New Website Build - SEO Advice

[monthlylocal]

Hi All,


We are on the cusp on signing off on the build of an e-commerce store selling digital products. Is there anything that I should include in the spec that is a must in terms of ensuring the site is as SEO friendly as it can be?


Many thanks

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Oh lord, how late have you left it?

This should have been in the build spec.

You need to ensure you have individual titles descriptions and keywords on a per page/product basis. (KW not important at the moment but are more so for product sites as you can dynamically pull this data for other uses

You need product feeds, RSS feeds, you need independent titles for on page, the ability to use H tags, also microformatting (rich text snippets) for product attributes.
hell you need lots of stuff to help the site.

What of the above have you specified?

It never ceases to amaze me how many people KNOW ranking is mission critical, yet look at the SEO of a new build as a bolt on rather than a core consideration.

If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up.

the above is taken from the Google guide to SEO

Hopefully you are not too far down the road and/or have some if not all of the above (and more) available in the site.

 

[nitro23456]

As above but don't forget URL structure which can be a real pain to 'retrofit'.

 

[monthlylocal]

Thanks OWG - very useful.

Definitely not too late as I am still concluding talks on costs etc - So any more great advice very warmly welcomed.

Many thanks

Tref

 

[rich06]

As above, onsite SEO should be considered before and during the build and not an after thought. This is a usual problem with new launches.

Creating the meta descriptions and titles for each of the product pages can be a lengthy process, especially for a large e-commerce site. You can get through this by using a concatenate function in excel to save time. Here's a post on how to do this - http://www.inboundsource.com/2012/09/creating-meta-descriptions-in-bulk.html

This will keep them unique and will avoid any duplicated content.

Another thing to consider is how you are going to track your site. Make sure analytics and all the webmaster tools are included from day one. Also consider how your goal funnels will work and what your custom reports should look like. It's important to be capturing this data from the start.

Make sure your dev team knows exactly what tracking code goes on which pages before they publish.

Make sure your copywriters know what the keywords are for each page as well. This might not matter so much for the deeper product pages as they will attract long tail keywords, but you definitely need to do this for category and higher level pages. Look at the competition on page one for your main targeted terms and see how they have optimised their content. Look at their keyword densities and try to beat it.

 

[Baz Watkins]

Every single page and product you have has a keyword which needs to be utilised properly. Your website should be built with this in mind. For ecommerce that means writing individual descriptions with sentence based keywords, then titles need to be keyword based, meta and so on.

One of the key reasons ecommerce sites cost what they do, is the fact that seo'd content takes a lot of time. It needs to be done throughout the build.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

you can construct titles and descriptions by pulling dynamic data from the database and suffixing/prefixing/integrating other content.

It is exactly this sort of thing that makes the difference between success and failure of an Ecomm site.