"Basics of e-commerce" (part 2): 12 ways to improve your SEO

I’m pretty sure you have ever wondered how to increase the number of customers in your e-shop, every owner does. First of all we have to ensure there is a constant growth in new users and facilitate the way for the users that may know the brand but don’t know the address of the site. Only when there are users coming we can expect to have the increase in sales.

This is the second part of our E-commerce tutorial . In the first part we focused on how take care of the content presented in online shop -  when well cared for, it can make the process of browsing through the  website a pleasurable activity for clients.

There are various techniques to generate traffic, but today we’ll focus strictly on one of them – SEO. Frequently, this is the main medium through which the users visit our site. They can be either interested in a specific type of product, or just be someone who looks for more general information about their hobby, but is not planning ob buying antyhing. In any of these cases we should care about the best exposure of our site, so we can get the traffic right where we want it.

Google has about 95% share in the web search market in Poland, therefore we have to focus mainly on the actions related with positioning in their search engine. The algorythms used for creating the search results are very complicated and not fully available to the public. This is highly confidential and availbale only to Google employees, but basing on the experience, we may perceive some elements to be of higher or lesser relevancy to the actual positioning.  

12 important factors that influence your search engine results position:

1. Unique content
   Nowadays, this is one of the most important factors that influence the website position is the search results. Original and not duplicated content is something that is not only well received by the search engines, but also by the users who look for relevant content. This can be additional factor that influences the users to make purchase.
2. Client reviews
   Client reviews, that are placed under available products on your website, are also considered as an important factor. Having client reviews on the site not only gives us additional unique content, but, what’s more important, doesn’t cost us a dime, since it is content is created by the users.
3. Proper usage of H1-H6  headers¹
   Headers enable the search engines to identify the content importance on the site. For eg. H1 or H2 headers should contain the page title (for instance product name or category name). We should also be wary that placing too many H1 headers on site is not recommended - usually we should be aiming to have only one per page.
   
   

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2. Filled in metadata²
   It is very important to have the metadata filled in on the pages we want to be indexed by search engines, those elements are the excerpt of the page contents.
    

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3. Clean and readable site navigation
   Through the proper menu and category structure we facilitate the user paths on the site, what is also relevant for the search engines.

2. Website performance
   Page loading speed is crucial for the users, the longer we let them wait for the site to load, the higher the probability they will leave and never come back. Search engines promote the pages optimized for the best user experience, so this has also become a relevant factor to influence the positioning. The faster the page loads the better - to check how your website performs and what you can change to improve it, check one of the Google tools – Google Page Insights.
3. Adjustment to mobile devices
   Google openly admits, that websites adjusted to mobile devices will have better positions in mobile search results. Because of that, nowadays having a website created with Responsive Web Design technology seems to be a must. If you want to check if your site is well adjusted to be displayed on mobile devices, you can use another Google tool.
    
4. URL structure and readability
   The URLs should have a proper structure and be readable to users. For exmaple, the following example is readable to users: https://www.zalando.co.uk/womens-ankle-boots-sale/ while this one is not: http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/productlist/air-optix-contact-lenses/N=350006-352184. Although the search engines won’t have any problem with indexing any of those URL’s, it is a user experience that counts the most.
   
   

1. XML map
   Generating and placing the XML sitemap³ with all the site links on Google Webmaster Tools⁴  (currently Google Search Console) will facilitate indexing all the subpages of our website and will allow us to check if there were any problems with indexation.
2. Robots.txt file
   Robots.txt file will allow us to tell the search engines which of the pages should not be indexed, for instance it is wise not to allow user account pages to be indexed.
3. Social media integration
   Social media sites, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or Google+, allow us to create fan base for our brand. User, seeing the activities of other users, may be convinced that our products are worthwhile, since they have already attracted attention. High traffic coming from the social media site is also a signal for search engines that the site content is valuable to users, which strengthen our position in the search results.
4. SSL certificate 
   In 2014 Google has announced that having a SLL certificate installed on the website and using HTTPS protocol will be taken into account for creating search engine results. It was said that initially it will only have a small influence but it will increase over time due to Google’s focus on the web security. It’s wise to also consider having a SSL certificate installed already, so the sum of all the factor will strengthen our position in search engines.

 

At the end we would like to dispel on of the most commonly repeated error, which is result of one of the previous but no longer valid SEO approaches. Using presell pages⁷ and synonymous articles⁸ do not lead to better search engine results, therefore it is an enormous waste of time and money, what can be easly avoided.


In the this part of our cycle, we’ve shown you how to approach the basics of SEO for you e-commerce site. Eventually, sum of all of the even smallest factors affects your site position in search result pages, so you shouldn’t omit any of them. Look out for the third article from our basics of e-commerce cycle, where we will show you how to increase conversions with e-mail marketing.

¹ H1-H6 are elements of HTML code that are equivalent to written text. The numbers refer to the importance and the size of the element – the lower the number the higher the importance and the bigger the elements is displayed on the website. 

2 H1-H6 are elements of HTML code that are equivalent to written text. The numbers refer to the importance and the size of the element – the lower the number the higher the importance and the bigger the elements is displayed on the website. 

3 XML sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs within the site additionally including their weight or update date.

4 Google Webmaster Tools is one of the Google’s tools for diagnosing sites search engine optimization and search terms

5 Robots.txt is a file which allows to „tell” search engines which pages within the whole website should not be indexed by robots.

6 Robots.txt is a file which allows to „tell” search engines which pages within the whole website should not be indexed by robots.

7 Presell pages are specific websites for publishing content with plenty of backlinks pointing to the websites we want to position in search results

8 Synonymous articles are created by copying the base article and replacing some of the phrases with their synonyms. This action was taken in order to quickly create large amounts of unique content without the need to create articles from scratch.