Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs
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The fundamentals of search engine friendly design apply to all types of sites, including e-commerce catalog sites. The beauty of the dynamic e-commerce catalog is that generating search engine friendly e-commerce catalogs is easy. This document will give you a walk through of a typical e-commerce store, ranging from its homepage to its catalog pages, and from a product page to a brands landing page, explaining how to optimize each page to leverage organic search engine traffic.
The format is similar to navigating through a typical e-commerce Web site. We will start with the homepage, travel to the category pages, then move on to the sub-category pages and then down to the product page. We will also touch on the brand pages and the site map.
Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Web Sites
The typical e-commerce homepage has the company logo, some company specific information at the top, side bar navigation at the left, more prominent navigation in the middle of the page and featured products and sales on the right side of the page. I created a typical screenshot of the various pages to provide clarity throughout this document. The homepage will typically look like this image. Let's pick apart each section of the homepage from a search engine optimization standpoint.
Header
The header, which is typically an include file on each page, contains the company logo and top bar navigation. The logo should be a link to your homepage, and contain an alt tag and possibly a title attribute in the link tag. The remaining top navigation can be in nicely formatted text links. There is no real reason to make these top navigational links graphic buttons like many e-commerce sites currently do. Instead, use simple text links and format them with cascading style sheets to make them look nice.
Another tip is to dynamically change the alternative text tag for the company logo for each page to represent the same text you have on the title of the page. This way, when you conduct an allinurl:www.domain.com site:www.domain.com lookup in Google, it will display all the pages of the site and not give you that annoying message that they omitted results because they looked to be duplicate. Google currently does not use alt text within their ranking formula, so there is no current benefit to change the alt text for ranking purposes. For usability and credibility reasons, you always want to include the store's phone number in a location that is clearly visible on each page. Thus many sites include this information in the header file.
Left Side Navigation
The beauty of the left hand side navigation is its ability to solve two common e-commerce issues. The first solution is usability, having a well-defined left hand side navigation bar will provide a level of clarity to your Web site. Web site visitors will know how to easily navigate throughout your site as long as you keep the navigation consistent throughout each and every page. The second solution is search engine visibility, having a mini site map on the left side of each page makes it easy for search engines to crawl and then index your Web pages.
Since this document is mostly about the search engine friendliness of your e-commerce shop, let's discuss the second point in more detail.
Crawlers, by nature, need a method of locating your pages. Many sites that exist today make it hard for crawlers to locate these pages on your site. For example, let's say that your left hand side navigation is designed in Flash. Most search engines have a hard time finding the links within Flash files, so the search engines will not be able to locate the pages behind the Flash files. Problematic navigation elements can be found in my article named Internal Linking Structure Elements Strategy.
A text based side bar will work wonders in having the crawlers navigate throughout your site. In addition, it will provide an easier shopping experience for your customers.
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