DoublePlus » SEO

Adding More Content to Your Product Pages

Susan Petracco — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:16:52 +0000

We've all heard that "content is king", and it's just as true for an e-commerce site as it is for a news site, blog, or any other website. But one of the common myths in e-commerce is that it's good enough to throw up a two-sentence description and a bland image from the product manufacturer, and all is well.

However, if you're actually trying to SELL something, or to drive traffic through search engines, or both, it's incredibly beneficial to take a look at beefing up the content on your site's product pages.

But HOW do you add more content?

Manufacturer's Description

Most e-commerce sites start with the manufacturer's description. There's nothing wrong with using this, in most cases, but you don't want it to be the only content on the page. The truth of the matter is that many of your competitors will have the same product and the same copy on their pages, too. So if you include the manufacturer's description, take one of two approaches:

Label it as such: Include a section of your product page specifically for the "manufacturer's description" and label it with that phrase so that customers know what they are reading. Include your own description as well, and keep them separate, so that people can easily see what you wrote versus what the manufacturer wrote. See the following screenshot from Amazon (UK) who clearly distinguishes between the two descriptions.
Manufacturer's Description on Amazon
Rewrite it: If you don't want to label it as such, make sure to do a thorough job rewriting the text so that it doesn't appear to search engines to be the same content as found on other sites.

Your Own Description

Much better than canned text is a hand-written and thoughtful description of the product you're selling, along with a convincing argument for its purchase. This is the time to list not only the features of the product, but to detail how it can be used and what its benefits are. Most of the time, the manufacturer's description doesn't do a good job of selling, so here's your chance to really woo your customers.

Something to note about implementation: if you're going to include separate descriptions for your own copy and the manufacturer's, it's a good idea to store them separately in your database. The reason I suggest this is for when (or if) you start an affiliate program and need to provide a product feed to your affiliates. You can give them the manufacturer's description in the feed, instead of your custom product copy, so that the content you worked so hard to complete doesn't get spread across the internet. You can also use the same approach when you list your product on marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, and comparison shopping engines like Nextag or Shopzilla.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are considered the holy grail of user-generated content on an e-commerce site. Why?

Customer reviews are inevitably unique, because people don't typically submit the same review to multiple sites.
They give other customers a sense of third-party endorsements - which is why it's good to include even negative reviews from customers.
If reviews are provided regularly, search engines see this as fresh content and are likely to give the page a boost in rankings, to crawl the site more often, or both.

Zappos.com is a company that really puts customer reviews to work for them. In addition to displaying the reviews on the product page, they have enough volume to also show recent reviews on higher-level brand pages. Here's a snippet from their Reef Sandals page:

Customer Reviews on Zappos.com

Employee Reviews

The downside of customer reviews is that they are hard to generate, especially for a site that is still working to build traffic and sales. You don't want to write a fake customer review, because it's not ethical, and they can often be easy to spot. So if you're not getting them yet, ask your employees to contribute a review, publish it on the website, and note that it's an employee review. With their permission, you might even list the employees' names or qualifications with the review. (For example, if you're selling textbooks, list their major or degree subject.)

Although it won't be seen as an unbiased opinion, like customer reviews often are, an employee review still provides unique and fresh content for your pages. It also gets a person's voice onto the site, and if a customer feels a connection with a person, they are more likely to make a purchase.

Q&A

At this point we start to get into some of the lesser-used strategies, one of which is a question-and-answer section. Although not applicable to all products, a Q&A section can be developed based on customer inquiries that come into your call center or email. Chances are, if one person took the time to contact you to ask a question, there are ten others who wondered the same thing but didn't bother to ask (or buy).

A Q&A format is nice because it starts to put words into the customer's voice. People who read the questions can often relate, thinking "I wondered that myself" or "Good question", which creates a more personal experience. It also has the added benefit of reducing customer inquiries, because they are more able to find answers to their questions up front, rather than relying on one-to-one communication.

If possible, think in advance what some common questions might be, and provide answers to them as soon as you list a new product.

Product Documentation

If you sell a product that comes with documentation, include the contents of that documentation on your website, after getting permission from your vendors. PDF documents are scanned and indexed in search engines, and there's a good chance that this kind of content can bring in visitors. Granted, they may already own the product in question and are looking for support, but they may be interested in buying accessories, related items, or additional quantities of the item as gifts.

Restaurant Equipment Solutions, a site that sells restaurant supplies, does a great job of providing digital copies of documentation for their products. Here's a screenshot where I've labeled the different documents that can be viewed for one of their refrigerators:

Product Documentation

Ingredients or Specifications

Many products lend themselves to having descriptions that include their ingredients on specifications. Ingredients and even nutritional details can be specified for food, vitamins and supplements, and health and beauty supplies. Specifications are extremely useful for many products, but especially for electronics and computers, which need to interface or interact with other equipment.

13 SEO Improvement Ideas for E-Commerce Sites

Susan Petracco — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:06:18 +0000

For most e-commerce sites the online marketing mix is made up of paid and non-paid traffic channels. The biggest and most cost effective non-paid marketing channel is organic web search traffic. If you agree and are looking improve your search engine optimization potential (SEO) for 2010, here are a couple of tried and tested tips.

Ensure unique page metadata - Each page on your site must have relevant metadata based on the keywords you're trying to rank for. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and the page description to 140 characters.
Site Title and Description in Google
Improve your content - Search engines (Google especially) value good quality content which should be seen as a long-term SEO strategy. Consider adding editorial product reviews, how-to pages and guides to complement your products.
Optimize product images - Optimizing images for users means ensuring all images are of high quality and (if possible) including more than one image per product. Optimizing images for search in order to gain organic traffic from Google image search means using the product title as the file name and using alt text.
Unify homepage versions - Some e-commerce sites have multiple versions of their homepage which will result in poorer performance. The most common issue is having non www and www versions. To test how many versions of your page exist use a content duplication checker.
Improve navigation - The idea behind improving navigation is to keep product pages and category pages close to the main root. This will help search engines find and index the page quicker. Think about keeping your product pages one level from the root, for example www.sitename.com/product-title.html instead of www.sitename.com/category/sub-category/product-title.html
Enhance internal linking - Linking smartly between products and categories can help your SEO by giving certain pages more authority. For example, breadcrumbs are useful to link from product pages back to the category page, but also linking from your FAQ section to a product or even between products helps.
Improve loading times - The time taken to load a page is important for SEO and for increasing conversion rates. To test how quickly (or not) your pages are loading and to view helpful suggestions use a page analyzer.
Add site maps – an HTML site map and XML site maps will help both potential customers and search engines. The XML site map is useful in indicating to the engines which pages are available on the site and to ensure as many as possible get into the index. The HTML site map is used to allow customers to find product and category pages quickly.
Improve on-page SEO - Turning the product title into an H1 tag and other sub titles into an H2 or H3 tag will increase the page's SEO potential. Together with image optimization this is known as on-site optimization.
Find and fix 404 pages - Error pages resulting from old product pages or badly configured files might have some SEO value and should therefore be fixed. If you're using Google Analytics you can easily find these pages and fix or redirect them to a more appropriate page.
Encourage customer reviews - Customer reviews for product pages can help persuade potential customers to make purchases and they can also be very useful for SEO. Because search engines will see fresh content every time they visit the page it will make the product page more important and increase its crawling rate (i.e. how often search engines visit the page).
Add This
Encourage link sharing - One of the most important parts of SEO is building the number of links pointing to inner product pages. If you have many SKUs, a smart strategy is to use your customers to spread the word by encouraging sharing. Embedding a social sharing button such as AddThis or ShareThis will give customers sharing tools which are free and easy to use.
Make small changes and test - You shouldn't make huge changes to an established site. By making too many changes at once, you'll find it hard to understand and analyze what has worked and what hasn't. Consider making small changes and always test the outcome before continuing with further changes.

Good luck with your SEO efforts for 2010. Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Head of Sales and Marketing at online wood worktops vendor Wood and Beyond. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing.

Advanced URL Rewriting with Miva Merchant

Susan Petracco — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:30:16 +0000

URL Rewriting is a way of changing the URLs within a website to a more logical and/or more search engine-friendly format. The default URLs within a Miva Merchant site are long and full of querystring variables, and can easily be rewritten to cleaner formats, as described below. To find out if this is available for your website, check with your web host.

History

URL Rewriting first became popular among Miva Merchant sites when Copernicus released their Search Friendly Links module, long before the advent of Miva Merchant 5.0. At the time, Google favored URL structures that had, at most, a single name-value pair in the querystring. To understand this, one must look at the structure of a URL. A URL begins with either http:// or https://, followed by the domain name (such as www.google.com). After that comes another slash, zero or more directories separated by slashes, and a filename. For example:

http://www.site.com/mm5/merchant.mvc

In this example, www.site.com is the domain name, mm5 is a directory, and merchant.mvc is the name of the file within the mm5 directory that is being called. A querystring is appended to the URL by adding a question mark, and then one or more name-value pairs separated by ampersands. This can be seen throughout Miva Merchant, such as the URLs that define a product page:

http://www.site.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=ABC123&Category_Code=flowers

In the above example, the querystring contains three name-value pairs: Screen=PROD, Product_Code=ABC123, and Category_Code=flowers. At the time that the Search Friendly Links module was released, since Google was devaluing links with more than one name-value pair, this type of URL clearly did a disservice to Miva Merchant site owners. Search Friendly Links changed the above URL to a directory structure:

http://www.site.com/page/PROD/ABC123/flowers/

Mod_rewrite

The mechanism that allows this to work is built into Apache, the webserver commonly used on *nix servers, and is called mod_rewrite. To turn on mod_rewrite for your site, you need to edit (or add) the .htaccess file in your root directory. Note that on *nix servers, files that begin with a period ("dot files") are hidden by default, so you may need to set your FTP client to show hidden files or dot files in order to see the .htaccess file in the list. Within the .htaccess file, add this command above any rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine On

This command turns on the rewriting engine. Specific rewrite rules can be added based on the format chosen below.

"Supershort" or "Jedi-style" Links

Although Search Friendly Links is no longer needed with Miva Merchant 5.0 and above, mod_rewrite can still be used to generate shorter URLs that offer an advantage among the search engines, and offer the customer a more logical set of URLs for the website. One common URL format is to add a "c-" to designate category page URLs, and a "p-" to distinguish product page URLs. Using our example above, these URLs would become:

http://www.site.com/c-flowers.html http://www.site.com/p-ABC123.html

The URLs within the pages inside of Miva Merchant 5 can be changed to this format in the following manner:

http://www.site.com/c-&mvt:category:code.html http://www.site.com/p-&mvt:product:code.html

And to allow these URLs to work, the following Rewrite Rules should be added to the .htaccess file below the "RewriteEngine On" line:

RewriteRule ^c-([^.]+).*$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [T=application/x-httpd-mv,L] RewriteRule ^p-([^.]+).*$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [T=application/x-httpd-mv,L]

"Store" directory - Miva Merchant within a larger site

Sites that include a Miva Merchant store within a larger framework of pages or applications might want all shopping cart pages to appear in the /store/ directory, for example. Using this in combination with the "supershort" link format above produces:

http://www.site.com/store/c-flowers.html http://www.site.com/store/p-ABC123.html

The SMT code looks like this:

http://www.site.com/store/c-&mvt:category:code.html http://www.site.com/store/p-&mvt:product:code.html

And the rewrite rules might look something like this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=CTGY [NC] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Category_Code=(.*)& [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.site.com/store/%1.html? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=CTGY [NC] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Category_Code=(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.site.com/store/%1.html? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=PROD [NC] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Product_Code=(.*)& [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.site.com/store/%1.html? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=PROD [NC] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Product_Code=(.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.site.com/store/%1.html? [R=301,L]

Smart Links - The Shortest Possible Links

By adding the Smart Links for SEO™ module, it is also possible to create even shorter links. This module takes the string after the domain name, and looks within the Miva Merchant database to determine whether the string represents a category code, a product code, or a page code. (Note that when using this module, a store should NOT have product codes, category codes, and screen codes that overlap each other; they should all be unique.) This module allows a store to display these type of URLs:

http://www.site.com/flowers.html http://www.site.com/ABC123.html http://www.site.com/aboutus.html

In the first URL, "flowers" refers to a category code. In the second one, "ABC123" refers to a product, and in the final URL, "aboutus" is the code for a custom page. The rewrite rule for this format is simple, as it redirects the user to a single URL controlled by the Smart Links for SEO module. The rule looks like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.html$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=NBSEOLINK&thecode=$1 [L]

Summary

No matter which rewriting method you choose, be consistent with your URLs. Google in particular frowns on duplicate content, and although they are great at determining canonical URLs (the primary URL to reach a given page), you don't want to take any chances. And just in case, it might be a good idea to block robots from your /mm5/ directory using your robots.txt file. Do your planning up front, so you don't have to change your URL format down the road (which might cause your search engine rankings to drop). Figure out how you intend to optimize your URLs, formulate a plan, and stick with it, for ultimate success.

How to Write Great Product Descriptions

Susan Petracco — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:35:09 +0000

For an updated and more in-depth look at product descriptions, go to Adding More Content to Product Descriptions.

There's no doubt that, on the web, a thousand words is worth quite a bit more than a picture! At least, that maxim holds true when one things of search engine optimization. While shoppers love images, search engines love words. The problem is that writing good product copy is time-consuming, and, for some of us, downright difficult. Many of us sell products that aren't unique to our website. The products you sell - toys, kitchen supplies, home decor, etc. - may also be carried by a number of other retailers. Often, the manufacturers of these products offer canned product descriptions for use on the web. Although the quality of the writing of these descriptions may range from poor to excellent, keep in mind that even the most well-written descriptions, if used by other sites, may have less value to the search engines than copywriting that is both unique and compelling. Remember that the best product descriptions have the following values:

They are unique to your website
They are keyword-dense for SEO purposes, but above all, read well for human visitors
They are long enough to convey the information needed to make a purchase decision
They are simple enough for people to understand without thinking too hard

One of the resources we love is 73 Ways to Describe a Widget. This ebook helps jump-start your brain when you need to figure out how to describe what you're selling. For example:

What occasion is the item appropriate for?
How will the buyer feel when using your product?
How long has this item been selling?

Another website that has a lot of useful information about copywriting is Marketing Words. In fact, that's how I found out about the 73 widgets ebook. There's also a nice article at Vitamin. However, it helps to also keep it simple. Don't forget the basics: color, size, weight, texture, materials, skills required to use the product, advantages, and uses. Remember that it's the words on your site that attract the search engines and also convince users to make a purchase.

Choosing Product Codes or Item Numbers

Susan Petracco — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:31:53 +0000

If you're building your first ecommerce site, the idea of choosing a convention for your product codes may seem like a trivial task. After all, the product code is typically something that is primarily internal to your business, so what difference does the format make to your customers? The answer is, probably none. But it could make a huge difference on how you manage your stock, your customer service, your sales, and your marketing. One of the first considerations is whether your shopping cart builds URLs based on your product codes. For example, Miva Merchant's default urls to product pages contain the product code as part of the querystring. Consider this example:

http://www.yourstore.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=ABC123

Note the last part of the URL - "ABC123". That is the code for our hypothetical product. Now, consider what the URL might look like if you employ URL-rewriting strategies as part of your SEO work:

http://www.yourstore.com/p-ABC123.html

Although SEO experts still heavily debate the benefit of having keywords in your URLs, you can see how replacing "ABC123" with a keyword-based product code, such as "coiled-garden-hose" could give you a search engine boost! That's how we started life with our toy store WonderBrains. Our product codes included "4-childrens-card-games","magnetic-poetry-original-kit", and other keyword-based product codes along those same lines. This gave WonderBrains a search engine boost at the time (and I feel they still have some positive effect now). However, we quickly ran up against filename limits. Miva Merchant supports 50 characters for its product codes, but QuickBooks only supports 31. That caused some issues when we tried to synchronize inventory levels between the two systems, because Quickbooks truncated any product codes longer than 31 characters. Later, we introduced Photoshop actions to batch-process images, and discovered a 27-character limit when saving files (until we discovered the value of unchecking the Mac OS compatibility flag). Another consideration we had was the fact that we wanted to introduce a catalog in 2008. That meant phone orders. It didn't make sense for customers to call in and ask to order item "calico dash critters dash deluxe dash village dash house"! This was another justification for shorter product codes. We decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and change the product codes on over 2000 items. We settled on a format consisting of a two-letter prefix followed by 6 digits. The two characters uniquely represent a vendor. Putting these first allow us to sort our picklist by product code, and end up with a picklist where items from each vendor are grouped together (based on that 2-letter prefix). Since our warehouse is organized by vendor, that made picking items much quicker - an immediate payoff. The new format also solved the problem of synchronizing inventory levels between Miva Merchant and Quickbooks, and we switched to Easy Inventory Update to make that task go a lot smoother. The new format will also allow customers to more easily order an item by phone when the catalog is released later this year. Whatever format you choose, there can be a lot of effects down the road among the various systems you will need to run your business. Consider not only your shopping cart, but also your fulfillment software, your CRM package, your customer needs, your warehouse, or anything else that could be affected by the format. It's easiest to get it right the first time, then it is to change it after your catalog has grown to a large size and your site has taken a firm hold in the search engines!

Building Authority and Inbound Links with Squidoo

Susan Petracco — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:29:26 +0000

An interesting semi-SEO tactic that has become popular over the past year in Squidoo. Squidoo is a site where people can publish a webpage about a topic they feel knowledgeable about. Pages are called "lenses", and authors are called "lensmasters". You can write a Squidoo lens on almost any topic of your choosing! So how about one related to the products you sell? When you create a lens, you have a number of modules you can add to the lens to create your content. The basic text comes in the form of the Text/Write module. Use this module to enter a paragraph of text that will appear on your lens. Other modules include a link list, and RSS feed (which displays headlines, snippets, and/or full posts from a given RSS feed), Amazon (which links to related books), del.icio.us bookmarks, YouTube videos, a guestbook, and many more. Unfortunately, the potential of Squidoo for SEO has attracted tons of SEO spammers, creating dozens of lenses that offer little or no value to the Squidoo community. It doesn't make a lot of sense - a Squidoo lens has to be promoted just like any other web page. But the hype has attracted these types, so a controversy has arisen about the use of Squidoo for SEO and about Squidoo's value in general. In fact, during the summer of 2007, Squidoo lenses stopped appearing in Google's SERPs (search engine results pages) almost completely, though the reasons are speculated to be unrelated to Squidoo's spam. More recently, Squidoo lenses are again appearing near to top of Google search results for certain phrases. In fact, at the time of this writing, a lens is #1 for the Google search on "laptop bags". So how do you create a Squidoo lens the right way? Commit some of your time and effort to create a truly valuable page. Offer unique, hand-written content that is meant to inform, not just to promote your business. Once you've created a page, begin to promote it. Some ideas direct from Squidoo: Mention it in your blog, link to it from your facebook or myspace profiles, join a related Squidoo group, and even enter it into the Lens of the Day contest if you think it's good enough. And of course, don't forget to link to your website from your Squidoo page!

DoublePlus » SEO

Adding More Content to Your Product Pages

Manufacturer's Description

Your Own Description

Customer Reviews

Employee Reviews

Q&A

Product Documentation

Ingredients or Specifications

Other Content Specific to Books

13 SEO Improvement Ideas for E-Commerce Sites

Advanced URL Rewriting with Miva Merchant

History

Mod_rewrite

"Supershort" or "Jedi-style" Links

"Store" directory - Miva Merchant within a larger site

Smart Links - The Shortest Possible Links

Summary

How to Write Great Product Descriptions

Choosing Product Codes or Item Numbers

Building Authority and Inbound Links with Squidoo