Slides used at a Master Class eCommerce session at the WebIT Congress in Istanbul in 2012.

1. eCommerce
SEO dedicated for eCommerce

3. Massive opportunity!
“The global search engine market stood at 185 billion
searches worldwide in October 2011; accounting to
nearly 6 billion searches a day, over 248 million
searches per hour, or 4 million searches per minute.”
Multilingual-Search.com

4. Steady growth
By 2016, online sales will account for more than 14% of
total retail sales in the United Kingdom and more than
10% in Germany, the two leading European markets in
online sales.”
Forrester

5. The key….

6. The Google Panda Update
• Aim: to downrank websites that provide poor user experience
(design, trustworthiness, speed, and return desire) and to put higher-
quality sites nearer the top of the search results
– To identify such websites, a machine-learning algorithm was used. The algorithm follows
the logic by which Google’s human quality raters determine a website’s quality.
• Problem: many good websites were downranked
• Decision: 2-way communication, advisory

7. The Google Penguin update
• Aim: to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines by using black-hat SEO techniques, such
as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate
creation of duplicate content, and others.
– keyword stuffing – no longer used (color, 1 text size, etc.)
– Cloaking – 2 pages at once, for robots and humans
– participating in link schemes (fake websites with links)
– deliberate creation of duplicate content (several pages of a website with the same
content)

8. Ranking for 20 -20.000 products?
• In essence, the same rules apply. The main thing that
changes is the complexity and how you adapt your
Content Management System (CMS) to your needs
• Make sure you (at least):
– Have a SEO keyword field in your database that feeds to
the META Description
– Optimize your product detail page
– Avoid duplicate content (session ID)
– Product RSS Feed and Site Map
– Make sure you have a SEO friendly cart
– Go Social

9. The basics
• For product pages, here are the most important
items you can implement:
– Product name in Title, though obvious it’s so often
missed!
– Product name in text
• Sample: “Here you can buy ‘product name’ with free delivery.”
– For the product picture(s) use the Product Name in the
ALT tag
– To create better snippets in the search results make sure
the product name is in the URL

10. More basics
– Different pages for different colors of the product;
“iPhone 5 black” versus “iPhone 5 white”
– Don’t forget about local keywords, i.e. “city + product
name”
• Usually you can do this via adding a tab with delivery information
and mention here the most important locations for you in terms of
traffic
– Diversify content on product page. You might not be able
to create unique product descriptions for thousands of
items
• You can help by leaving the viewer/buyer an area to comment

11. Mapping your digital asset cloud
G Buzz Technorati
YouTube
eBay
Flickr RSS
Email lists
Blogs .co.uk Mobile
Company .dk .de
Regional
Twitter Topical .us .no User forums
.COM
CEO
.nl
.is Vimeo
.pt
Intranet .fr .se
PR
LinkedIn Newslettes
Webinars
Digg
Slide Share
Facebook

12. POST
Social Media & SEO

13. POST - Groundswell
• P is People. Don't start your DAO strategy until you know the capabilities
of your audience. If you're targeting college students, use social networks.
If you're reaching out business travellers, consider ratings and reviews.
• O is objectives. Pick one. Are you starting an application to listen to your
customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best
customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with
them? Decide on your objective before you decide on a technology. Then
figure out how you will measure it.
• S is Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after
you're done. Are you looking for a two-way relationship with your best
customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do
you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and
generating new ones? Imagine you succeed. How will things be different
afterwards? Know the endpoint and you'll know where to begin.
• T is Technology. A community. A wiki. A blog or hundred blogs, Twitter or
Facebook. Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you
can decide your path forward

14. Optimizing content on Product pages

17. Search Volume
https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool

18. SEO friendly navigation & internal linking
• Internal Hyperlinking
• Ranking can be improved significantly by:
– Categories are based on searches. Users first! Try to take
in account users’ intentions during categories and
subcategories planning
– Keyword-rich internal links. Use internal power of the
website for your categories and product pages

19. Internal Search Engines & navigation
Front page banner
Search results

21. Creatively designed Rich Snippets (Micro formats)

22. Web Analytics
“ABOUT US”
Touched 23% of revenue in < 1% of visits

23. LET’S LOOK ONLINE!

24. Thank You
Kristjan Mar Hauksson
kmh@nem.is
@optimizeyourweb
Board of Directors SEMPO
Join on SEMPO.org