If you’ve ever looked at the backend functionality of a successful e-commerce website you’ve probably noticed that its backend is great at having many tasks fully automated to reduce costs and improve efficiency. With that in mind, designing an e-commerce website in terms of architecture and automated SEO tasks will increase the likelihood of reaching high organic ranking. I’ve seen examples of online retailers ranking extremely high with minimal amount of backlinks, purely on the basis of domain trust and smart site architecture.
Here are 10 tips to bear in mind when designing the architecture of the website:
1. Keep products as close as possible to the main root and don’t exceed 3 levels so www.sitename.com/category1/product-name/ would work great, however www.sitename.com/category1/product-name/ which redirects to www.sitename.com/product-name/ is even better.
2. Make your URL search engine friendly by opting for keyword reach URLs such as www.sitename.com/product-name-product-id/ rather than www.sitename.com/script/223/product-code/
3. Keep your links in the site’s HTML site map below 200 to keep the page relevant as possible. Once the page gains authority, listing new products on this page will get the new products indexed quickly.
4. 301 redirect error pages (404 i.e. page not found) to your homepage together with an information message and a search box option using a hash for the keyword query. So a page which does not exist such as www.sitename.com/blue-widget will become www.sitename.com/#blue-widget. Because search engines won’t see any content passed the # and you’ll be using 301 redirect, credit for these page not found links won’t go to waste, but instead will go to the root www.sitename.com/#blue-widget
5. Use canonical tag for your main category pages to increase their relevancy and authority to be distributed to their products so you’d expect to site the category URL as
6. Use nofollow tag for pages with less SEO value such as privacy statement, terms and conditions, log in, sign up, contact us, add to basket etc and keep your link juice following in the right direction.
7. Offer breadcrumb navigation across the site and make the breadcrumb into an H2 HTML tag so you’d expect to see home » category » product name (as an H2).
8. Ensure that disconnected products are auto 301 redirected to the product’s top level category as these products are likely to have some backlinks and ranking. By redirecting the disconnected product to its category you’ll keep some of the link juice following in the right direction and offer better user experience.
9. Use text based recommended products blocks to link between related products to increase their relevancy.
10. Ensure that each product has unique metadata in terms of page title, *page description, H1, image name and alt text based on:
- For page title use
-* For page description either leave blank and let Google extract the necessary information based on the on-page product description and the search query or use
- For H1 use
- For image name and alt text use
Bonus tip – make sure your development server / site isn’t indexed as it might result in content duplication issues. You’ll be surprised how common it is
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