On-Page optimization is one of the important factors for websites to rank in search engines. In this blog I want to cover for eCommerce portal, and what you need to do if you have an eCommerce websites. All the basic On-Page SEO steps are same, having unique descriptive Title & Meta tags and content on the site. But what else you can do and you should do.
Include Rich Snippet - Schema.org Microdata Markup
To get an overview of microdata as well as the conventions followed by schema.org, take a look at the Schema.org vocabulary as it is recommended by all the major search engines. Back in June 2011 Google announced that it is going to support structured markups. Historically, Google supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa.
As an eCommerce portal, you can use Rich Snippet on your product pages, customer reviews, offers, breadcrumbs etc. Rich Snippet also improves you CTR from SERPs.
Use of Rel="next", Rel="prev" and view all
Pagination is one of the major problems that always faced by eCommerce sites. Google gave some good instructions on how to implement pagination on your site. This markup can help Google better understand pagination and pass link equity to key pages.
With rel="next" and rel="prev" markup, you can provide a strong hint to Google that you would like Google to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page.
Get User Generated Content (UGC)
eCommerce websites have always had the problem of getting unique content onto product pages on scale. To overcome this it is recommend to enable Customer Reviews and Q&A Content on-page. Customer Reviews and Q&A content can help solve this problem and gives you great scope to get user generated content onto lots of your product pages.
Canonical Tag
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonical URL tag is part of the HTML header on any webpage, inside ... section.
Example: <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/" />
Trust Signs
As an eCommerce website you will be asking your users/visitors for their credit card details. For them to be able to trust you and you are a genuine company and that their personal details are secure. You can do this by enforcing trust signals on the footer of every page. These are the types of trust signals you should be trying to incorporate into your eCommerce website.
Social Sharing Buttons
Social Media Buttons helps you to share your content with the social Web. These buttons allows your visitors to share your content quickly and easily if they feel the content is worth sharing. It can also help you to generate significant amount of traffic to your site, without spending any extra penny.
Social Media Share Button also look at your page to find a relevant Title, Description and Image etc. You should use Open Graph tags on your pages to help them to find these information.
PageSpeed
How fast your website downloads now impacts your page rank online. Fast and optimized pages lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. Google has decided to integrate page speed and quality scores of pay-per-click landing pages in their search engine rankings. Bottom line is that you should care about site speed for your users rather than SEO.
Product XML Sitemap
Create an XML Sitemap listing all your products URLs and submit it in your Google & Bing Webmasters Tools/Center and also list it in your robots.txt file too. That way all your product pages will be easily and quickly crawled by search engines.
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