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If you have taken some time to understand how search engines robots crawl your website you will realize that they crawl from top to bottom according to source code. So, in any normal e-commerce code layout of your product listing pages you will see that your product image is the first link to that product page meaning the search engines take that link as the first “vote” to that page. Understanding that is important for this advanced tip… let’s explore a little more.

Example: http://www.zzounds.com/cat–6-String-Acoustic-Electric-Guitars–2578
In this page showing 6-String Acoustic Electric Guitars I will highlight how zZounds.com is not capitalizing on their internal optimization of link juice and anchor text to their product pages.

Quick snapshot of the source code.. remember search engines crawl from top to bottom of the source code (aka the arrow shows the way):

Page Layout looks like this:

So in this picture above you will see two product layouts… lets work on the first one to see what I am talking about.

Epiphone EJ200CE Jumbo Cutaway Acoustic-Electric Guitar
This product layout shows you that from top to bottom order in the source code the first link that the search engines find that they will count as the “vote” and take whatever anchor text or alt tag is on this image in the example as that is what the page is about that is being linked to. So a quick look at the alt tag on this image is “Vintage Sunburst”. Now, is that actually what this product is about? No, it is not.

So the two suggestions on how to handle this issue that most e-commerce sites have is.

#1) Update the alt tag of the product image to match the name of the product you are linking to. So in this example the alt tag should be “Epiphone EJ200CE Jumbo Cutaway Acoustic-Electric Guitar”. This would mean inside your <img src=”images/example.gif”> you would add an alt=”Epiphone EJ200CE Jumbo Cutaway Acoustic-Electric Guitar”. In most e-commerce setups you can dynamically setup the alt tags with one change in one file.

#2) If you can’t do that you could always no-follow that image link so the search engines do not count that image as the first “vote” and actually the next vote in line would be the actual optimized anchor text of the product name “Epiphone EJ200CE Jumbo Cutaway Acoustic-Electric Guitar”. To setup a nofollow you would add it in your <a href=”link.html”> and you would add rel=”nofollow”

To backup this reference do this quick search: site:www.zzounds.com vintage sunburst
Notice that almost all of the 445 results are product info pages. This shows you internal ranking factors the search engines find that are the most relevant for vintage sunburst in the zzounds.com website. This should not be showing these pages.

While we are on the zZounds.com website I wanted to point out one other issue, the product listing right below this example:

Again taking a look at the order in which the search engines crawl this example is actually “special offer” image is the first link they will count as the vote towards what this product page is about. A quick look at the alt tag on this image “special offer!”, so the search engines think this next page is about “special offer!” when it really should be “Taylor 214E Grand Auditorium Acoustic-Electric Guitar (with Case)”.

To backup this reference do this quick search: site:www.zzounds.com special offer!
Notice that almost all of the 115,000 results are product info pages. This shows you internal ranking factors the search engines find that are the most relevant for special offer! in the zzounds.com website. This should not be showing these pages… this should be showing the special offers page first which I would think: http://www.zzounds.com/blowouts

*We at SEOTipADay.com are in no way affiliated with zZounds.com.