This post is aimed at webmasters who have an e-commerce website which has more than one page of products. For example if your website sells Lamborghini’s and the first page of your ‘Products’ page displays 10 Lamborghini cars for sale. At the bottom of the page you might have a ‘Next’ button for the visitor to move onto the second page of Lamborghini cars for sale.

So should you do anything special to help out the search engines to index these pages? Well you don’t need to but we think if there is anything you can do to help the search engines index your website then why not help them.

Research has shown that visitors to websites prefer to land on the page which displays all the products (view all) in one continuous list than one of the ‘pages’ which only displays 10 products. Therefore Google has decided to give these pages more priority when it comes to indexing. If Google are going to prioritise these pages then why not help them along the way. There are a few bits of HTML you can use to do this. Using the rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ link codes will help group these pages together and along with a session ID Google will know which page is connected to which. Using the rel=’canonical’ tag will direct the link juice to the full product list, which in turn will help that page rank better.

Googles webmaster team have created this in depth video explaining your options and it is worth the watch. We have created a SEO lesson section to our website, why not have a look!

If you have any questions about optimising e-commerce websites or about this video please get in contact.

 

You may have been reading up on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and keep coming across a phrase called ‘Link Juice’. Well as our company is based on this phrase we are perfect people to explain it to you.

Link Juice is the value (benefit) you get from links from other websites. For example if you have a link from BBC.co.uk the chances are the value of the link juice is worth more than if you had a link from job-bloggs-website.com.

It doesn’t come in a bottle and you can’t drink it, but to an webmaster or SEO company it’s the World!

 

This week Google have started to roll out their SSL version of their search engine which was first seen in America back in October 2011.

So why does this affect the SEO world in the UK?
Google are very keen to let everyone who wants to know the benefits of SSL (HTTPS) which includes making searches more secure. But to the webmaster or SEO there is a more important side-effect to this change. We will get even less information about the visitors coming onto our websites.

Because Google will be using a secure server (SSL) they will not be able to pass on some of the information we love to know about, like what keyword they used to find the site for example. Google say this only effects less than 10% of searches but we think it is more, and will get more over time.

 

There are other ways to find most of the information but it is not as easy or exact, time for the SEO to earn their money!

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