How to Improve the Online Visibility of Your E-Commerce Store

Search engines love unique quality content. One of the mistakes that web developers make on e-commerce sites make is using the same page title and meta description for all the pages.

If you had an e-commerce site with 200 products and all the pages, including the homepage and category pages had the same title and meta descriptions then your site is going to perform poorly in search engines.

You can check this by doing a site operator search on Google. For instance go to Google and type in site:www.yoursite.com. If your site suffers from this problem you’ll notice that in the results returned all the pages will have the same or familiar titles and meta descriptions displayed. The listings for each page may look the same and not be uniquely descriptive for each page.

You could also set up a Google Webmaster Tools account. Google will be kind enough to give you HTML suggestions as how to improve your pages and resolve any duplication issues.

Make sure you site has a clear hierarchical structure. Pages shouldn’t be buried so deep down the structure that they are hard to get to both for search engines and users. One of the best structures for an e-commerce site is a pyramid structure.

With this structure you’ll have a homepage, with site wide navigation to the categories, and then from the content of the homepage link to the main categories and the best performing products.

The internal linking within the site is important and can help you pass authority to the most important pages. Pages should not be orphaned.

When linking to pages within the site make sure to use keyword rich anchor text, this will help search engines associate pages with the keywords you wish to rank for.

From product pages, link to other associated product pages and related product pages. This is good practice, again not just for search engines but for users.

Use breadcrumb navigation, and include keywords in web page names and category folders.

If your site has a complicated structure then consider using a HTML sitemap.

Once you have the on site work completed, make sure to add your sites to sites within your niche that perform well. One way to easily check which sites do well is to search Google for the keywords that you want to rank for. If there are directory listings that appear in the results then add your site. Some of these may cost for a review, but they may well bring you targeted traffic. If there are blog owners, contact them and ask if they would be willing to accept a guest post.

Participate in forums and social media and boost your online profile and credibility.

Make sure you get listed with Google shopping and add your product feed.