When developing an e-commerce website many people take one of two available paths. They either use a shopping cart that's using a SAS (software as a service) model i.e they license a product from a company, or they set up a site using open source software or purchase a shopping cart off the shelf and customise it to their needs.

Product listings
If you're like many other online retailers you're on-selling someone else's products. Typically most people do this through drop shipping. Most wholesalers will give you all of the product information you require in the way of a brochure or spreadsheet. This is great as it makes things easy for you to look through the products or even possibly upload a spreadsheet into your shopping cart, however keep in mind that everyone else selling this wholesaler’s products has also received that information.

This being the case it causes many websites on the net to have the same product descriptions, titles and images for your products. Basically your website is the same as everyone else's that sells that product range in terms on content. This means that Google will crawl the web and see many sites all showing the same information and filter it as duplicate content. They will most likely attribute the content back to the wholesaler (if they have all their products up online) meaning that your copy of the page will be very hard to rank as Google will see it as yet another duplicate in the sea of other websites showing this product information.

So... how can you fix this?

Well there are a couple of ways:-

1. Write your own descriptions for your products
   This is a considerable task if you have many hundreds or perhaps thousands of products on your website but it can really make a difference. If you have staff who upload new products, it would be worthwhile getting them to complete a search engine copy-writing course or some rudimentary search engine optimisation training. This will enable them to enter some additional information to your product listings to help you rank for these products.
2. Create unique title and description tags for each page
   This is still a considerable job but not as tough as re-writing the description for all your products. The best solution would be to have all unique titles, descriptions and description tags for all your products.

Images
When adding images to your website you should be adding descriptive alt tags to these images. Read this article about Alt tags and SEO for more information. With more and more additional items like video and images making their way into search results, making sure you optimise your images is more important than ever.

When adding content and alt tags to your images take into consideration the words you use to save yourself being filtered by safe search.

Keywords
When considering your keywords for your e-commerce content pages try to optimise your pages for one keyword per page. This doesn't mean adding that keyword hundreds of times on the page, it just means that if you're writing about a 'blue widget' then stick to those types of keywords. Don't dilute your keyword strategy by adding irrelevant keywords or unrelated keywords to your pages.

Categories
Most e-commerce software (if it's SEO-friendly) will parse the category and product title into the URL. This gives you the opportunity to create great category names that will help you with your search engine optimization strategy. Rather than using something like 'product range one' for your categories, use a keyword phrase.

If you look at the URL structure of SEOhub you will notice that each article is added to a category, and the category and article title are then parsed into the URL.

For Example:

This article Top Ten list of free online marketing tools has the following URL:-

http://www.marketeam.com.au/main/SEO-for-beginners/Top-Ten-list-of-free-online-marketing-tools.html

SEO-for-beginners is the category that the Top-Ten-list-of-free-online-marketing-tools.html article resides in.

Duplicate content
Make sure you filter out duplicate content from your site. For example if your site displays categories, you may want to consider filtering these out of the search engine results pages using a robots.txt file. To find out more about duplicate content check out this article What is duplicate content?

Deep linking
Make sure you deep link your site using targeted keyword phrases. If your shopping cart has a related items feature and it allows you to edit the copy within it, consider using keywords to link to additional pages. This could be as simple as "If you like this shirt you may want to consider purchasing these “Keyword-Phrase” pants."

Remember to track your conversions
The most important aspect of your SEO campaign should be to monitor it and ensure it's working. The best way to do this is to track your conversion data through your analytics program.