1.Not Enough Content
Most ecommerce sites tend to be great with putting content on their product pages, but forget about their homepage and their category pages. Content rich product pages are great when people are searching for your products, but what about people with slightly broader searches? If your category pages just have a list of products on them but no content about the category, then you are missing a big opportunity.
2. Bad URLs
URLs serve a few purposes in SEO. Firstly, Google uses keywords in the URLs as ranking factor. So, the page
will have a boost in search engine rankings for the keyword “Blue widget”. However, many shopping carts don’t have friendly URLs. For example, osCommerce default URLs look like this:
www.site.com/index.php?cPath=2_15&RD=LPHomTxt
Not only will that lack a keyword boost for Google, but it’s not a great search result, it doesn’t entice people to click. Most shopping carts have an SEO friendly URL solution that at least improves it, if not makes it totally perfect, but it’s amazing how many people don’t have this turned on.
3. Good Metadescriptions
Meta description tags aren’t used by Google as a ranking factor, so tweaking them won’t make you rank any higher. In most shopping carts, the meta description is created automatically based on some simple rules.
However, the meta description tag is often used by Google to show the abstract that appears in the search results. As a result, a well written meta description tag is more likely to entice people to click on your listing rather than your competitors listing. Good quality meta descriptions are a good way to increase your traffic without increasing your rankings.
4. No Alt Tags
It’s amazing how many online shops don’t do something as simple as put alt tags on their product images. Not only is it best practice for accessibility (sight impaired users rely on alt tags), but it’s a great SEO boost as well. Google and other major search engines weigh the text in alt tags at least as high as headings, so it’s definitely worth your trouble.
Ideally your alt text will be custom written for every image, but for the especially time poor you can insert the product name automatically into the alt text. This should be a relatively simple template change in most shopping carts.
5. Canonicalization Issues
Canonicalization is when one page has multiple URLs. There are a lot of causes for this in shopping carts. Some examples:
> Some carts have the same product appear in multiple categories. For example, a particular mountain bike might appear in the men’s bike section and the mountain bike category. However despite these pages being the same, they may have multiple URLs.
> If a page has more product reviews than can appear on one page, the “next page” button will sometimes show a page with similar content but a different URL.
> Sites with layered or faceted navigation can often produce an infinite number of URLs all containing very similar content.
The canonical tag can be a good way to solve these problems.
Conclusion
While no one of these factors is going to see your traffic sky rocket, often moving up a few spots on in the rankings is about getting the small things right. Fix all these issues and the chances are very good you’ll see a nice jump in traffic.
3 Comments on "Top 5 SEO Problems found in Ecommerce Sites"
I have an Actinic on line catalog and the URL strings can get messy,if the same page is added to another section it will become a copy_of_promotional_umbrellas.html as an example.
Hi,
As you say, meta description doesn’t give a factor in pagerank, so it is ok if I will put a href in my description meta tag?
And also what should we do if we have so many links more 150 links..,in our sitemap? We will divided that into to two or more?
It is instructive to write, I try to achieve