E-Commerce SEO

[buzzmartseo]

Dear SeoMoz fans,

I'm really glad to be a part of the community. Just have a quick question. I run a marketplace similar to eBay where users sell the products.

I would like some suggestions on how to effectively proceed with SEO for an ecommerce marketplace of this type.

Should I be proceed developing product review or product comparison landing pages and build links towards them as often suggested or should  I consider alternative marketing methods?

Looking forward to your replies.

[zeepartner]

If the domain is new you're going to have some hard months before you until you can rank for competitive terms. Foremost, I would try finding niches and create unique content for those (i.e. not too competitive products, where you write your own product descriptions).

I assume you are referring to buzzmart.com? What strikes me here is that there seems to be no direct way to_navigate _to your category pages - just the search field. I guess it would help to include categories in the navigation somehow.

Link building is definitely key too and if you can find some ideas how you'll get mentioned as a new alternative to ebay that's pretty good. On the other hand, I would hold my horses concerning directories, forum/coment spam, as I've seen there is something going on there...

[buzzmartseo]

Thanks for confirming. I will also try to find a way to incorporate categories on the homepage without breaking the current layout.