Ecommerce Skate Shop – Applying the principles

We recently wrote a series of Professional Ecommerce Strategies articles on this blog. Since then we’ve continued to apply the principles discussed in them to our clients sites.

Our most recent launch is the Baxxt online skate shop which has enjoyed a complete overhaul of it’s design, SEO and site structure.

Perhaps one of the more obscure changes made was the refocusing of the sites directory structure. The site had lots of seemingly random url paths, such as the skater profile section:

/skatepark/canvey-skatepark
/skate/reviews/eastwood-ramp
/saktepark/cambridge/cambridge-skatepark

We changed these to a consistent structure:

/skatepark/canvey-skatepark
/skatepark/eastwood-ramp
/skatepark/cambridge-skatepark

This involves creating lots of 301 redirects and applying them to the sites .htaccess file so Google and other search engines know the content has moved to the new site structure.

Really boring work that we automated with quick code scripts as much as possible. Ultimately it still requires trolling through Google’s excellent Webmaster Tools software looking for your inevitable mistakes and checking that every page is now directing to the new site structure.

So given the un-fun nature of the work and the high probability that the client would never understand what exactly we had done anyway, why did we do it?

Google Site Links is one answer. On some websites that Google determines to be of significant quality and very relevant to the users search, not only will Google show you at the top of the search engine but may also attempt to display links to various sections of your site.

Take the example of http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=microsoft – a search for Microsoft.

The results show several links under the top results:

Download Center
Windows 7
Support
Internet Explorer
Windows downloads
Microsoft Security Essentials
Microsoft Update
Office - Microsoft Office

Now Baxxt doesn’t currently have site links at the time of writing, Google doesn’t think it’s import enough yet… but we plan to change that.

If someone performed a search for Baxxt or maybe ‘skate shop’, wouldn’t it be nice if the results included site links such as:

Nixon Watches
Skate Shoes
VonZipper Sunglasses
Skate Clothing

This SEO of site structure doesn’t just offer the potential for site links, as cool and stand-out as they are in the search engines.

With a logical site structure Google can easily follow the various pages and sections of your site and build a picture of where the priority areas are… the products probably.

I could write several articles about how we applied the principles in our Professional Ecommerce Strategies series to the Baxxt Skate Shop site but that would essentially be covering old ground and I don’t believe we’ve coved Google Site Links in any great detail so chose to make a start here.