There are millions of stores on the web that customers can buy from. Because of that, it’s very important to make sure your store is unique, optimized for users and easy to use. All of this, however, won’t matter if no one can find your store.
In order for people who have never heard of you to find your store, you need to be high on search engines’ list of results when users search for something related to your products. This is called search engine optimization.
The best way to gain high rank in search engines is to use pertinent keywords and phrases that your potential customers would be using to find your site. For example, if you sell bio-degradable scuba gear (is that safe?) some of the phrases you might try to target is:
- green swimwear
- echo-friendly scuba equipment
- bio-degradable scuba gear
- weird swim stuff (ok that one’s a joke!)
See how all of the phrases had to deal with the scuba products in general? These kind of descriptions are great for the meta keywords, titles and descriptions on your site.
There’s also a great place to put detailed information to help both your users and your search engine rank – the products! Each product comes with it’s own unique description that allows you to put pertinent keywords in there.
However, DON’T just load up the product description with a bunch of jumbled keywords. The purpose of ranking high on search engines is to gain more users, therefore the users are the most important.
Let’s do a description together. Say we have a store that sells cool doggy stuff and this is one of our products:
Now we could simply title this product as “Dog Collar” and give it a description as “Black nylon”. But this helps neither Google or the customer figure out what this product really is. Let’s try being more descriptive and using some pertinent keywords (bolded) as well.
“Black fashion dog collar with a silver pawprint design that goes around the neck. Made of eco-friendly materials, real silver and long-lasting materials. Give your puppy some bling with our affordable dog accessories.”
See how that description contains both keywords and more detail for the user? The more unique your content is, while still repeating the same keywords, the higher your store and products will rank.
This is good advice. I’m curious as to your perspective on how product attributes help SEO. We find that if you can generate standardized attributes that contain the important keywords in them, they can be used for site search, navigation, AND SEO purposes.
Comment by Dan Barbata — September 9, 2010 @ 1:56 pm