Ecommerce and SEO advice : what to leave out

In my latest opinion piece for The Drum, called 'Search Engine Optimisation fundamentals for e-commerce sites', I have spent several hundred words explaining how ecommerce sites can use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to improve their organic rankings.

This is my 5th article in my online column about eCommerce and rather than it be a subjective piece, I wanted to produce a more factual article and dip into some technical elements too. However, in writing it there was quite a lot of SEO topics that I missed out, mainly because I wanted the article to be understood by the majority of The Drum's readers, who are more likely to be creative and marketing types rather than those at the sharp end of online site optimisation.

So what did I miss out? Well here's some things I didn't cover:

1. Webmaster tools insights that are relevant to online retailing

2. Micro formats, such as the star ratings for products that can then get fed into organic results

3. Canonical references and robots.txt techniques to reduce crawl bleed

4. Multiple sitemap.xml files for content, catalogue, etc

Was I wrong not to include these? I don't think so. Besides, it would then have meant I couldn't write this article :-)

A surplus of creative feedback

Just ask anyone in the media, marketing or promotional industries and they will tell you how difficult it can be to get sign-off of anything creative.

From clients that "just want a few extra changes" through to the wholesale madness that is "I don't like it, do it again".... Everyone has an opinion on creative work, everyone.

But just like every waiter in LA being an out-of-work actor and every taxi driver in London having a cure for immigration or Chelsea's failures in European Championships... Everyone seems to think they know how what good design looks like, even if they're not even asked.

You never get this in other industries (usually). Architects don't get treated like second-rate draftsmen, car mechanics are taken at face value on the quality of their work and I've never heard a hairdresser told "oh just do something and I'll tell you if I like it when it's done".

But give a client a single website design at breakfast and you'll have 10 different pieces of feedback by elevensies, plus a few more contradictory ones by lunchtime.