Comment on Online Shopping by SEO Dave.

Online Shopping In my earlier comment SEO for Online Shopping Sites I discussed some of the SEO positives on this webpage, in this comment let’s look at some of the on-page SEO mistakes you can learn from and not repeat on your online shops.

Look at the top of the webpage.

We have a link to home anchor text: WordPress SEO Packages
WordPress Tagline: Best Google Hummingbird SEO Package for WordPress

Because I built the Stallion WordPress SEO package I use on this site I didn’t add any additional relevance to this link back to home and the WordPress tagline. It’s just a simple text link and bit of body text with no more SEO relevance than the identical content above (just a link and text).

With many WordPress themes the developers put the link back home in a H1 header and the tagline in a H2 header adding SEO relevance, this damages the on-page SEO of each individual WordPress post! Go to one of your WordPress posts and view code source, search through the code for H1, H2, H3, H4 and see what content is in those header tags.

Does it support that webpages shop SERPs? If not you have an SEO problem.

As a Stallion uses though having this unrelated link and text on THIS webpage is SEO damaging to the online shopping SERPs, it’s minimized by not adding a header around it.

Remember this website isn’t an online shop, I’m mostly targeting SEO and money type SERPs and for most webpages on this site the above content helps those webpages SERPs, but by adding no additional SEO relevance any SEO damage is minimized. When building a WordPress site try to name it with SEO in mind, the title of a site is used by all WordPress themes, what you name your site will be the home pages title tag.

If I named my site “Dave’s Awesome Blog” the home page will be search engine optimized for “Dave’s Awesome Blog” (don’t think there’s any traffic for those SERPs :-))

For an online shop run under WordPress what you call it is important, if you lack a true brand identity (my site doesn’t have a strong brand) aim for an important SERP (mine is “WordPress SEO Packages”), if you sold India Fashion you might name the site something like “India Fashion Shop”. If Amazon ran under WordPress it’s site title based on the title tag would be “Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more” which is bloody awful SEO wise, I’d go with “Amazon.com: Online Shopping” or even better “Online Shopping : Amazon.com”.

I could easily use a WordPress Custom Page Template for this webpage and remove or replace the above content. So there is a solution, but it would be a bit weird having one webpage with no header or a different header and the SEO damage is minimal and the link back home helps the home page SERPs.

Below this content we have a navigation menu, look at the anchor text of the 7 links, they tend to target WordPress, SEO, Tutorial type SERPs, again not supporting this webpages SERPs, but supporting my most important webpages. If this was a shop site I’d mostly add shop/shopping relevant links above to support the sites shop SERPs. If you are optimizing a WordPress shopping site and use a navigation menu try to mostly add supporting links for most of the site (I want SEO Package, WordPress SEO, SEO tutorial type traffic and my navigation menu supports these SERPs).

We find a lot of webmasters stuff this area with a lot of links and don’t add enough SEO relevance to the links (anchor text is REALLY important). If you are linking to a section of your site about iPhone 6 faceplates you sell don’t just add the anchor text “iPhone 6”. Does this mean you are selling the iPhone 6, buying the iPhone 6, supplying apps for iPhone 6… Be as specific as what works for your design, if you sell iPhone 6 Faceplates your anchor text should be something like “iPhone 6 Faceplates” NOT just “iPhone 6” or just “Faceplates”.

On-page SEO is really easy, look at my nav links, they all describe where the link goes. Sometimes you have to add links that aren’t for SEO reasons, the Recent Discussions link and Tech support link are for users, makes it easy to find recent comments and ask for support.

I don’t have a contact page because I want contact via comments, as a shop you’ll need a prominent Contact or About link sitewide. You can add relevance to the links, “Contact Amazon”, “About Amazon”, “Contact SEO Dave”, “About SEO Dave”, “Contact Stallion Responsive” (pushing it a bit), “About Stallion Responsive”. Try to avoid just “Contact”, “About”, “Home”, “Click Here”, “Continue Reading” for anchor text.

Now we come to the truly damaging SEO part of this webpages design, the left menu.

The Buy SEO Package widget helps this pages SERPs (BUY is relevant), but the rest isn’t. I have two silo SEO widgets on the left menu, popular posts and recent posts.

The Popular Posts widget is SEO’d, but it’s Silo SEO’d for the Test SEO category (the category this post is in) and a couple of other related categories which is why most of the links have anchor text related to SEO.

My SEO test is targeting the “Online Shopping” SERPs, but I lack any supporting webpages for this SERPs (why I’m writing these comments), I don’t have an online shopping category, I don’t have an online shop.

If this were an online shop the Popular Posts widget would be renamed “Popular PRODUCTS” and I’d silo SEO the widget to only load popular PRODUCTS from categories related to shopping online.

Same for the Recent Posts widget except it’s silo SEO’d only for the Test SEO category (only shows recent posts from one category). If this was a shop the widget would be called “Recent PRODUCTS” or “Latest Products” and would show recent products from a shop category.

Every webpage on this site works this way. Go to the SEO Silo Tutorial and the Popular and Recent posts widgets only load posts from the SEO tutorial related categories: you’ll see different links from this webpage. Go to the Laptop vs Desktop PCs post which is in the Product Reviews category and you only see links to other product reviews. This is built into Stallion Responsive.

I COULD fix the left menu SEO issue, I have multiple options with Stallion.

Can set the Popular and Recent posts widgets not to load on this one post (Stallion feature) and add something else to fill the blank space.

Could set the post to use a custom post template that lacks the left sidebar.

Could write a series of articles (10 say) regarding Online Shopping SEO and move the post from the SEO test category to the new Online shopping SEO category. This would give me enough related webpages to online shopping for the popular and recent posts widget to support the online shopping SERPs (that would be the best SEO fix, but is time consuming writing supporting webpages).

Currently writing a few comments to support the online shop SERPs, the main article now has two more links with anchor text “Online Shop SEO Mistakes”. By adding comments with relevant comment titles I’m adding more links out to related webpages (Stallion Responsive has a feature that generates webpages from comments).

As more relevant comments are added the 20 unrelated links from the popular and recent posts widget become less important. The ratio of related anchor text to unrelated anchor text is increasing. Also the webpages generated from the comments are indexed by Google and link back to the main online shopping article with relevant anchor text. If I can get to around 10 comments we’ve in effect built a online shopping section to the site via comments, a small SEO silo structure just for the online shopping SERP: pretty cool SEO tactic when it works ;-)

I don’t seriously expect any competitive Online Shopping SERPs, this is a teaching tool to show HOW to SEO a WordPress site.

David