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This is another post from a Tell Me What You Want comment.

First let’s define what a retail site is.

A retail site is a site that sells numerous products from the site and usually has a shopping cart system to take the orders. The products can be digital but most of the time they are physical products that need to be delivered. Amazon.com is probably one of the best examples of a retail website.

Websites for retail stores have two basic types - hand coded where every page is made by somebody and uploaded to the site and dynamic where a script feeds the information from a database to create the site.

The resultant pages should have the same features when it come to on page Search Engine Optimization.

First you want to break down your products into categories but these categories should be keywords that you are using.

For example if you are selling pet supplies you would probably want general categories of:

• Dog Supplies
• Cat Supplies
• Fish Supplies
• Other Supplies

This will not only be the category but the first part of your title tag for the product.

Once you have your general categories you would then need to break them down to sub-categories.

Dog Supplies

• Dog Collars
• Dog Leashes
• Dog Houses
• Dog Bowls

Then in each category you will have your products. The title tag for the product page should be a chain of categories ending in either a description of the product or the model identification for the product. Whether you use a description or a model number depends on the product for example when you are dealing with electronics people search for specific model numbers. Here is an example of what a title tag should look like for a digital camera.

Electronics – Digital Camera – Sony DSCS 730

Electronics and Digital Camera are both categories on the website with digital camera being a sub-category. You could take this a step further and add sub-categories under digital camera for still and video.

Remember you want your title tag to be clear, keyword related and concise. Google only reads the first 65 characters of your title tag so you want to get all your keywords in before you reach their limit.

Now for some products you will definitely want to use a description of the product instead of an item number. Let’s go back to the pet supplies; if I was going to the search engine to look for a spike leather collar for my dog I would search something like this, “leather spike dog collar”. I wouldn’t know an item number for it. So your product page title should look something like this:

Dog Supplies – Dog Collars – Spiked Leather Collar

As you can see, that tag would fulfill my search rather well.

Do note that I don’t have the domain name in either of these title tags. Unless your domain name has keywords in it (which I highly recommend) then it won’t help you from an SEO stand point. If you do want to have your domain name included in the title tag and it has no keywords in it put it at the end of the tag so that it doesn’t take away from the 65 characters that Google reads.

Dog Supplies – Dog Collars – Spiked Leather Collar – From the Curiosity Shop

Also notice that I have dashes between the categories. In recent reports I have read that if you put a pipe instead of a dash it does better for SEO. I haven’t personally tested this yet so I can’t vouch for the effectiveness. But you could try it.

Dog Supplies | Dog Collars | Spiked Leather Collar | From the Curiosity Shop

Then end product page should also have as much content as you can provide about the product on the page and have your keywords worked into the description. Don’t over use them or force them, they should flow naturally because you are describing the item and the item should fit those keywords. If your item doesn’t match your keywords then you are using the wrong keywords.

The next items don’t have the impact of the title tag but every little bit helps.

You page names should also contain your keywords but make sure you put a hyphen or underscore between the words. For the main domain name the search engines will actually break out the individual words but for sub-folders and page names they don’t seem to do this.

Instead of a URL that looks like this:

http://www.site.com/dogcollars/spikedleathercollar.html

It should look like this:

http://www.site.com/dog-collars/spiked-leather-collar.html

If you have an image of the product on the product page make sure you use the alt tag to describe the product and name the image something that describes it. For example the image for the spiked leather collar could be name spiked-leather-dog-collar.jpg. This helps if some one does an image search.

It also helps if you can put the product description at the top of the page in an H1 tag. If you don’t like the way the H1 tags look on your page then use a CSS style to make them look the way you want.

Having the content on the product page makes the page more relevant for the search engines. This is why sites like Amazon.com let customers post their comments and reviews for the product on the product page.

The technique described above is a great way to work the “long tail” keywords for a retail website and if your site is hand coded it is fairly easy to implement but most retail websites are scripted.

Most of the big retailers have custom made scripts and they can have their programmers integrate these techniques without much problem. But if you aren’t that big look for a script that will do this:

• You want to be able to make categories and sub-categories
• You want script that will dynamically create the title tags for you but you have some control over what goes in the title tag.
• You want a script that will let you configure the layout of the product page, including changing the way the item name is coded so that you can make it a H1 tag
• You want a script that creates real URL’s instead of just coded links. I will explain this one:

Some scripts use product id numbers to create pages on the fly and you end up with a URL that looks something like this.

http://www.site.com/products.php?id=983794

You don’t want your URL to look like that you want it to contain your keywords. This is usually done with something call a mod rewrite that will take the link above and make it:

http://www.site.com/dog-collars/spiked-leather-collar.html

And this will be a valid URL when ever some one comes to your site. This blog works the same way.

But remember all of this is just to get them to your site. Once there you have to convert them and a key factor in that is how easy it is to use your site. If a possible customer comes to your site and gets confused they will probably leave without purchasing.

I recommend a book by Steve Krug called, “Don’t Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” You can pick it up at Amazon.com of course.