Google Shopping Feed Optimization

Google Shopping is now commanding an increasing importance for online merchants, nevertheless  remarkably few web merchants optimize their shopping feeds in order to succeed with the product shopping search engine index.

Why is Google Shopping important ?

First of all, e commerce website operators should remember that positioning a product listing in the top 3 results for a Google shopping query often translates into a top position in Google Web results as well – see screen shot further down the page. By the way, this is the reason why – can you feel the shameless plug coming? – we have released Vidax a few month ago, a unique E commerce website redesign service (based on SEO Samba and SEOTOASTER) which takes care of all facets of product feeds optimization with an unique open source and pricing model. I especially recommend it if you feel strangled by fees on Yahoo store and other commercial E commerce solutions out there.

Why is size a critical product search ranking factor?

Back to the subject at hands; along with longer description in order to increase relevance, and the consistent use of MPN ( Manufacturer Part Number) which is bound to increase Google’s confidence in your web store product catalog information  (still optional but soon to be mandatory attribute), the choice of your product conditioning might make the difference between sales and no sales. Indeed, three options are given to users in order to sort Google shopping results; by default Google shopping uses product relevance, but users can, and do, sort on price; here we’re suspecting low-to-high is the most common setting picked by users out of the gate – hey, everyone wants a good deal, right? – So where is size coming in ? well if you sell regular size or a small number of units as packs of similar products then your price point is lost in the masses of products, and your listing does not get seen.

What should you do?

Well, you can follow three strategies concurrently;  first you still need to optimize products attributes with good description

length, pictures and as many custom attributes as possible.  In addition, consider proposing both sample product size and smaller product conditioning, so that your price point gets to be lower than the competition and your product listing gets to be on top of the list whenever the Google shopping result page gets sorted on low-to-high prices.  Finally, you can cover it all by offering extra large packs so that you also come up first when shoppers sort their result pages on high-to-low price.

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog

In March 2000, Nupedia was launch around articles written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. In January 2001, a feeder project with the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, and the supporting technology choice of using a wiki, gave birth to Wikipedia. By the end of 2001, with roughly 20,000 articles, Wikipedia gained serious ground with search engines and quickly overshadowed all but three websites in terms of SERP visibility.

Indeed, we already knew that collaborative writing can create vast amounts of information. However, Wikipedia’s organic search success is due to more than just content and built-in quality control processes.

1. Platform and automation: Highly search engine-optimized pages, navigation, technical readability, and linking structure are all vital. Two hundred and fifty million internally optimized links help Wikipedia’s SEO efforts tremendously. Search optimized internal links across related and high-quality pages make a world of difference, but manual coding is not an option to execute deep links consistently over time.

You also need additional flexibility because your websites and lead generation mini-sites are not geared towards being know-it-all encyclopedias. However, there is good news here because you will augment your clout with search engines by segmenting your content across a number of domains (links spread across root domains is a sign of quality). You need a platform that scales your efforts across multiple domains.

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki. What do you use?
Yes, we know Wordpress is a great blogging platform, but, no, it is not an option to scale search engine visibility across vast number of website properties.

2. Quality is key. Content should at least equal that of sites you wish to beat in SERPs. But that’s the only point I will include on that list that requires on-going thinking from your part in the absence of hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. Interns or offshore writers might be good sources to cost-effectively meet the quality threshold.

3. Volume matters. Thirteen million articles filled with original and relevant content are bound to give you a good level of visibility: Wikipedia counts 165 million inbound links.

But what is less known is that pages start with a small nominal value in terms of page rank. As a result, the more pages you’ve got, the more page rank you create for yourself. And that’s page rank you can pass around throughout your own network of pages and websites. In short, you can keep mostly to yourself. That’s where the next point comes in.

4. Manage link equity. Wikipedia works as a vortex that sucks out inbound link equity (a.k.a. Google Juice) from outside the network (see opening statement) and never sends it back thanks to the systemic implementation of the infamous rel=”nofollow” tag. Follow links within your corpus of websites; follow contextual outbound links to authoritative websites, and use ‘no follow’ tag for others. You can automate most of this too.

Pick a technical framework built to scale and manage exceptions to the rules only. Then write any amount of quality content you can muster, and augment volume over time. For this, obviously I would not recommend any else than SEO Samba as the first multi-site SEO execution platform or SEO Software as a Service. Success breeds more success.

Post from: SEO Samba official SEO blog