Optimising your Product Pages - May 10th, 2008

Many e commerce stores struggle to obtain traffic to their individual product pages, for large e-commerce stores with lots of products this can result in a serious loss of traffic. The main reasons for individual product pages failing to rank are:

• Internal Optimisation
• Poor Internal Linking
• Duplicate Content

There are however a few tactics you can follow to try and get your product pages listings in the search engines, these include:

1. Avoid Using Manufacturer Descriptions
Although it is very tempting to simply copy the generic manufacturer descriptions for your products this should be avoided, this is because all you competitors will be using them as well. When Google sees this content it will deem it as duplicate and most likely favour the site which had the content first. To avoid this duplicate content issue simply re-write your descriptions so they are unique to your site, although this can be time consuming it could greatly improve your traffic levels

2. Add Product Reviews
Add an option for users to add product reviews to your site. This is a great was of adding relevant unique content for free, this content will also be unique on your individual site

3. Use no-follow
Many e-commerce sites needlessly pass PR (Page Rank) to pages which they do not want to rank, i.e shopping cart, privacy and login pages. To ensure that PR is not passed onto these page simply add the no-follow attribute to any links pointing towards them

4. Internal Link Structure
It is a good idea to link your most important pages from the main navigation, this ensure there are more relevant links to your important pages. To help enforce your top products it is a good idea to link to them from the home page, possibly in a best sellers section. In addition you should link to popular products within textual content, this could be implemented by linking similar products together in their product descriptions

Implementing these changes should help your product pages to prevail in the search engine listings, helping you to attract more long tail keywords which are more likely to turn into conversions

Paul
SEO Project Manager

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The Negative Effects Of Splash Pages - May 9th, 2008

When you work in Search Engine Optimisation you come across many different websites, some great sites and some not so great sites but one thing that is sure to hinder your campaign weather you have an amazing site or a less than great site is a splash page. A splash page is a page that loads when you go to a website but it isn’t the homepage, its a page before, usually with an animation on it and a single button to move onto the homepage of the site.

Splash pages can have a negative effect on your website from two different angles. From an SEO perspective and also from a usability perspective.

When it comes to SEO your homepage is the strongest page on your website, this is because it should have good indexable content with a nice menu structure that can be spidered easily by the search engines. Your inner pages feed from the link juice (page rank) that is taken from your homepage that receives all the links to your site and with a good internal linking structure your site can benefit from this. When you use a splash page you are effectively robbing your website of its strongest page. Your average splash page will contain no content as its usually an image or some flash and it will only have link on the page, A worst case scenario is that that one link or redirect that is used to get to your homepage will be embedded in flash which would mean in the eyes of Google your website would consist of 1 page with no content on it. If this was the case Google would not give this page any relevance to any keywords. Even if the link or redirect could be seen by Google and it followed then what should be your best page is now considered as an inner page for the site.

The second negative effect of a splash page is from a Usability point of view. If you are a large site like a brand such as Nike then i would consider this to be less of a problem as your users will probably be there because they know your site and they have not just stumbled across it searching for something. If you are a smaller site then a splash page can be a problem for your site. When it comes to usability a website has approximately 3 seconds to keep the attention of a user before they hit the back button or they navigate away. Usually a splash page will not provide enough content on the page to keep a users attention. Also a splash page makes more work for the user to find the homepage let alone what they came to the website to look for.

So next time you are having a website designed or if you are thinking of a re-design remember these two vital reasons not to have a splash page because with poor SEO and poor usability you could end up with very few users.

Gary
NSEO Programmer

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