What are the Best On-Site SEO Practices before an E-commerce Site Goes Live?

[TopLeagueTechnologies]

Hello,

I’m working on a client’s E-commerce website.

This website is not live yet. Before the site goes live, I am curious to know what the best practices of On-site SEO are.

Please let me know from which factor should I start analyze?

Thanks.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I have compiled a list of things that are needed before you launch. Run the Moz campaign mode and see if there are any errors do this by allowing Roger bot to index but not Google - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

Allow a specific web crawler to visit a specific web page - Disallow: /no-bots/block-all-bots-except-rogerbot-page.html User-agent: rogerbot Allow: /no-bots/block-all-bots-except-rogerbot-page.html and http://moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Then use https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader and https://marketing.grader.com/

I would buy screaming frog SEO spider to index your website if over 500 pages and be certain there is no possible duplicate content and a simulated Google bot can index the site properly. This is most important. You can also Check the Way, Google would be your website through the eyes of Google bot using http://feedthebot.com or http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ . This will show you any errors when you run it through all the tools available.

Well this may sound very obvious, make sure no index no follow is in place right now if you do not want to go live & you are using a staging server. If you are using a staging server make sure to 301 redirect that link to your site use a rel canonical link to point to your new domain's site pages that were on the former staging server for instance. If you have an alias/staging server named example.staging–server.com who would want to follow the example below on the staging server to make sure there is no duplicate content. This is rare but does happen - https://example.staging-server.com/shoes/hightops/

You can use this if running Magento - https://yoast.com/tools/magento/canonical/. Everything else is listed below:

• http://www.gpmd.co.uk/blog/onsite-seo-for-ecommerce/
• http://jasonmun.com/ecommerce-seo-best-practices-for-new-website-launch/
• http://www.vudumarketing.com/on-site-seo-guide/
• http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33164/6-SEO-Tools-to-Analyze-Your-Site-Like-Google-Does.aspx
• http://www.prestashop.com/blog/en/10-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-opening-an-ecommerce-site/
• http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/seo-webinar-follow-up-contest-winners-top-seo-questions-answered/

Sincerely,
Thomas

[David-Kley]

Simply put, make sure you have no duplicate content, including:
Page titles
Meta Descriptions
On Page content
Multiple URL's with the same content (often a huge issue with CMS or cart systems)

Screaming Frog seo spider  is a good resource to use, and its free up to a number of URL's.

Don't forget to check your robots.txt rules, to filter out anything you dont want showing up. If you are using a CMS, check that the home page isnt being rendered with multiple URL's such as:
YOURDOMAIN.com and YOURDOMAIN.com/index.php. This can be corrected with a 301, unless you are using VirtueMart, which needs the index.php. (there is a custom fix we came up for this to not display)

[Everett]

All of these are great answers. Below are a few more resources you might want to check out prior to launching:

The 2014 SEO Checklist by ClickMinded: I can't endorse 100% of everything on there (we all have our own opinions, tools and methods) but it is a fairly comprehensive checklist.

The 2013 SEO Ranking Factors Study by Moz: This is from last year, but still relevant and mostly accurate.

The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors by SEL: I find this visual format very confusing and convoluted, but others find it very logical and easy to interpret. I think it depends on the person. I'm more data-oriented rather than visually oriented. Either way it's a good resource.

The biggest mistakes I see on eCommerce sites are as follows:

1. Non-Unique Product Copy (e.g. Content taken from manufacturer or distributor descriptions, or product feeds)
2. Internal Duplicate Product Copy (e.g. product variants with their own canonical URLs using the same copy, non-canonical URLs created by query strings, from products in multiple categories, etc...)
3. Thin or Useless Product Copy
4. Indexable URLs for Filtered/Faceted/Layered navigation
5. Indexable URLs for internal search results
6. Indexable shopping cart URLs

Good luck!