SEO techniques for online store

I'm looking for recommendations and tips/techniques for optimizing an online store. I'm consistently in the 3rd and 4th position for my keyphrase but can't seem to get ahead of the #1 and #2 sites.

Does anyone have recommendations other than submitting to thousands of directories that all have the same listings.

I do have some listings in directories that are targeted towards automotive parts as well as link exchanges with similar sites.

Other than the product descriptions, there isn't a whole lot of content on the site.

I'm having trouble coming up with unique ways for adding more content to the site without "overloading" the product page. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Many of the online store application are not SEO friendly or allow all On-Page SEO elements to be edited. If your database does not have field for the <title>, Description, Keywords, and <h1> tags then you need to look for a new application.

As we obtain a new product line, the data is supplied by CD from the vendor. Although this is a great help, it creates a "duplicate content" penalty because the vendor gave everyone else the same CD. Therefore the "Item Description" is not unique.

We have found that we needed to create custom fields and data to bypass the penalty. But this also said we had to create a "short description" to use in the <h1> and primary image's Alt field.

Last, we have now customized the "category" and "sub-category" pages to have unique content and highly SEO tuned content. This gave us the rankings but destroyed the ease of editing/navigation.

 

Thanks for the reply. We're using a custom built store so editing fields isn't a problem. One of the issues we're having is the same you were having. Our product descriptions come from the manufacturer. Rewriting several thousands of product descriptions is out of the question so in turn, we have duplicate content and end up competing against sites like amazon, shopping.msn, pricegrabber etc.

We are doing something similar with the short description in the alt tag which has good results for several product pages but we still can't seem to get over the hump for our homepage.

thanks again

 

If you are ranked 3rd and 4th, onpage changes likely won't have much affect. You need to build a stronger link profile than the #1 & 2 sites. Submit to directories, distribute some articles, submit a press release, comment on blogs, get forum signature links, etc.