Ecommerce SEO Site Structure
What is the best ecommerce SEO site structure? What is best will depend somewhat on you and what SEO and site structure choices you feel are important. Whatever you do, structure your site logically. While sites can always be re-designed and re-structured on the fly, if possible, take the time to rough out your site structure before you actually build you site. Take a look at some examples of successful ecommerce sites. Look at REI, Victoria’s Secret, Eddie Bauer, Newegg and so forth. A small site that I really like is Grounds for Change. My point is that there is not just one fixed template for a good site structure.
As mentioned above, logic is important. The site structure must make sense. Also important, from the point of view of search engines, is that your site be easy to spider. That is, search engines should be
able navigate your site with as little effort as possible. This takes us back to structure. Simple, elegant structure = equals easy navigation. Even if you have a huge site, if it is logically organized, both humans and search engines will be able to get around. Both human and search engine visitors will smile.
Since we are talking about SEO, for the search engines, you can make spidering easier by providing multiple sitemaps. You may want to provide only one sitemap to your visitors (or not), but there is no reason you can’t give the search engines more than one to ease their task (and be sure to submit each sitemap as an rss feed to the major rss engines). You can create sitemaps whose listings are cross indexed according to your specifications (Kurt Melvin has actually created a tool that automates this process). For example, sitemaps could be created based on specific product (e.g. pocket knives), product line (e.g. hunting goods), function (staying dry), gender (coats for men and women), keyword, topic and so forth.
Of course, talking about sitemaps without a site or structure is putting the cart before the horse somewhat. Back to structure, keeping in mind that SEO largely hinges on content, generally speaking, you want your product pages to be as close to the home page as possible. Ideally, your product pages will each have at least 300 words of keyword rich and relevant content and each page will make appropriate use of headings, bold and italic (appropriate is key–never over use).
Sidebar: Appropriate Content
I know I said at least 300 words. The content on your product pages must be natural and easy to read for your human visitors. The needs of your human visitors always trump search engines, but you can really have both. Let’s face it, if you can only do 100 words of natural, relevant content, then do 100. Don’t stuff an extra 200 words of crap.
Product pages should lead easily to checkout, and the payment process itself should also be as direct and intuitive as possible. Buy something from Newegg, for example, and see how easy that is.
As for structure, generally, you will organize your site according to some notion of ordinancy, or taxonomy. For example, by categories or features. If you look at big shopping sites you might see broad categories of products for men and products for women, and then further sub-categories of say, indoor and outdoor products. Your choice of organization is very important not only for human visitors
but also for search engines. Be sure that your pages are SEO friendly, which means that your pages have file names in English (or in whatever language you want your site to be found) and include your keywords. As mentioned above, I recommend having a site map.
I would also consider a sort of silo structure, but also be sure the structure suits your needs and expectations. A silo is a tall, verticle structure for the storage of grain and the like. The idea is that you organize your site by categories titled with main keywords. The content in each sile (category) is related by subject and keyword. You can also do clever things with linking between content entries and between silos, but this is the general idea. So you have your Home page (HP), and from your HP links to Contact, Help, Privacy and so forth, and then links to each of your product categories. You main categories themselves may then have “sub-silos” of related information. I think you get the idea. My point is to give you an example of one sort of logical structure. Be sure to look at real example of different kinds of successful ecommerce sites. How quickly do they respond when you click on an item? How easy is there check out? How close are the product pages to the main page? How easy is it to get around the product pages and back to the main page? How clear and well written in the content?
One other point I feel is important but overlooked, is the actual coding of your site. If you are having your site written specifically for you, the code should be as clean, simple, and efficient as possible. Basically, when someone clicks on as link, you want a snappy response. You want the coding and other scripting to occupy as little server resources as possible so that it responds and gets from A to B or Z as quickly as possible for both search engine and human queries.
I will try to add more to this post, but in the meantime, please see two other posts on the subject of ecommerce SEO:
