Optimize your webshop
One of Gintou’s subsidiaries: TopNutrition recently launched its new webshop. Before the launch we have spent a decent amount of time setting up a solid SEO strategy. On our other e-commerce web sites organic search accounts for approximately 35% of all sales which makes it obvious that SEO is an important factor in business decisions.
As a second (and maybe third) post on this blog I figured it would be nice to explain a bit of the SEO features and functionality we have implemented on our webshop.
Technology: OsCommerce
The shop is based on OsCommerce, a pretty solid and complete e-commerce package if you’re running on a budget. It’s open source and highly customizable (though this may require some programming knowledge). However, if you are planning to start a webshop I’d sit out the wait for Magento Commerce. They have already released a very promising beta and the first production version is expected around March/April.
Optimized URLs
Standard OsCommerce URLs are really crappy, dynamic and full of parameters. Useless from an SEO point of view. The standard SEO Friendly URLs add-on is better (static, descriptive) but still not optimized. All pages are placed in the domain root which isn’t very usable if you have a lot of different products. We’ve created our own add-on that generates well structured, descriptive URLs without the nonsense.
Page titles
Page titles are perhaps the most valuable factor in SEO. Not only are they indispensable if you want to achieve good rankings but they are also displayed in the SERPS. Having a well written title can increase the CTR from the SERPS with more than 50%. We have set up OsCommerce in a way that we can give every page its entirely unique title. Currently only “product name” or “category name” are displayed but we will add the site name later.
Page descriptions
Page descriptions are underestimated. It’s true that they don’t really matter in terms of ranking but since they’re also displayed in the SERPS they can influence your CTR. Having a great “call to action” can convince someone to click your snippet, even if you’re not in first place.
More in a next post…
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