Optimising your Product Pages - May 10, 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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