Every now and then I hop on these freelance jobs that assure me the quality time for SEO research, which is described best by my trademarked philosophy tag line

“If you wanted to learn SEO, all you had to do is search“.

This time a year, I’ve been lucky enough to be assigned to a new full-time job in New York City optimizing three very interesting domains that will assure me the continous exploration into Search Engines. Now I know that approximately 75% of my readers are very interested about SEO tips and if the company let me I will even pull hands-on examples to optimization.

The three new projects, which I’ve been assigned to optimize, are

1. Retail (E Commerce)
2. Wholesale (E Commerce with Login)
3. CMS Website (Hardware)

Very exciting! But before we begin let me summarize these three so you can quickly select which area you are most interested in reading about:

Retail E Commerce SEO – There are many aspects to look into when building a retail E Commerce website, especially with all the niched categories, landing pages and title tags. This post will cover all the necessary tools and tips needed to build a successful SEO optimized E Commerce website. Read more below

Username Protected Wholesale E Commerce SEO – While there might be a debate on which platform to choose for a wholesale, I will always stand by and recommend to create a few landing pages focusing on your wholesale material, and giving an additional back-end user-name and password afterwards. Article coming soon

Hardware Website (CMS) SEO – A regular 5-6 page HTML based website with no PHP or MySQL functions. How to optimize a landing page? Well, that’s a great question. Article coming soon

The journey for Search Engine Optimization for E Commerce site begins.

There are many aspects to look for when building a site, especially a E Commerce site. I’d have to say follow the first moves like I do. I keep a folder, that contains 3 different files, they are the site-map validated for the following engines: Yahoo! Bing and Google. Right after I create, I will always generate a site-map, and once the site is completed I will submit it to the following

• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Google Site-map
• Bing Webmaster

(You can also submit to more search engines like Ask.com, but most likely they will find you after you appear in the top three).

Tips for Optimizing E Commerce site

Avoid Manufacturer Product Description – RESIST THE URGE! DO NOT COPY PASTE! Building an online shop might be a pain to generate a lot of content however you should consider it a must. Search engines hold a grudge against Ecommerce based sites. Often times, I agree. Many online stores offer little useful content – if it’s Cellphones, just the main description (weight, color, type) the excerpt that is used includes dry manufacturer product description, poor internal linking and no unique user generated content. Without thinking about it twice Ecommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. As much tempting as it is to copy paste – avoid it. Even if you do copy paste, at least write your own unique content around it or change a few words here and there.

Create a SEO Keyword field in Product Database – Sounds confusing? It might just be as well. Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, SKU and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to your Ecommerce site, enter commonly search for keywords (use Google Keyword Tool to search Keyword examples and volumes). Remember: not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.

All products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page – Look, I’ll keep it very simple for you: The homepage is the highest ranked page in your site. It’s the juiciest highest ranked page, and the first page that an engine looks it every time they go into your site. You don’t want the crawler to have to go through 20 different pages to reach an item.   Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. I’ve seen many Ecommerce sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories and sub subcategories. Using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page can accomplish this. I recommend, at least 24 products per page if not 50 and try to not exceed 4 pages of products.

Use iframes for Duplicate Content – If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product description is not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that the data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalise you for duplicate content. It’s a win win.

Create a Product RSS Feed: Creating a product feed and submitting it to relevant content aggregators such as Google Base, which accepts an XML file like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. (‘Shopping’) Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages. Including Retweets.

Unique Keyword Meta Tags – Meta tags including keywords and description should be entirely unique on every single product of the page. Though Meta content does not directly affect your ranking (yet), unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties.

Product Reviews – A perfect strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user-generated content from customers who previously purchased, or just feel like reviewing a product they’ve seen or used before. Allow your customers to review products they’ve purchased.

Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many Ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the Search Engines to crawl. There are always ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spider without the session ID.

Crawlable Navigation - AVOID JAVASCRIPT based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In addition don’t rely on form-based navigation such as drop down lists since the engines can’t follow them.

Don’t stuff Keywords in your navigation bar – This is useless and very tacky. Keywords are placed in navigation bars are not as important as they used to be. Instead use keyword rich anchor text pointing to the landing page, which is rich with SEO, optimized content for that specific landing page.

Optimize your images – I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. Don’t upload images to your site that are called ’12498172.jpg’ or ‘iphone3333.jpg’ Be specific! People today are searching Google Images, or other Image search engines like crazy. And if they are looking for a specific Cellphone type, such as Nokia N95 they will Google it, and if you had changed ’12498172.jpg’ to Nokia-N95.jpg you will most likely rank for it. Another tip: only use – and not _, &, ~.

Use Alttributes in Links – If you asked me about link alt 1 year ago I would say avoid it, it’s just a hassle. But today it’s a very important aspect of a link, some might say more then the anchor text itself. Always use the link alt=”description”.

If you’re looking to enhance performance on your website’s search engine here is a very easy method that will benefit you in two ways.

1. You will make money from it
2. It’s better then what you’ve got installed already.

If you’re not an AdSense  member it’s time you start reading more about how Google can give you the money you’ve been avoiding.

So what is Adsense Search? AdSense for search is a free solution that allows publishers to place a search box on their site and earn revenue from relevant ads on the search results page.

1. Choosing the content your users search: your site, a collection of sites you choose, or the entire web.
2. You can also prioritize and restrict search to specific sections of sites. customization of look and feel – you choose the colors, location of the ads, and the option to host the results on your site or have Google host them for you.
3. Monetization of search results pages with targeted ads

See it in action:

So how do we do this? Easy Peazy.

STEP 1 (Getting the Google Code)
- You will need to go to Google Custom Search http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ and register for an account if you dont already have one. Follow the steps to create a new search engine.
- In the “Look and Feel” tab, you will need to choose the “iframe” option
- Specify a URL in your site where you want the search results to appear: eg http://your_domain_name/search/
- Make sure you specify the advertising be placed on the top and bootom

The Search Box Code and Search Results Code will look like this:

STEP 2 (Create a Search Page to Display the Google Custom Search Results)

You will need to create a search page for the google search results to be on. Making sure the permalink for the page is the same as you specified above.
- Create a new page named Search via the Pages -> Add New command on the left menu in the Admin panel.
- Edit the post slug if needed to ensure the Permalink is http://your_domain_name/search/
- Click the HTML tab in the post editor.
- Paste the Google Search result code.
- Save and publish the page.

STEP 3 (Modify the searchform.php file)
You will also need to modify the searchform.php file. Replace all the contents of the searchform.php file and paste in the Google Search Box code.

For example your new searchform.php file will look like this:

<form action="http://www.yoururl.com/search/" id="cse-search-box">
<div>
<input type="hidden" name="cx" value="017284621037843979677:6xpazlqjxva" />
<input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:11" />
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="UTF-8" />
<input type="text" name="q" size="31" />
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
</div>
</form>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en"></script>

STEP 4 Style the Results Page
The default google custom search results page may be too wide for the themes page if you dont specify the advertising be placed on the top and bootom. To make it fit on the page change value=”FORID:10″ to value=”FORID:11″ in the Google Search Box code. If you need to style the results further you can directly download and manipulate the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files that control results styling. Refer to the documentation here http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ … index.html