When dealing with ecommerce stores the internal links structure is the key element for customers to locate and buy a product you sell. Concentrating on the right areas to place internal links the proper way something that can increase sales and organic traffic. In this entry we will examine the most important areas to achieve a proper internal links and navigation structure.
Allowing customers to locate a product with the minimum number of clicks.
  Customers visit your online store because you may have a product they want. Positioning a products search on an easy to access location in your website, has the potential of people using it. The most convenient location is below the page header and above the main content.
The quality of the internal search results is important when a customer submits the search form. You need to return results ordered by importance. Importance is subject the search criteria and to the products you have on sale. Stock Availability, Price, Brand, Shipping Costs, Keyword Position in Title, may differ among related products and following a quick search the customer may want to perform an additional filtering of results. Once the quick search is used, it becomes crucial to initiate an add to cart operation as soon as possible. Internal links of searched products should include an add to cart option and a products detail link.
The ecommerce search function should be limited to human visitors as the search links or buttons, should require a session to be activated. Failure to do so, may allow search engines to index pages via the search links you display, interpreting those as ones with thin content. Other methods of preventing spiders from indexing these pages and following search links, is by using forms or javascript whenever appropriate.
Another method we examine is with facet navigation. Depending on the product types you want to sell, you could use javascript and expose few main categories along with many product filters. This method can completely replace the website's quick search, where internal links are exposed with the main categories only. The facet filters are used to trim the results in various ways and can be activated by javascript to streamline and reorganize listings. If a category contains a thousand products, a combination of filters applied, can narrow down listed items to just few products. At the same time a top category listing becomes accessible to search engines having product links ordered according to importance.
For more information on navigation issues and solutions see our article on SEO click depth for page access.
Exposing and organizing groups of products to offer alternatives to visitors.
 Organize products in different ways by displaying multiple filtering types, so visitors can narrow down and isolate products they're looking for, real fast. Categories with filters, sort ordering of products in different ways, live search in product pages, are important areas your store should be able to handle. A filtering stage in a product's page, increases the page focus and could display links to relevant products offering alternatives.
Another note, you should limit the number of information pages as ecommerce is about selling online not about text books. If extensive product details are required due to the nature of merchandise, provide alternative content formats including videos, specifications in PDF and appropriate internal links. Spiders are becoming smart enough to properly treat this type of content instead of assuming it's part of online commerce. If you need to write articles keep them separately, one method is to setup a sub-domain and place extensive information there.
If possible display listings with a particular focus, so search engines understand the important keywords. For example if you target accessories from an all store's categories, make sure there is an additional filter that is applied to increase the page focus. Use a default one if you are planning to expose this type of listing page to spiders. Otherwise generalized listings maybe treated as pages with thin content and have high bounce rates.
Improving the rank and page focus of pages containing products on sale.
The product information page is the first page for a potential sale. It means the customer has found something he has an interest on. For the online a store, a bounce on the product information page implies poor navigation and incorrect keywords setup with product titles or product links or an inadequate search facility. Check the logs and trace the links the customer followed to get to that page, repeat these steps by following the links yourself to get a better idea of what possible goes wrong.
Keep in mind with ecommerce sites, the search engines will give a chance to domains to rank for their products this means a 2-click distance from the domain root is covered. Any product you sell should be accessible following a sequence of two separate clicks in two subsequent links.
Remove secondary links from hard-coded HTML anchors
 Thin content pages provide little value to generate organic traffic. The advanced search page, shopping cart, the login page, create account, checkout page etc., are pages useful for humans in certain cases. They do not assist search engines. Use cookies, forms or javascript and expose these pages exclusively to human visitors. Do not rely on nofollow, canonical tags or any other temporary workarounds that could detriment the site's overall rank exposing irrelevant information and may require additional maintenance in the near future as search engines reassess their algorithms often.
Other secondary pages with links that could also detriment rank could be positioned further away from the home page so spiders understand these are not important ones. For instance the sitemap could be accessed when an error page is displayed or the search performed did not return any results. It can also be placed in a form of javascript, so it's accessible to humans only. An HTML sitemap page is not the same as the sitemap you intentionally submit to search engines.
Links in the footer may include other secondary pages like privacy, terms and conditions, FAQs, shipping info and could be rearranged to be accessible from the related pages. Customers who view products listing pages are looking for specific products at that stage not for the privacy info. This approach will force you to present different focused pages on the important content just by altering the links exposed.
Recording visits and offering navigation history and predicting future page visits.
Record page visits and link clicks each customer follows to locate a product and checkout. The accumulated history of click events can then be parsed to locate the most preferred path the customer followed to complete an order. Check for backtracks in link paths followed, so you can correct problems with invalid links or difficult to see spots during page navigation.
Once you rectify any serious navigation problems concentrate on the customer preferences with navigation elements. Main menu, Categories Boxes, Product pages and order followed gives hints for areas where the customer encounters difficulties and the store's layout requires improvements.
Setup keywords density with product links to rank higher with search engines.
Each product link you display should have the important keywords a visitor may search for with spiders. Setup links with targeted keywords and point them to the product information pages from the page listings. Do not repeat keywords in links and rearrange those with the most important words listed first. Product characteristics, unless critical for a search, should not be included with anchors.
Ensure relevant keywords are part of the anchor title tag. This increases the link relevancy and provides to customer a visual summary before following the link and has the potential to reduce page bounce.
In addition review the inline domain search for product keywords with search engines. Double check if the page results you see is what you expect. This is trivial task and although time consuming, can give you hints on product pages with optimization and keyword problems. Make sure you use the targeted keywords for domain inline search as the ordering of pages can be insignificant by just entering the plain domain name on its own.
Use static links without meaningless numbers or unrelated keywords in them. The shorter the link it is the better the page will rank for a given combination of keywords it includes. Do not include price or other numeric figures with the product or category links, as it is highly unlikely visitors will try to locate products with numbers.
Increasing conversion ratio of visits to sales.
Once you the visitor locates a product he searches for, he should be able to choose associated options and then follow the necessary links to complete the order. Best practice is to offer two separate paths for the checkout procedure. One via the shopping cart page and another directly into the checkout page. Position the checkout links as close as possible to the product's price tag along with any other information that may alter the order final total amount in clear visible HTML tags.
For instance if you offer free shipping, use a visual and attractive HTML tag to display it and link this text to a popup window with shipping details and shipping terms. If you use a shipping estimator follow the same linking method with the popup window, including a form to estimate shipping cost and options subject to the customer's location.
The cart and checkout pages should list the products to be ordered along with back links so the customer at any time can go back and review details of the products he's about to order.
Eliminate orphan pages
Each page in your store should be internally linked from another page at least once. If a spider crawls your content from the domain root it should be able to find every single page. Sometimes orphan pages are unintentionally generated because you modify a section of the site, altering internal links and point them somewhere else. When this happens, rank factors change and page link juice is shifted as there is no path to link your active pages to orphan ones. In time as more pages added, it becomes difficult to track orphan pages as the internal links structure is more complex.
Use 301 redirect for errors
When a page is not found either because it was never there or because it was removed at some point use a 301 redirect to the closest page as a replacement. If you can predict a similar page, given an error and redirect the customer to a page where he may able to locate the product he's looking for. If you cannot locate a relevant page, use the sitemap a products map, all categories listing page and as a last resort the home page. These pages are your best bet to limit bounce rates given a page not found error.
To generate static links and handle page redirection you could further read on SEO-G an advanced links manager with friendly links generation. |
