Recently I had the privilege of quizzing Aaron Wall from SEO Book regarding eCommerce SEO strategies. Below is the Q and A from the interview. A special thanks to Aaron for his time. After the read, be sure to checkout his SEO Training program.

A: I don’t think you need to get links to every product from external sources to do well…most of your competition suffers from the same issues as your ecommerce site does. Ideally you just want to get your brand featured and try to get some links into key products. Affiliate programs are great for building links. So are contests and any social elements to your site - like a company blog.

Q: What type of keyword strategy would you recommend for an online retailer with a large product catalog? Should the focus be on a few, larger volume keywords or a long tail approach?

A: In general if I had to pick one I would say that a long tail is typically a better approach, but you really need to look at sales data and promote what is selling. If you know a certain category is particularly hot then feature it to drive more of your link equity to that part of the site. If another category is low margin and rarely sells then link to it less often.

Q: Many internet retailers struggle to attain good rankings for their individual product pages. With so much competition on the internet in nearly every niche, how does one make their product pages rank higher in light of the competition?

A: The 7 easiest ways to gain traction are:

1. Ensure your on page SEO and site structure are well optimized.
2. Limit your selection and hold sales events. Woot.com does great with this strategy.
3. Offer leading quality editorial reviews and how to guides that help people trust you and want to do business with you.
4. Create wish lists and other widgets that people can spread virally on their websites…give people a reason to feature your brand.
5. Focus your internal PageRank and anchor text to promote the most important items.
6. Build community, contests, and/or an editorial voice that makes people keep coming back to you for the latest product releases.
7. Aggressively engage in public relations and link building.

Q: Many online retailers struggle with getting all of their product or category pages indexed, due to the large number of pages and content deep within the site architecture. What advice would you give to ensure a deep crawl?

A: Focus your crawling priorities on your most important pages. Add tools, gadgets, editorial information, and engage in public relations / link building to help your site get crawled as deeply as possible.

Make sure your domain does not have pagination issues, canonicalization issues, or low information pages that are sucking up PageRank that can flow to more important pages.

Q: Do you have any other recommendations in regards to eCommerce SEO?

A: Promote seasonal offers with internal link authority at least a month early so search engines see a lot of PageRank pointing at those pages.

If you find that your store is a thin listing store (like a yellow pages website) then look at the 2 year performance of RHD and IAR…the value of thin listings are all going to Google. You really need to have interactivity and editorial to have a sustainable strategy.

cheers

a

Ok, so it’s probably not possible to own all 10 listings on the SERPs for your brand name, but you can certainly try.

First off, why should you care about having more than one result for your company name? From a branding point of view, it lends great credibility. Multiple results on various web properties conveys that you’re “out there” and actively engaged with your customers in many forms. From a public relations view, it’s a great way to potentially push negative press (customer complaints) off the first page.

By utilizing the hugely popular sites of the day, it’s not impossible to own at least 5 out of the 10 top spots on Google. Here’s my list for the top web properties you should have a presence on.

1. Your Website (duh!) - If you don’t yet rank for your own company or brand name, don’t read any further in this post. You’ll want to first focus on some basic SEO tactics.
   
2. LinkedIn - The most popular business professional networking site. Your profile page should rank highly for your brand name.
3. Press Release Sites - I’ve seen press releases ranking on the first page for years after their initial release. These provide an ongoing source of branding and traffic about previous newsworthy events. PRWeb.com will get you the best results.
   
4. YouTube - Post a short informational video about your company. Google loves YouTube content, so your video may instantly rank first page for your brand.
5. Facebook - Facebook now displays a limited public profile, so it can be indexed by search engines.
   
6. Myspace - Declining in light of Facebook, but still possesses great social networking capabilities. Make sure your profile page contains your brand name prominently.
7. Squidoo - Create a Squidoo hub for your brand and link it up with your RSS feed, YouTube videos, and Flickr images.
   
8. Hubpages - Similar to Squidoo and a Google favorite.
9. Wikipedia - Not every brand is worthy of Wikipedia entry, but it’s worth a try.
   
10. Technorati - Claiming your Technorati space should be the first step after creating a blog.
    

In addition to having a presence on the sites above, try using these tactics to create a Google indented listing.

Did I miss anything? Be sure to leave a comment. Hope everyone has a great Easter weekend.

“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.

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

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.

As an SEO & SEM consultant, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my productivity and effectiveness. In this quick post, I’d thought I’d share 5 tools that are making my life a heck of a lot easier.

1. SEO Digger: My top fav right now, this innovative tool allows you to see which search queries you are ranking in the top 20 Google results for. According to the SEO Digger site, here’s how it works: “Seodigger works by building a reverse index. The first 20 SERP results are saved from 60 million search requests. Then, a “backward index” of the search engine is built, linking sites with keywords these sites can be found by.” For me, the tool is useful because it shows me keyword phrases that I haven’t intentionally optimized for, but present a great opportunity for capturing good traffic with a little work.
2. Google AdPreview: A godsend for PPC marketers, this tool allows you to see ads as they appear to the normal Google visitor performing a search. (typically your Adwords ads don’t appear for your own searches when you are logged in). You can also change your geographic location in order to preview local ads as someone would in other part of the world. Thanks to Jeff Novak from 10 Golden Rules for alerting me to this one.
3. SEO Book’s Firefox Plugin: This is the one Firefox plugin I can’t live without. The plugin shows 22 SEO metrics directly on the Google SERP, including incoming links, PageRank, Technorati Rank, Domain age, and more. You can also right click on any webpage and look at these same metrics at a glance.
4. Google Sets: This Google labs tool is a great way of generating related keyword ideas. Basically, you enter a few keywords, and Google generates a list of related search terms. While the regular Google Keyword tool also generates keyword suggestions, Google Sets takes into account more than just one keyword phrase at a time.
5. AdCenter Keyword Mutation Tool: Microsoft AdCenter’s keyword mutation tool is great for finding misspellings. Thanks to Linda Bustos for pointing out this tool as a great way to optimize internal site search.

Have you found any other SEO or SEM tools that are making your job easier? Please drop a comment.

Recently, I received a few links to my blog from a website located in France. About the same time, I started receiving traffic from the French version of Google. (google.fr) This got me wondering how to capture more international search traffic.

Despite the many SEO blogs I subscribe to, I see very little information posted on global SEO strategies. Out of curiosity, I started researching international SEO tactics. Below are some suggestions that I found.

1. Use Local Domain Extensions: The most effective strategy for international SEO is the most obvious one. If you’re trying to optimize for Google.ca and your domain has a .ca extension, you have a great advantage (though it’s still very possible without one.) In addition to the domain extension, Google probably looks at the IP address location of your server to determine the geographical relevance of your site.
2. Translation Isn’t Enough: Many assume that a word-for-word Google translation of existing website content will result in high rankings on international SERPs. Those of use who’ve ever read a word-for-word translation from another language to English realize this isn’t a good idea. You may get into the SERPs, but your odds of converting the visitor and slim to none.
3. Get Links from international domains: If your site contains a good diversity of incoming links from many domain extensions (.co.uk, .ca, .fr, etc), Google will begin to notice your site on the non-US versions of Google.
4. Links to international domains: While I’m not sure if this will really improve rankings, it at least shows you’re participating in a global community by linking to international sources.
5. Keyword + Country Landing Pages: I’ve found searchers sometimes do a keyword search and append their country name to it. (e.g. “ipods uk”) By optimizing a landing page for this combination, you can begin ranking for the terms.
6. Do International Keyword Research: It doesn’t make sense to get your keyword suggestions and counts from keyword tools only showing US results. Aaron Wall’s International SEO keyword tool allows you to get keyword data from 15 different countries.
7. Know the Local Lingo: Anyone who has traveled to another English speaking country knows there are significant differences in local lingo. For example, one of my clients discovered that “shop” is more frequently used than “store.” in many European countries.
8. Consider Local Search Engines: Google doesn’t exactly rule the entire world of search….yet. While its still the number #1 engine internationally, local engines such as Voila in France, Ansearch in Australia, or Yandex in Russia are very popular. If you’re targeting a certain local audience, it pays to understand the algorithms of other engines besides Google.

For many international brands, global Search engine optimization remains a virtually untapped arena. According to this podcast from Oban Multilingual, 70% of internet search queries are not in English.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Justin Palmer is an eCommerce, SEO, and Web Usability consultant that offers Local SEO consulting and SEO Website reviews for small to medium size e-businesses.

In some ways, it seems search engines have a grudge against eCommerce sites. Often times, I don’t blame them. Many online stores offer little useful content, including dry manufacturer product descriptions, poor internal linking, and no unique, user generated content. Without a doubt eCommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Below I’ve gathered 25 tips that I’ve successfully used while optimizing eCommerce sites in the past.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
2. Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
3. Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
4. Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other parameters. If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
5. All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page.
6. Unique Title Tags: While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the value of the rest of the text in the title tag.
7. Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific page they are on.
8. Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
9. Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
10. Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
11. Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don’t tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
12. Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the SE’s to crawl. There are ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spiders without the session ID.
13. Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
14. Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
15. Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.
16. Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that they data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.
17. Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
18. Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.
19. Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Nav: This is useless and very tacky. Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of relevant text.
20. Don’t Use “View” or “More”: On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like “View” or “See more”. Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.
21. Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
22. Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
23. Create Brand Landing Pages: If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.
24. Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. <a href=”page.html” title=”keywords here”>) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.
25. Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO services and Expert eCommerce consulting for small to medium size businesses.

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.

So you’ve got your listing in the top 5. Now what? How about doubling your real estate with an indented SERP result?

So what exactly is an indented result? According to Help Center, “When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.”

So how to you get an indented Google result? Here’s 3 simple steps:

1. Identify 2nd Highest Ranking Page for your Keyphrase: Simply do a Google search for the keyword phrase you are seeking to obtain an indented result for. If you don’t have another page that ranks, or you don’t like the current page that comes up 2nd, create a new one.
2. Link from the 1st Ranking Page to the 2nd Ranking Page: Using your keyword phrase in the anchor text, link from the first page to the second page. Preferrably, use a contextual link within a body of text rather than a sitewide navigational link.
3. Begin Building Links to the 2nd Page: Depending on the competition for this keyword, you may only need a few good quality backlinks to create the indented result.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that indented results can be somewhat fickle. They are frequently here today, and gone tomorrow. However, with proper link building, you should be able to maintain the result.

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO consulting and Local Search Engine Placement for small to medium size companies.