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12.03.09 Restructuring Your Shopping Site URLs To Improve SEO  By
Michael Gray When you run an online e-commerce store with a shopping cart, it's quite easy for your architecture and URL's to enter into territory that's not friendly for search engines. Here are some basic tips I recommend for everyone working with an online shopping cart. Product Pages Your product pages are the money pages in your site architecture. They are the ones you want to be in the absolute-most-search-engine-friendly format. Many shopping carts will place them in a category directory like this: http://example.com/department-name/product-name/ However, I recommend a a different structure such as: http://example.com/product/product-name/ http://example.com/prod/product-name/ http://example.com/p/product-name/ I don't recommend using the department because most stores have a one to many relationship between products and departments. In layman's terms, a product can be categorized in more than one department. For example, a set of plates could be in the "dinnerware," "tableware," or "entertaining" categories. It can also be in the "new," "seasonal," or "featured" category as well. When the merchandising side decides to change/add/remove departments, the URL is in jeopardy of changing, and that's something to avoid at all costs. Some stores are going completely flat and use no subdirectory. It's a little risky: you have to watch for naming conflicts, and you lose a layer of control. But it's not horrible. I also recommend that you avoid using URL parameters at all on the product level pages. I prefer using 3-5 words for the product name, ommiting stop words, and keeping the URL as short as possible. If your marketing or advertising divisions insist on using tracking parameters, write the info to a cookie and 301 to the proper page. Yes the new canonical meta tag will deal with a lot of it, but don't ignore good site architechture because of laziness. Unless you have a really good reason for using alpha/numeric ID instead of the product name, I'd always prefer the product name in the URL. Don't stuff in extra words having the product name in the URL is almost always better than not. Just make sure it persists and doesn't change if you go from a "blue widget" to a "cyan widget." If you do change, handle the 301's properly. It doesn't matter what file extension you use (.html, .jsp, .asp, etc) but I prefer to omit file types so you can change programming languages without remapping URL's or needing to maintain legacy hacks in perpetuity. Rip off the band-aid once, get it over with, fix it right, and move on … 'nuff said. Try to keep HTML title and page header/titles similar unless you can work in variations. Keep your titles as unique as possible and make your product descriptions as unique as possible. Copy/pasting or importing and using a feed without any re-writing is a bad idea. Reviews or other UGC are a great way to do that. Just don't be a faker. Always use a site map with links to your products. If you have a lot of products, use a dedicated HTML products-only sitemap(s). If you have at least 100 products I'd also go the XML sitemap route as well and ping all of the services. When a product goes out of stock, keep the page up and display a message saying that it's not available for purchase. The only exception is if you are never going to have the item again and there is no replacement. Serving a 404 is a bad idea. Going back and forth between a 404 when it's out of stock and standard page when it is in stock is worse than a passive aggressive ex-girlfriend and should be avoided at all costs. Department and Category Pages Continue reading this article. About the Author: Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org. |
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