5 Ways to Make Your eCommerce Website Search Engine Friendly

Making your eCommerce website search engine friendly requires solid fundamental understanding of HTML/XML coding and how search engines work. Following are the 5 ways that should help you make your eCommerce website search engine friendly. As a business owner, you must first go through Google Webmaster Guidelines to get an idea of what search engines like Google prefer.

1. HTML Tags

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Taking a look at your html tags for your existing eCommerce website pages will give you better results than anything else. An important activity in HTML is to review the html tags and optimize them for the search engine. The tag is a crucial element to consider when doing search engine optimization. The meta tag should directly give the information about the webpage. The 3 important aspects to consider in tags are - 

a. Meta Title: Ideal length of a Title should be 65 characters. 
Only these many characters would be displayed in the search results. So use your words wisely.

The title tag is the first thing that you tell your users and search engines what the page is about. So be clear and to the point. Use the keywords most suitable for the page.

b. Meta Description: Ideal length should be 165 characters 
Meta description is nothing but a short description of the page. It helps users know what is the page about when displayed through a snippet in the search results. This is very important since users will decide whether to click on the title link or not.

c. Creating a descriptive URL: Keep your URL in simple text format rather than in any code or numbers. 
This helps visitors and search engines to remember the webpages. Make sure, the url for each page is written carefully. This will help you to build a better directory system, enabling search engines to pull any page that is requested through a query. Also see if the ALT attributes are descriptive and correct.

2. Provide the content that your visitors want

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Search engines are built to offer searchers what they are looking for by entering a search query. Your website should provide the content that your visitor is looking for. The eCommerce website should be optimized with the content that is relevant, authentic, original and valuable to the visitor. The more the visitors like your pages the more are the chances that search engines will come back to crawl again and again to check if anything new has been published on your site. Ensure use of words that your audience may use when searching for you. These are called the keywords or search terms.

3. Test your site to see if it appears correctly on all browsers

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It is a very important factor when you are taking an effort making your eCommerce website search engine friendly. You must first ensure that if the site can be seen correctly on any browser. Any variations could prove to be harmful when your visitors visit the website. They may not like it and thus add to your bounce rate. If the bounce rate increases, there would be an obvious decline in the overall rankings in the eyes of search engines. Test the site to also know if it well targeted to the planned audience with necessary features.

4. Submit your site and sitemap, use of robots.txt

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When your site is ready to be launched, you should submit to the search engines for example Google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/. Along with this, always submit a sitemap using Google webmaster tools. It helps the search engines to know the structure of your website and access all the pages within the website easily. Always ensure you use a robots.txt file on your web server. This tells search engines which directories it should crawl and which not allowing you to not allow the confidential information to be made public. The robots.txt file can be tested using a tool such as robots.txt analysis tool.

5. Monitoring site performance regularly

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All webmasters must regularly monitor the site performance and load times. Search engines prefer websites that are optimized for fast load time and quick visibility. Fast sites results in user satisfaction and improves the performance of the web thus of search engines too. There are various tools available to  monitor the performance of your eCommerce website, such as Page Speed. You should avoid landing page redirects and ensure a better user experience all the time. Some simple ways to improve your eCommerce website performance can be by reducing server response time, optimizing images, leveraging browser caches, enabling compression and compacting html coding.

To sum up, these are the basic 5 important factors webmaster should consider when making the eCommerce website friendly for search engines. Always try to make pages for users and not for search engines. Search engines are smart to notice your relevancy and understand your websites motive well. Avoid deluding your users and tactics to improve search engine rankings. Be genuine and original, your eCommerce website is bound to come up on the first page when your customers are looking for you.