Guide to SEO for eCommerce Sites - Part 1, Product Pages and Title Tags
Over the past year or so, we've taken large strides at MCM to optimize our site for search engine optimization. I'd like to share some of the steps we've gone through to get to where we are today. Obviously, optimizing for an ecommerce site is a bit different than optimizing for a blog, but there are a lot of similarities. Each week, I'll cover a different portion of this process.
Most of the work we did focused on our product detail pages, as our primary goal was to get better coverage of our site and increase our indexed page count. We have something like 250 thousand product pages and a fraction of that number make up the rest of the site. Because our product detail page is technically only one page of code and affects hundreds of thousands of pages, it's the best "bang for the buck", so to speak.
I think its important to point out that there are several elements that comprise a search result, and that they all come from different places on your page. There is the title, the body and the destination url. These are all important in their own ways.
The first item on our product page that we addressed was probably the most important item; the title tag. This populates the title of a search result. We originally had something like this:
<title>MCM Electronics | 58-10665 - 12 Ft DVI-D Home Theater Cable</title>
So there are a few problems with this. Initially, when browsing search results, your store brand is pretty much irrelevant. Sure, brand will play a small part in whether or not a searcher clicks on your result, but a relevant page title will go a lot farther towards getting a click. If you do your job and actually show relevant data in the title, people will notice your result, then see your brand in the url line below, or once they click through and visit your site.
Thinking like a potential customer who is searching, lets define what terms they are likely to search. Using the example from above, which is a Monster Cable cable, by the way, the searcher may search for "Monster Cable". They may search for "DVI400-4M", Monster's part number. They may search for "DVI-D cable". Out of all of this, the only bit in our original title was "DVI-D cable"; no manufacturer info at all. The truth is, when dealing with branded products, there are only a few bits that are universal; the manufacturer part number, upc and a few other identifiers. Therefore, it's more relevant to put these important bits in the title. MCM's sku is pretty much worthless unless someone knows they want a 58-10665 from MCM Electronics, but chances are, if they know that much, they will be visiting our site directly and not through a search engine. Hence, there is no real point in including MCM's proprietary sku in the title.
Putting all of the above together, we reach the conclusion that we want to include the manufacturer part number and the best title or description of the product we can come up with. Additionally, many people will search for the manufacturer name in conjunction with the manufacturer part number. Combining these two fields in a search query is a sure-fire way to get relevant data, and will rule out the possiblity to get results for a "DVI400-4M" from some other company, should they have the same term in their title. Now we have something like this:
<title>12 Ft DVI-D Home Theater Cable | Monster Cable | DVI400-4M</title>
This is far more relevant than what we first started with. It combines three model specific attributes that searches will be searching for, if they are searching for this product.
It's important to remember that search engines have limits to number of characters they display. Google limits their titles to 66 characters, including spaces. If your title is longer than that, it will get cut off and Google will display a '...' at the end of the line. You can do some coding behind the scenes to cut your long title down to size, or simply let Google do the work for you.
Next week we'll discuss META tags.
Labels: SEO, Web Development