmaster can let search engines know about the pages which they are supposed to crawl and the pages which they must not.
For eg. in an e-Commerce website, there are pages like checkout, terms, and conditions, privacy policy, etc. which webmasters may like to restrict from search engines so that the crawlers can focus on important pages like products, category pages, etc.
On-page tip#5 Blog
Having a blog on an eCommerce website can be an added advantage for the webmasters because through the blog posts they can let users know not only about the usage of several products that they have showcased on their store but also welcome search engine crawlers to index the fresh content each time they visit the website.
I am sure that the above on-page optimization tips can really help you as a webmaster to generate a good amount of traffic from the search engines like Google. Do check out some of the great off-page optimization tips in my next post.
