Improving the Visibility of your e-Commerce Product Catalog

Everyone knows the importance of search engine optimization in order to ensure that your website ranks well for keyword phrases within your industry and marketplace. Much time and effort is placed on tweaking meta tags, re-writing copy to include keyword phrases and building in-bound links to your website. But what about the individual product pages within your site. You know, the ones that actually produce transactions. Larger e-commerce sites can have indexing issues when it comes to their product pages for a number of reasons. Sometimes the sheer size of the site, navigational issues or having SEO unfriendly URL’s can be the culprit. Not allowing search engines to find and index these pages can directly result in lost sales and market share as customers unable to find products on your site will certainly find them on your competitors sites. So how do you find out if you have an indexing problem in the first place. Do a search using the following phrase, site:www.mydomainname.com. This will produce a list of all the pages that Google has indexed and knows about. Hopefully you see your product pages in the results. If not, then you have some work to do. When some e-Commerce software platforms generate product detail pages they are pulled from a database and the final URL has category and product ids in it. Although Google and other crawlers are certainly sophisticated enough to index these, having a keyword friendly URL such as www.mydomainname.com/product-name.htm would be better. Whether or not your e-commerce platform makes use of friendly URL’s, ensure that you enter unique meta tags and content for each product. This will ensure that the googlebots see each product detail page as being unique and therefore indexes each. Sometimes due to the sheer size of your e-commerce site, the site’s navigation can make it difficult to reach low level pages. Deep-linking from your home page directly into product or category pages can help. Because Google is able to find your home page, a deep-link will certainly be crawled and indexed. Lastly, register for a Google Webmaster account and create an xml sitemap of your website. This will provide you with reporting if Google ever encountered an error in indexing your pages allowing you to take corrective action.