It is possible to achieve high rankings for an ecommerce website but it can sometimes be tricky depending on the site's design framework.
There are a multitude of online shopping sites in the search engines. Some are custom built from scratch while others may have been created using programs such as osCommerce or Atinic. You only have to take a look at SEO articles and blogs to see that ecommerce sites often run into problems when it comes to indexing and ranking.
The first and most common issue is how the page URLs are written. If the page name becomes too long and contains certain strings in it there is a good chance that a search engine spider may give up crawling the entire site. The only way around this is to either ensure your URLs are written in a friendly format or use a page rewrite tool such as LinkFreeze. A page rewrite will make unfriendly URLs more acceptable by the search engines.
Then next problem is more related to custom built ecommerce sites. Some shopping sites are not initially designed with the search engines in mind. While these sites may look nice they will unduly face problems later when they fail to achieve any kind of presence in the search engines. One common reason for this is that none of the ecommerce product pages are optimized individually. Often you will find duplicate title areas and meta tags across every single page of the site. This is a big problem with Google which values a page on its content relevance. Google is not a fan of duplication and a lot of duplicate content will harm your sites ranking. If you have a site that contains 2000 products then you will be hard pressed to create a generic title / meta tag combination that will make every product page relevant. Each individual product will need to have a set of its own keywords. The latest versions of osCommerce and Atinic allow each product page to be custom optimized.
Another issue with e-commerce sites is their page structure. To make all pages reachable by a search engine the links to them should generally be no more than two links away. An ill thought out ecommerce site may have more than four levels of category, sub category and product pages. This creates the potential of the inner pages not being fully crawled by the search engines. To get around this use a sitemap which contains all of the ecommerce sites pages. The sitemap link itself should be on every page of the website. This will make every page visible to the search engines in no more than two link jumps. A further enhancement of this would be to make a navigation system that allows every page of the site to be reached from it.
If you use this information combined with other methods of search engine optimization it should help your ecommerce site achieve a high level of traffic.
Source by Ant Spinks
