On Page SEO for eCommerce Websites
Putting up an ecommerce website with the descriptions from the manufacture is bad for SEO. Putting up any content on your website that is not unique is not good for SEO. The excuse that “everybody does it” is not valid. Sure there are some people out there that rank well using manufacture descriptions but your not them. When you get the same kinds of links that they do you will outrank them because you have unique content. When Google spiders the web they notice that there are a lot of people selling the same item with the same description. If you want Google to notice you you’re going to have to be different. A very good example of a website doing this right is www.jpeterman.com.
If your serious about getting more sales through organic search traffic your going to have to spend the time or hire somebody to do it for you. Somebody is going to have to go in and rewrite your descriptions. When you rewrite the description you need to make sure you include keywords you want to rank for. Also add alt tags to your images. Another thing I recommend is to consider how Wikipedia is set up. In your description talk about other items that go with this item and link to them with anchor text. Notice in Wikipedia articles there are lots of links to other pages in Wikipedia. That is one of the reasons they rank so well. Internal linking can help you rank above your competitors. On page SEO is hard work and has to be done on large ecommerce websites.
Don’t forget that an ecommerce website is also a website. It should not just be a cart. You need to include articles. The more interesting your site is the more links you will get. Talk about your products. Talk about how they can be used in different ways. Talk about ways to augment them. Write stories about somebody using your product. Spend time on your template and try to keep the code down so that Google mostly finds text instead of tons of junk. Don’t forget that people will leave your website if your page is not loading very fast.
