5 SEO Tips for Product Pages

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Thursday, 27 March 2008

5 Key tips to optimizing your e-commerce product page for search engines.

When it comes to search engine optimization, e-tailers spend the majority of their time on the the home page of their website. While the home page of an e-commerce website is one of the most important areas to optimize for search, its not the most important and certainly doesn't have the affect on ROI that the product page does. Your organic SEO efforts should somewhat mirror that of you're Paid Search campaigns. If your successful in this efforts it will reduce the amount you have to spend on paid search to get more customers to your product pages.

Most e-tailers do some SEO optimization work to their product pages, but typically just stick to the basics. Let's take just a few minutes and look a 5 SEO tips that will go a long way towards bringing in more customers to the right pages.

1. Product Page Title Tag

The title tag of the product page is something that's easy to get confused about. Do you put your site name first, then the product name? Or do you even need your site name in the URL?

The best way to solve this is to think about what you're doing and how it will appear to searchers. The page title is what will be shown as a link to your page on the search engines in the organic rankings. So you should think about how you'd like your link to look. You have two options here.

Site.com - Widget A
Widget A - Site.com

While a lot of sites use the first method with success, the best method is the second. It gets the product that your offering on the front and center, and then displays the name of the site. If you're an Amazon.com or Old Navy, then it makes sense to put more focus on your brand name, but if you're Bobs Discount Widgets, you just want the customer to know you've got the widgets they want.

2. The HTML Header Tags

HTML Header tags are used on pretty much every website today, and are heavily used in standards based sites of recent years. Most people know that the purpose of the Header tags is to define header with text, but not everyone knows of their significance with search engines, especially Google. To search engines, the header (if used properly) should define what the page is about, and since there are up to 6 HTML header tags, you can describe the page pretty clearly to the search engine by simple using the header tags and they will in turn provide a boost in keyword relevance to the words wrapped in the header tags

So where do you use the header tags? The H1 tag should always describe the topics and content of the page. Wrap the H1 tag around your product names, but not the descriptions. You simply want the product title without the description as an H1 tag.

Don't forget to use CSS to style your header tags. They don't have to be big and bold

Check the W3C site for more information on how to use header tags

3. Image Alt Tags

Simple yet often overlooked, there isn't a better way to increase keyword relevance and density on your e-commerce product page while than taking advantage of image alt tags. As if the SEO benefits wasn't enough, the purpose of image alt tags is to make your site more accessible.

4. Custom Product Descriptions

If your using copy from the manufacturer of the product as the description on your product page, you may be hurting your changes to rank higher without even knowing it. Most of the time, to get their products online as fast as possible, e-tailers will use whatever product descriptions they can find, which usually means using manufacturer descriptions. The problem with this is, LOTS of other online stores are doing the same thing, and to the search engines, all these pages with the exact same text isn't a good thing, it looks like duplicate content.

It is recommended that you at least alter your descriptions somewhat if you can't write them yourself. Just go in and replace a few keywords and add a few lines here and there. The more original and relevant your copy is, the more the search engines will view your page as a valuable resource.

5. Product Linking

Linking to other relevant products from within your descriptions can really boost your keyword relevance for that product. For example, on the product page for "Widget A" you might want to mention that Widget A makes a great add on to Widget B while linking to Widget B.

How does this help? Lets look a bit closer. Your product page for Widget A will be identified by search engines as a resource for the keyword you've optimized the page for (Widget A in this case) so any links within the Widget A page will receive more relevance for the keyword "Widget A", and in our case that link would be Widget B which is also a widget. It might sound confusing at first but it all has to do with your product pages being a relevent source of information.