As the search engine optimization game continues to evolve, keeping up with the tricks of the trade can often feel like a fulltime job! Fortunately there a few core principles that can help you draw more organic search traffic to your ecommerce shopping cart. One of those principles - proper code structure - is a must to maximize visibility to search engines.

Proven Practices
Although the criteria for search engine visibility has become very complex, there are a few fundamental concepts and proven practices that will give your ecommerce site the most page ranking bang for your SEO buck.

Search engines continue to lend strong importance to quality and relevance so it’s important to keep content useful and on-topic. Keyword-rich text will be a natural product of that effort and in turn, favorable search engine page ranking. Relevant, high-quality inbound links continue to be an important element of search engine visibility as well. As with text content - quality is key. The golden rule for modern search engine optimization is that what’s good for the end user is good for SEO. Discouraged practices like keyword stuffing can actually have a negative effect on your page ranking.

Don’t Forget The Code
With so much focus on content and some great SEO tools available to improve your ecommerce site’s page ranking, it’s easy to forget the SEO impact of the most fundamental element of your ecommerce website - the HTML code. Search engine friendly coding is perhaps the most overlooked piece of the page ranking puzzle. Luckily, the same concepts involved in improving your ecommerce site’s code structure for search engines will also make your site easier for customers to use and navigate.

On it’s most basic level, HTML code is a collection of containers for your content. The many types of containers - called tags - establish a basic structure and meaning for each piece of content. Search engines use this structure to understand your content and assign importance to certain elements. Since you control the tags and content that search engines see, it’s an ideal opportunity to capitalize on keywords that already appear on your site.

Heading tags are considered to be the most important for search engines, but they’re often misunderstood and misused. Simply wrapping keywords in heading tags without a cohesive structure to the content of the page as a whole won’t have the desired effect. Much like the outline of a book or article, the top level heading should describe an overall topic or subject and each subheading should describe a section within its parent heading. Failure to follow a hierarchical structure of heading tags will diminish the search engine visibility of keywords used in each section heading.
It’s easy to see how this kind of structure can place extra importance on the keywords of headings and help search engines to understand your site’s content. Most websites involve much more detail and complexity, but as the HTML platform evolves this process continues to get easier. New rules and more meaningful tags encourage greater organizational flexibility and give search engines an even better chance to accurately understand your site’s content.

In addition to advantageous use of headings and other tags, it’s important that your ecommerce site use optimal code and technical configuration to minimize page load time. A fast ecommerce shopping cart is more useful to your customers and contributes to favorable search engine page ranking.

Even if you don’t personally administer your ecommerce website you may want to familiarize yourself with basic HTML and audit your site’s code. Addressing missed opportunities for search engine visibility can really add up!

Interested in maximizing your website's search engine visibility? Learn the basics of search engine optimization.

SEO Tools For Ecommerce
Some of our most popular AspDotNetStorefront add-on products can help you to improve your site’s visibility to search engines. From blogging and mini sites to breadcrumb navigation and keyword/product tag clouds, improving your ecommerce site’s search engine page ranking could be just a few clicks away!

XML BreadCrumbs for AspDotNetStorefront
Tag Cloud for AspDotNetStorefront
Mini-site System for AspDotNetStorefront