The journey continues as our film web site has launched its e-commerce web site for the film and with the configuration still a work in progress, we are starting to turn our focus to getting the site found. Specifically, the task of getting your e-commerce site found is similar in many ways as traditional web site SEO but in other aspects completely different.

During our implementation of an e-commerce site, we evaluated many different types of shopping carts, self-managed and installed, WordPress plugins and out-of-the-box hosted solutions. Initially we went with a Wordpress plugin because it was cheaper and we thought it would suit our basic needs. But that had technical issues and we decided to re-evaluate our needs. We ultimately chose the Network Solutions e-commerce package and we found it to be mature and extremely sophisticated yet easy to use for even the most basic of shopping carts. Now I am not here to pitch this solution, but I will say is you get what you pay for in many cases and if you are not a developer or have a development team I would stick with the mature hosted solutions that can probably do the job 99% of the time.

Once we got past the setup, which I will talk about that experience in a separate post, we had to start looking at the external factors of tuning the site for people to find the products and optimize it for search engines. Through this experience, I wanted to give a short list of powerful SEO tips for your e-commerce web site:

• Make sure your e-commerce package integrates with analytics tools – at the very basic level you should be able to hook up your e-commerce system to Google Analytics to track campaigns, traffic and all the other basics. If you use specific analytics packages, you will have to evaluate that to see if it fits your needs.
• Prioritize the best and active sellers on the home page – If you had a physical storefront, you would hide the hot stuff in the back of the store. It would be in the front window to draw people in.
• Create landing pages that have your product name in the URL – Having the product name in a specific URL makes search engines really happy instead of come older systems that have it as a mix of numbers and characters that have no meaning to a search engine. You can also run campaigns to that specific page and track them better with the analytic tools we mentioned earlier.
• Leverage Social Commerce Techniques – This is a fairly new concept, one that I am speaking about at Social Commerce Camp DC, and it revolves around employing collaborative social media tools to assist in online purchasing and selling. Social commerce can be correlated with Search Engine Optimization as a way to build inbound links and generate user content, all of which are tools to improve a website’s search results on a given search engine such as Google.
• Add related links – Got this from SearchEngineLand “SEO is really about leveraging large amounts of pages efficiently, and using that scale to advantage. Related linking accomplishes that very well, but can be an intensive feature to implement and manage (there are several third-party resources for this, including TextWise, SLI Systems, and others)”
• Complete this e-Commerce checklist – This e-Commerce SEO Checklist has great tweaks for on-site, on-page and off-page SEO basics for the e-commerce site. We are currently going through each one in the next two weeks.
• Avoid using “View” or “More” words as anchor text - This is most common mistake committed by most of the e-commerce websites. Many people put a brief description on the product category page about various products and use “View”, “more”, “click here to read more”, etc., beneath every brief description to direct the users to the product pages.
• Find and kill duplicate URLs – This is similar to having duplicate blog content or any other type of content page out there. It results in page dilution and page rank split. SearchEngineLand says “ecommerce sites are especially bad at having multiple versions of product pages. Normally we can find these with site: and inurl: search operators. Pay careful attention to the product level URLs, as this is usually the area duplicate content creeps in (through faceting and sorting of URLs, or through tracking or cookie information appended in the query string). It’s also an area that can cause major negative impact on search rankings. Each product page should have one single, authoritative URL.“

Some other great resources we leveraged for SEO help in our quest to tune the e-commerce site:

SEO Tips for New Web Shop Owners

E-Commerce SEO Checklist

9 Tasty Tips for e-Commerce SEO’s

If you are writing a blog or thinking about writing a blog, you might be focused on crafting that awesome, catchy title you might be missing a very important component of Search Engine Optimization in blogs. That is the actual web link of the blog post. Inside of the dashboard of Wordpress at the bottom on the left section column under “Settings” there is a sub-section called “Permalinks”. These permalinks are what you use to create the structure of your post links on all published content. There are many different ways and structures of permalinks that give you flexibility to fit your need but it can also be a problem if you don’t implement it right from the beginning.

Avoiding the Dreaded Duplicate Content Issue

Ok, so I might have to get a bit geeky here but in search engines like Google, if they see your post or index it as they call it and find a duplicate post they will cancel each other out making in impossible to come up in search results. I was reading a great article on this from Michael Bubbo and he explains this part really well so I will let him talk for a minute:

“Basically, the biggest hurdle I found is making sure your posts and pages do not succumb to the infamous “infinite” duplicate content bug, which occurs when Google indexes your post permalinks with and without a trailing slash (if you are using just /%postname%/) and whenever someone types ANY combination of characters into the category portion of your permalink (if you are using /%category%/%postname%/).

Hard to imagine that if you type domain.com/2008/your-post/ or domain.com/FAIL/your-post/ that Google may end up indexing both and therefore create the dreaded duplicate content scenario! But it’s true, try it on your own blog…and if you want more details on this, you can check out this blog post on permalink structure and duplicate content.”

If You Already have Content you can still fix this and Improve SEO Results

They way to fix this is to first download and activate the Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin. It integrates a 301 redirect solution for any old permalink structures that you have stopped using — thereby saving all those potentially lost visitors.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, go to Settings –> Permalinks in your WordPress Admin panel and COPY your current Permalink Structure.

Creating a Good Structure for Your Blog Links

There are many good ways to go about creating a good SEO friendly structure. Michael Bubbo points out correctly that “Google does NOT want a trailing slash and would like posts to end with .html — which is something I personally do not use, as some visitors may type in a permalink and forget to add .html! Instead, compromise by dropping the trailing slash and keeping your Wordpress permalink format short and sweet.”

Top 5 WordPress Permalink Structure Suggestions

/%year%/%postname%
i.e. www.yourdomain.com/blog/2009/post-name
My personal favorite, please note there is NO TRAILING SLASH after Postname!

/%postname%
i.e. www.yourdomain.com/blog/post-name
A very popular choice, Wordpress will automatically add a dash and numerical value if you use the same Post Title more than once (no worries there!). Again, please note there is NO TRAILING SLASH after Postname!

/%category%/%postname%
i.e. www.yourdomain.com/blog/category-name/post-name
Standard Blog issue, please note there is NO TRAILING SLASH after Postname!

/%postname%.html
i.e. www.yourdomain.com/blog/post-name.html
Google’s favorite, every blog entry post ends with .html

/%category%/%postname%.html
i.e. www.yourdomain.com/blog/category-name/post-name.html
Google + Standard Hybrid, every blog entry post ends with .html

My preference? I really like %postname% because it is simple and works on basic web sites as well as more flat structures. If you are building a blog with lots of content you might want to go with /%category%/%postname% OR /%year%/%postname%.

Michael’s post has more instructions on making this plugin go smoothly over at his post “Best Permalink Structure” so I would check it out.

One of my favorite sites for SEO is SEOMoz.org. I read it every day and there are some awesome tips to be shared and yesterday was no different. I have been learning about the concept of off-page SEO. What is that you ask? It is exactly what it sounds like doing things off of a web page to improve web site results.

We took a greater list from SEOMoz.org of 21 Ways for Leverage Off-Page SEO and we found that there are 15 Ways that really work best. Our value is trying things and failing miserably so you can Below is a list of some things most people may be familiar with, but I have also added a few advanced things that you may not know. Try these Advanced Off-Page SEO Strategies to market your website, get ranked in search engines, and to build online reputation (branding) for your company/website so that you can survive in this competitive SEO world.

1). Community Creation in Social Networking Sites

Also known as online reputation management, this is the first and foremost step with which you have to initiate your process. Try to become a member of the most popular social networking sites like Orkut, Myspace, Facebook, Linked In, Ecademy, etc., and create a profile of your own. By doing this you can extend your network online, get connect with your friends, share things with each other, and promote your company/website to build an online reputation. This is most likely the same as Web 2.0 (Participatory Web), which means you have to show your active participation on a regular basis.

2). Blogging

This is one of the most powerful ways to promote your company/website online. Write a blog of your own for your company/website and include lots of unique content. Be precise in what you’re trying to convey for the users in your blog entry and promote your blog in blog directories and blog search engines. You can also promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawlable by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs). If you’re not very good at writing content for blog posts, hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view.

3). Forum Postings

Create a forum/online discussion board of your own and start a discussion or share topics with your friends. You can also post/reply to a thread in other service-related pre-existing forums that allow links in your signature which can be crawled by the search engines (aka “Do-Follow Forums”).

4). Search Engine Submission

Submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Alltheweb, Lycos, Excite, etc., to get listed for free.

5). Directory Submission

Many people may say that directory submission is dead. As far as I’m concerned it is still alive. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. Of course, I agree that it gives quite delayed results, but it is worth doing it. Submit your websites to the topmost quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, ZoomInfo, One Mission, Pegasus, etc. Nowadays many web directories may offer paid listings but don’t go for it.

6). Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is yet another powerful way of promoting your website, but nowadays most people are spamming social bookmarking sites without knowing how to use them. Since content in these websites update frequently, search engines like these types of sites and often visit them (this is commonly termed as Tagsonomy & Folksonomy in Web 2.0). Do some social bookmarking in popular bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network. This may increase your website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.

7). Link Baiting

Suppose you have copied/published another website’s news or content in your blog/website. Don’t forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity.

8). Cross-Linking

Link to internal pages within your site wherever necessary (this is commonly termed Internal Linking). This increases your internal link popularity ,which is another major factor of Google Page Rank algorithm. The best known example of successful internal linking is Wikipedia. Also try to get a content link from websites/blogs that are related to your site theme. Try getting a link from within their site content using a targeted keyword as anchor text (much like Wikipedia does). We know that this strategy can often be hard to implement, but these types of links have more weight from a search engine point of view.

9). Video Promotions

Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, etc.

10). Business Reviews

Write reviews about others businesses or ask your friends/clients to write a review of your business in major business review sites like RateitAll, Shvoong, Kaboodle, Stylefeeder, etc.

11). Local Listings & Yellow Pages

Instead of going global and facing huge competition, make your website local so that search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit your website to Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Superpages, Hotfrog, etc.

12). Article Submission

Write articles of your own and submit them to popular article sites like Ezine, Go Articles, Now Public, Buzzle, etc. This will help you to attain some deep links for your website (though it’s usually a slower process).

13). Press Release Promotion

If you are a business/service provider then go for PR submission in popular PR websites like 1888pressrelease, Open PR, PR Leap, etc. This will help you to publish your site in Google News.

14). Answers

Participate in Answers by asking and answering relevant questions and placing a link to your website in the source section if necessary. If you don’t spam, this is another great way to increase your link popularity (Yahoo Answers, Cha-Cha, Answer Bag, etc.)

15). PPC Ad Campaign

When none of the above strategies work for you, go for a PPC ad campaign with your targeted keywords. Remember that you have to pay to drive more traffic towards your website through PPC.

Closing Thoughts and an Important Note

While all these techniques are cool and build your SEO results, you should first focus on the web page itself before you do any of these things recommended above. Anything you think we missed? Leave a comment and tell us.