Using SEO Effectively In Ecommerce Web Development

Author: Ronaldo Rick

Long term commercial success on the Internet is part product and part promotion. That's where SEO comes into the picture with eCommerce web development. No matter how brilliant or amazing your products are, success is elusive unless the eCommerce company is promoted properly.

Putting SEO into eCommerce web design isn't exactly an intuitive job. You must always be on the lookout for different methods and opportunities where you can sell your item to people and promote it to search engines at the same time. Here's where you can start.

Sticking to Structure

As much as avant garde site designs are novel and interesting, they're largely ineffective for the purpose of promoting your site to search engines. You'll be better off keeping to the HTML and XHTML structure standards set by the W3C, which has been proven to be helpful when it comes to search engine rankings.

What does this mean for your site? The people handling eCommerce web development should be be able to plan your site such that there's a clear structure, and that each page is no more than a few clicks away to all the others. Closeness of pages and navigability are two traits of good structure that your customers will be sure to appreciate as well.

URL Clean-Up

Most barebones eCommerce solutions and shopping cart software packages would give you product pages that have all sorts of random strings and characters in them. The cheap way out might be intelligible to machines, but it's far from easy-to-use for humans. And this could be hurting SEO for your eCommerce company to boot.

It's a good idea to put keywords and short descriptions in the URLs of your product pages to maximize SEO opportunities. If you're selling appliances, for example, you could put in category terms like 'kitchen appliances' or 'personal blenders' if you're trying to sell an Oster blender because they can act like search keywords as well. It doesn't hurt to use the item's actual name as its URL, too.

Remember, URLs are still viewed as text components most of the time by search engines. That means they're as useful as anything if you need more SEO for your site.

Describing in Depth

Customers aren't the only people who get to read your product descriptions. The search engines get to read through the text on your product pages as well, which is why you should give them a lot of time during your eCommerce web development stage.

A good rule of thumb to live by is to always thoroughly describe the item, complete with adjectives wherever possible. This gives the search engines more relevant content to see, as well as increases the likelihood that you'll have a search term or two hidden in there. Use words like 'personal,' 'effective,' 'cheap' and other similar terms that customers will probably type into their search engines.

When doing eCommerce web development, always scrutinize every step of the process and see if there's an element that will be visible to search engines. As soon as you find one, use it regardless of how big or small it is. For all you know, an SEO gold mine could be right under your very nose.

About the Author:

We at Jelecos.com do more than just eCommerce web development. We know exactly how to sell on the Internet, and we make sure that your site is visible to search engine results pages as well as your target market.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Using SEO Effectively In Ecommerce Web Development