How the online store "like" the search engine

For an online store, organic search engine traffic is one of the most profitable ways to attract customers. Contextual advertising also shows good results, but competition, growing day by day, and a constant increase in the number of advertisers leads to a continuous increase in the cost of a click. Of course, in comparison with the context, SEO is a less reliable, manageable and poorly predicted channel, but in the hands of a professional it is able to give greater returns on each invested ruble than any advertisement.

How to increase the effectiveness of your SEO-promotion? Let's look at 12 fairly simple solutions that will greatly facilitate understanding between your online store and search engines.

We select keywords wisely

Ordinary optimizers do just that: they use the Wordstat.yandex.ru service and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, receiving a large number of words that show statistics (generated by SEO tools, optimizers and bots), but there is no real traffic. Choosing the most popular high-frequency (HF) and mid-frequency (MF) requests, such experts believe that it is through them that most of the traffic is generated. However, this is not the case. According to Yandex, the main stream of requests is made up of unique requests, that is, given to the search engine only once a day (source: goo.gl/cnjlh) Of the order of 100 million daily requests processed by Yandex, only tens or hundreds of thousands are set by users several times a day. Therefore, while compiling the semantic core, it is worth expanding the number of sources by connecting, for example:

• open statistics of competitors in the issuance (for example, LiveInternet counter);
• Yandex and Google search tips (you can collect them, for example, using the KeyCollector program);
• historical data about the transitions to the site from "organic" and context (Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica, Adobe Site Catalyst). Unload requests for a long period of time, and for the initial filtering you can use the events “order completion” or “browsing without failures”, that is, those sessions during which the user viewed more than one page.

But sometimes this is not enough - the right keywords have to be predicted, seasonality and change (occurrence and attenuation) of demand have to be taken into account.

We consider SEO in site architecture

To make it easier for search bots to index the site of your online store and make it more convenient for customers, you should design the structure so that the deepest page is accessible with a maximum of three clicks. If you use pictures, flash, javascript elements in the navigation, then each link must be duplicated in text form, thereby taking care of users who have disabled some functionality in the browser, and making the site easily indexable.

Design the URL structure

The page URL must match its place in the site hierarchy. That is, if a user, being on the page shop.com/electronics/mobile (section "Electronics / Mobile Phones"), deletes part of the URL and tries to get to shop.com/electronics, he should not be surprised by the 404th error , and the "Electronics" section.

In general, the site structure may look like this:

• Home - shop.com;
• List of categories - shop.com/catalog;
• Category - shop.com/shoes/;
• Subcategory - shop.com/shoes/casual;
• A subcategory with a filter by brand is shop.com/shoes/casual/converse.

A hyphen rather than an underscore is preferred as a word separator. Do not abuse keywords in the page URL - each of them should occur no more than once.

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation (filtering the list of goods by one or several criteria - for example, “laptops weighing up to 1.5 kg”, “black Apple phones with 32 GB of memory”, “men's leather sneakers”) has become widespread on the Internet stores lately. But its use is fraught with difficulties in terms of search engine optimization. The following should be considered:

• Watch for no duplication. A fairly common situation is when the same product list with one set of faceted filters, but with a different order of their selection, is available at different URLs: for example, shop.com/shoes/adidas/men/ and shop.com/shoes/men/adidas .
• Avoid endless navigation. There can be many combinations of faceted filters, so you should only open for search bots, for example, pages with a set of two or three filters, and make more detailed lists not available to them.

We use a navigation chain

As an additional navigation element for users and search engines, it is recommended to use the bread crumbs element (bread crumbs, a navigation element representing the path of the site from its “root” to the page on which the user is located), reflecting the position of the page in the site hierarchy. At the same time, the page should not link to itself. For example:
Home -> Mobile Phones -> Samsung Phones

We decrease the site loading speed

Practical experiments show that there is a relationship between the time a page returns to the server and the amount of pages loaded by search bots. The loading time of the pages of the site is reflected in its ranking.

Reduce the size of HTML / JS / CSS code and use special techniques for compressing files; optimize image sizes, use GZIP on the server and caching in the CMS.

We advance in the regions of Russia

Introducing regional ranking and separation of requests into geo-dependent (about 16% of requests) and geo-independent in 2009, Yandex seriously improved the quality of search and simplified the life of owners of local sites. But federal players have a new headache - only a limited number of regions can be assigned to a site (up to six through Yandex.Catalog, although there are exceptions). How to advance in other areas of presence? If, depending on the region, you have different prices for goods, assortment, unique promotions or special offers, it makes sense to create subdomains and assign them the target region through Yandex.Webmaster (spb.shop.ru, ekb.shop.ru, etc. .d.). In other cases, duplicating a site is risky - this can lead to sanctions by search engines. It will be enough to limit ourselves to indicating the full (with an index and a local phone number) addresses of all branches, representative offices, and points of issue of orders. Do not forget to add them to the Yandex.Address service as well. Then in the snippet (description of the site on the search results page) next to the domain the address of the representative office closest to the user will be indicated; in addition, he will be able to find you in the Yandex.Maps service.

Optimizing a multilingual website

Does your online store contain pages in different languages? In this case, it makes sense to use the special tag rel = "alternate" hreflang = "x". So you point out the connection between versions of the same page in different languages, helping global search engines, like Google, show the right option depending on the language of the interface and the user's region.

There are alternative ways - instead of including the tag in the source code, you can use additional headers in the server’s response or provide links to documents in different languages ​​in the XML-map of the site (it will be described below). Description of the standard on Google: goo.gl/fK6tg .

Optimize Meta Tags

Title Title (this tag is displayed in the browser title and is used on the search results page) should contain keywords and be informative, i.e. reflect the content of the document.

Title should be unique for each page of the site.

Recommended length is not more than 80 characters (this is approximately 10 words).

It does not allow the use of special characters (# $ * @), to separate several words, use a hyphen or a vertical line (for example: "Men's shoes - Leather sneakers - Converse sneakers").

Description meta tag is used by search engines to compose a snippet. It is necessary to give a brief (no more than 200 characters) description of the page (but not the site as a whole). This tag must be unique for each page of the site.

The keywords meta tag, according to Google, is not taken into account when ranking the site; For Yandex, the situation is similar, or its influence is so small that this tag can be neglected.

We add value to product pages.

A non-unique description of goods from the same supplier used by dozens and hundreds of online stores is not uncommon and quite normal. In this case, this will not be a bad signal for the search engine. But it is better if the product page on your site will be different from competitors, for example, due to user reviews. Reviews positively affect the conversion, in addition, the page will be constantly updated and updated with new content. High-quality reviews will make the whole product page more relevant, and there will be much more chances to take first places in the results.

Also, increase the conversion and usefulness of the product pageBlocks like “With this product often buy” and “Related products” will help. There are many different algorithms for building personalized recommendations. The costs of developing such functionality will pay off in the future: this system allows you to organize automatic linking between goods, which cannot be manually created for a large online store. Speaking of direct returns - at Amazon.com, personalized recommendations generate about 35% of additions to the basket.

Building a reference environment

After the release of the Google Penguin search algorithm and in view of the constant trend of Yandex to complicate the life of active buyers (and sellers) of SEO links, one should more accurately increase the volume of the link mass and make it as diverse as possible.

A few possible recommendations:

• Do not abuse the links containing keywords (more than 30% of the links with the headings "online laptop store" for the corresponding site will look suspicious in the eyes of Yandex and Google, which may entail sanctions in the form of a deterioration in positions on these requests). Dilute links with keywords links with the name of the company or with frequently occurring words such as “here”, “here”, making the link environment look as natural as possible;
• choosing sites for placing links, look at such parameters as: proximity to the theme of your site; the amount of content on the page; lack of words found on sites of dubious content; lack of pop-up, pop-under and other aggressive advertising; ratio in the volume of indexed pages of the site in the Google / Yandex index; the number of external links on the page as a whole and the number of other SEO links from the page. Remember: the “basement” for placing a link is the least preferred place in terms of giving it a “weight”;
• smoothly increase the number of referring pages / domains, otherwise you run the risk of getting sanctions for a “link explosion” (recently, this, however, is becoming less common).

An affiliate program can become a managed and scalable source of links that affect site ranking. You can use widgets with indexed links with keywords leading to your site, or negotiate with quality thematic sites about paying links not for the very fact of placement, but for a percentage of sales. Remember that pages containing the partner ID in the URL may be closed in robots.txt. To correctly take into account the reference weight, it’s more correct to redirect them with the answer “301 Moved Permanently” (writing down the information about the source of the transition in the cookie), or use the tag.

Do not delete missing items

The constant assortment for the online store is quite a rarity. New items appear, some goods are removed from sale. But even if new receipts to the warehouse are not planned, do not rush to delete the pages of the missing goods - otherwise you will lose the accumulated "authority" in the form of external links.

You can do different things:

• Redirect to the category page (Apple iPhone 3GS -> Apple Phones);
• Redirect to a more current model (for example, Apple iPhone 3GS -> Apple iPhone 5);
• Leave a page with an easy-to-read message that the product is not on sale and display a list of similar models.

In addition, it is better to exclude these pages from the XML sitemap so as not to waste crawl budget - the limit on the number of pages that the search bot crawls on your site in one session.

Finally

The key to success in an SEO project is orientation to increasing the value of the site for users, full adherence to the recommendations of search engines and immersion in analytical data “with your head”. Only in this way, and not due to the use of short-lived “themes” or vulnerabilities in Google and Yandex algorithms, we can make the organic search traffic channel stable and gain a foothold in the subject for a long time.