Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Product Optimization : Your Products Need Optimization Love Too!

I got a question in a thread about optimizing products so I wanted to create a blog post about optimizing your products and the importance of it. I hope you enjoy!



A lot of website owners always concentrate on optimizing their website categories, sub categories and information pages on their site, which is absolutely great but what about your products?

Your products need some optimization love too!


Products are important when it comes to converting traffic into sales. One reason being is because if you have a person searching for a specific type of product based off of colors, prints, patterns, size etc. and your product is optimized for that keyword phrase that they type in to find your product, then you are more likely to convert that visitor to a sale. Reason being, people that search for a specific type of product color, product brand, product name etc.. those people are usually looking to definitely make a purchase and not just window shopping or website browsing. So wouldn't it make sense to make sure your product is optimized for those customers who are actually looking to buy!?

For example:

A person goes to their favorite search engine and types in "brown and white baby bedding" the fact that they typed in a color let's you know that this customer is most likely not just internet browsing or what I like to call internet shopping instead of window shopping. This customer has actually included a color so they pretty much have in mind what they are looking for and most likely will be ready to purchase a product within minutes of visiting a site.

What you have to do is make sure you have your colors or prints, brand name (if popular or searched for) and what type of product it is in your meta tags as well as in your description. You want to make sure you say exactly what your product is within the first 20 words of your description. Include colors, sizes, and your main keyword. If you can it also helps to include a price.

Visitors will read the small description that search engines provide in their search results, so take that opportunity to post sell your product. Use it as a mini billboard ad.

Some of you have the ability to add a meta description to your products, take advantage of this but limit your meta description to under 255 characters, but be enticing enough where someone will be more likely to click on your link instead of your competitors.

For those of you who don't have a meta description, don't worry, you can just use the area where you enter in your product description. Do the same but in addition to your first 20 words, make sure you include a header tag. You can do this by choosing Heading 1 in your drop down menu of your description editor, it may start off with the word Normal or Paragraph, or you can add it manually if you don't have it in your tool bar: 

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By adding header tags, you are letting the search engine spiders know that this is the keyword it wants to focus on. Use your main keyword for the header 1 tag and secondary keyword for the header 2 tag (optional).

The key is to make sure you pay attention to your product pages as well. These are your landing pages, and a good landing page is not only important to SEO but definitely important when it comes to converting your traffic into sales.

Buyers are impatient, if they don't see the product that they are looking for right away, the likelihood of them, clicking on your categories to find it is very small unless you have a design that is just that appealing to them.

So go ahead and show your products some love! Your online success may depend on it.

Carla Phillips
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