You may have spent hours designing, planning and developing your eCommerce website, but if search engines can't see it correctly you may be missing out on some significant traffic (and sales!).
If you have quite a few products in your eCommerce website it can be beneficial to add rel='next' and rel='prev' attributes to your pages <head> tag. This helps the search engines understand how your website pages fit together in relation to each other, and will help pass link equity to important pages.More information on the rel='next' and rel='prev' attributes can be found at the official Google Webmaster Cental blog.
Sometimes less is best - however as search engines rely on website page content to determine search engine rankings lack of content can be detrimental to your rankings. A great way to add more information to your pages without actually adding any visible page content is to use Schema tags to define product values. These tags define information that search engines and social media platforms then use to display your product information in various ways, one example is in google shopping results:
Here you can see that google has detected the product title, image and price from the page content and has displayed the information within the search results. The full list of supported Schema tags for products can be found here - http://schema.org/Product some other interesting schema tags include the following:
There also Schema tags for events, people, places and offers.
Most eCommerce websites will configure the products URL's in one of two ways:
Either option is fine, however if your website uses the second example it's important to add rel='canonincal' tags to any products that can be viewed under more than one category. This is a way of telling google that you are aware that the page cnotent exists in more than one location - otherwise you run the risk of being penalised due to duplicate content. For more information about rel='canonincal' check out this article at the Google Webmasters Blog.If you need any more advice on optimizing your eCommerce website, contact Bang Online Marketing via email at info@bangdigital.com.au , Facebook, Twitter, or on (08) 9328 7000.
