2015-01-08



Top SEO Practices That Could Positively Impact Your Online Business

Even though it takes some believing, good SEO practices and optimization of conversion rates can really have a great impact on your site traffic and sales. You just need to take care of some basic issues regarding site management and ecommerce business operation and you will find customers more than willing to keep on visiting you and generating the sales you desire.

What to Do With Out-Of-Stock Products?

If you are sure that the situation is temporary, it is best to leave the pages up and running without hiding, deleting or replacing them. You may want to point visitors to alternatives that are in different colors or are newer models or even similar products of other brands. Try and inform a date when the product is likely to be back and permit backorders or email alerts. To keep interest level high, you could even offer a discount for returning visitors.

What to Do With Products No Longer Being Offered?

The worst thing from an SEO point-of-view is to delete the pages giving error messages to people who had bookmarked them. If an alternative is available, try using a 301 permanent redirect from the earlier web page to the URL of the newer model. This technique informs Google that a new page needs to be ranked enabling you to retain your SEO value. If there are products that serve the very same purpose, you could employ a redirect to the category of the parent to solve the problem of the visitor. If the expired page needs to be deleted, be sure to use a 410 status code to inform Google appropriately.

How to Deal With Seasonal Products?

First reinforce the product categories and then link the seasonal stuff with links and breadcrumbs embedded in the product descriptions. The most important product pages should be optimized. If a product with a huge demand is being launched, add page with a “Coming soon” message and pump up the excitement with unique content, pre-order forms, and launch notifications. Try and leverage social media by integrating suitable links. Adding the current year in the URL for annual sales is a simple way of a 301 redirect when the new page is ready.

How to Deal With New Products

The secret to Google finding and indexing products is a good information architecture comprising the architecture of internal links and structure of the website. From the home page, link the categories and then the product pages. Also remember to link these pages from the parent category. The theme of the website should be optimized to enable presentation of the new products on the home page allowing them to be discovered and indexed faster.

How to Deal With Little or Nil Unique Content

Spend time building unique content for each product page instead of pulling the standard information from the manufacturer’s page and creating problems of duplicate content. Instead of having bare pages with just product photographs, include some relevant and unique content that makes it easy for the search engine to understand what the page contains and how it relates to the rest of the website and how relevant it is for the search term. Among the best traffic growing tips, one is to try and include content that is user-generated to make your pages stand out with unique content.

How to Deal With Category Pages

Consider category pages to be individual home pages as these are vital to your online business. Be sure to add relevant content to the category pages and incorporate product category deep links. Ensure that the URLs of the category pages are search-friendly as this will send out strong hints to search engines regarding the content and relevance to the site. Don’t spoil things by keyword stuffing as this is a sure shot giveaway that you are trying too hard to attract traffic without having relevant and useful contents. Integrate social media and guest blogging to give the category pages their unique identity.

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