In this post I am going to share with you more ways to optimize your e-commerce website. It will follow on from the article: 8 Steps To Achieve Top Rankings For Your E-commerce Business. If you have not read it, I would suggest you take a look now, as it will also help you optimize your content. Combine what I will show you in this post and it will give you a complete overview of how to get your e-commerce website optimized for profit.

Basic Optimizations For Your Pages

Optimize Your Headings
A lot of e-commerce websites do not realise the importance of having a good heading which can be the difference of having your product listed on the search engines to not being found at all. To understand this, I will be showing you how to place your keywords using heading tags that can be easily implemented. Since there are already many articles explaining what the <h1>,<h2> and <h3> tags are, I will let my friend Nicolas Prudhon explain it to you: Did You Get Your Heading Tags All Wrong?.

Our focus will be optimizing the product and category pages within an e-commerce store. Do remember we are trying to optimize your e-commerce store so that more traffic is driven to your products that will lead to a sale. It is not as important to optimize other non-product pages such as your about us and contact us pages. Though I have covered on how to do that in my article: 8 Steps To Achieve Top Rankings For Your E-commerce Business.

Optimizing Your Categories Page
The most important aspect in optimizing your categories page is aiming to get the title of the category in a <h1> tag. For example if you are selling Apple iPods and the main category they fall under are “MP3 and Portable Players”, and the sub-category is “iPods”, then you want to have the following:

<h1>MP3 and Portable Player</h1>
<h2>iPods</h2>

It is as simple as this and too often we overlook all this. The next part we will look at is optimizing the products.

Optimizing Your Products Page
More than likely the search engines will find products on a website first, which are more relevant to a customer’s search. Therefore it’s crucial to optimize your products pages well to capture the traffic and ultimately create a sale. Continuing from our example of selling Apple iPods, we will be more descriptive this time and look at selling the “Apple iPod nano 4 GB Silver (3rd Generation)”.

What we want to achieve is to have the title of your heading containing the details of your product. For example you will want to have the following tags in place:

<h1>Apple iPod nano 4 GB Silver (3rd Generation)</h1>
<h2>Apple iPod features</h2>
<h2>Apple iPod specifications</h2>

Here is an example on a website:

Hopefully you can see how important it is to have the right tags in place within your products page. If we want more traffic, we need to optimize these pages for the search engines to find us and ultimately we will generate more sales.

Telling Search Engines You Have An XML Sitemap

Informing search engines that you have an XML Sitemap is the best way to help them index your content faster. It won’t necessarily help you achieve a higher ranking, but it will definitely help you get onto a search engine’s crawler. Learn more about the Importance Of A Sitemap for your Internet Business.

There are two ways that you can create an XML Sitemap, manually or dynamically. Most e-commerce packages or solutions have a built in option to generate the XML Sitemap dynamically for you and all you have to do is have a webmaster account with the search engines. On a regular basis you will need send an update to the search engines to get them to crawl through your site to add your updated products and categories to their index. Ask your e-commerce software provider to find out more. Alternatively to create an XML Sitemap manually, continue to read below.

Creating An XML Sitemap Manually
There is a simple program that I run that is available for free on the Internet. It’s called XML-Sitemaps and all you have to do is enter web address into their system and the rest will be done for you. Once the XML Sitemap has been created it will give you different options to save your file. Select the sitemap.xml option and download it to your computer. Then all you have to do is upload it to your e-commerce website’s main directory. The search engines will do the rest.

If you want to view your sitemap simply type in (replacing your-domain-name with your web address):

<your-domain-name>/sitemap.xml

As your inventory changes, you’ll have to re-generate XML Sitemaps. To make sure they’re up to date, the best way is to set up a cron job, which I will show you in a later post.

Take what I have showed you and apply it to your e-commerce website and watch your traffic improve. I continue to use this strategy throughout my e-commerce websites and it has proven to work.

Tyrone Shum
Optimizing E-commerce Websites