Where to Put Content For Product Pages - How To Structure Website?
-
Currently we have 300+ products. We do not have a CMS or Ecommerce site at the time being for certain reasons. Currently our site is set up with content on almost every single page. The main catagory page, explains everything on the main page, then our products page has a lot of text too. But right now, it seems as if our main pages are only ranking.
In the near future I will be using a cms and purchasing a template. I noticed most Ecommerce style websites have just the product with the name and price, then when they click on the product it brings you to that page with a brief product description and some photos.
My question is, does each page need content? Or can just the product page itself have content?
For example, say we have a link to SHOES. Then the shoes page displays dress, casual and athletic. Then the athletic page brings you to a page with, running, tennis, cross training shoes, and so forth. Is it best to write content on this main catagory page? If so, how much?
Or should we focus on putting content on the actual page of the individual product? Along with pictures and specifications?
I know Content is Key and we are doing pretty well at that, however, I am starting to wondering if we have to much content or too similar content.
What is the best structure to try and recieve GREAT organic rankings?
-
I am very much a novice and have had some success with cms systems. I have found they offer a variety of options and are very intuitive. Some even talk about trade offs regarding different styles and formatting issues. There are a lot of great cms platforms out there for you to use, I am sure you will find one which will work great for you. Dave
-
Cody, it was my understanding it does not matter how many directories deep a page is located, but instead how well it is linked to.
Using your first example (example.com/products/sports/tennis/tennisracket.html), if that page was linked to from the home page, it can perform very well on SERP. It would beat the second example if that was not linked to from the home page.
If a user actually had to click through all those links, then yes it would be inconvenient for the user and be buried content which would not be crawled as often.
-
You are right about the ecommerce layouts... typically product organization is by category then you can click in deeper for the product detail. Categories are commonly nested as well... like your Shoes category branching to dress, casual, and athletic.
Most decent ecommerce platforms will allow a full description on the product detail page and a short description for display on the category page. Furthermore, category pages themselves will often have a description/content field of some sort. Obviously, you want to avoid duplicate content issues, but you can use the combination of the category descriptions and product short descriptions on your list pages for ranking on the category. Then, you can use your product pages to rank as well. Again, you can keep the content different between the short and long product descriptions.
I've seen sites handle the category pages without much content; however I don't think you can go wrong with the additionally ranked pages if you set them up correctly.
Also, check to see if you can get an ecommerce template that supports related products - this will help with your internal linking. You can also check out up-sell/cross-sell areas of the product page as well.
Do you have a link we could check out for content suggestions? That may give a better idea of why the product pages aren't ranking well for you.
John
-
Good decision on the CMS. You'll love it. Be sure to use it to give your product pages relevant URLs, Titles, and other good on-page SEO attributes. This will very much increase their likelihood of getting picked up. Also, if it has canonicalization features built in, these are often good for e-commerce sites. You'll have a lot of dynamically generated duplicate content across categories.
My advice to you would be to build your site to give your user's the best possible experience first, then worry about search engine rankings second.
Think to yourself - "If I were a user on this site, would additional content on what this page is about be helpful on this page?" If Yes, go ahead and do it. If No, you might want to leave it out.
If it were me, I don't know how much useful content you can put on a category page alone. It might even be distracting. At this point your goal is to get your users to clickthrough to the next step in the buying process. This usually doesn't mean reading something. It usually means clicking a picture or link, right? I might just leave that one alone, but that's totally your call. It depends on the situation.
Keep in mind that the further down in your hierarchy you put your product pages the lesser their importance is in the eyes of Google.
For example, if I have a tennis racket I am selling, the second of the examples below is going to appear more important, because it is closer to my root domain. The flatter you can make your site architecture while still providing a good user experience, the better results you are likely to see in the search engines.
example.com/products/sports/tennis/tennisracket.html
vs.
example.com/tennis/tennisracket.html
Hope this helps get your wheels turning.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Putting review aggregation in product's navigation
Do you guys think it's a bad idea to put a review aggregation page in a product's navigation? Such as: "Which Brand of Men's Shampoo Is Best for You?" Rand suggests against it in this Whiteboard Friday as it interferes with a product's funnel, but I wonder if including it in navigation will give a domain and that page increased authority for a head keyword, such as "men's shampoo." What do you guys think?
On-Page Optimization | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hey Moz Community, Newbie here. On my second week of Moz and I love it but have a couple questions regarding crawl errors. I have two questions: 1. I have a few pages with duplicate content but it say 0 duplicate URL's. How do I know what is duplicated in this instance? 2. I'm not sure if anyone here is familiar with an IDX for a real estate website. But I have this setup on my site and it seems as though all the links it generates for different homes for sale show up as duplicate pages. For instance, http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258 is listed as having duplicate page content compared with 7 duplicate URLS: http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78247
On-Page Optimization | | HandyRealtySA
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78253
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78245
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78261
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260 I've attached a screenshot that shows 2 of the pages that state duplicate page content but have 0 duplicate URLs. Also you can see somewhat about the idx duplicate pages. rel="canonical" is functioning on these pages, or so it seems when I view the source code from the page. Any help is greatly appreciated. skitch.png0 -
How to rank Product pages over its Resource counterpart?
So, I have a resource page coming up in the SERPs above the product page, obviously both pages are targeting a lot of the same terms... it's like one is how to use the product and the other IS the product. What's your take on getting the money page to rank instead of the resource page? The only things I can think of include making sure that (internal) anchor text hyperlinks are all powering up the product page, and possibly adding more content to the product page and it's sub-pages. Possibly even including the how to use the product info on the product page itself. Any other ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | wiredseo0 -
Form Only Pages Considered No Content/Duplicate Pages
We have a lot of WordPress sites with pages that contain only a form. The header, sidebar and footer content is the same as what's one other pages throughout the site. Each form page has a unique page title, meta description, form title and questions but the form title, description and questions add up to probably less than 100 words. Are these form pages negatively affecting the rankings of our landing pages or being viewed as duplicate or no content pages?
On-Page Optimization | | projectassistant0 -
Duplicate Page Content Should we 301 - Best Practices?
What would be the best way to avoid a Duplicate Page Content for these type of pages. Our website generates user friendly urls, for each page..
On-Page Optimization | | 365ToursSafaris
So it is the same exact page, just both versions of the url work.. Example: http://www.safari365.com/about-africa/wildebeest-migration http://www.safari365.com/wildebeest-migration I don't think adding code to the page will work because its the same page for the incorrect and correct versions of the page. I don't think i can use the URL parameter setting because the version with /about-africa/ is the correct (correct as it it follows the site navigation) I was thinking of using the htaccess to redirect to the correct version.. Will that work ? and does it follow best Practices ? any other suggestions that would work better ?0 -
What is the best way to manage industry required duplicate Important Safety Information (ISI) content on every page of a site?
Hello SEOmozzer! I have recently joined a large pharmaceutical marketing company as our head SEO guru, and I've encountered a duplicate content related issue here that I'd like some help on. Because there is so much red tape in the pharmaceutical industry, there are A LOT of limitations on website content, medication and drug claims, etc. Because of this, it is required to have Important Safety Information (ISI) clearly stated on every page of the client's website (including the homepage). The information is generally pretty lengthy, and in some cases is longer than the non-ISI content on each page. Here is an example: http://www.xifaxan.com/ All content under the ISI header is required on each page. My questions are: How will this duplicated content on each page affect our on-page optimization scores in the eyes of search engines? Is Google seeing this simply as duplicated content on every page, or are they "smart" enough to understand that because it is a drug website, this is industry standard (and required)? Aside from creating more meaty, non-ISI content for the site, are there any other suggestions you have for handling this potentially harmful SEO situation? And in case you were going to suggest it, we cannot simply have an image of the content, as it may not be visible by all internet users. We've already looked into that 😉 Thanks in advance! Dylan
On-Page Optimization | | MedThinkCommunications0 -
Meta Data definition for multiple pages. Potential duplicate content risk?
Hi all, One of our clients needs to redefine their meta title and description tags. They publish very similar information almost every day, so the structure they propose is the following: Structure 1: Type of Analysis + periodicity + data + brand name Examples 1: Monthly Market Analysis, 1/5/2012 - Brand Name Weekly Technical Analysis, 7/5/2012 - Brand Name Structure 2: Company Name + investment recommendation + periodicity Example 2: Iberdrola + investment recommendation (this text doesn't vary) + 2T12 (wich means 2012, 2nd trimestrer) Regarding meta description they want to follow a similar approach, replicating every time the same info with a slight variation for each publication. I'm afraid this may cause a duplicate content problem because of the resemblance of every "Market Analysis" done or every "Investment recommendation" done in the future. My initial suggestion for them is to define specific and unique meta data for each page, but this is not possible for them given the time it takes to do it for every page. Finally, I ask them to specify the data in each meta title of content published, in order to add something different each time and avoid duplicate content penalty. Will this be enough to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance for your help folks! Alex
On-Page Optimization | | elisainteractive0 -
Keyword placement on home page or throughout the website
OK, I find the courage to ask this because there is not supposed to be a dumb question. Like all of us, I want my website to rank great with a particular keyword. Do I have to use this keyword only on my home page (the start page which I want to appear on top Google results), or does it make a difference if I use the keyword on several articles that I post on my website. These articles all have seperate links. Eg i want the www.website.com to be found by Google, but this website contains www.website.com/link1.html, www.website.com/link2.html.. etc. Will keyword usage on link1.html, link2.html etc be relevant so that www.website.com is found by Google? Or is every single page for itself? Hope I have explained that well and I would really appreciate your feedback.
On-Page Optimization | | polyniki0