Attention Retailers: These are Your Top 10 SEO Mistakes

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art and an experimental science. To date only a small, elite minority of merchants and affiliates have cracked the code to getting to the top of Google for highly sought-after keywords. Wouldn’t you like to know why they’re winning and why you can’t seem to outrank them? What SEO mistakes are you making?

Stephan Spencer, SEO expert and Co-author of The Art of SEO, led an hour long webinar this week for Shop.org Members answering these questions.

Here are just a few…
Mistake #1: Making assumptions about customer vocabulary
Mistake #2: No or ineffective keyword brainstorming
Mistake #3: Cannibalizing organic search with paid search
Mistakes #4-10: Sorry. Watch the webinar playback (Shop.org Members Only)

Shop.org Members can watch the webinar replay explaining each of the four mistakes and six more that I have not included. I would consider it SEO mistake #11 if you miss it or don’t forward to anyone and everyone that manages your SEO program.

In addition to diving into his list of mistakes (and examples for each), Stephan answered some fantastic questions from the Shop.org community. We thought we would share the answers with all of you and encourage you to chime in and even ask a few additional questions.

1. Code versus content ratio I’ve heard is important. How important is it, and how do comments affect this ratio in SEO?
Simply put, it’s not important. And HTML comments are really of no consequence either. It’s acceptable to have HTML comments, just know it won’t help, it can only hurt (i.e. if you spam the comments with lots of keywords). I avoid HTML comments primarily because it slows the page download and costs you conversions (sales).
Where did you hear it was important? Was it a credible source? Did they back up their assertions with evidence? Yes I’m trying to make a point. The larger issue here is that folks will state opinions as if they were facts, and because they sound so sure of themselves, so authoritative, we tend to believe them. Don’t make that mistake! Test all this stuff to make sure it really holds true. If you aren’t allowed to (or otherwise unable to) run SEO tests on your employer’s e-commerce site, get yourself a blog or content site or affiliate site and test your hypotheses and theories over there. You can build, or you can buy them for cheap (sites for sale are advertised regularly on Flippa, WebSiteBroker, and Digital Point Forums, among other place). You can even monetize your new site so it makes you some passive income, like my daughter’s done with her Neopets fan site or I’ve done with an Writers / Authors Online Community site (both with Google AdSense, also known as the “poor man’s affiliate program”). Think of it as an annuity that’s also a low-risk testing ground / sandbox to play in.

2. Is Flash an SEO killer?
It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Flash has its place. Flash is not an appropriate medium for your product specs or main navigation. Heaven forbid you make your entire site in Flash. Why? Because Flash doesn’t give you the same capability to semantically mark up your content like HTML does. That said, there’s nothing wrong with using Flash for interactive elements like product demos. In fact it’s a great use for the technology. For example, if you’re selling cell phones online, then an interactive Flash animation where the visitor can spin the phone around, type on the keys and see what happens on the device’s display is a great use of Flash.

3. If I redirected to a wrong page and directed that page to the right page 3 weeks later, how much is lost?
Other than the obvious answer of the last three weeks’ worth of traffic, probably not much. Once the engines discover the corrected redirect, they will associate the origin URL’s links to the new destination.

4. In Yahoo Site Explorer example, how do you know where the link was on the page if the page was cached with the link, but it no longer exists? Is there merit to a temporary link?
If the link is gone from the page that is in the search engine’s cache, then it’s not counting any more so it’s a moot point that you don’t know where on the page it was located. There is merit to a temporary link, if only because scraper sites will steal that page’s content — links included — and republish the stolen content elsewhere on the Web.

5. What is Phrase match?
Phrase match is related to PPC, as is broad match. If you phrase match on “black dress”, your ad will show up for searches on “little black dress” but not “black sequin dress”. If you broad match on “black dress”, the word “black” and “dress” both have to appear in user’s query, but not together as a phrase. So “black sequin dress” would be a match for a PPC campaign on broad match targeting “black dress”.

6. What’s your opinion on the flexibility of a proxy site optimized specifically for SEO vs. having the actual web site indexed?
A proxy based solution such as Organic Search Optimizer is infinitely more flexible than doing major invasive surgery to your website’s underlying platform. The proxy server makes changes to the pages in real-time, in a search-and-replace sort of fashion based on a set of rules stored in a database (I’m oversimplifying here, but I think you get the picture). The effect is the same: the spiders get an optimized version of the requested piece of content. It just so happens that it was accomplished without complex recoding of the CMS.

7. A lot of retail websites are managed by some type of internal search or reduductive navigation – this generates dynamic URLs as people refine. How would you handle this? Even if you start out on a static category page – as you drill – the URLs end up with different parameters. What’s the best way to handle this while still presenting the user all these different ways to refine?
The ultimate goal is to present to the spiders only the facets that have SEO value — like color and brand combinations, and NOT color and price range combinations. Nofollow is not really the preferred route of doing so anymore. Let’s say that one of the links is to change the sort order based on price. A great way to handle that would be for the sort function to be AJAX based, where the resorted content gets pulled into the existing page asynchronously without reloading the page at a different URL. If the facet has good SEO value, then that page should be search engine optimized — the product attributes of the facet should be in the title tag, in the headline, and ideally there should be some intro copy specific to that facet. That can be done easily through a proxy solution like discussed above; probably this would be difficult to accomplish otherwise because the faceted navigation systems were not built with SEO in mind from the ground-up.
If you want to read more about faceted navigation and SEO best practices, I encourage you to read a piece my colleague Brian Klais wrote a a while back for Search Engine Land called Cleaning Up the Retail Site Navigating Mess. There was also an excellent discussion of this topic recently on Google’s Webmaster Help forums here.

If you enjoyed this blog post or get value out of the webinar playback I strongly recommend attending the Shop.org Online Retail Boot Camp on September 27th where Stephan will be leading a three hour SEO Interactive Power Session. You can also read more from Stephan on his blog.

A special thank you to MarkMonitor for sponsoring this event so we could bring this great content to the Shop.org membership!