E-commerce marketing...
Search engine optimization
Today’s search engines appear to be in love with content… lots of content. The more content the better. They also seem to like sites with contextually similar content. This is good news for e-commerce sites but there is some bad news for sites that use dynamic content. Dynamic content is any content pulled from a data archive or database. For instance, our
Letmeshop catalog software uses a single page (display_products.asp) to display every product in the database. The page decides which product to display on this page based on the request by the site visitor. Many search engines see this as only one page.
This process is not unusual for online catalogs that have a product management database. In fact, when we created
LetMeShop we designed it so all of the catalog pages ran in a sub-folder. This left the root folder open for you to add optimized pages that the search engines would like. This worked but required our customers to build optimized pages for the search engines.
Now for the good news. We have always focused our catalog development on ways to help our customers market their site. In the newest version of
LetMeShop we included an automated HTML page builder. This program uses the information from your product database to build a site map and an HTML page for each category or manufacturer in your catalog. The wizard is easy to use. All you have to do is create a link from your home page to the site map.
Once the wizard is completed and you have created your link to the site map your work is done. The resulting pages contain every product in the database for a particular category. The pages are optimized using HTML tags that are relevant to the search engines. While not the most beautiful pages in the world, every link on the page throws the site visitor into your real catalog. The important thing is that the search engines appear to like these pages very much. In several cases we have seen the pages produce dozens of top ten keyword placements. In one case, the manufacturer map produced top twenty placement on practically every manufacturer name as well as dozens of top placements on keywords.
This wizard appears to work wonders but there are a few things you can do to increase the effectiveness.
- Keyword load product short and long descriptions: If you have specific keywords you want to promote you need to seed your product short and long descriptions with those keywords. The short description of the product is used in the META description and keyword section of the HTML page. It is also used in the “link” from the HTML page to the same product in your catalog. Remember that real people will be seeing the short and long description so you need to make it appealing to them. But, it will help your optimization efforts if your keywords are also there.
- Whenever possible use your keywords as the name of your category. The wizard creates HTML pages using the category name for the name of the HTML file. Most search engines give the words in the file name more relevance which helps in their placement.
- The Manufacturer wizard creates file names using the manufacturer name. You may want to enter the manufacturer name in the database along with a single word that describes their main product line. For instance, if you sell Black and Decker tools you may want to enter the manufacture name as “Black and Decker Hand Tools” or “Black and Decker Power Tools” or “Black and Decker Drills”. When you do this you need to realize that the wizard will treat each as a separate manufacturer and create a different web page for each. If you have a lot of manufacturers you will have a lot of pages to build with the wizard. But the result will probably give you better placement for the keywords in our example… “Power Tools”, “Hand Tools” and “Drills”.
- Product ID: LetMeShop lets you create your own Product I Ds in the product database. This field is not the stock code so you can use anything you like. You can increase the effectiveness of the wizard pages by using keywords in your product ids. For instance you could use “BD_drill_38” for the Black and Decker 3/8” drill. This adds the keyword “drill” as an additional link in the wizard HTML page.
All of these suggestions originated from our optimizing crew or our customers. If you have additional ideas on ways to improve the optimization of these pages please contact
support@letmeshop.com so we can pass them on to other LetMeShop users.
Our customers have had such great success from this wizard we really urge you to use the recommendations above and then use the wizard. It can really make a difference.
Web Transitions, Inc.
540-334.7107
sales@webtransitions.com
LetMeShop E-commerce Solution Support.
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