Ten Commandments Of Ecommerce SEO

One of the most common topics among Internet marketers in 2011 is ecommerce marketing and SEO. While we are all aware of the power of ecommerce SEO to drive your online store to the forefront of the major search engine results pages, there really is such a thing as overdoing it; especially in online marketing. Sometimes even the most effective methods search engine optimization can take a turn for the worse and become counterproductive when not used in compliance with the Google standards and guidelines.

Adopting an aggressive and progressive ecommerce SEO marketing strategy to your online sales endeavors can bring you great success by increasing your SEP rankings and driving maximum web traffic to your ecommerce site, providing you do not become over-zealous. We all know “what to do” to increase our ROI, let’s explore “what not to do” for a moment.

Thou Shalt Not “Keyword Stuff” - Composing content created by 90% keywords is asking for trouble. And it doesn’t read well either.

Thou Shalt Not - “Hide Keywords” - Google ain’t no dummy! Just because you can’t see the keywords hidden white-on-white or black-on-black text, doesn’t mean the search engines can’t.

Thou Shalt Not - “Hide Links” - Would see fairly obvious as you cannot hide keywords, but some sneaky folks like to test “technicalities”. Hidden links - also not a good idea.

Thou Shalt Not - “Link Punctuation Marks” - How utterly clever! However, frowned upon by Google.

Thou Shalt Not - “Index Individual Pages” - Don’t submit every single page of your site to the search engines. That’s just being greedy and karma is a “you-know-what”

Thou Shalt Not - “Over List Your Site” - Creating multiple pages on Google “Places” that all contain the same physical address to your ecommerce page is not at all a good idea. You’re not fooling anyone.

Thou Shalt Not - “Abandon A Well Ranking Page” - They need to be nurtured too. If you abandon a well ranking page, it could abandon you in return. Show it the attention and maintenance it deserves; and needs to prosper.

Thou Shalt Not - “Covet Thy Neighbor’s Keywords” - The biggest mistake you can make is using un-researched keywords just because they are found on a competitor’s ecommerce site. There’s no telling where those words have been! Use your own list of well researched keywords relevant to your business.

Thou Shalt Not - “Create Unnecessary Pages” - You don’t need a different page for each and every keyword target. An even blend of several keywords woven seamlessly through your existing pages is enough to get the job done.

And here’s the big one....

Thou Shalt Not - “Spam Thy Customers” - Keeping in frequent contact is one thing, but nobody likes an over commenting, multiple linking busybody polluting their forums and email inboxes.