One common client many SEO companies have on their roster is an e-commerce client. After all, these are the websites that want to get to the top of Google and Yahoo to get their products and services noticed. But commerce sites come in two varieties: Those simply advertising a service, such as a site for a law office or a restaurant, and those with actual products on the site. The former often contains less than fifty pages, while the latter can be in the hundreds. In creating an optimization campaign, what do you do to get both websites optimized with content and links and to the top?

A blogger at Search Engine Land makes the suggestion for a link directory as the gist of the optimization plan and content secondary. But, the case he makes for content is to do it for nearly any page. With his amount, he recommends outsourcing to have content for all pages. Both of these are important to any site, but, instead of the suggestion for outsourcing content, it should still be done in house.

As web and, more specifically, SEO content is a relatively new field, the assumption five years ago was anyone can create SEO content for optimizing a website. Words on a page do not make writing, however, and now skilled copywriters and those with experience in print writing are needed to craft SEO and general web content, as the search engines have gotten smarter with refining algorithms to detect spam content.

So, what does this mean for optimizing your large commerce website? It means you need to pick and choose what pages get content to prevent repetition and spam. With outsourcing to India or the Philippines, you don’t know what content you’re going to get back. In fact, your in-house writers may even need to edit it to make it less spam-like. When deciding which pages should be optimized, think of the keywords first. Each page should be dedicated to one or, at most, two keywords, and base your content on this. If the title tag, description, and content don’t fall under a single keyword or phrase – and this is often the case with singular product pages – don’t optimize it. Based on this strategy, the index, category, and sub-category pages all become optimized with content. With some commerce websites, this may mean adding content to any page that is not a singular product.