In this ProStores Video, you'll learn how to quickly add a dedicated domain name (custom URL) to your store.
Your domain name will be the stores address on the Internet. It also enables additional secrurity and email options.
In this ProStores video, you'll learn how to edit the Title and Description Meta tags for your stores home page.
Search Engines use these tags to rank and display your store in a search result. You could increase traffic to your store and improve your online sales by practicing SEO.
A few of the key points discussed during the Webinar included:
-
The advent of social media and how the Web is changing everything
-
Working with the media: What’s important to them and why?
- What
makes headlines?
- How to handle media interviews
During the Webinar we shared some interesting case studies and do’s and don’t’s when speaking with the media.
ProStores provides an automated product feed integration with Google Base (which feeds Google Product Search).
By default, all new ProStores stores come with a product feed to Google Base that does not require an account.
ProStores also provides a Google Base product feed that works with your personalized account at Google Base. Having an account at Google Base allows you to review specific analytics about your product feed that can help you improve your product feed and drive more traffic to your store.
We recommend that you set-up a Google Base account as soon as you have the opportunity to configure the feed. This video will walk you through the process of creating your account, and connecting the product feed.
For written instructions, please visit our knowledgebase article: Google Base Setup Instructions
Related Articles/Videos:
ProStores provides a pre-configured Google Sitemap that helps you keep Google up-to-date on the pages within your store, which includes product detail pages.
Connecting the ProStores generated Google Sitemap to Google's Webmaster Tools can be a very valuable addition to your SEO strategy. We highly recommend merchants take advantage of this feature as part of getting your store started.
The following video will take you through the steps of setting your store to create a store sitemap. We'll then show you how to set the store to notify Google when a new sitemap is created, and how to tell Google (using Google Webmaster Tools) where to find the sitemap file in your store.
Please note: Google Sitemap is different than Google Base (aka Google Products).
We asked Kurt Davey, President of neoverve.com, for recommendations on how to improve your site's ranking in natural search results. Here are his top seven suggestions, along with tips on how you can use built-in ProStores features to optimize your web store.
1. Keyword and Competitive Analysis
Spend some time performing searches. Make a list of keywords and keyword phrases that you believe a person is likely use to find the exact products and services you sell. Performing searches using your list will lead you to your competitors' sites. Analyze their sites and try to determine what they are doing to get good placement.
2. Never Try to Trick the Search Engines
Long-term, high placement in the major search engines requires correct and thorough optimization techniques. Hidden text, doorway pages, and link farms don't work and could result in blacklisting your domain. In fact, so many webmasters began spamming meta tags with inappropriate keywords that search engines have greatly de-emphasized the importance of meta tags on search. Even so, it's a good idea to add meta tags with relevant keywords using ProStores built-in features.
3. Product Names and Descriptions
Probably the most important optimization criterion is the existence of highly targeted, pertinent, keyword-rich text on your store pages. Your product names and descriptions must contain relevant keywords for each specific product in your catalog. Name your products and write your short and long descriptions so they are effective for selling to visitors and optimizing for search engines.
Based on your product and category names and descriptions, Prostores will automatically populate your store meta tags with this information — an essential step in optimizing your store for natural search.
4. Category Names and Descriptions
Text-based category names in your navigation that include keywords and links to a list of relevant products that also contain keywords in the product names and short descriptions is highly desirable for search engines. Optimize for broader keyword phrases by choosing descriptive category names and using ProStores category descriptions.
5. All Dynamic and No Dead Ends
There is no need to create static pages for your ProStores store and insert them among your dynamically created ProStores pages. Doing this can actually be detrimental. The major search engines' robots are very effective at spidering deep into even the largest product catalogs.
You should, however, make use of ProStores' built-in customer service pages—and your home page welcome text—to provide content about your products and what makes your store unique. Not only does this help keep your customers interested, the relevant keywords on these pages help improve your ranking: quality, useful content is essential!
6. Keep it Fresh
The major search engines recognize fresh and timely content and will reward you with improved results. Continue to work on improving your product descriptions, welcome text and other information pages using timely content that references holidays or popular current events.
Use ProStores' featured product and category functionality on your ProStores home page and change the products and categories regularly.
7. Measure Your Effectiveness
The best measurement is not simply an increase in traffic to your store, but an increase in converting those additional visitors to buyers. Track your changes and updates to see what's working and what isn't. Look into adding conversion tracking with Google Analytics or other third party web analytics tool.
In wrapping up, Kurt says, "Optimizing your store for the major search engines is complex work, but it is not black magic. Invest time into researching the best practices for site optimization and implement what you learn as you go. It may, and likely will, take months to thoroughly optimize your store and for the search engines to completely index your catalog. But if you do it right, the payoff is achieving your sales goals."
Learn more about neoverve.com's advanced ProStores customization and SEO services.
This webinar is presented by Shopping.com and offers tips on optimizing your web store for search engines.
Check out the Search Engine Optimization webinar by Shopping.com
Search Engine Optimization is vital to your long term success. If done correctly, you can benefit from higher search rankings, increased traffic to your web store, and more visibility.
Learn how you can begin to apply simple changes and optimize your ProStores today.
If you are not comfortable working with HTML or SSML source code, you may want to start with the basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) options and topics reviewed in our knowledge base.
Please remember that you should always set a new template baseline before performing any template edits. This will make it easy to restore the template code to a functional format should you experience any difficulties customizing your template.
Creating Custom Page Titles
The use of customized Page Titles may favorably impact how some search engines rank your site. They may analyze the page title content and it’s relevancy to the content on the page when indexing pages. If you want to change the default page title that ProStores generates (Store Name/Product Name/Category Name/Template Name)
to your own customized page title
You will need to edit the source code of the Header template and any of the body templates where you want a custom title page displayed.
Here is a code snippet that will insert your custom page title on certain pages and then use the default ProStores functionality (the product name, category name or template name used for page title) on any pages that do not have a custom page title defined.
On the Header template, replace the default code:
<title><ss:value source="$page.title"/></title>
With code like this:
<title>
<ss:set name="title" value="$string.replace($page.title,$store.name,'')"/>
<ss:if test="$page.getDirective('page.title')">
<ss:value source="$page.getDirective('page.title')"/>
<ss:else/>
<ss:if test="$title" >
<ss:value source="$title"/>
<ss:else/>
<ss:value source="$page.title"/>
</ss:if>
</ss:if>
</title>
And then add this code:
<ss:directive name="page.title" value="Enter your custom page title here for this page"/>
to the top of the page for any the targeted body templates (storefront, about, service, etc.) where you want a customized page title. You would edit the content in the tag (red text section) accordingly for each template you want updated.
Adding Alt text to category name links
The use of Alt text for images and links may favorably impact how search engines ranks your site. ProStores default templates include Alt text for product images. If you are using customized templates, you may want to confirm your product images include Alt text. The SSML calling your images should look something like this:
<ss:image source="$product.thumbnailImage" alt="$product.name"/>
or
<ss:image source="$product.photoImage" alt="$product.name"/>
You may also want to add Alt text to your product and category links. Here is a code snippet that will add Alt text to your category links that may appear on your header template.
Update the tag on the header template that looks like this:
<ss:link source="$category"/>
So that the tag looks like this:
<ss:link source="$category" title="$category.name"/>
Adding Alt text to product name links
One can use this same logic to update the product links that appear in various areas of the store such as the search results page (Product List template) or the home page with featured products.
One would simply update the product links that look like this:
<ss:link source="$product">
to something like this:
<ss:link source="$product" title="$product.name">
Adding Default and Custom Meta Descriptions and Keywords to Additional Pages
Currently, ProStores only displays Meta content (keywords and descriptions) on product pages. Meta content can be added to other store pages with the addition of some SSML code.
Here is a code snippet that will allow one to create and post default Meta content (keywords and/or descriptions) on any page that doesn’t include specific Meta content and use specific Meta content for selected page templates. One can specify which pages need custom Meta content. This allows one to create custom Meta content for the Home page, default content for the Customer Service page and Product specific content on the product detail page. The ability to customize Meta content at the product level exists now, but this approach will allow that functionality to continue to behave as expected without impact from modifications to other pages.
On the header template, replace default code that looks something like this:
<ss:if test="$page.hasMetaKeywords()">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="$page.meta.keywords">
</ss:if>
And replace it with something like this:
<ss:choose>
<ss:when test="$page.hasMetaKeywords()">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="$page.meta.keywords">
</ss:when>
<ss:otherwise>
<meta name="keywords" content="default keywords here used whenever keywords are not defined for a template">
</ss:otherwise>
</ss:choose>
And then add tags that look like this to each of the templates where you want custom Meta keywords:
<ss:directive name="page.meta.keywords" value="this page specific custom meta keywords for page x"/>
You do not need add this to the Product Detail template. It already includes code that allows you to manipulate product Meta keywords and descriptions through the Product Information page in store administration.
You can apply the same logic to the Meta description content. Replace the default code that looks like this:
<ss:if test="$page.hasMetaDescription()">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="$page.meta.description">
</ss:if>
With code that looks like this:
<ss:choose>
<ss:when test="$page.hasMetaDescription()">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="$page.meta.description">
</ss:when>
<ss:otherwise>
<meta name="description" content="default description here used whenever it is not defined for a template">
</ss:otherwise>
</ss:choose>
And then add tags that look like this to each body template you want to have a customized Meta description:
<ss:directive name="page.meta.description" value="this page specific custom meta description for page x"/>
You do not need add this to the Product Detail template. It already includes code that allows you to manipulate product Meta keywords and descriptions through the Product Information page in store administration.
Millions of qualified, ready-to-buy consumers are turning to comparison shopping engines (CSEs) or shopping search engines (SSEs). These sites can deliver highly qualified buyers looking for the products you sell.
CSE’s operate on a pay-per-click basis similar to paid search advertising but the rates are usually fixed per category and placement is also based on store rating and other factors determined by the individual CSE.
The result is that CSEs are often a more cost-effective option than general paid search for smaller merchants – especially if you achieve “preferred” or “trusted” status on each site.
To have your products listed on sites like Froogle (which is free) and Shopping.com, you need to send your product details to these sites using a data feed – a file that contains your entire product catalog or a narrower selection of products.
ProStores has built in tools to help you set up and automate this process once the initial setup is in place.
ProStores is integrated with the following sites:
Just go to Store Administration>>Product>>Market Demand and click on the site name for instructions on how to get started with each one.
If you’re interested in broadening your CSE campaign, check out MerchantAdvantage – a ProStores Compatible Application that can automate feeds and help you analyze your results on dozens of CSEs.
SEO, SEM, CSE, ESP and many other three-letter combinations can be confusing. However, the balanced usage of these marketing acronyms can be extremely profitable.
All online sales begin with marketing, but surprisingly few online merchants understand their marketing options and how to effectively leverage them. Whether your budget is $50 per month or $50,000 per month, those funds must be spent wisely to achieve profitability. If you you’re interested in learning more about how to properly leverage marketing options to increase sales, you will want to review this webinar recording. In this webinar, you will learn the following:
Michael Lambert, CEO and Co-founder of MerchantAdvantage is the guest speaker for this event.
Recorded 8/9/07 60 minutes
Watch the Channel Options recorded webinar
