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In the first BlogHer interview with SEO expert Ann Smarty, we talked about how you can improve your search engine rankings and build your traffic as a blogger.
Rhiannon Wilson left a comment on that post, saying,
I think these are great tips for bloggers. But like she said, blogging is more network focused, but as for us eStore owners, search engines are our lifeblood. We get 80% of our traffic directly from search engine searches. I would love to hear her tips for eCommerce websites.
I contacted Ann Smarty about the idea. She said she would be willing to do another interview with me, this time more focused on business. I sent her some of my own questions and a few I got from a quick email exchange with Rhiannon.
Q: Does the type of business make a difference in the SEO approach?
A: Absolutely. The type of the site, niche and the content it has -- these are decisive factors when it comes to developing an SEO strategy. Blogs build links on their own (therefore, I usually recommend starting a blog at the same domain as the ecommerce site) while commercial websites are harder to both optimize and build in-coming links.
I usually evaluate the future SEO approach on a case-to-case basis: how easy will it be to promote? Will I be able to take advantage of my existing connections or will I need to build new ones? How strong are the competitors? Which platform does the site runs on and how hard will it be to optimize it? Which SEO tactics did the site implement previously? Does it have any entertainment/educational/other value to get people link to it? The questions are plenty!
Q: What's the most important factor in business success in terms of SEO?
A: Time. You should never hurry when it comes to organic rankings. When you have a new site and start changing everything actively or building links, you may raise a red flag. Once you're suspected of shady tactics, you may find it hard to get rid of the bad association for a long time. And that may result in years of forced lower rankings no matter how hard you may be trying.
Therefore my first advice to new businesses (or those businesses that are just coming online) is to take it easy to be safe.
Q: What are some common mistakes you see people make when trying to create a successful ecommerce site?
A: Bad navigation which results in a bad user experience and hard work for search crawlers trying to access deeper pages. Creating a clear structure has never been easy, especially for sites with lots of products hidden deep below the top category pages. I did a post once on how Amazon has been changing its navigation menus over time, which demonstrates how difficult the process really is: Amazon Navigation Menus Evolution.
Pagination is another thing that makes the deep pages hard to find for people and search engines. Besides, pagination creates some duplicate content problems because all the pages have the same title tags and only differ in numbers.
That being said, the absence of clear structure is the most frequent problem eCommerce sites come across.
Q: Are there other common mistakes you see people make when trying to create a successful ecommerce site?
A: First is trying to do that on their own. Please don't think that I'm overestimating my profession here. I have honestly stated in my previous interview that blogs almost never need SEOs. But eCommerce sites do. The structure is too complex and the amount of content is too huge. Chances are that you will need an SEO consultant to guide you through the whole website development process.
The second one is neglecting new trends in HTML, coding, web development, etc. There are so many template-driven eCommerce websites that have no new trends implemented. For example, nowadays, we have Microformats and RDF. Those get integrated by Google and help it better understand the site structure and contents. Here's some basic info for
