If you run an Bigcommerce store, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving traffic and sales. In this post, we’ll go over the 3 tips for BigCommerce product page SEO, and show you how to implement them using Stencil coding.

Optimize your product titles and descriptions

One of the most important SEO elements for product pages is the title and description. Make sure your product titles are descriptive and include relevant keywords. Your descriptions should also be detailed and include keywords, but be careful not to stuff them with too many keywords – this can actually hurt your SEO.

To optimize your product titles and descriptions in BigCommerce, you can use Stencil coding to dynamically generate them based on product data.

Add structured data markup

Structured data markup is code that helps search engines understand the content of your website. By adding structured data markup to your product pages, you can increase your chances of appearing in rich snippets in search results.

To add structured data markup to your product pages in BigCommerce, you can use Stencil coding to generate the appropriate JSON-LD code.

Optimize your product images

Product images are an important part of the shopping experience, but they can also impact your SEO. Make sure your images are high-quality, properly sized, and named with descriptive filenames that include relevant keywords.

To optimize your product images in BigCommerce, you can use Stencil coding to dynamically generate the image URLs and alt tags.

Finally, optimizing your BigCommerce product page SEO can help increase your visibility and drive more sales. By following these top 3 tips and using Stencil coding to implement them, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

Resources:

1. BigCommerce’s SEO Resource Center: https://www.bigcommerce.com/seo/
2. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

One Take Services:

• One Take Media SEO Clean Up

I can tell you that when I have a ProStores client that is selling a branded item that comes with a manufacturer provided description those products always do better if they let me take that information and write a unique description than if they just stuck with the original manufacturer description.

One of the reasons is that many sites just copy and past what the manufacturer send them. They you have 20 sites or so all with the same basic content. When you can provide the same [B]information[/B] but written in a unique manner you have a much better chance of sticking out in the rankings.

Granted there are always those powerhouse sites that have been online for 10 years longer than anyone else who seem to rank well no matter what. But you can’t focus on them. Focus on one thing realistic goal at a time and work your way up.

Search Marketing and Search Optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either stupid or lying.

So without any further time wasting here are four ways to rid yourself of pesky customers in no particular order.

1. Don’t waste money on a Dedicated SSL Certificate, that way when people go to your checkout they can freak out when the url in their address bar changes when they click “Checkout”. Having the same url throughout your whole site just builds confidence in your store and product and convinces people to buy stuff from you, who wants that? Annoying.

2. Write product descriptions and page titles so that its hard to know what it is your selling. Specificity and clarity is hard work and will only make people find you and then convince them they need to buy from you. In ProStores they make it easier by creating your page title from the first four words in your products name, but don’t give in! Spend that time better by scrubbing out the toilet or vacuuming under that couch you’ve not touched in 6 years.

3. Don’t optimize and name your product images properly. Sizing product images properly and saving them with reasonable file sizes is a pain, so it takes 40-50 sec for those 3000×2400 images to load up. So? Its just easier to upload them right off the cd or digital camera.
Naming the product images with file names that match what is on the picture will just make your page more relevant on the search engines and just takes more of your valuable time, as well as clogging up your web server’s internet tubes. Skip it I say!

4. Leave that Add to Cart button at the bottom of the page all nice and hidden from your customers. Along with your quantities entry box. Putting those above the fold will just make your life miserable with all those annoying orders and trips to the UPS store.

Whew! That was a lot of work, I’m not sure why I wrote it, I guess I could have just continued my game of GemCraft… Well I hope you people are doing this stuff above. Make your life easier! Heed my words, and answer these questions three.. oh wait, thats a movie..

I’d strongly suggest you all watch it, its only 10 minutes long.

Most people have a footer with links in their site. Some use it to list pages that they don’t deem as important as the links at the top of their site but don’t want to just not link to them. Some people use footer links to try to manipulate their rankings buy using highly target keyphrases or keywords linking to their own or other’s content. (I fall into the latter).

But as the article suggests, as does a couple the comments, this method may be falling under more scrutiny by the search engines. Rand Fishkin, President of SEOmoz lays out a good article showing examples of that he would consider good and poor Footer link structure.

Tom_C points out that he tries to encourage his clients, at best, not depend on footer links for helping with ranking. He even cites an incident where Yahoo Site Submit even rejected a client site until he removed the footer links.

Long and the short of it? Read Rand’s article, make a well thought out decision, maybe answer the question, “Will these footer links really benefit the people who visit my site?”.

I know I’ll be thinking about it long and hard.

Sign up for google webmaster tools, it will show you a list of some of your backlinks. good article on finding your links from Google. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/discover-your-links.html

You can go to www.yahoo.com and put linkdomain:yoursite.com -domain:yoursite.com into the search bar.

I also recommend you sign up for Yahoo Site explorer and you can view a large portion of those who link back to you that yahoo has in its database.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
type in the search bar site:www.website.com

Click the Inlinks button > click the first drop down and choose “except from this domain” then once that loads again move to the second drop down and choose “Entire Site”. This site has a few tools that are very beneficial. Get the SEO Link Analysis plug in by Yoast, it gives you on page analysis of the backlinks and is very useful. While your at it sign up for Yoast’sRSS feed. Sign up for our ProStores Tips and Tricks Feed as well.

There a lot of third party tools as well. http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/backlinks is one i use a lot, it will also show you a historical list of your backlinks. It uses siteexplorer but like I mentioned before it will show you how many you used to have. So it provides a good basis for comparison.

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/09/10-seo-and-marketing-friendly.htm

Read this, then check out my post about creating custom page titles in ProStores.
http://onetakemedia.net/blog/prostores-tip-creating-custom-page-titles/

Two issues (of several) with this:
1. When google crawls your site it compares your content against other sites, if your site has copy that is a duplicate of another site typically the site that is older will get the credit, so by not creating your own unique content your effectively hamstringing yourself.
2. If you do this to often you may find your pages falling out of the index altogether by not providing unique content.

A great article about Duplicate Content and how Google handles it.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

Here is a link to a great tool that will show you how Search Engines see your site. http://www.seo-browser.com/