Common SEO Errors With Retail Websites

There are at least 5 common errors with many retail websites.

1. Hollow PageRank sucking pages.
2. Information spread across many pages.
3. Bad site structure.
4. Sloppy page titles and on site optimization
5. Nothing remarkable.

1.) Some websites have a lot of pages like “view cart,” “shipping information,” “track orders,” “contact us,” and other such administrative pages. In some cases there are many unique permutations of these types of pages depending on what page of the site you are on.

It is in the interest of most retailers to prevent these administrative type of pages from getting indexed, especially if they have a lot of them.

2.) Some websites only offer a limited amount of information (like the manufacturer details) on the product level page. And then they create another page for one or more of the following: product photos, product feedback, manufacturer details, related products, editorial reviews, and consumer feedback. Ideally much of this information can be consolidated into a single page such that pagerank is spread more heavily across a fewer number of pages.

3.) Some retail sites put way too many choices in parallel, featuring low value categories and low value products alongside their top sellers. Seasonally selected items, best sellers, and other high margin items can be promoted more aggressively across the site to help flow more PageRank and exposure to those pages.

Additionally, if a company expands internationally it is recommended to use subdomains or separate domains for the various target markets rather than placing all the content for the various markets on one domain. Clean breaks in language help the robots understand what language and market each site serves.

4.) Many retail sites have page titles that look like this:
My Store.com > Top Level Category > Second Category> Individual Product

The lead words in the page title are the words first seen by searchers and the words that are given the most emphasis by relevancy algorithms. Rather than placing the whole navigation tree in the page title it makes sense to put the product name first, and then perhaps a parent category after it. If you have a strong brand it may also make sense to put your brand name at the end of the page title as well.

5.) Some new ecommerce sites offer nothing new to the market. If you don’t give people a reason to talk about you they probably will not.

Effective businesses keep marketing, adding value to the marketplace, and evolving their business models. A few years ago I could have been happy making $3,000 a month, but instead I reinvested much of my profits into creating free SEO tools ( http://tools.seobook.com/ ) to give away and improving my site design and upgrading my model to a membership site rather than selling a one off ebook.

If you sell online what are you doing to make your business different and more remarkable than the competitors? Why should Google (and potential customers) chose to trust you more than the competition?

About the Author

Aaron Matthew Wall is a Search Engine Optimization Expert and this is guest post as his Viral Blogging Experiment . Thanks Aaron for the pleasure of having you post on my blog

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