Well, my extended holiday vacation is over now (boo hoo) and its time to get back to work again. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and wish you a very happy and profitable New Year ahead.

To that end I’m hopefully going to make my first posting of 2009 a huge help for all of you who have eCommerce and/or retail sites online.

One of the biggest hurdles you face with an eCommerce or retail site, especially if you’re running an affiliate site from merchant data feeds, is simply being able to stand out from the crowd in search results.

When the title, description and even product images you publish are the same as every other affiliate using the same data feed it limits what you can do on-page to stand out.

If you’re a decent programmer and have a lot of time (or resources for hiring freelancers) you can always add unique content to be displayed on your pages on a product by product basis. That’s a great thing to do in-fact, however its a little advanced for most people.

So, I wanted to take a look at what the average person could do with their eCommerce or retail site that might give them an edge over their competitors.

The easiest and best (in my opinion) option is to focus heavily on your category pages. This serves a dual purpose. In a normal eCommerce or retail site you’re going to have 3 tiers to your site structure. The top tier is your home page, the second (or middle) tier is your category index pages, and the third tier will be your individual product pages.

In a perfect situation you will be able to make your individual product pages unique from your competitors and spend resources building backlinks directly to the products. However, for the average person using data feeds that’s not a viable option.

So, the next best thing is to focus on your category index pages.

In most cases the system or script you use for displaying your merchant’s data feed as a web site will have separate template files for the category indexes, so you won’t need to know much (if anything) about web scripting beyond very basic HTML to make edits to these.

I want to make sure I’m clear on what I’m talking about here, so lets assume you’re running an Electronics retail site. Your main home page is going to describe what your site offers and in most cases link to each of your categories such as “Computers”, “Printers”, “Scanners”, “Home Audio”, “Home Video” and etc.

Since you’re likely to have hundreds or even thousands of actual products in the inventory its not feasible to link to all of the products from a home page, so category index pages are used to keep your site navigation orderly.

Many site owners recognize that link building for every individual product is an overwhelming chore, especially when you’re first starting out, but where they often go wrong is they instead focus initially on simply building links to their main home page.

Home page links are fine, but they’re easy to get and if your site suddenly goes from Zero links to a thousand links all pointing only to the home page then the search engines are going to view that as unnatural and fishy.

So again I say, focus on your category index pages. Add unique content to each one and spend your link building time gaining links directly to these instead of your home page.

I said this serves a dual purpose and here it is: your category index pages should list individual products in that category, so in building strength and authority for your category index page you’re also building some strength and authority for those individual product pages too by proxy.

In addition, your category index pages should also link back to your main home page too. So again by building strength for your category indexes you’ll be building strength for your home page as well.

Remember, “link juice” or authority flows through links, so go out and get links to your category index pages and that “juice” will flow to them and through them to your individual product pages along with your home page.

Another good idea is to control your site strength and authority by not leaking it onto non-money pages. For example, if you’re selling or promoting sales then you should absolutely have an “About Us” page, a “Privacy Policy” and other pages that let your customers know who they’re dealing with and what to expect. Those pages are important to the visitors you already have, but aren’t useful to bringing in new customers via search results.

So, make sure you block those pages from being indexed in your robots.txt file and when linking to them from other pages of your site use the rel=”nofollow” tag in the link code. In other words, make sure your customers can find these pages, but also make sure search engines ignore them. Otherwise they’re just sucking your strength and authority away from where you really want it–on the pages that will bring you new customers.

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