Optimize Your Product Pages

Don't forget to optimize the product pages on your website! Once you've nailed down your shopping portal strategies and optimized your data feeds accordingly, turn your attention to your website product pages... You still need to make sure your website's product pages are optimized. Just stick with the strategies you've already learned at the Search Marketing Lab:

• Do your keyword research so you can get high rankings on your product listings. You'll increase your conversions -- list exactly what your target audience is searching for.
• Make it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for. Organize your site structure and navigation into logical themes. Catalog websites are great examples of theme building -- you have the homepage which leads to category pages which list more specific sub-categories and link to the product pages.
• Use CSS (cascading style sheets) for websites that have a lot of pages so the spiders can get right to the important content information.
• Create two sitemaps if you have lots of products -- one to help your visitors find what they want quickly, and an XML sitemap for the search engines.
• Put keywords throughout your code. Use your H1 tags, bolding, italics, and keyword-rich titles and descriptions of all your products. If you have thousands of products already, start with your most popular products and categories.
  • Put keywords in your title tags. Most SEO-friendly shopping cart programs will automatically name each page something generic like www.mysite.com/product/12234/22344-product12.htm. Then you'll have the option to go to the title tags and re-name your pages manually to include your product name, color, model number or other important keywords.
  • Think about all the images you have. What a fantastic SEO opportunity! Use keyword-rich image names, descriptive alt text, and linking.
  • Write a keyword-rich meta description.
  Most shopping search engines will use a portion of this for your product description, so think about what you want your potential customer to see when you're writing your meta descriptions.
• Fast-loading pages are must, especially if you are using Google AdWords -- page loading time is now part of the quality page algorithm. Customers want it NOW and will not wait before they click off to the next website.

nAs you can see, you have lots of options for putting your products right under the noses of highly motivated buyers -- very quickly. Get familiar with each shopping site, as they all work a bit differently. If you have a question, post it in the Search Marketing Lab forum. As with any search marketing strategy, be prepared to track your conversion rates carefully as you try each shopping engine to make sure you get a positive return on your investment. Encourage reviews, and provide excellent customer service and value -- and soon the word will spread about how great your company and products are.