Ecommercepartners.net

Each time a new site comes in the door for ecommerce development, I’ll be informed as to whether or not they are going to sign up with our SEO services. Regardless, I always involve myself in the development of all new sites to ensure proper usability, design and scalability for the future. But when clients simply sign up for ecommerce development I am hands off in many ways. One task inparticular that I do not participate in, is Information Architecture. That tends to be left in the hands of the client.

Suprisingly, it’s a little known fact that the better one structures their information via logic, segmentation AND naming, the better they will perform in the SERP’s based on those segments and names (assuming the site is built to be search engine friendly). I can’t tell you how many times I see unknowing clients categorizing their product inventory and assigning the most vague category names to represent their catalog offerings. Even worse is when they are interested in SEO services and refuse to budge on how the site will be set up, in this regard.

If all I have to work with on your gift site are two categories entitled “For Him” and “For Her”, you’re really not giving me much to work with, are you? From a search engine standpoint, what does “For Him” describe? Is that the phrase you’re targeting for high rankings? I sure hope not. But in truth, that’s what’s happening. “For Him” is what will appear in the title tag, “For Him” is what will appear in the navigation anchor text, “For Him” is what will appear in the heading… and so on. So from a search engine’s perspective (which is that of a text only view), the page in question is all about “For Him”.

But what is “For Him”? How about getting a little more specific..? Maybe set up category levels with the top levels being “Gifts for Men” & “Gifts for Women”, then break down the types of gifts the site offers for each. Under “Gifts for Men” you could add sub-categories that include “Sports Gifts”, “Graduation Gifts”, “Retirement Gifts”, and any number of logical descriptions and segmentations of your product offering, which also happen to be GOOD KEYWORDS.

High rankings not enough to get you to change your ways? Then do it for your users (who we should always think of first, anyway). If we’ve learned anything it’s that the majority of web shoppers aren’t all that savvy and need help navigating a site anyway. Setting up logical, descriptive categories and levels based on descriptive keywords will help aide the user in finding what they are looking for.

So, tip for the day… If you sell organic bedroom products and one category of your inventory happens to be organic mattresses, instead of following the initial instinct of naming that category “mattresses”, name it “organic mattresses”. This is much more on target with what the site is actually offering and will pay instant dividends with improved conversions and higher rankings down the road. Otherwise, you might as well sell regular mattresses and live in SERP oblivion.

Remember, a large percentage of the keywords a site should target can be accounted for through the logical structuring of information via categories and product naming. Why scramble to target those keywords later on and through other means when it can be effictively taken care of before the site is even built?

technorati tags: seo | information architecture | ecommerce seo

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 1:59 pm and is filed under SEO/SEM, Tips and Tricks, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.