By Herman Drost
Many e-commerce sites don?t bother to optimize their product pages because they only contain images. This means you will be losing out on attracting lots of extra traffic to your web site.
Search engine spiders will only index pages that are correctly designed and contain lots of quality content.
Here are 10 ways to optimize your e-commerce web page:
1. Professional Design
Create a design that is attractive to visitors. Make sure the colors blend well together. Don?t use background colors that make the text hard to read. Black text on a white background is still the easiest to read on computer screens.
Vischeck shows how your site will appear to color blind people. It provides a computer simulation of the entire process of human vision.
2. Simple navigation
Don?t use images for navigation as search engines only read text. Don?t use javascript as some visitors deliberately have this turned off on their computers.
3. Validate code
Run your e-commerce web page code through an html validator to check for html (xhtml) errors. HTML errors will slow the indexing of your site by search engine spiders. HTML errors will also slow the loading of your pages. This will cause visitors to click elsewhere as they wait for your page to load.
4. Web Accessibility
Make sure your page is web accessible. Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. This includes people that have visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. It also includes older people with changing abilities due to ageing. ie visual impairment.
This online tool identifies errors in your content related to Section 508 standards and/or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
5. Image optimization
Large images or too many images on a page will slow the loading time of your web page. Reduce the size by rescaling it in your graphics software. If you need to use large images, create a thumbnail image first then link to the larger image.
You can also reduce the number of pixels of your image in your software also.
Every image should include an alt tag to help identify it.
6. Content
Be sure to include content that describes the item of your product page. Include your main keywords in the content. Place the content at the top of the page then add the image of your item below. Search engines tend to spider the top of the page first.
7. Header tags
Header tags are used to emphasis headings and subheadings of your web content. Use the H1 tag for the main header and H2 and H3 tags for the subheadings.
8. Title tag
The title tag is the most important tag in your code because it?s what the search engines use to determine the theme of your site. Include the main keywords that you included in the content of your web page.
9. Meta tags
The meta tags include description and keyword tags. Even though search engines don?t place much value in these tags anymore, include them anyway. The description meta tag is what appears within the search engine results pages, so make sure you write an attractive description about your page. This will help prepare them to buy your product.
The keywords meta tag should include all the main keywords used on your product page. Include approximately 20 keywords.
10. Broken links
Broken links on a page will not only frustrate your visitors but will also prevent search engines from finding other pages of your site. Check your site periodically for broken links particularly if is a large one by running it through a link checker.
Conclusion
Even if you have a large site containing hundreds of product pages, it is still worth optimizing because each page will attract additional visitors. Visitors will enter the page by conducting a search from a search engine. This will increase the overall traffic to your web site and result in selling more products.
About the Author
Herman Drost
Owner of iSiteBuild.com
Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) and Author of ?Marketing Tips? Newsletter
Site Design, Hosting and Promotion
www.isitebuild.com