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Increase Positive SEO Signals and Reduce Negative Signals

Posted by Helmut BerieAugust 20, 2015eCommerce, SEO, Site Search

My last blog outlined the main SEO tools that businesses need. Tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, when set up correctly, help you monitor both the positive and negative factors that affect your site’s SEO.

Positive signals to watch and improve include:

Mobile friendliness – The degree to which your site is mobile friendly will affect your SEO. In April 2015, mobile friendliness became a significant ranking factor for Google in determining a page’s position on the SERPs for Google visitors on mobile devices. Use Webmaster Tools (WMTs) such as Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to monitor and improve your site’s mobile friendliness. As a separate tool, Google offers a quick test that reviews your URL and reports whether the page has a mobile-friendly design.

Keyword rankings – When your site contains relevant, quality content related to search phrases frequently used by visitors of Internet search engines, then these are positive signals for your SEO. Use WMTs to see which keywords and pages rank highest; use this information to determine which content on your site is most influential. Avoid the temptation to pack more of those high-ranking keywords into every page of your site – this could backfire and send out negative signals. Instead, use the keyword data to guide your content development and focus.

Links from other sites to yours – The links you naturally earn from sites with high domain authority (like when you’re mentioned in an e-commerce industry article) equate to positive signals that increase your rankings. However, resist the urge to outright ask publications or associations to add a link to your site – Google has mysterious ways to discern whether a link is simply requested or actually earned. Instead, create standout blogs and provide valuable industry news through social media and PR efforts. When you deliver information that others want to share, you truly earn links that boost your overall SEO efforts.

Structured Data – Structured data improves the bots’ understanding of the entities (products, organizations, blog posts, video objects, etc.) referenced on your site. You can improve the visibility of your pages by marking up the main entities and ensuring organizational markup is present on all pages. Check that structured data used on your side is understood correctly using the tools provided by Bing and Google. Keep in mind that incorrectly implementing structured data might do more harm than good.

Negative signals to watch and minimize include:

Crawl errors – A common crawl error that triggers a warning from WMT is a soft 404. If search engine bots pick up on pages that no longer exist and a no-results page is shown but not accompanied with a 404 http return code, this is a negative quality signal against the domain. To be clear, showing no-results pages is not a bad practice in itself – there are even possibilities to engage with visitors on them. However, they always need to be accompanied with a 404. On spotting soft 404s, you should immediately engage with your web designers to ensure the no-results page behaves as expected. Once the fix is in place, you might choose to “fetch” or “fetch and render” the no longer existing page to ensure it is returning the desired 404 response.

Large number of URLs on site – WMTs will send you warnings if you use too many URLs on your site, which could negatively affect your SEO. To correct this problem, you need to take a hard look at the pages that are already found. The WMT warning message will contain some example URLs; go through the list and confirm whether you want all of these URLs to be indexed. In addition, check for canonicalization issues. Ensure you have blocked access to your site search so that the bots cannot crawl your search. Even if someone links to a result page of your local site search, you don’t want Internet search engine bots crawling the page and adding it to their indexes.

Also think about indexation depth within your site navigation so you can avoid too many pages getting indexed. Generate an impressions/clicks report from the top pages to understand how much attention your deeper pages generate. Limit access to deep pages and consider not allowing all navigation refinements to be indexed.

HTML signals for missing, duplicate, too long or too short meta descriptions or title tags – Meta data still matters, and it’s easy to add any missing meta descriptions or title tags. WMT offers HTML improvement suggestions to show you any meta data that needs correcting. Simply add a description or title that is relevant to the topic and content of the page, within the provided character limits, and then you’ve resolved your problem.

If these tips were helpful, feel free to download our SEO Guidebook, “How to Get the SEO-Driven Revenue You’re Missing.”

Improve SEO with User-friendly URLs

Posted by Helmut BerieJune 17, 2015SEO, User Experience

There is a compelling correlation between well-ranking webpages and them having user friendly URLs. Therefore, improving your site’s URLs is one of many simple ways you can optimize your SEO. Just follow these guidelines:

Identify the Top Keywords to Use – In the actual URL, use keywords that summarize the topic and content of the page. These are often the same keywords as used in the page titles. Making URLs SEO-friendly starts with the discipline of creating quality content where each page is focused on one main topic that can be described in 1-3 words.

Keep the URL Short – Use a few keywords only to keep the URL as short as possible. Any keyword required to state the page topic should be in the URL but nothing else. This not only helps in SEO, but also makes it easy for users to copy and paste or even remember the URL.

Use Real Words – Avoid use of numbers, special characters (with the exception of hyphens, which are recommended to separate words) or made-up words – unless they are a key component of your brand. Only use words that someone might search for. Try to stay clear of URL query strings (URL part following a “?” towards the end of the URL) entirely.

Remove Articles – Take out unnecessary words like “the,” “and” and “an.”

Use Hyphens – A simple hyphen is the best way to separate words; they’re found to be easier to use and to read than an underline mark, period or white space between words.

Use a Consistent Case – Be consistent in whether you use lowercase, uppercase or camelcase words in your URLs. Whichever you choose, follow the same style for all.

Avoid Canonicalization Issues – These issues can arise when multiple URLs direct to the same webpage. Most home pages, for example, can be called up by using any of the following structures:

http://sitename.com
http://www.sitename.com
http://www.sitename.com/index.php
http://www.sitename.com/index.htm
http://www.sitename.com/index.html

However, you want to choose one preferred URL for each page and have the others use a canonical tag. Otherwise, your page authority for these pages can diminish, which negatively impacts your SEO. In addition, you are wasting crawl capacity that might prevent some pages from getting crawled.

Generally speaking, canonicalization issues are considered bad website design, and once they are spotted by Internet search engine bots, it will negatively impact the rankings of the entire site. It is common for duplicate content issues to be canonicalization issues in disguise. If content moves, you should set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the current page. By grouping the duplicate pages together in this way, their combined ranking signals work together for better overall search engine ranking.

We will continue with this blog series on Improving Your E-commerce SEO. Please subscribe to our blog to ensure you are informed about new posts. Also, download our free white paper, “How to Get the SEO-driven Revenue You’re Missing” for more best practices on improving your e-commerce site.

The 2015 Guide for Improving E-commerce SEO

Posted by Dawn MortensenMay 18, 2015eCommerce, SEO

As a retail executive or e-commerce professional, your goal is to produce more revenue. You want site traffic that is high in quantity, but also in quality – you need it to convert.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just one practice out of many in your tool belt. Unless SEO is your full-time job, it’s nearly impossible for you to fully keep up with the details of constant algorithm updates that affect your site’s rankings, like the recent mobile-friendly updates from Google and Bing (a.k.a. “mobilegeddon”).

Plus, it can be difficult to know which SEO-related activities can drive more revenue without causing damage to your site’s rankings.

To help, I’d like to present our new SLI Systems white paper, How to Get the SEO-driven Revenue You’re Missing.

The easy-to-use 22-page guide will help you identify what’s possible with SEO and start on the path to improvement. Whether you have an in-house expert, use an outside agency or need to learn how to do basic SEO on your own, this paper will help you know where you want to go with SEO and outline the main steps to get there. Topics covered include:

Why you need to pay attention to the changing SEO landscape
A review of the basics: Top SEO principles
Two SEO tools you need to set up correctly before doing anything else
Six steps to improving the SEO of your e-commerce site
Major SEO “no-no’s” that can damage your site’s reputation
New streams of SEO-driven revenue most retailers miss out on
How user-generated SEO increases traffic and conversions without negative SEO

At SLI Systems, our search and SEO experts continually monitor and improve the on-site search of more than 1,000 client sites in the e-commerce industry. With more than a dozen years in business, we have gained unique insight into SEO best practices and opportunities, and we’re happy to share them with you.

Enjoy our new white paper now, and stay tuned to this blog for more articles on the topic of SEO in e-commerce.

Optimize Your Search Merchandising for the Holidays

Posted by Shaun RyanSeptember 17, 2013Analytics, Merchandising, Newsletter, Related Search, SEO, Site Search

As an eCommerce professional, you’ve likely been preparing for the holiday shopping season for months – deciding which products to feature, planning orders and organizing marketing campaigns. Retailers predict an 11-20% rise in holiday spending for 2013, with eCommerce and mobile driving much of the growth (Retail TouchPoints, Aug. 12). While the opportunity is great, so is the challenge of making your products stand out. Here are some thoughts on how you can use search merchandising tactics to ensure your holiday campaigns are effective.

Get Insight from your Site Search Data

The first step in successful search merchandising is to look at your site search data for real-time insight into users’ behavior. Review the queries that shoppers type into your search box, along with your site analytics. Which searches are most popular? Do shoppers want a product you don’t have? Are they seeing “no results pages” because they search using different language than you use on your site? Do they move from your results pages to a purchase, or do they jump away from your site without buying?

If you gather such insights from your search data now, you’ll have time to make improvements well before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you don’t already have an advanced site search provider, engaging in such services now can give you the extra set of hands and tools you’ll need to be agile in response to holiday trends.

Use the Right Tools at the Right Time

The second step of a successful search merchandising plan is to know which tools can make the most impact, and how to use them. A couple of my favorite tools for holiday merchandising are landing pages and gift finders.

Landing Pages for Holiday Products: In most cases a relevant search results page is the best page to show your visitors when they type in a search term. However in some cases you want to have more control over their experience and a specialized landing page may be the right tool. For seasonal specials, simply create a web page with your top holiday merchandise and set the page to load when visitors type certain words like Holiday, Christmas or Hanukkah into the search box. Assign a dedicated URL to your holiday landing page, and then use it in holiday email campaigns and advertising. Not only does this promote your holiday specials, but it gives you a trackable link in your Google Analytics so you can gauge the success of the campaign.
Gift Finders: Gift Finders are another way to generate more sales revenue around the holidays. Set up refinements that allow someone to define a set of criteria for a gift – e.g. price, occasion, recipient type and gift type – then see a list of the products that match those criteria. Promote your gift finder on your home page or by using a landing page with a PPC link for email and ad campaigns. When done correctly, it can be a useful tool that increases users’ likelihood of buying from your site. Read more about gift finders in this blog from SLI Systems Co-Founder Geoff Brash.

Branding banners, ribbon overlays and integration of social media are other merchandising tools that can improve the odds of holiday shopper conversion. These and a dozen other tools are covered in the new white paper “Using Site Search Data to Improve Merchandising,” which is a free download from the SLI Systems website.

Lastly, be sure your site search provider offers proper merchandising controls for your site so you can quickly test and easily refine the presentation of promotional messages, products and content on your search and navigation pages. Such agility will help you compete for consumers’ spending money during the holidays and beyond.

SLI Blog

Increase Positive SEO Signals and Reduce Negative Signals

Improve SEO with User-friendly URLs

The 2015 Guide for Improving E-commerce SEO

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