Product Pages
Now that we’re done with the home page we’re going to look at the product pages. This is the place were you need to organize relevant links across the rest of the website. You’re going to relate products with each other and link them across different categories. Also, you will need to flatten to architecture.
A lot of navigation solutions are based on recommendation engines that are mostly made in JavaScript, but these wont be seen by crawlers. Tools like this can be good for e-commerce websites but they’re very SEO unfriendly. These engine need session information to inform their recommendations.
Less could be more in this case and quality is still important. It is possible to make good topical links on the product pages but it requires a lot of good quantity data. It is not advised to link from product or item URL to multiple categories even though it can be quite powerful. You should keep the linking de-emphasized to keep the best path for crawlers.
When looking at usability you’d also want to prevent linking products to different categories unless they’re very relevant to each category. Although it could be of value if the search engine has permanent and relevant links.
To summarize the techniques for product pages:
- Related product links are a lot more competent.
- Pick quality over quantity.
- You need a lot of quality data.
- Related links should be focused across the product and item level.
- Don't forget to link the products and items prominently to the relevant category.
Category Pages
To achieve the most possible visibility for products and item pages in search, you need to build equity into category and sub category page and then make them go to item-level pages.
On larger websites it is not feasible to start linking to the product pages themselves. They should become a part of the whole structure of the website. In addition, they will naturally benefit from many internal links on condition that the architecture is good and concise taxonomy. A recommendation is to add a “top product” section for each category. In this part you can display special products which can help you with search competition. These product will have more prominent internal linking.
Primary category pages can contain external links but don’t put them deeper into the product level unless you have a large evergreen section. A good and powerful technique is social media and this can be build in at product and item level, such as “linking” a product or “tweeting” an item.
To summarize the techniques for category pages:
- Categories should have your primary focus and then equity down to products.
- Top products in each category can be very helpful for SEO
- You can add external links at the category level. It can however happen that a single product is so important it needs its own link.
To be continued, for more information, Please contact Kudos Web Design Manchester and see what we can do for you!