SEO strategy for ranking multiple inner pages?

[mike75]

I have ecommerce sites with 500-600+ pages and i am trying to find some seo strategy that will boost the ranking of the sites internal pages. I am not going after some competitive keywords nor am I aiming for ranking on the first page. I need something that can boost a sites ranking as a whole not just specific url because the pages are ranking for long tail keywords. I was thinking to get backlinks from high PR blogs only to main domain. I think this should boost the ranking of the internal pages also but i would like to hear if someone can offer a better strategy that i could use.


Thanks!

[louieramos]

I have a couple of ecommerce SEO client, they have the same setup, hundreds of pages with duplicate content on other similar ecommerce sites. However we were able to ranked them on the Top of Google UK for long tail product keywords. What we did are the following

1. Pick the main keywords and associate them with their respective pages during link building.
2. Performed onsite SEO by modifying the (title, meta tags, html tags and contents) of those pages suited to the main keywords and similar/synonyms.
3. Perform balance link building on these keywords and their respective pages

Their rankings have started to climb gradually within 1-2 months, and now some of their main keywords are on Top 1 & mid page 1.

[suhanaanjum]

Just go working SEO with best keywords using them with high page ranks for link building

[louieramos]

suhanaanjum your post doesn't make sense and even if it does, it is so thin and basic, please come up with a more detailed response next time to keep the value and credibility of this forum high compared to others

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Ease up, what suhanaanjum said is basically correct, I'll elaborate for him.

For starters you can open up Google webmaster tools and see the list of keywords Google has assigned as important to your site. You can then look up, while still in GWT, which pages Google thinks rank best for those keywords. If you agree with Google's assessment you can then make sure those pages are easy to reach from the index page(assess internal link structure) and tweak the SEO on them as best you can. You can also remove duplicate pages that aren't ranking for those keywords, or better yet improve them and have them target other keywords.

When you have a clear list of which pages best support which keywords you can begin your link building efforts for those pages/keywords. You should have had this list ready before building the site but it's better late than never.

More advanced tip - interlink articles to improve their rank a little as well as reduce the perceived importance of your category pages. When you write non-essential type articles in the future place them in a category that you do not interlink with and they will not compete against your existing pages. This also makes it easy to use robots.txt on an entire category of non-essential pages, if you want to take that route.

Incoming links are always welcome, having them lead to the right places is even better and not wasting a drop of their value is optimal. I wouldn't waste too much effort on one type of activity over another, creating great content is always your best bet with your time in the long run.

[louieramos]

Good on you Sgt_kickaxe for elaborating, +1... those are the answers I expect to find here. I still think what he said is very basic and given.

[Planet13]

@ Sgt_Kickaxe

Thanks for your elaboration.

When you write non-essential type articles in the future place them in a category that you do not interlink with and they will not compete against your existing pages.

I have to ask what the point of writing "non-essential type articles" is in the first place if they will be marginalized by minimal linking / robtos.txt

Please understand that I am not being flippant here. Is there some way to monetize them if they won't be interlinked? (Or if the interlinking will be minimal?)

Thanks in advance.

[netmeg]

For the ecommerce sites I'm responsible for, I make sure every product page has a unique title and meta description. Took me a slap month to write them for 2500 products on one site, but I did it - and I had the client put in custom coding that would allow me to do it, and we wrote a script ourselves that would alert me every day via email whenever the client added a product, so I could go in and tart it up.

I paid extra attention to meta descriptions, to try to entice the viewer to visit the page.

It paid off big time. Not right away, but we have easily three times as many indexed pages bringing in traffic than we did a year ago.

That by itself will go a long way, because many ecommerce platforms are built to cut corners on such things.

I pay attention to my internal linking, and we have blogs and videos featuring products, and I link (judiciously) there too.

It doesn't hurt to go into some of your inner pages and fetch as Googlebot (from GWT) either, to make sure you know what Google's seeing.