Ecommerce sites face search engine optimisation challenge

14:00 2nd February 2010

Ecommerce sites face a challenge to get the most out of search engine optimisation as a lot of their pages are likely to be deemed by search engines to be duplicates.

That is the opinion of Eric Enge, president of US-based Stone Temple Consulting, who told Search Engine Land that as pages on online shopping websites are usually similar for different products, with lots of overlap of content, search engines did not consider them important.

Mr Enge explained that Amazon got around the problem of search engine optimisation by allowing users to post their opinions on products, boosting the page's rankings in search engine results pages every time a commenter used a keyword in their reviews.

However, this is not always an option, especially for smaller companies.

He said: "For sites without an authoritative link profile, or without enough traffic to generate a lot of customer commentary, it is probably a good idea for them to generate their own unique content."

Mr Enge said digital marketers should build up the pages with unique content in layers, prioritising the most important pages on the site and produce 100 to 250 words of material for them.

Another successful way of boosting the search engine optimisation of a site could be to use hyphens to separate words in a URL.

Ann Smarty told Search Engine Journal that there were disadvantages to using spaces, commas or full stops in a URL, but none to using hyphens.