Top 10 Tips to Optimising SEO

Optimising for search engines and shopping engines is all about accessibility, authority and relevance.

When rigorously optimising for search and users, sometimes the basics get ignored or overdone leading to entire sections of the site being blocked, duplicated or rendered useless for search engines.

Ensure you follow these salient rules to avoid falling into the "low visibility" zone. 

1.  Check noindex rules across your site

If you have implemented the noindex meta tag on extensive sections of your site based on certain guidelines, revisit these guidelines to make sure they are still relevant and do not conflict with other rules on the site. Do not submit pages with a noindex meta tag in your XML sitemap to search engines or shopping feeds. Double check that rules in the robots.txt and noindex tag are consistent.

2.  Check robots.txt on every sub-domain

Are you blocking sections of your site in the robots.txt file? If so, ensure that you are not inadvertently restricting the search engines from accessing product listings or related content because the entire directory is accidentally blocked in robots.txt.

3.  Don’t embed HTML in the code of your feed

When submitting feeds to shopping engines, embedding html or stuffing promotional text in the product titles and descriptions will lead to messy and truncated titles and descriptions. Do not stuff promotional text into the product description as it could end up truncating irregularly or even worse be removed from shopping engines.

4.  Redirects

If you have recently relaunched a section of your site and redirected old pages to new ones, make sure the redirects are 301 (permanent redirects). If the pages have 302 or temporary redirects implemented, the new pages will not get indexed because the search engines will continue to think that the redirect is temporary.

5.  Duplicate Meta Titles

If you are generating meta titles dynamically based on the changing content of the page, check the rules and ensure that the meta titles and descriptions uniquely identify a particular page and are not so broad that they lead to duplicate content. Check your webmaster tools to check pages on your site that have duplicate meta title tags and/or duplicate meta description tags.

6.  Out-of-Stock products

When you submit your product listings to search engines or shopping engines, do not provide landing pages (URLs) that are broken, redirected or contain out of stock products. This will affect the CTR (click through rate) to your site as well as user perception with regard to the quality and consistency of your site. If the engine has a quality score in place, your site could be down ranked based on high bounce rates, that is people clicking away from your page.

7.  Avoid duplicate product URLs in the feed

Don’t provide multiple URLs or landing pages for the same product or item. This will lead to duplicate content and will risk down ranking of all URLs due to this issue.

8.  Push external links to product specific pages

Don’t rely on external links to your homepage or domain. Analyse the distribution of quality external links to your home page vs. deep links to product-specific pages.

9. Spider webs

Got a new site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. Another approach is to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

10.  Update product price, stock status, product description and best uses

Content has a shelf life and needs to be updated regularly to maintain its value. Outdated content, when not monitored and evaluated, can snowball and lead to negative perception about the quality of your site. With the increased focus on quality content and value add pages in the search index, it is important to keep content current and clean. Updated content will keep conversions high and will also draw in new users based on.

Both search engines and shopping engines are advertising platforms for your site. Strong, clean feeds are a requirement for success. Optimising and updating the listings you feed to search engines will help your site compete for a higher share of visibility as well as perform better from a conversion and revenue stand point. Use these tips as the framework towards a smart strategy for your brand or product. Pipon Solutions can help you get these basic components right.