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RSS FeedSearch Engine Optimization for PDG Shopping Cart and PDG Commerce – Teal Aardvark, Anyone?
Teal Aardvarks? Read on; you’ll understand!
In general, there are two important aspects of optimizing your site to achieve top natural/organic rankings within major search engines: 1) page optimization and 2) link building. While there are ultimately many, many additional considerations built into the search engines algorithms (complex “formulas” that help determine where a site should position), both known and unknown, focusing on these two major areas can have an immediate positive impact on your site. We’re going to break down these two main areas below and provide advise on how you can get started in optimizing your website and earning your way to #1 rankings.
Before we begin, a word of advise for those new to the idea of search engine optimization… BEWARE ANYONE WHO GUARANTEES YOU TOP POSITIONS. Next time you get someone offering to guarantee your site achieves the #1 ranking on Google, ask them where there own site appears in Google search results. Are they #1 for “search engine optimization”? If they have so much pull over getting #1 rankings on your site, wouldn’t you expect that they would have done the same for their own site? Most often these types of offerings are either a) bogus/scam, b) has some fine print of “we’ll determine what keywords we’ll position your site for” (who wants to be #1 for “teal aardvarks” when you’re selling “flower bulbs”) or c) is using “black hat” optimization tactics that can have a quick and short term benefit in position, but can ultimately get your site banned/blacklisted from the search engines. Remember that the goal of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information possible for the term a user is searching for. If they see that you are attempting to “beat the system” using tactics they oppose, they can and will penalize your site by simply removing it from their results.
As a side note regarding #2 above, set a reminder for 7-10 days from now to see where this page is positioned for “teal aardvarks”. I suspect you’ll find out how easily anyone can achieve top rankings for search terms that no one is searching for. It’s very important to keep this in mind as a #1 search ranking doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get traffic to your site or increased sales. If no one else is searching for that same term, the only person who will ever see that #1 result is YOU!
Step 1 – Optimizing your PDG generated storefront pages
Below are a few major things you’ll want to work on in order to make it clear to the search engines what the page is all about. Note that it is no coincidence that these same things are also very important to making your page as useful and “shoppable” as possible for your customers:
1. Unique page titles that emphasize the content of the page
Page titles, at least in my opinion, are one of the most critical aspects of page optimization. This info, which appears on the very top “bar” in your browser, is there specifically for the purpose of telling visitors (human and spiders) what the page it about. So how do you make sure that each and every one of your product pages has a title that is specific to that product when all of your pages are being generated based on a single HTML template? The answer is simple… You do it the same way that you have unique information appearing within each of the actual pages — using PDG tags.
Within each of the HTML templates utilized by PDG Commerce are PDG “comment tags”. These tags, when encountered by your PDG application during the process of generating a page, are replaced with actual data from the PDG database relevant to your request. For example, on the detailed item page generated by PDG, placing <!–––DESC–––> anywhere within the <body> of the document will cause your PDG product to insert the product’s “1-line description” (e.g. product name). So in the same way that adding <h1><!–––DESC–––></h1> would create a visible heading on the page with the product’s name populated, adding <title><!–––DESC–––></title> within the head of the document will result in the product’s name being populated as the page’s title. You can use similar PDG tags such as <!–––TEXT–––> (long description), <!–––KEYWORDS–––> (searchable keywords you’ve defined for the product) or <!–––USERDEF[x]–––> (custom fields 1-10 available for each of your products; replace [x] with the # of the custom field) to populate meta descriptions and meta keywords.
2. Use visible text to provide thorough and keyword rich copy for all visitors (human and spiders)
It used to be that stuffing keywords into the meta fields within the head of your document was all that you needed in order to achieve top rankings. Unfortunately, some people used this to their advantage; stuffing their fields with words that ultimately had to relation at all to the content of the page (think targeting “disney, kids, etc.” on an adult site). So how did the search engines react? By largely devaluing meta keywords and meta descriptions and focusing instead on the visible page title (referenced above) and the actual visible text on the page. When creating long descriptions for your products, which will be part of the text on the PDG generated page that your user sees, think “outside the box”. If you’re inserting the same 2 sentence description that was provided by a manufacturer, quess what? There are likely dozens, hundreds or thousands of other people using the exact same text. The result is that there is nothing that would cause your site to stand out in the search engines mind. On the other hand, providing a verbose description of the product, utilizing some of the keywords you’re trying to target on the page, can make a significant difference. What does the product look like? How is it used? Where would someone use it? How does it smell/taste/feel? The better your describe the product, the better you help yourself stand out from the crowd. Again, it is no coincidence that the same effort is likely to grab a visitors attention and make them feel more comfortable with purchasing the product.
3. Use image “alt” text to describe portions of page created with graphics
For sight-handicapped users, providing alt text for your images allows them to hear a description of an image being displayed on your page when they roll over the image. For search engine spiders/bots, which view the web from this same perspective, it does the exact same thing. If two pages have similar content, titles, etc., but one of the sites has images that demonstrate or display the content being discussed, which one would it make sense for Google to position higher in their results? Similar to using PDG tags to insert visible content & page titles, you can also use tags to add alt attributes to your images. For example, wherever you’re displaying a product image, the HTML source would read <img src=”!–––IMAGE–––”> (the tag is replaced with the URL you specified for your image. Modifying the template to read <img src=”!–––IMAGE–––” alt=”!–––DESC–––”> would automatically insert the product’s name as the alt text for the image.
4. Use <h1>, <bold>, <strong>, <i>, <em> and other HTML tools to add importance to specifics keywords and phrases being targeted by the page
In the same way that raising your voice, using a different intonation, etc. can make someone listen more intently to a converation, using different size, color and strength fonts can have the same impact. From a search engines point of view, if you’re distinguishing text on the page for the sake of making it stand out to your users, it must be pretty important text, right? Use HTML attributes to help the most important portions of your product’s descriptive text stand out to your visitors — again, both human and spider. Note that you can use attributes such as these within the PDG template (e.g. <h1><!–––DESC–––></h1> on the template would create the heading of the page with the product name), but you can also insert HTML code directly into the “long description” field inside of PDG (e.g. “This is a <bold>small gadget</bold>.”).
Step 2 – Establishing a Link Building Strategy for Your Site.
We’re going to tackle this step in a future blog post. To whet your appetite, consider this. If there were two people standing in front of you, both claiming to be the most knowledgeable person in the world about teal aardvarks, but with one having 20 friends to back up his claim and the other having no one to confirm his expertise, who would you believe?
There is no doubt that having more “legitimate” sites linking to you can have a tremendous impact on your site’s credibility and search positioning with search engines (not to mention more traffic from actual people following the links). So how do you go about getting such links?
To be continued…
UPDATE: Well, it only took 1 day as it turns out. One day after this post, this page is already #1 on Google for “teal aardvark”.
http://www.google.com/search?q=teal+aardvark
[...] on part 1 of our Search Engine Optimization post that talked about optimizing your pages to be easily indexed/searchable by search engines, today [...]
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