As an online store "like" the search engine

For an online store, organic traffic from search engines is one of the most profitable ways to attract customers. Also, contextual advertising shows good results, but competition is growing day by day, and the constant increase in the number of advertisers leads to a steady increase in the cost of a click. Of course, compared to the context, SEO is a less reliable, manageable and poorly predictable channel, but in the hands of a professional it is able to give a greater return 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 the understanding between your online store and search engines.

We select keywords c mind

Ordinary optimizers are simple: use the Wordstat.yandex.ru service and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, getting a large number of words for which there are impressions in the statistics (wound 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 a search engine only once per day (source: goo.gl/cnjlh ). Of the order of 100 million requests processed daily by Yandex, only tens or hundreds of thousands are set by users several times a day. Therefore, while developing the semantic core, it is worth expanding the number of sources by connecting, for example:

• open statistics of competitors in the issue (for example, a LiveInternet counter);
• Yandex and Google search hints (you can collect them, for example, using the KeyCollector program);
• historical data on transitions to the site from "organic" and context (Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica, Adobe Site Catalyst). Upload requests for a long period of time, and for the initial filtering, you can use the “order fulfillment” or “no failure views” events, that is, those sessions during which the user has viewed more than one page.

But sometimes this is not enough - the right keywords have to be foreseen, taking into account the seasonality and change (occurrence and attenuation) of demand.
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We consider SEO in the 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 available with a maximum of three clicks. If images, flash, javascript elements are used in navigation, then each link must be duplicated in text form, thereby taking care of users who have disabled any functionality in the browser, and making the site easily indexable.

Designing a URL structure

The URL of the page should correspond to its place in the hierarchy of the site. That is, if the user, being on the shop.com/electronics/mobile page (section "Electronics / Mobile Phones"), deletes part of the URL and tries to get on shop.com/electronics, there should be no surprise in the form of the 404th error , and the section "Electronics".

In general, the structure of the site may look like this:

• Home - shop.com;
• Category list - shop.com/catalog;
• Category - shop.com/shoes/;
• Subcategory - shop.com/shoes/casual;
• Subcategory with filter by brand - shop.com/shoes/casual/converse.

As a word delimiter, it is preferable to use a hyphen rather than underscore. Do not abuse keywords in the URL of the page - each of them should occur no more than once.

Faceted navigation

Faceted navigation (filtering the list of products by any sign or several signs - for example, “laptops weighing up to 1.5 kg”, “Apple phones in black with 32 GB of memory”, “men's leather sneakers”) has become widespread on the Internet shopping lately. But its use is fraught with difficulties in terms of search engine optimization. It is worth considering the following:

• Watch out for the lack of duplication. A rather common situation when the same product list with one set of facet filters, but different order of their choice, is available at different URLs: for example, shop.com/shoes/adidas/men/ and shop.com/shoes/men/adidas .
• Avoid "endless" navigation. Combinations of faceted filters can be many, so you should open for search bots only, for example, pages with a set of two or three filters, and make more detailed lists not accessible to them.

Use the navigation chain

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

Reduce the download speed of the site

Practical experiments show that there is a relationship between the time a page is returned by the server and the volume of pages loaded by search bots. Loading time of pages of a site is reflected in its ranking.

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

We are moving in the regions of Russia

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

Optimizing multilanguage site

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, to show the correct version depending on the interface language and region of the user.

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

We optimize meta tags

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

The title must be unique for each page of the site.

The recommended length is no more than 80 characters (approximately 10 words).

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

Meta tag Description is used by search engines to compile a snippet. It is necessary to give a short (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.

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

Increase the value of grocery pages

Non-unique description of the goods from the same supplier, used by dozens and hundreds of online stores - this is not uncommon and quite normal situation. In this case, it will not be a bad signal for the search engine. But it is better if the product page on your site will differ from competitors, for example, due to user reviews. Reviews have a positive effect on the conversion, in addition, the page will be constantly updated and updated with new content. Quality reviews will make the whole product page more relevant, and the chances of taking first place in the issue will be much greater.

Also, to increase the conversion and usefulness of the product page will help blocks like "With this product often buy" and "Similar products." There are many different algorithms for building personal recommendations. The cost of developing such functionality will pay off more than in the future: this system allows you to organize automatic linking between products that can not be created manually for a large online store. If we talk about direct returns - in Amazon.com personal recommendations generate about 35% of additions to the basket.

We build reference environment

After the release of the Google Penguin search algorithm and in view of the ongoing tendency of Yandex to make life more difficult for active buyers (and sellers) of SEO links, you should more carefully increase the volume of the reference mass and make it as diverse as possible.

Some possible recommendations:

• Do not abuse links containing keywords (more than 30% of links with “online laptop store” headings for the corresponding site will look suspicious in the eyes of Yandex and Google, which may entail sanctions in the form of worsening positions on these queries). Dilute links with keywords links with the name of the company or with frequently encountered words like “here”, “here”, making the reference environment as close as possible to the natural one;
• selecting sites for placing links, look at parameters such as: proximity to the subject of your site; the amount of content on the page; the absence of words appearing on sites of dubious content; lack of pop-up, pop-under and other aggressive advertising; ratio in the volume of indexed pages of a 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: “basement” for placing links is the least preferred place in terms of giving it “weight”;
• gradually increase the number of referring pages / domains, otherwise you risk getting sanctions for the “reference explosion” (lately, this, however, is becoming less and less common).

A managed and scalable source of links that affects the ranking of a site can be an affiliate program. You can use widgets with indexed links with keywords leading to your website, or negotiate with high-quality thematic sites to pay for links not for the fact of placement, but for a percentage of sales. Remember that pages with a partner ID in the URL can be closed in robots.txt. For correct accounting of reference weights, it is more correct to redirect them with the answer “301 Moved Permanently” (recording information about the transition source in the cookie), or use the tag <metaname = “robots” content = “noindex, follow” />.

Do not remove missing items

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

You can do differently:

• 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 easily readable 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-map of the site, so as not to waste crawl budget - the limit on the number of pages that the search bot walks around on your site in one session.

Finally

The key to success in an SEO project is to focus on increasing the value of the site for users, fully following the recommendations of search engines and immersion in analytical data "with the head." Only in this way, and not through the use of short-lived "themes" or vulnerabilities in Google and Yandex algorithms, can you make the channel of organic search traffic stable and permanently entrench in the subject.