Google Product Search at work

Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) was released in the UK in October 2004. If you’re selling online and are unaware of Google Product Search then you’re missing a trick. It is a free service aimed at those who are selling products and services online and appears in the main search engine listings when Google believes you’re searching for a product.

To see an example of this perform the search ‘puky trike‘ and you’ll see “Shopping results for puky trike”. These results are brought directly from data that merchants have uploaded to Google Base, at the time of writing the top two products are from one of my clients We Love Toys.

Upload your products to Google Base
In order to get your products into Google’s search results you’ll need to upload your product information to Google. To do this Google has a service called Google Base (recently renamed Google Merchant Center) which you can upload products to manually or setup an automatic product feed. For our clients we setup automatic product feeds which Google collects on a nightly basis, this ensures that the latest prices and products are always available to appear in the search results.

Optimise your Google Base feed
If your Google Base feed is optimised correctly it can be a very good source of traffic, from my experience traffic coming from Google Product Search also converts at a much higher rate than regular search engine traffic. The reason behind this is fairly obvious, when a user clicks on a product from the search results they are already aware of the price which is not the case when a user clicks through from a regular listing.

Based on my experience of optimising Google Product feeds I have the following tips :

1. Do use keywords in product titles and descriptions
   Just as you would when optimising a normal webpage, ensure you include all relevant keywords otherwise your products stand no chance of appearing in the search results.
2. However tempting don’t over use keywords
   A problem many face when optimising content is the overuse of keywords, this leads to copy which is hard to read and switches customers off.
3. Make sure each product includes pictures
   Having a compelling, high resolution picture for each product not only helps your position but also encourages users to click for more information.
4. Complete as much information as possible
   There are many data fields on Google Products to complete, the more of these you complete the better, include as much information as possible, even if it is a pain.

This week saw the official launch of a new service from Evoluted designed to help you track your website’s position in all the major search engines – SEO Tracking. The project has been a joy to work on as I honestly believe it’s a useful product, something that will make site owners lives much easier.

The hardest part of the project has been deciding a name for the service; we toyed about with loads of variants:

• search engine tracking
• search engine tracker
• website position checker
• search engine ranking
• website position tracker
• seo tracker
• seo tracking
• website ranking checker
• search engine placement tracking

Normally we’d choose a great sounding name with an eye on what keywords are really popular in the search engines. However in this field the most popular keywords crossover with the actual SEO market, something at this stage we don’t want to be confused with. So after much debate we went with SEOTracking.net, a great sounding name easy to relay over the telephone or in conversations.

I’ll be updating more in the coming months to keep everyone updated with status of SEOTracking.net so make sure you check back.

Please head over to SEOTracking.net and take a look around. I’d love to hear any questions or points so please feel free to comment!

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Whenever we’re doing search engine optimisation work on client sites one of the biggest issues we face is duplicate content pages. Many content management systems create several versions of a page with the same content, as there are many instances when this is required.  This can however cause problems with the search engines as they are unsure which version of the page to list in their index.

The Problem

Consider for example a category page on an e-commerce site, in this case showing shoes. This might have a URL that looks something like this:

www.example.com/category/shoes

You are able to order the shoes category page by name, price or season, this however generates 3 copies of the page with the same content but slightly different URLs:

www.example.com/category/shoes?orderby=season
www.example.com/category/shoes?orderby=price
www.example.com/category/shoes?orderby=name

As discussed this now causes problems as the search engines see four pages when we only want them to list one. A secondary issue is that each of the pages will have some PageRank; ideally we want to concentrate all this PageRank on a single page to achieve a higher ranking.

The normal procedure with duplicate content pages is to redirect all the copies to the original page using a 301 (permanent) redirect. The problem here is that in the situation above this isn’t possible as the user needs to be able to view all versions of the page.

The Better Way – Canonical Tag

There is now (and has been since February – I’m just late to the party) a tag which will tell the search engines to ignore the duplicate pages and pass all ranking value down to the original page.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/category/shoes " />

The URL you need to use is the URL of the original page that you’d like to appear in the search engines.

Notes

There are a few points worth noting if you intend to follow this approach:

• It is recommended that you use absolute URLs in the canonical tag to avoid the chance of errors.
• The canonical tag will only work with pages that are similar, some changes are allowed such a different sort order for the content on the page. Too much change and the search engines will ignore the tag.
• The canonical tag can only be used across pages in the same domain.
• The tag is currently supported by Google, Yahoo! & Bing

Image by Eric Hart

When we started the Crossword Solver website back in early 2007 we didn’t really expect it to become the huge success that it is today. In fact the initial version of the site took less than 2 days to fully build. Now it is 2 years later and each month the site has just over 400,000 visitors who generate 4 million page views.

We knew from the beginning that Google would be the provider for the majority of the site’s traffic so we began optimising the site and with time we achieved a #1 ranking in Google.

In order to achieve our #1 ranking we followed were some very simple on page optimisation techniques:

1. Keyword Research
The first step in any optimisation campaign must be to research keywords, which have traffic, which don’t. Using tools such as Google Trends we quickly spotted that the most popular key phrase was “crossword solver”. If your site has a narrow focus Google Trends may not return data, in this case you can get good results using the keyword selector tool in Google Adwords.

2. Choose an Appropriate Domain
This optimisation technique has really caught on in the last 18 months as you see more and more keyword focused domain names. In our case with the Crossword Solver this meant a subtle change in the domain name we used. Previously we were running on crosswordcluesolver.com but we changed this to the slightly more focused crosswordsolver.org – a direct match for the most popular key phrase.

3. Semantic HTML & Header Tags
A pretty basic step but still crucial. Make sure your site is built using semantic HTML and has H1-H5 tags that clearly represent the page content and the keywords that you are trying to target.

4. Optimise Title Tags & META Tags
Similar to the previous step, you need relevant keywords in the title and META tags that describe your content and the keywords you are targeting. Personally I don’t stuff the title tag with keywords as many do as I prefer a clean, easy to ready entry on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

5. Optimise Page Copy
An obvious step but you’d be surprised how many fail at the easiest step. Your site’s copy must include the target keywords; otherwise you’re doing yourself a disservice.

6. Be patient – it will take a while
Once you’ve followed the above steps be prepared to wait to achieve real success. You should see a bump in the ranking of your site within a few weeks but it may be a gradual rise through the rankings to the #1 position.

Image by Ian Lloyd

Time and time again we see people at Evoluted who believe that having a website will lead to success and riches. It’s a common misconception, the media is full of stories of young businessmen who setup a web venture and then bang, they were millionaires! Sadly whilst this happens for some it just isn’t going to happen for the majority.

Setting up an e-commerce site is akin to opening a small shop in quiet part of town with low foot fall. To get people to visit your shop you need to shout about it, let them know where you are. It’s no good expecting customers to know where your shop is, what it sells and what great value it is!

There are a number of ways to bring traffic to your site and develop a sucessful online business:

Target a Niche Market.
This makes everything considerably easier as you are narrowing your focus, there are less potential customers but they are easier to reach. It maybe that your offline business is already in a niche market, such as Trafalgar Marine Services (one of our clients) in this case you’re onto a winner. In other cases, if you can specialise then do so, rather than opening an e-commerce site selling electronic equipment, pick a particular subset such as cameras, or even narrower such as high end pro cameras. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The holy grail is search engine optimisation; if done well it will drive traffic to your site for free! How much success you’ll have with SEO depends on your competition and your market. The key is to includes lots of text full of relevant keywords and ensure you update your website regularly. Ask your web developer how well optimised your e-commerce site is, can anything more be done? 

Pay Per Click (PPC) 
Pay per click marketing is a massive business which really makes sense for many e-commerce sites, we use PPC with our clients to supplement existing natural search engine results. The market leader here is Google but you may well find better value per click with Yahoo! and MSN. 

Email Marketing
Get your latest offers and news out to clients and potential customers, don’t let them forget how great your shop is! Email marketing is a comparatively cheap form of marketing, the key is to ensure you are using a good quality set of email addresses that you have permission to send to. You should be capturing email addresses from customers when they make purchases either online or offline. 

Social Networking / Viral Marketing
Encouraging your users to share your latest and best offers is an approach that will work if your offers are really great, bringing exposure to customers that you wouldn’t normally reach. Add share buttons to the product detail pages on your shop to encourage customers to post your offers and products to sites such as Facebook. 

That’s it for now but if you’d like any advice or tips then please get in touch!