Tag Archive for: 80-20 rule

Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex.  In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products.  How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?

This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.

  • Google likes unique posts, good content
  • Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
  • You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages

By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site.  Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue.  Focus on only these elements.  Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.

By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it.  In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages.  For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”.  There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue.  By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.

Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help.  Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions.  For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.

The 80-20 rule is one that applies to several areas of business.  This includes SEO.  There are some elements in SEO that take a large amount of time and effort, especially in areas like building backlinks.  In this case, deciding on which 20% of these can provide 80% of your SEO value can save lots of time while not cutting many results.

In addition to this, when you have hundreds (or thousands) of pages on your site, it’s important to try avoiding the duplicate content penalty where possible.  To do this, each page must be unique and have valid content.  With that many pages, even with a full staff it still takes a lot of time.  In this case the 80-20 rule can be applied to choose the most important of your site’s pages and make sure they’re prepped to be crawled fully by the search engines.  You can find more detail on how to apply the 80-20 rule to SEO from Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch.