In one of our earlier blogs, Top Five Seo Tips for Yahoo! Ecommerce Storefront Owners,¬† “Removing SEO Roadblocks ‚Äì domain, code, layout, or scripting issues“ is listed as a top tip to help boost your Yahoo! online store SEO.
When most people use onsite optimization tactics with SEO, they usually only make changes to the content itself,  when many behind-the-scenes factors could very well be causing hiccups. Those hiccups deter a search engine crawler’s ability to follow and understand the structure and content of what you are putting out for actual humans to read.
This checklist below highlights some often ignored behind-the-scenes factors:
Potential domain issues
•    When you type in http://yourstore.com does it forward to http://www.yourstore.com?
•    Are other versions of your domain forwarding correctly?
If not, then you could be thinning your SEO presence online – or creating duplicate content issues.
Internal linking strategy
•    Are you positioning more important links near the top of the page?
•    Do you link to all pages from all pages? You’ve heard the phrase, “If you show everything, you show nothing.” The same can be said for your internal linking strategy.
•    Are you using no follow tags on links that point to pages considered unimportant from an SEO perspective?
•    Do you have breadcrumbs in your store?
•    Have you taken advantage of strategic linking in the footer?
Internal linking not only builds a healthy store hierarchy from a visitor’s perspective, but it gives the search engines an idea of what to consider important in a store.
Basic coding issues
•    Have you run any tools on pages to detect unclosed tags, load errors, or just bad code?
•    Do you have an extraneous numbers of lines making up the source of a page? Can this code be optimized?
Pages may load somewhat well in some browsers, but remember to test pages often to make sure they are loading cleanly and ensure that pages are programmed as cleanly as possible.
Javascript and CSS
•    Are there currently CSS or Javascript errors on any of your pages?
•    Do you have all Javascript located in external files?
•    Do you have all CSS located in an external file?
•    Do you have important links embedded inside Javascript?
Clearing up some “behind-the-scenes” SEO roadblocks may require an additional technical skill, beyond what the average SEO expert may have, so it’s definitely worth asking your programmers to check for code issues before calling it a day.
In conclusion, getting the most out of your SEO efforts requires an ongoing, multi-pronged strategy that doesn’t just stop with creating great keyword-rich content and getting external links pointing to it. If you need SEO experts that can take you to the next level, contact FastPivot.com for an initial consultation.
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