The Most Significant Tips to Optimize your E-commerce Website

Optimizing a website generally involves 2 stages:
1) Planning out each web page so that the search engines can understand exactly what the content is about.
2) Obtaining links from other relevant and trusted websites back to your website.
If you can successfully complete these stages it can lead to your website ranking highly in the search engines and generating lots of free traffic and customers.
The problem with most eCommerce websites is that they can contain hundreds and possibly thousands of products yet the product descriptions tend to be very basic or simply generic product descriptions taken from a manufacturer’s brochure or website.
In order to optimize an eCommerce website successfully, you have to expand these minimal descriptions, be creative and introduce the keywords that are relevant to the products in such a way that they are informative and flow correctly. Some websites have product descriptions stuffed with keywords yet they have no logical meaning. The search engines will spot this and penalize your website.

Here are 10 eCommerce website optimization tips:
1. Create and maintain a clean and uniform site structure. The home page should promote the product categories whilst all the internal pages should follow a clear path easily understood by both search engines and customers.
2. Every product page should have a unique title. This is one of the most important areas of eCommerce website optimization. Products can be very similar but you have to try and differentiate them from one another by some unique variation.
3. Select an appropriate unique keyword for every webpage reflecting the important phrases within the webpage content.
4. Create an interesting and relevant description for each page. This description is the snippet that appears in the search engine results pages and the more interesting you make the wording the better chance you have of getting a potential customer to click through to your website.
5. Create a visible ‘Breadcrumb’ navigation structure which will enable customers to find their way through your website easily. This helps to indicate to visitors whereabouts they are in the site and offers them shortcut links to previous pages. It also improves eCommerce website optimization.
6. Optimize all images by completing the Alt tags using relevant keywords. This is the alternative text that the search engines can read as they cannot read images on their own.

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7. Generate an XML sitemap which will help the search engine robots to find and index all the webpages. If the eCommerce website has hundreds of pages you can generate and submit multiple sitemaps.
8. Submit your site manually to SEO friendly directories. Filling in the submission forms manually and carefully helps to make the directory administrators job an easier one and hopefully approve a link to your site.
9. Submit quality articles with titles and content relevant to your website and keywords to article directories and social bookmarking sites. Article submission is an important part of eCommerce website optimization as it is one of the quickest ways of gaining high-quality backlinks. Submit the article URL’s to do follow bookmarking sites. You need to select the do to follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them.
10. Monitor the success of your eCommerce website optimization with a good analytics tool. There are some excellent free analytics tools available but if you have a particularly large site you may have to spend some money on a paid version. You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool.
By putting the above tips into practice you can help to strengthen your eCommerce website optimization and improve its rankings in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.