SEO for eCommerce

It's not that much different than SEO for other types of sites in terms of how you build rankings. If you don't yet know it's all about the links - we'll talk more about that in a bit.

What is different about eCommerce SEO versus SEO for bloggers or info marketers is the depth and complexity of a typical eCommerce store. With hundreds to thousands of product pages stemming from category, sub category, sub sub category, and possibly even more layers of pages. While simplicity in your build is helpful for users and spiders, it's not always possible and the question becomes where should you focus your SEO efforts?

Unfortunately, there is no one correct answer. But don't let that put a halt to your efforts. Start by building links to your home page. You want to do this because your home page is likely the best designed page of your site in terms of capturing visitor interest and displaying the types of products you have for sale. By getting your home page ranking for important, high traffic terms you'll be getting a wide range of prospects to the most engaging page of your site.

From there you want to evaluate what types of pages to optimize for next. You figure this out by looking at your analytics. Are people getting to your category pages and clicking on a lot of products? Are they leaving once hitting your sub categories? What are your most popular products? Those are a few good questions to begin with.

If you have visitors landing on your category pages and looking at a lot of products and then buying, your category pages might be worthy to get ranked. If people are leaving from these pages without buying, it is probably better to to focus on getting your products ranked.

Basically wherever you're capturing the most interest (where people are buying or digging deeper into your site) is where you want to place most of your effort. Pages where people are leaving or aimlessly clicking around but not buying are not worth getting ranked. They are however worth taking another look at in terms of design - once you figure out what is causing them to leave or lose focus and fix it you can start to work on ranking them.

That is the best approach when it comes to eCommerce stores and SEO. It comes down to your site design and your market; objective, analytical evaluation will tell you what pages are working and those are the pages you want to concentrate on getting ranked.