A lot of our clients come to us with on-line shops and the main issue we come across is title tags and page descriptions. When we are talking on-page optimisation the title tag and the meta description tag are highly important.
Unfortunately a great percentage of shops we see use the same title and description throughout the site. Another great problem we come across is not using a URL re-write to turn ugly URL's into user and search engine friendly URL's. This combination of errors completely destroys the sites organic ability to rank highly in the search directories.
I talk of 'organically' ranking as if we design the e-commerce site the right way, that is our result, a site that naturally is optimised for the search directories 'organic seo' which in turn makes the entire job of SEO easier.
First the title tag, this is what the user sees in the web browser bar (see fig 1.0) this needs to be written for the person looking at your site but also for the search engines, if we are talking a product based site this in essence is not overly hard. As I outlined earlier one common mistake is to have the same title tag throughout the website.
What not to do:
xyz.com.au The best resource for keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword
We see this so often it is not funny, in some cases the title tag is longer then the browser bar and is just the sites products or keyword phrases going on forever this is a real big no no. The other common fault is putting the domain name in the beginning of the title (this can be seen as SPAM) Furthermore Google advise not to do this either as laid out in their optimisation guidelines.
Before we start to write out title tag we need to consider the search engines let us look at Google and Yahoo, Google will display up to 66 characters including spaces and punctuation. Yahoo on the other hand will display up to 120 characters including spaces and punctuation, we can address this in two ways either limit out title to 66 characters or write a split title.
A split title for Google and Yahoo
SEO – Advice on writing better title tags for Google & Yahoo | On-page optimisation techniques & advise
Now the first part of the title is only 61 characters and will be indexed and displayed in full by Google, the second part is for Yahoo. Now with this method you need to understand how Google and Yahoo treat long titles. Google will display up to the last full word then crop accordingly so we will see the Yahoo and the pipe (|) Yahoo on the other hand just chops off once it has hit the character limit. So bare in mind if you are going to write split titles be as close to the the limit on the Google side as possible so as to keep the title making sense.
When it comes to the length on the description tag it should be noted that there is no actual limit on the length of the description but only a snippet is shown to the searcher, with this in mind we recommend the first 150 characters be written to form a concise enticing paragraph. It is also to be noted that the description tag will not directly influence your sites ranking. The snippet or description should be written to entice the searcher to click through to your website this is the primary job of the meta description tag.
"WE SEO provide a complete marketing solution, Internet and direct marketing in Brisbane Sydney and Melbourne Call 1300 78 50 60 today."
Not only do we want our site to have good saturation and rankings within the search directories, but we want when the searcher is presented with a list of results, we want the highest chance for that user to click through to our website.
Unlike the description tag, the URL can and does have an impact on your sites ranking, a well written URL helps the search directories and the end user it should be descriptive. We find the URL is so often overlooked by the developers which is a shame as it is not difficult to integrate a URL re-write module into all modern .php based websites. The job of the url re-write is to turn a URL such as...
When we insert an image into a web-page there is a tag called the image ALT tag, you may of noticed this when hovering your mouse over an image. Image ALT tags are also often forgotten about and another resource for search engines indexing and ranking your page has gone. Image ALT tags again should be descriptive to the page or product in question.
"Canon G9 digital camera"
Let us look at an example of all these factors working together
Digital cameras | Canon G9 compact camera 12.1 mega pixel | Reviewed as the best compact camera available | Free delivery
Canon G9 compact digital camera, 12.1 mega pixel with image stability technology. Reviewed as the world’s best compact camera.
http://www.xwz.com.au/digital-cameras/canon/Canon-G9-Compact-Camera.html
Canon G9 digital compact camera
What does all this actually look like?
Here we have all the above as it would look in HTML format, you can see the HTML of your page by selecting view source in your web browser often under the 'View' tab in your browser navigation bar.
<title>Digital cameras | Canon G9 compact camera 12.1 mega pixel
| Reviewed as the best compact camera available | Free delivery</title>
<meta name="description" content="Canon G9 compact camera,
12.1 mega pixel with image stability technology Reviewed as the world's best compact camera." />
<img src=http://www.xwz.com.au/images/canon/canonG9.jpg" alt=Canon G9 compact camera">
Now you may be sitting there going, "you lost me on the second sentence" so let us try and make it a little easier for you. If you have not yet built your new product based website, ask your developer about open source platforms such as.
Drupal and Jooma are both CMS platforms, personally I would call Drupal more of a website framework than a CMS but none the less can still be considered a CMS or "Content Management System" Both these platform have shopping carts available for them with all the needed modules to make all we have talked about simple and hassle free. Best of all they are all free, as they are all open source. Magento is a complete product bases site solution and we highly recommend it. Magento is easy to use, and again all we have spoken about it comes with straight out of the box.
You want to ask your developer for the following.
In most cases when adding new products to a store you are presented with a product name, short description and an ability to upload images. In the easiest scenario and let's look at Virtuemart a shop front module for the Joomla platform along with the plug-in SH404SEF a URL re-write module for the Virtuemart shopping cart.
In this scenario all you have to do is write good product titles following the advice we have laid out here and the same for the short product description. Now remember it about the first 150 characters that are going to be in the search snippet, in most cases you will be writing a longer short description than that, just be aware the first 150 characters are what is going or not going to make someone click to your site.
We cannot go into every platform available it would simply be to in-depth and quite complicated to talk about all the different ways this optimisation advice could take place. We also assume your website or future website is built using .php and running or will be running on a Unix based Apache web server. This is due to the fact it is the most common scenario.
This article is only touching on what is required to achieve higher rankings and more traffic, apart from the mentioned ways to improve your page optimisation there is far more to be considered and many more optimisation techniques to gain more traffic and directory exposure. For a complete analysis or for a consultation for your on-line business please call one of our friendly consultants on 1300 78 50 60. We can take care of everything mentioned in the above article and help your business discover a whole new market base. Call WE SEO today and leave your mark on your market.