This guest post is by Mary From Tradestable 
As some of the largest websites in the world, ecommerce sites have a particularly difficult task in developing and maintaining an SEO strategy.
The first place to focus is on the product description pages themselves.
Focus On Product Description
These pages feature a wealth of information applicable to shoppers – pictures, prices, specs, and reviews, but the site needs to figure out how to get them there in the first place.
In important thing to look out for is the use of duplicated content on your product page.
Whether it’s the same as the manufacturer’s description or another ecommerce site selling the same product, it’s important to have a unique product description and keywords in order to drive shoppers to your site.
Another important factor is the design of your website.
Design Of Your Blog
The in-site navigation must be SEO friendly, and it is helpful to maintain an internal link network, allowing search engine spiders to crawl your site and index your product pages.
Ways to achieve this include having a prominent sidebar or other menu to link to category landing pages, and ensuring that all your main categories are listed on the site map in an organized fashion.
As for your internal link network, this is achieved by having product description pages link back to one another, through providing recommendation or “similar product” links on each product description page.
Once you’ve optimized the content on your product description page, take a look at the URLs that you’re using. It might be easiest to generate a random number, or use product codes, but by including a keyword in the URL for a particular product, it makes the page much more SEO-friendly.
Alright, now that you have optimized your product pages for external search engines, focus on your internal search engine.
Focus On Search Engines
Shoppers on your site need to be steered toward the product they want, and this doesn’t always mean just by typing in the product name, for example used cars.
Search queries can include keywords, related products, SKUs, and model numbers, and your internal search engine needs to be able to use any of those to direct a user toward the right product.
In addition to directing your shoppers to the right place, internal search data is helpful in determining which keywords are most likely to convert to sales, and which are sending users away from the site.
Another area to focus on in making your site SEO friendly is in the user experience.
Focus On User-Experience
The interface of your site must be user friendly, allowing shoppers to easily sort your products according to their preferences – whether it is price, popularity, relevance, or age of the product.
Additionally, the speed and performance of the site is vital. Not only are faster page loading times appealing to a shopper, who does not want to sit around waiting for a product page to load, but Google is now thought to incorporate site speed into their search ranking algorithm.
Finally, Social Media must be taken into consideration. Allow your shoppers to share, like, or tweet about your products, and link back to their social media profiles.
Google takes this social media presence into account, and by interacting with customers in this way, you increase brand awareness.
Guest post by Mary Johnson from TradeStable.com.ng, one of the most important free classifieds websites in Nigeria.
Image Credit: websiteexpert