Poor SEO will affect your business site’s visibility and credibility, ultimately denting your profit margins. This is something that you cannot afford in the longer run. So you must pay utmost attention to all aspects that determine the online accessibility of your E-commerce platform that hosts the relevant products and services.
In the previous post, I’ve discussed some of the aspects that hold the key to a site’s chances of being successfully crawled and indexed by engine spiders. Some of the problem areas for e-commerce sites in ensuring accessibility and hence higher rankings as already pointed out are: broken links, Valid HTML and CSS rather lack of it, forms and applications functionality.
File size: Barring a select few documents search engines consider to be of greater importance, pages over 150K in size are seldom fully cached. This is done to bring down index size, bandwidth usage and unnecessary load on the servers.
This factor should be taken into consideration while making pages with large amounts or size of content. It is advisable to keep the file size in check to ensure that every keyword or phrase is spidered/indexed. Smaller file size means faster download s for site users – a worthy outcome in itself.
Downtime and server speed: The performance of a site’s server may well adversely affect search rankings and flow of visitors if the issues related to downtime and slower transfer speeds are not addressed in time. It is highly recommended that you invest in quality hosting to prevent the fallouts of shoddy server speed.
URLs, title tags and Meta data: These components together denote your site strengths and page parameters to the visitor as well as a search engine. It is vital to keep them relevant, accurate and compelling for the site to be ranked higher. You can utilize them as launching points for major keywords to ensure successful optimization of your site.
Ideally, the URL of a document should be as brief and equally descriptive as possible. If, for instance, your site’s structure carries several levels of navigation and files, it (the URL) should reflect so with folders/subfolders. The URLs of Individual page also needs to be descriptive sans stretching overly, so that a site visitor who notices only the URL gets a fair idea of the page contents.
Meta tags once were considered of great importance for successful SEO. However, the usage of meta tags, especially the meta keywords tag, to an extent has undermined their importance from the angle of search engine optimization. The meta description tag though, should not be totally overlooked, as several search engines make use of it for displaying the snippet of text just below the clickable title link in their relevant results pages.
In essence, addressing the various aspects related to a site’s accessibility by search engines as well as users in a satisfactory manner will ensure enhanced visibility for your products and services across the Web.
