Helping Google not only crawl your site efficiently, but also properly categorize your content is fundamental to maximizing organic search potential.

This post presents 5 tactics that your business may not be executing in efforts to help search engine optimization.  These tactics will help improve both your “primary” keyword phrases and also help position your longer tail phrases within the search engine result pages.  Let’s begin…

Tactic #1) Limit your duplicate content on your domain

It’s widely known that search engines do not like when the content on your website mirrors content that is published on other domains.  In instances which retailers embrace product descriptions that are provided by manufacturers, or when content is purchased for a website and is also used by other domains, Google will not reward your website.  This is not new news.

Did you know however that you can have duplicate content within your own domain?  Because of the nature of search and navigation systems that are being leveraged today, Google may index multiple version of the same page as long as multiple URL’s are in existence.

For example, in working with a partner, we discovered that 27 versions of the same product page were indexed in Google.  Because of varied parameters that were included in the URL, Google indexed all of these pages on an individual basis.

When this happens, it’s not optimal for your search rankings.  Not only does Google not know which page to render within a user query, but your pagerank, otherwise known as the numeric value that defines search rankings, get disseminated among a wide number of the same page instead of one primary page.

Google has provided tools to help fix this problem that are easily available.  First is their stance on embracing the canonical tag within their search index.  Essentially the canonical tag tells search engines when duplicates are present and which page to index as a primary authoritative page.  Here you can see Google’s blog post discussing the canonical tag.

Also, they have added a layer of functionality within Webmaster Tools that allows a domain to exclude certain query parameters from the URL string.  If your URL’s have database driven parameters, that really don’t help in classifying pages, you can eliminate them within the Google index using this functionality.  Here is Google’s announcement regarding this capability.

By executing these two tactics, you will have a more efficient crawl from search spiders and consolidate your pagerank to key merchandising pages.

Tactic #2:  Provide a feed location for your sitemap

Too many online retailers do not have XML sitemaps within their domain.  An XML sitemap is a great way to ensure that Google gets an appropriate representation of your entire product catalog and fills in any gaps that exist outside of a standard HTML sitemap.

If you are in the mood for a technical read, I highly recommend taking a look at this whitepaper written by Google and UCLA relating to the importance of sitemaps within organic search.  It provides some details on how to properly classify your feed and make sure it adheres to best practices.

Once your XML feed is live on your domain, preferably in the root (ex. Mysite.com/sitemap.xml), the next step is to tell the search engines where it is residing.

Be sure to go to Webmaster Tools (Google), Webmaster Center (Bing), and Yahoo Site Explorer to map the location of your XML file within their interfaces.  If you do not have accounts and your domain is not authenticated with these toolsets I highly recommend that you do so.

These tools provide the capability for your business to go “under the hood” of your domain from a SEO perspective and receive direct messaging from the engines themselves regarding errors.

Tactic #3:  Make sure reviews are not “injected”

Product reviews are fantastic.  They provide consumers with the peer based information they need in making comfortable purchasing decisions.  When deployed properly, reviews can also help your domain in ranking for “commercial intent” queries and reward your domain with the freshness aspects within Google’s algorithm.

Unfortunately, many times reviews are “injected” into product pages via Javascript technology.  This approach is great from an implementation standpoint but does not provide the SEO benefit where it is needed most, at the product page level of the taxonomy.

Product reviews embedded in HTML within the product page layer of your eCommerce site will help your overall SEO penetration drastically.  Your business will receive a greater percentage of “long tail” queries, the four to six word phrases that make up the majority of Google searches.

In conjunction to the benefit of having your domain “match” to more user semantics, you will be updating your site more frequently and training crawlers to come back at a more accelerated pace.

Tip #4:  Don’t neglect outreach based link-building

Quality links are fundamental to organic search excellence.  Because Google uses the backlink profile of a domain as a major factor in determining authority status for a keyword phrase, it is an area of your web marketing that should not be neglected.

The problem with link building is that there are many schools of thought of what works and what does not.  In recent years, algorithm shifts have led down the path of “quality over quantity” in the area of link-building and the best way to acquire these type of quality links is to get in direct contact with influential bloggers and webmasters within your market niche.

Let’s say for example that you are a multi-channel wedding retailer.  Your goal is to get penetration for the non-branded queries that associate within your marketplace (ex. “wedding dresses”).  To get a ranking for such a competitive phrase, you are going to have to get links from trusted sources on the web.

Conduct some research in Alexa and find out the major bloggers in your niche.  Mine the backlink profile of the competitors that rank ahead of you in order to uncover some potential partner domains.  After getting your initial Outreach list together, then start contacting these sites with personalized emails.

By building a relationship and communicating directly, you will be able to receive in-text links with targeted anchor text that associates to the phrases you are going after.  Offer a unique piece of written content in conjunction with a small monetary contribution to the upkeep of the blog.  These two things are usually enough to convince a site to link to yours.

Once you start getting these links, you will see your rankings likely rise.  You will be increasing the amount of trust and pagerank to your domain and help your merchandising pages get better search placements.

About the author:

Craig Smith is the Founder and CEO of Trinity Insight, a leading eCommerce consulting agency.  Trinity specializes in SEO and web analytics consulting.