“How can I SEO my product pages?” - It’s a good question that I hear frequently. After all, who has the time and resources to build links to hundreds, even thousands of individual products on an eCommerce site? Who has the time to write compelling, keyword rich copy for all these pages as well? Obviously, product page SEO must take a different approach. First, let’s start with the problem:

Why Product Pages Get Screwed:

1. Nobody links to them
2. They are buried deep within the site architecture
3. They usually contain crappy, recycled manufacturer product descriptions

In this post, I’ll share the process I use to optimize product pages for long-tail search.

1. Reduce the Number of Clicks from Your Greatest Source of PageRank: First and foremost, if you want your product pages to rank highly, your internal linking structure needs to reflect that desire. If it takes 5 clicks to reach a product, you’re telling crawler bots you don’t think very highly of it. My top recommendation for implementing this is displaying as many products as reasonably possible on your product listing pages. In my experience a/b testing, product category pages with more items always win out. (who wants to click those tiny 2, 3, 4 pagination links anyway?). In addition, it prevents the Googlebot from having to crawl through them as well.
2. Determine Whether the Product is Better Suited for Branded, Non-Branded, or Solution Search: For each product, ask yourself this question: “Will people be searching for this item by brand name, by a generic name, or will it be a solution oriented search?” For example, suppose you were selling running shoes. Here 3 possible target keyword phrases:

Generic	Running Shoes
Branded	Nike MayFly shoes
Solution Oriented	Shoes for running faster

3. Create a Unique Title Tag: Once you’ve completed step #2, place this keyword phrase in the title tag. A heated debate rages regarding where (or even if) the site name should be included in the Title. While I believe there are exceptions to any rule, I strongly believe the site name belongs behind the product’s name and keywords for 2 reasons. First, if a potential customer searches for your target keyphrase, they’ll be looking for that phrase, not your site’s name. Second, odds are search engines consider the order of keywords in the Title when determining the relevance. If all your product page Title start with your site name, it may look slightly boilerplate-ish.
4. Create a Unique Product Description: Too often, product descriptions are a neglected afterthought of online merchandising. Why not just show a few snazzy pics? After all, a picture is worth a thousands words right? While I would never mitigate the importance of good photography, pictures sometimes fall short on communicating specific product details, features, and benefits. If your company has sales people, ask them to write the product descriptions for you, as if they were selling the item face to face with a customer. Getting back to SEO, I don’t generally recommend stuffing keywords in product descriptions. It looks tacky and sounds awkward.
5. Don’t Forget the Meta Tag Keyword & Descriptions: Yes, they still work. Not for endless keyword repetition, but for showing that you took time and effort and care about your product pages. Typically, I will populate the meta keyword tag with the product name, brand, and any other relevant keywords. In the description tag, I simply pull the product description from the database, stripping out any unnecessary html formatting.
6. Display Product Reviews: How do product reviews help you in SEO? Interestingly, customers tend to describe products in ways that you would never think of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a customer review and thought, “Heck, I never would have described it that way!”. Sometimes, I even take the customer’s lead and optimize the Title & meta tags around a product review.
7. Display Product Tags: Just as you would tag a blog post or a Flickr image, let customers tag your product with words they find relevant. As mentioned in step #6, you may find they think of keywords you didn’t. Checkout Amazon’s product pages for an example of how tagging works.
8. Don’t Forget the Alt’s: Take every opportunity you have to convey information about the content of your product pages. For the product images, populate the Alt text with product name, brand, or other keywords identified in Step #2.
9. Give Special Attention to Your Top Products: Identify what you consider to be your top products and highlight them on your landing pages with the most PageRank. Create anchor text that points to these product using the keyword phrases you’ve isolated in Step #2.
10. Track the Results: So, how do you know if the steps above are working? Personally, I like to monitor the number of total search visitors to product pages divided by the total number of product pages indexed by Google. Over time, you should see this number increase.

Yes, SEO-ing product pages can be overwhelming. If the thought of individually optimizing hundreds, maybe thousands of items makes you break out in a cold sweat, slow down, and take it one step at a time. Over a period of several weeks or months, this daunting task can be completed. The end result will be worth the effort.

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About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing provides modern, effective, & affordable internet marketing consulting services. For personalized Do It Yourself SEO recommendations, checkout MySEOPlan.

Local search presents unique challenges and opportunities. With the potential for your listing to show in 3 different areas on the results page, (organic listing, local listings, and paid listings), local search presents an exciting potential to dominate your space.

I haven’t done a 25 Ways Series post in a while, so I thought I would share my top 25 Tips for optimizing for local (geographically targeted) search traffic.

Get Listed with the Biggies:

1. Google Maps: If you were to only use one of these suggestions, this would be the one. Getting listed with Google Maps requires a simple application process followed by a verification by mail or phone. Once you are verified, you will be listed within 4-6 weeks in the “Local Listings” area of the SERPs.
   
2. Yahoo Local: Similar to Google Maps, minus the verification, Yahoo allows you to create a free business listing. Fortunately, Yahoo’s approves your listing within days rather than weeks.

Get Listed with “Yellow Page” Type Directories:

3. Yellow Book: A popular supplier of hard copy phone books, YellowBook.com also offers internet listings.
4. Yellow Pages:YellowPages.com claims to represent over 100 million local searches per month. They offer a free online listing.
5. Super Pages: Superpages supplies listings to many well known portal sites, including MSN and About.com. They offer a free, yet very basic listing.
6. Regional DMOZ Listings: Getting listed still takes forever, but it’s worth the wait if your site gets approved. Navigate to the regional section of Dmoz, and submit your listing in the proper category.
7. InfoUSA.com: The InfoUSA business directory powers many high traffic local internet directories, so getting your listing here can result in great visibility.
8. Localeze: Another widely used local business data repository, Localeze claims to supply 45 of the top local search sites with business listings.
9. TrueLocal: True Local is a business directory that represents about 14 million US and Canadian business. They offer both free and paid listing options.
10. Yelp: Originally designed for San Fransisco, Yelp now serves most major metropolitan areas with local business listings and ratings. With a focus on customer generated reviews, Yelp is the most Web 2.0 friendly local search property I’ve seen. To add a free listing, navigate to your city, do a search, then click “Add Business”.
11. CitySearch: CitySearch offers pay per click or pay per call advertising programs, ensuring that you only pay for qualified leads.
12. BOTW Regional: For around $250, you can get a highly trusted and relevant regional directory listing from Best of the Web (BOTW.org).

Create Optimized Local Classified Listings:

13. Craigslist: Every business should post an optimized Craigslist ad regularly. Be sure to use your keyword phrases along with your local city and state in the title of the ad. I’ve found that a well optimized Craigslist listing can quickly outrank your own site, so treat it like you would a landing page, with a strong call to action that leads them to your site.
14. USFreeAds: USFreeAds’s free listing isn’t nearly as good as Craigslist, but it’s still a high trafficked and well-ranked classified site.
15. DomesticSale: Another nice little free classified site.

Optimize On Site First:

16. Title Tags: Title tags should contain your target keywords plus your city and state. This is the single most important on page tactic at your disposal.
17. Address on Every Page: Your business address, phone number, and zip code should be included on every single page.
18. Mention other Areas You Serve: You should also mention other cities, counties, or states that you serve. While simply bullet listing every city in your area won’t likely won’t yield good results, mentioning them within the context of your content will.
19. Meta Tags: While localized meta tags aren’t the silver bullet for local SEO, it doesn’t hurt to use them.

Other Tips

20. Get Reviewed: Many believe local search listings and local directories rank results in part on customer reviews. Ask your customers to write reviews for you on these sites.
21. Diversify your Anchor Text: Local SEO is a perfect example of the long tail of search. The most effective strategy will employ a wide variety of anchor text diversification. For example, don’t just optimize for “Los Angeles Flower shop”, also create inbound links for variations such as “Flower shop in Los Angeles”, or “Flower Shops in Los Angeles, California.”
22. Get Links from Important Local Sites: Getting listed on your local chamber of commerce site, Better Business Bureau, or another well trafficked similar site can have huge benefits. To find sites like these, simply do a search for your city name + “business directory” and see what pops up.
23. Add Online Coupons: Google allows you to create online coupons that can display next to your local listing. If a customer has to choose between several business, and you’re offering the coupon, you have an edge.
24. Geo-Target your PPC: By geo-targeting your pay per click ads, you can ensure you ads are displayed even if a searcher from doesn’t enter their city into the actual query.
25. Get Ready for Mobile: Create mobile ad listings with your Google adwords account. Many believe the greatest source of local search growth will come from mobile devices.

Like the tips listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing is a Web Marketing consulting firm, offering local search marketing services. For more information or to ask a question, please contact us.

Far too often, SEOs spin their wheels obsessing about link building. (I myself included) It’s easy to forget that classic on page and site-wide SEO still works.

I was recently reminded of this. While working on a landing page on one of my sites, I carelessly left a link pointing to a page that was irrelevant to the actual anchor text in the link. In other words, the keywords in the anchor text had nothing to do with the actual text of the page. Despite this, Google quickly picked up the page for the target search phrase, replacing the page I intended to optimize for. Despite having at least a dozen good quality, keyword specific external links pointing to the page I intended to optimize, the other page now replaced it in the SERPs because the weight from the 1 internal link trumped all the external links.

This situation reminded me that good SEO starts on-site. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even start link building until you:

1. Build Several Internal Contextual Links: Search engines care immensely how webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1 relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links. In Sugarrae’s great link building interview, Andy Hagans recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.
2. Mold Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are unimportant from a search point of view. For example, while your Privacy policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and product category pages.
3. Do On Page Optimization of your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying about external links.

Since many experts think effective link building tactics are going underground, I believe on page and site wide SEO will become increasingly important.

Getting into the top 10 is only half the battle. How does your search result fare against the other SERP real estate? Here’s some simple tips I’ve gathered to help make your listing stand out.

1. Questions: Try using an intriguing question to spark the interest of the user. Questions leave people hanging, wanting to know more. If you ask the right question, your result will hopefully be clicked. RagePank offers some good thoughts on using questions in your title tag.
2. Keyword Dividers: If your title tag consists of several keywords, consider separating them by something more attention grabbing than commas. I frequently use double colons (::), the vertical bar( | ), or caret symbols ( >> ).
3. Short Titles: If you don’t care about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your title tag, consider shortening your title in order to make it stand out. Short titles are very scan-able
4. Company Name in Tag: The question about whether or not to include your company’s name in the title tag is a topic of much debate. If your brand name is well recognized, you could benefit from the additional trust implicit in the name. If not, you may simply be distracting from more important keywords and wasting valuable real estate.



5. Short URLs: Get Elastic shares some interesting data from Marketing Sherpa that suggests shorter URL’s increase click-through since they do not distract from the more important page title. While there may not be much you can do about the length of your domain (Palmerwebmarketing.com is an unfortunate 18 characters long), you may want to shorten your page files names.
6. Keyword in URL or Page File Names: This tactic is frequently used in Pay Per Click ads. By creating page file names with keywords in them, you make your listing appear more relevant. However, you may want to balance this tactic with the one above by not making unnecessarily long URL’s.
7. Indented Listings: Recently, I posted on creating indented search results. In addition to doubling your SERP real estate, and indented result creates a great visual marker that sets your listing apart.
8. Move higher: This seems like a no-brainer, but often we forget how much more clickable the number 1 spot is over number 2. Moving up a few results can have an exponential effect on your click-through rate.

Not every suggestion here will work for everyone. Be sure to test these tactics on less important pages, and then analyze the results. The key is to stand apart from your competition. If all top positions are using Questions in the title tag, you’re better off doing something else.

Well, it finally happened. The long awaited Google PageRank updated has sent shockwaves through the SEO community. Despite some of my client’s sites loosing a notch on the over-rated PR scale, I can careless. The results of the SEO campaigns I currently manage have never been better.

In this quick post, I’ll share what SEO tactics have been working for me in the last few months.

1. Focusing on niche keywords first, High volume keywords later
2. Creating multiple landing pages, each focusing on 3-4 keywords
3. I’ve nearly stopped SEO-ing home pages and focused on niche landing pages instead
4. Greatly diversify link anchor text
5. Focusing on Site-wide SEO including url and linking structure
6. Stopped wasting my time with Web directories (I still use blog directories, however)
7. Dropped all Reciprocal Links Pages. (according to Matt Cutts, linking to certain sites can actually decrease PageRank)

I suppose this post didn’t have much to do with the PageRank update. But I think that supports my point that PageRank is a poor SEO metric. 

It’s a question I hear asked over and over again. Most eCommerce sites struggle with ranking their product pages due to 3 factors: duplicate content, poor internal linking, and competition. While nothing can be done about the last problem, much can be said about the first two.

In this post, I’ll share some of the tactics I’ve used to improve product page rankings for my clients.

1. Product Reviews: Product reviews are a sure fire way to ensure your pages are rich with unique content that occurs only on your site. Back when we were able to view supplemental results on the Google SERPs, I found that pages that had unique products reviews did not end up as supplemental results. On the contrary, pages without unique descriptions or product reviews did.
2. Keyword Rich URLs: Because most ecommerce sites are linked with a dynamic database, they use ugly url’s which contain at least one number parameter. Convert your category product page URLs into friendly, keywords rich file and folder names. For more info on URL re-writing, check out this Wikipedia article. For IIS users, you might want to consider this software from Isapi Re-write.
3. No Follow Tags: Many sites distribute their internal link juice in such a way that is not favorable to the product detail pages. In order for your pages to rank highly, they need to receive a decent flow of PageRank. I would strongly recommend slapping a no-follow tag on your less important pages from an SEO perspective (e.g. Privacy, security, about us pages). Just be sure to link to them from your sitemap without the no follow. For more info on this tactic, check out this post on the no-follow tag.



4. Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions: Resist the temptation to copy and paste manufacturer provided product descriptions. Why? Because all your competitors use them as well. When Google sees multiple pages with the same content, it will likely favor the site in which the content was published first. In addition, these stock product descriptions often are not the most well written from a sales perspective.
5. Add SEO Keywords to Title Tag: It goes without saying that all your title tags must be unique and contain the product name. However, this is simply not enough. Create an extra field in your product database where you can add alternative SEO keywords. Then have these keywords show up in the Title tag for each product page. For example, while you’ll likely never rank for a high volume keyword search such as “apple ipods”, you may stand a chance at ranking for “discount apple ipods” or “Apple ipod mp3 player” if you add those phrases to the title tag.
6. Internal Contextual Linking: Link to your important product pages internally from a non navigation link. For example, you may want create a keyword rich link in the product description of one product linking to another product page.

I hope you’ll find these suggestions useful. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

Now that everyone and their mother has a website and thinks they know SEO, odds are the number of websites competing for your keywords has increased drastically. Within any business, it’s vital to keep track of what your competitors are doing. This practice is even more important when it comes to SEO. In this post, I’ll share some steps to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing so you’ll remain on top.

1. Identify Your Competitors:  Obviously, the easiest way to find your competitors would just be to Google your keywords. Another good way would be Alexa Traffic tool and look at the related sites.
2. Setup Google Keyword Alerts: A great way to monitor your competitors as well as your industry in general is to setup Google Alerts for each of your primary keywords. Every time Google finds a blog post, press release, or article featuring your keywords, you’ll get an email with a link to it. Many times, Google alerts have alerted me to the fact that a competitor was using a less than ethical SEO tactic, such as splogging.  
3. Setup Google Company Name Alerts: In addition, setup a Google alert for each of your competitor’s names.
4. Check Your Competitor’s Back links: By using the “link:www.yourcompetitorurl.com” command in Google or Yahoo, you can see where your competitor’s back links are coming from. This is a good way of generating ideas for link building.
5. Check Your Competitor’s On-Site Tactics: What keywords are your competitors targeting on their landing pages? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered keywords on a competing website that I’d never considered.

I know what you’re thinking. The rel=”nofollow” tag is only used when you link to external websites right? According to Wikipedia, the no follow tag is “ a relation tag (rel=”nofollow”) which can be added to any link and is technically a request from the website to search engines to ignore the link.” Basically, it stops the flow of the link juice, not passing any page rank.

Why would you want to use this on your site? Well, consider a typical e-commerce site. You’ve got your important pages like top level product categories, and lower level product detail pages. However, the navigation for most sites also includes links to “less important” pages such as your customer service page, return policy, and privacy policy. While these pages are technically still “important”, you don’t necessarily want them to receive the same link juice a category or product page receives, because they are rarely updated.

It’s important to keep in mind that although the Googlebot has the ability to crawl as deep as possible, it rarely will go 5, 6 or 7 levels deep. If it does, it’s a rare occasion and those pages likely don’t rank well.

What’s the solution? Slap the rel=”nofollow” tag on all links in your site navigation that don’t need to be crawled as frequently. If you do this, be sure to link somewhere to them without the nofollow, such as from your physical sitemap.

I believe this stategy can work wonders on getting your site’s pages out of the supplemental index. Be sure to leave a comment if you’ve successfully used this method before, or let me know your results after using it.

Update: Google no longer labels results with “Supplemental Result”. Nevertheless, the penalties still exist. 

“Supplemental Result” – the term no business wants to see next to their website on the search page. Unfortunately though, billions of sites reside in Google’s purgatory, doomed to receive only minimal traffic. Why does the supplemental index exist? How can a website get out of it? The following post will suggest 4 ways to get out of Google’s supplemental results.

Get Rid of Duplicate Content

90% of the time, a website is in the supplemental index because it contains content (usually text), that exists on many other websites. A few examples of this would be manufacturer product descriptions or syndicated content such as news or articles. How do you fix this? Simple, re-write content and make it original to your website.

How do you know if your content is duplicate? Try this duplicate content checker:

Cleanup Nasty, Complicated URLs

Many websites, especially sites that rely on database content, use query strings in the URLs. For example, http://www.url.com/ID=XXX&SOURCE=YYYY. Unfortunately, many search engine spiders don’t like crawling these pages. One reason is that engines consider each url as a unique page, even if it has the same content. So although the page http://www.url.com/ and http://www.url.com/id=123 may have the exact same content, you may incur a duplicate content penalty.

What’s the solution for this? Try to minimize using parameters if possible. While using them for external campaign tracking may be alright, definitely avoid them in the internal linking structure.

Many websites now are re-writing their ugly URL’s with re-writing software. This also has search engine optimization benefits as well. Software such as this is available for both Apache and Windows servers. For more info, checkout this Wikipedia article.

Build Deep Links

While links to the homepage are nice, targeted links to product detail pages within your site will ensure that pages don’t get orphaned and ignored by the spiders. If the crawler always starts at your homepage, it’s likely it will abandon the session before crawling your whole site. Deep linking to content gives spiders a new starting point to find fresh and relevant pages.

Traditionally, I see most SEM experts divide SEO into 2 types: on page and off page. I like to think of a 3rd category: site wide optimization. Here’s my top 10 tips to keep your entire site healthy.

1. Don’t use JavaScript or css navigation. The SE’s can’t crawl it.
2. Don’t use session id’s in your URLs. These can create duplicate content problems.
3. Avoid using more than one parameter (or ID) in a url
4. Better yet, eliminate parameters entirely by using static links
5. Submit an XML sitemap to Google sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer
6. Create a physical sitemap
7. Create a Robots.txt file that defines your sitemap and lists exclusions
8. Don’t use JavaScript or css navigation. The SE’s can’t crawl it.
9. Don’t stuff keywords in your primary navigation. Site wide links are devalued.
10. Link to your SEO landing pages contextually. In other words, within a decent size body of text.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Christian Internet Marketing and Christian Search Marketing for businesses and ministries.