What follows are five important items that can be used by an e-commerce site to gain traction on the major search engines. Some take more effort than others, but pursuing all five can help your site move up in the rankings and bring in more traffic. Please note that this list is in no way comprehensive, as there are literally hundreds of things that must be considered when optimizing for E-commerce.

1. Don’t Neglect the General Keyphrases

First, make sure that you target general phrase as well as product-specific phrases. When optimizing an e-commerce site, a lot of people will ignore the fact that searchers are using general phrases to find a supplier of the category of products being sold - and those phrases are more popular than individual, specific product phrases. The other advantage of targeting general phrases is that they tend to bring in people who are lifetime shoppers rather than shoppers who are product-oriented or price-oriented. For example, if you had an e-commerce store that sold office furniture, somebody who typed “office furniture” would be more likely to be looking for a site that he could return to time and time again for his furniture needs. On the other hand, if someone typed in a specific manufacturer and model number, she might buy that item from you one time, but she might not come back for multiple purchases. Both of these people are valuable, but in the grand scheme of things, the person who is searching for the resource can be a more valuable customer over a lifetime than the person who is searching for the individual product and who might simply be price shopping - and checking out your competition while doing so.

2. Make Sure Your Server Is Working for You

Next, make sure that your server behavior has been modified so that your product pages are automatically optimized each time they are generated. Note that search engine spiders will read your code post-parse, and this means that they will treat your code like it is fixed even though it was created on the fly by your server. To take advantage of this, look carefully at how your database is set up. If it’s like most databases, such as MySQL or Oracle, there will be separate fields for, for example, product type, product number, color, brand, and so on. The trick is to make sure that your database is set up in such a way that the keyphrases that identify an individual product are separated and can be pulled from the database.
If the identifying information for search purposes for a particular item includes (for example) the color, the manufacturer, and the model number, you need to make sure that the server can access this information from the database and put it in the appropriate places on the page for optimization purposes. By setting up the database with fields for each piece, this can be done much more easily.

But it’s a mistake just to assume that while you are pulling this product information, you’re deciding on your own what’s relevant, what’s not relevant, and in what order the information should go. You must us research tools rather than relying on instinct. Do searchers normally type in the model number first, the brand name first, or the color first? You don’t want to guess, because the right order can give you a great boost in the rankings.

3. Make Sure Your Pages Are Spiderable

A critical part of e-commerce is making sure that search engine spiders can see and index all of your product pages. While Google and Yahoo! each have a site mapping tool that allows you to submit individual URLs, experience tells us that those results typically are fed directly in the index and then are used as supplemental results if the spiders can’t find anything else. So what you really want to do is make sure that the engine can find the pages by going through your website directly.

Also, there are an amazingly high number of sites out there that have their entire e-commerce section blocked from search engine spiders because some of the technology that they are using, or information that they are demanding, has made their product pages invisible.

4. Flatten Your URLs

While some search engines - most notably Google - are getting better and better at indexing URLs that have long parameters in them and URLs that definitively say this is a query by containing such characters as question marks and ampersands, it’s still worthwhile to flatten your URLs to make them as compact as possible. There are still some benefits to having keyphrases in a URL, so if you can construct your URLs on the fly using information from the database, much like was discussed earlier in this article, you can have the best of both worlds.

5. Build Links

Link building is an old standby that’s good for any site, not just e-commerce. Link popularity is one of the largest factors in determining how sites are regarded by search engines. Essentially, a link to a website is treated by a search engine as a vote for that website - and all votes are not created equal. Links that are from pages that are relevant to yours in business and that are important or highly regarded are the ones that are going to be the most valuable.

These are only five of the issues that you face when considering optimizing your E-commerce site. Hundreds of other items are much more technical and fall outside the intended scope of this article. However, the five steps above represent a good start. Good luck!