Full eCommerce Site Development Project

[Josh Sexton]

I've been wanting to develop a full eCommerce site for a while, and I recently established a relationship with a US-based drop shipper of bedding for bedspreads.us. Up until this week it had been an affiliate store, and now it is a full eCommerce store built on the Shopify platform.

I'm pretty happy with the looks of it, but there are still quite a few things needed, with the #1 thing being SEO. Please take a look & let me know what you think and how I could improve it.

 

[rolandkeys]

Nice Design! Is quite difficult to deploy a clean ecommerce platform and at the same time making it look nice. Ok first of all:
1. You might need a Dedicated IP. This is really important in order to differentiate yourself with the crawler.
2. Add meta tags. I don't know of an easy way to add these in Shopify.
3. Exchange some Backlinks.
4. Subscribe your site in directories.

That may help your site have a good position on search engines.

 

[Josh Sexton]

Thanks for the very solid advice!

You covered a couple of the major drawbacks to Shopify. It is impossible to get a dedicated IP address with them from what I have read in their forums. That almost made me not even start with them, but as their really isn't much/any trash on their servers and many Shopify sites rank for competitive keywords anyway, I went ahead.

Things like setting up meta tags/descriptions are possible, but doing it isn't well integrated. I will do that soon.

Looking at the Google SERPs, the top 10 for "bedspreads" seems like they may be beatable, but I can't tell how hard it will be. Amazon is #1 for "bedspreads" with no backlinks but with a PR5. I know the Amazon domain is very powerful, but it seems weird that they could be 1st with no backlinks. Maybe they did a 301 redirect from an old bedspreads page or something... The other sites in the top 10 have 20-150 backlinks showing with PR0-4.

It is somewhat troubling that my site isn't ranked in the top 100 already. It has been indexed since last August and has around 60 backlinks. A lot of those are from NP, though . It very well may have been penalized for being an affiliate store before + I think I need to figure out how to include more content on the home page.

 

[enlytend]

- Dedicated server - NOT necessary unless you have the traffic to warrant it.
- Meta tags - Keyword meta is no longer used by major search engines. Don't worry about it.
The Description meta is not used for ranking. It is often used for the "snippet" in the search results so a good description can improve click through. If you CAN add it, do so, but make it unique per page.

The biggest issue you'll face on a dropship ecommerce site is thin content/duplicate content. Try to get some content on your category pages. If you can dustomize the manufacturer descriptions and titles, do so. You also want to make sure multiple pages are canonical to the main page (rel=canonical) and that different subsets have unique page titles OR are canonical to the higher-level page ... IF the platform allows it.

Get a variety of inbound links from different sources. Go for quality over quantity. If you can come up with something to add to the site which makes you stand out from the crowd it will be a lot easier to get good links. Who are your competitors? Who's linking to them? What are they doing that you can do better? Start there!

 

[bnet]

would you mind care to share the dropshipping company as i want to have an online store here in the philippines that sells beddings.