ProStores and other e-commerce platforms have some built in SEO features that must be enabled to be effective, as well as some design elements that should be built during the design of the store that allow your site to be easy to navigate for visitors, and easy to index for search engines. By designing your site with the customer in mind, you can improve the search engine ranking of your store.
Using ProStore’s built in Search Engine tools
Basic Comparison Shopping (No account required)
ProStores provides tools to allow you to upload your products to free comparison-shopping sites Google Base, NexTag, & The Find without registration. These are free and do not require an account so make sure they are enabled, and the products are frequently being uploaded to the sites as signified by the “Last Upload” date. Click on each link to Google Base, NexTag, & TheFind to go to their respective settings and enable them.
Advanced Comparison Shopping (Account required)
Below the basic comparison shopping options, there are advanced options which require an account, and sometimes a fee. They are Google Base (advanced), Shopping.com and Shopzilla.com. The only option that is free is Google Base advanced, the rest require a paying account.
To set up a Google Base account (Now Google Merchant Center), follow the instructions in the video below.
Upload your site map to Google and Yahoo
Next, it’s very important that Google and Yahoo are seeing your site maps. See below for a video on how to set up your site maps with Google and Yahoo.
Build your ProStores site to be Search Engine Friendly
Adding breadcrumbs for navigation
Adding breadcrumbs to your site will make the site much easier for search engines to navigate. When crawling a website, the search engine clicks on a category, then subcategory, and so on, until it gets to your final product. Using breadcrumbs on your site allows users and search engines to navigate backwards from smaller subcategory to major category, and across different subcategories. This allows for better indexing as more pages can be reached from more areas of your site.
Adding Product Listing Navigation
We’ve seen a large increase in search engine results when we added navigation to our product listing templates. I am guessing this is because it adds more words related to the products being searched for to the website. It also adds more relevant search terms to the pages, which search engines see. After using ProStore’s built in tools, the Breadcrumbs and Product Listing Navigation have helped out search engine rankings significantly.
Featured Categories with Sub-Categories listed on Home Page
ProStores gives you the ability to list featured categories on the home page. This is nice however it doesn’t give customers and search engines much information on what’s listed below the featured categories.
By listing the subcategories of the featured categories on the home page, it gives your home page more text for search engines to index, and shows your visitors a greater array of products your store carries with easy links to the most relevant information.
Make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for
Make it as easy as possible for customers to find exactly what they are looking for. Forcing customers to click through 3 levels of pages to find the product they need is extra work IF you can design your site so they can find what they need in 2 clicks.
Customers like it when they find what they need fast, and search engines love it when they can find what your store carries fast. It’s a search engines’ job to get the most relevant information possible to a search engine user as quickly and efficiently as possible. If the information or product is going to be hard for a user to find, it’s going to be ranked lower on a search engine.
Remember, anything that will help website visitors navigate your site and see more products (and text) will help your search engine rank. The better your site is designed and the easier your navigation, the more your site will be appealing to search engines and visitors alike.
Speak your customers language when designing product pages
We ran into a problem when we first designed our site. We spoke the technical language for our products, but not the customer language. When writing page titles, make them 70 characters or less, and written in a way that customers would search for. Compare the 2 examples below. (actual examples, old vs new)
Wash up blade 40-1/2 ‘ x 2-1/4” x 14 holes, metal & rubber for Heidelberg sm 74
Versus
Heidelberg wash up blade for SpeedMaster 74
Leave the detailed descriptions of the product for the product detail area, and let the product title draw the customer in to find out more about the product.
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Thanks!
