What is one of the most effective and most profitable online marketing channels for retailers? If you’re an online retailer and you do not know the answer to that question then this article is a must read. If you answered syndicating your products to “Google Product Search” then you are correct. Google Product Search is the number one online product comparison search engine (based on July 2010 rankings by CPC Strategy) and it does not charge any fees whatsoever. Most if not all serious online merchants are already taking advantage of this excellent sales channel. GoECart developed its Product Data Feeds Manager so you too can take full advantage of it, simply and easily.

So how can you easily syndicate your product listings to Google Product Search and other popular comparison shopping engines like Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, etc.? GoECart automatically generates an optimized preformatted product data feed which can be immediately uploaded to Google Product Search and other CSEs. There is no longer the need to manipulate any data in Excel or Notepad; all data is compliant with engine specific guidelines and is correctly formatted with rich attributes like Price, Rating, Title, Description, etc to help you earn high rankings!

Now let’s say you offer a number of very popular and competitive product lines and you want to ensure that your products rank high in the comparison engines. GoECart allows you to optimize all the product attributes uniquely for each shopping channel without affecting the content on your storefront. GoECart even allows you to add custom fields to your product feeds. You can use the simple web interface in the product editor to add engine specific custom fields of your choice to the feed. For example, for a book, you can specify ISBN and Author as custom fields. These features allow merchants to differentiate themselves further on the comparison shopping engines and rank higher. Creative use of copy can be very effective in attracting bargain shoppers from comparison engines to your site without cannibalizing your storefront sales.

GoECart makes it easy for you to quickly and effectively market your products online through leading comparison shopping channels. Learn more about how to rank higher in Google Product Search.

Google Product Search, formerly known as Froogle and Google Base, is the leading comparison shopping engine for retail products launched by Google Inc. in 2002. Since then, Google Product Search has evolved into a highly competitive, free product search engine that allows ecommerce website owners to list their products so online shoppers can find them quickly and easily. And in some cases, products appear even within Google.com organic search results for highly competitive search terms.

With a tremendous potential for increasing website traffic and improving conversion rates by up to 30%, Google Product Search is one of the most effective and profitable ways to promote your products and brands in front of millions of consumers. If you are a retailer and you’re still in the dark about Google Product Search, it’s time you realized how important Google Product Search is and start listing your products there before your competitors do. Otherwise, you will lose opportunities for additional sales.

Use Google Product Search to get in front of your prospects

One of the best things about Google Product Search is that it allows you to list an unlimited number of items for FREE. Google makes no commission on the sale of the products and it does not accept payment for products to show up first. As an online retailer, you can submit product listings directly to Google Base either by API, FTP, XML data feed, or by typing product information individually in form fields on the Google Product Search user interface.

Google Product Search has its own portal and snippets of its product listings are regularly displayed in searches on Google.com as part of its universal search. With Google’s new search interface, online consumers can search for products with just one click on the word ‘Shopping’ on the left navigation of the Google search screen. The search results include images, prices and links to the retailers’ ecommerce websites.

Boost your Product Search rankings by using proper optimization techniques

There are now two different ways that Google displays product listings. If your product is unique or there are only a few competitors selling them online, then they create a dedicated listing that links directly to your product page. If you sell a popular product, then Google creates a dedicated page for the product and adds you as a retailer to that page.

Let’s examine both of these listing types and what you can do as an online retailer to rank higher and get more exposure on Google Product Search.

Dedicated listings:

In order to rank high in Google Product Search there are a number of optimization points:

• Pricing.By offering the lowest total price, you’ll appear higher, appeal to more consumers and ultimately gain more exposure.
• Seller Rating. Ratings and Reviews are an important determinant of your success as an online retailer. So make sure you maintain a stellar online reputation.
• Title tag. Similar to generic organic results, having the key phrases for each product placed strategically in your title tag can help you rank high within Google Product Search. Most important keywords should be included first in the title. E,g, product name, brand, model and then product type. Review your web analytics account to see which keywords are being used to find your products and use them in the title and description fields.




• Description. Make sure the most important and highly searched keywords are included in your description. Also, don’t neglect the long tail keywords.
• Data Freshness. One of the methods Google recommends to get higher rankings is to make sure that you are regularly adding your new products and updating existing data when necessary.
• Data Quality. It’s important that your data is error free, well formatted and meets all of the required quality standards.
• Additional Parameters. Google points out several times in their guidelines that using additional fields isn’t going to improve your positioning in search results. However, optimizing these fields can help increase your exposure and make your site look more professional.

Dedicated pages:

The factors discussed above for dedicated listings will help you with your ranking on dedicated pages as well. For merchants with brick-and-mortar presence, make sure you have store location entered into your Google Product Account. Also you can gain additional exposure if you use the Google Checkout payment option and offer free shipping.

Dedicated pages tend to also include Ads from Google Adwords, Editorial reviews, Youtube Videos, Similar items and Accessories listings. These are examples of additional areas you can optimize to get further exposure.

If you participate in both Google Adwords and Google Product Search, you should consider linking these two accounts together so your products appear in Google Adwords.

Finally, make sure you are tracking your Google Product Search results using tracking software. If you are using Google Analytics you can either tag each URL with campaign tracking tags or set up a filter in Google Analytics. Visit http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/07/16/tracking-google-product-search-traffic/ for more information.

Important notice from Google:

Product offers in the Electronics, Books, and Media categories that are submitted without Unique Product Identifiers may not be listed or may appear in a lower position in the results. We recommend checking the Data Quality tab in your Merchant Center account to see examples of products that may have missing or incorrect identifiers.

And as always, you can refer to GoECart Knowledge Base for more information.

How can merchants benefit from being listed in Google Product Search?

Increased traffic and sales - Google Product Search brings merchants together with an enormous number of online shoppers. By listing your products on Google Product Search you are helping customers find your site quickly and easily, thus, generating more traffic and sales.

Greater product exposure - Submitting your products to Google Product Search is one of the best ways to generate exposure for your brand and your products, and that too for free.

Increased conversions - Listing your products on Product Search will help you reach buyers precisely when they are searching for items to buy. Google Product Search has proven itself to be one of the most effective search engines in terms of delivering shoppers who are ready to buy.

List your products through an approved Google Product Search Partner

GoECart is a worldwide leader in on-demand ecommerce applications. GoECart’s innovative technology solutions help retailers of all sizes maintain a competitive edge in today’s marketplace with added support for Google Product Search. Through GoECart’s reliable, scalable, and secure ecommerce engine, we can help merchants seamlessly integrate their product data feeds directly into Google’s Product Search engine.

As a Google Product Search Partner, GoECart is here to help you achieve increased traffic, greater product exposure and higher conversion rates!

Visit www.GoECart.com today and join hundreds of retailers that rely on GoECart every day to help them rank higher in Google Product Search and enjoy more traffic and sustainable sales growth.

In early May, Google™ made a major algorithm update to its search engine with the goal of making ‘long-tailed’ results—phrases that contain three or more keywords—more useful. For example, a Google search for ‘Widget Model 554’ is a long-tailed search. Unfortunately, the change has adversely impacted online retailer’s standings in the search giant’s results pages. Consequently, there has been a great deal of outrage over this algorithmic update particularly from online retailers that have seen their traffic and online revenues drop sharply.

Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee, had this to say: “This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them. These pages might be several clicks from the home page and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them.” Many ecommerce sites have this structure.

Matt Cutts, ofGoogle’s Web Spam team, said that site owners who saw their traffic drop need to keep adding great content and make sure people see your site as an authority.

With thousands of online retailers seeing fewer search engine rankings for their product pages, many retailers are wondering what can be done to regain these positions and recapture lost revenues.

Optimize Product Pages

Online retailers often face common problems when trying to get their product pages to rank well in the search engines. One key challenge is with images and content that are exactly like those provided by the manufacturer. One of the core reasons Google made this algorithmic update is to prevent this type of duplicate content from being indexed. For example, when you search for ‘Widget Model 554’ and every search result yields the exact same content from multiple retail sites, there is little value to the online shopper. Since using manufacturer-supplied catalog content is a standard practice amongst merchants for many reasons; it could take months to manually rewrite each product description for potentially thousands of catalog pages. However, by not taking the time to add value to the content, your search results will suffer. So how can these challenges be addressed? Start with proper page optimization:

• Write unique keyword-rich TITLE tags for every product.
• Ensure your product page URLs are search engine friendly and contain the product name.
• Rewrite the product information provided to you by the manufacturer; for example, further expand on the products features and/benefits.
• Allow your customers to write reviews on the products they purchase from you. Let your customers create unique content for you on each product page!
• Add a unique and detailed expert reviews to each of your popular products.

Adding value to your product pages can be a very time consuming task; however, taking the time to do it right will result in higher search engine rankings and more satisfied customers.

Employ an Effective Link Building Strategy

Google stated that they will factor in links from other sites even more heavily as a key area in the algorithm update. Since product pages, due to their nature, generally don’t have many links from other sites to them, online retailers need to build back links to these pages This involves developing new content containing the embedded links to your pages making sure the content gets posted to other sites across the web. For example, you can create the following types of content containing the links back to your site:

• Regularly scheduled press releases and announcements about new products
• Articles about your products, such as what differentiates them from competing products or general overview articles
• Squidoo™, Google Knol™, or a HubPages™ pages about each of the brands or products you carry.

You can then send this content to bloggers, article distribution sites, trade associations or post them on your company blog. You can also try some of these additional link building strategies:

• If you have a large customer base, consider developing a widget or badge customers can put on their blog or site which features a product wish list or registry. Go to your most popular competitor sites and see where they are acquiring their back links from. There may be specialty sites in your niche you can leverage.

There are many more ways you can generate quality links to your site’s category and product pages, just spend some time going over the sites within your vertical, and you will begin generating lists of potential sources.

Indeed, keeping up with Google’s latest algorithmic updates can be overwhelming for many online merchants. To help avoid your online store dropping off in the search results, the general rule of thumb is to develop unique, valuable site content. In doing so, we can stop chasing every algorithmic update and begin focusing on our core business and its customers. But first you must make sure both visitors and the search engines see your site as an authority within your vertical.

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Vital statistics

Consider the following:

• IMT Strategies reports that prospective customers find websites 10 times more often through search engines versus magazine ads, 38 times more frequently than direct mail, and 40 times more often than banner ads.
• Over 85% of the respondents to a Georgia Tech study indicated that prospects most often find websites through search engines and have intent to buy.
• More than 200 million searches are performed each day using the Google alone!

With information like this, it’s obvious that you can’t run the risk of your store not being ranked higher by the major search properties. Now consider these statistics:

• 78% of users will abandon their query if the first three pages of results do not yield an answer to their query.
• Fully 33% of users believe companies whose websites are found in top results are a major brand in their specific product/service category.

But with literally billions of pages indexed how do you make your site get higher rankings in organic search listings? This article summarizes some effective tactics you can employ for search engine friendly ecommerce.

Keywords are key

Your first step is to identify the major keywords that your customers will use in looking for your products and/or services. Tools like Wordtracker® (http://www.wordtracker.com/) and Overture® (http://www.overture.com/) can help you identify top keywords. Once keywords are established, you need to integrate them into the content present on your webstore and underlying code of the web pages in your site. This includes optimization of:

Title Tags: A brief description, that includes keywords, should appear in the tag for each page. Since search engines look in this tag and compare it with the content of that web page, all pages in your webstore should have unique titles. Your title tags should contain one or more keywords that are a reflection of what the web page is all about. Never use long, irrelevant titles.

Meta Tags: Meta tags, especially meta keyword and description tags, should be optimized with keywords that are consistent with the content of the web page. Again, you should write page specific meta tags optimized with right keywords for all the pages of your store.

Page Content: Content of the page plays a important role for generating search engine friendly ecommerce store. Your keywords should also be included in the text of your web pages that is visible to site visitors. However, this should be done in an optimal manner-instead of overloading the text on the page with keywords or not using them at all.

Filenames and URLs: It can really boost your rankings if your filenames contain important keywords. Note that most search engines are not able to index dynamic pages with variables like “%”, “&”, “$”, ” =”, “+”, or “?” in their web address. Therefore, if you have dynamic pages in your site make sure that you have mechanism to that make the dynamic page URL’s appear to search engines as static pages.

ALT tag: Search engines rely on alt tags to understand the contents of the images in your site. Always use alt tags wherever images are used.

Other tactics

There are a variety of additional tactics you can employ to make your website search engine friendly and get it ranked in organic listings of search engines. These include developing an effective site map and adding H tags to the breadcrumb trails that guide search engine “crawlers” through the key pages in your site. Getting quality links to your site from other sites such as online directories, link exchanges, and other websites can also boost the “popularity” score of your pages – in turn giving you better rankings. Search engines also assign greater value to sites that update content frequently, so be sure to keep your site fresh to help it get noticed by the engines.

Don’t get penalized

A word of caution: there are some technical factors that can prevent your web pages from getting a good ranking and in some cases may even result in your entire site being banned from a particular search engine. Things to watch out for include:

• Overuse or misuse of “doorway” or “cloaking” pages
• Slow web page loading time
• Junk code (such as overuse of keywords)
• Improper web page coding structure (e.g., bad HTML, CSS)

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Since the mid 1990s, search engine optimization (SEO) has been a godsend for small businesses online, allowing merchants to attract large amounts of targeted traffic for little money. When you combine GoECart with search engine optimization best practices, your online visibility really begins to increase. GoECart is the most search engine friendly ecommerce solution available today. It provides web merchants with the foundation needed to get indexed by the search engines and begin ranking high. This article provides search engine optimization best practices for GoECart merchants that if followed can result in their search engine positions increasing.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

GoECart allows you to take dynamic URL queries and make them static URLs with keywords. By making your site’s URLs static and placing keywords relevant to the page in the URL, your site can see a boost in search engine rankings.

Common mistakes: When you change a page URL, you are deleting the page and putting up a brand new page. The best thing to do when renaming a page URL is to place a 301 redirect on the old page URL pointing to the new page URL. This tells the search engines that you have renamed the old page’s URL. For information on setting up 301 redirects, see http://www.machinteractive.com/WhitePapers/SE-Positions.pdf.

Unique Title Tags

GoECart offers the ability to assign every page a unique title tag. Title tags should be short (no more than 64 characters) and should contain keywords relevant to the page.

Common mistakes: If your domain name is keyword rich, end every title tag with ‘ – Your Sites Name’ instead of ‘YourSitesName.com.’ This can also help boost your positions and help in branding efforts.

Link popularity

Link popularity is the total number of web sites that link to your site. Building link popularity is key to any search engine optimization program. If your site does not have enough quality sites linking to it, then your search engine positions will suffer. DMOZ.org, Yahoo.com, sbd.bcentral.com, BBB.org, HackerSafe.com, and your local Chamber of Commerce are good places to start for building quality back links to your site. I also recommend participating in forums and discussion groups within your vertical and including your link in your signature of each post. This will both help you in building link popularity and establishing your company in online communities. Request links to your site from manufacturers, wholesalers, and any large companies that are business partners.

Common mistakes: Not all links are good; think quality over quantity.

Unique Content

There is a saying in search engine optimization circles, and that is “content is king.” This saying should not be taken lightly. Unique keyword-rich content is a critical piece of a successful search engine optimization campaign. In addition to content-rich product pages, you may also want to include the following on your site:

• Product Instruction Manuals
• Customer Product Reviews
• Press Releases
• Original Articles

Common mistakes: Try to place online unique and relevant content because if the content found on your site can also be found on hundreds of other sites, a “duplicate content penalty” may be triggered.

Freshness

Your site should always be kept fresh, especially your home page. Constantly adding content and new features to your site can help increase your search engine positions.

Common mistakes: Update only small sections of the homepage such as a current news box, monthly featured products, or new product releases. You do not want to be changing large quantities of your homepage constantly as that can negatively affect your rankings.

Sitemap

You want to have a sitemap that links to every single page on your site, so that when the search engine spiders crawl this page they can follow the sitemap to locate every page in your site.

Common mistakes: Webmasters tend to forget about this page, so when you add or delete pages make sure they update the sitemap.

Other Tips

Here are a few additional quick tips that can make a big difference

• Convert any text in image form to regular text.
• Limit the number of external links on your site to maximum of five per page and only link to high quality sites.
• Place your site on a dedicated server with a unique IP address.
• Continuously check your site for broken links and fix them as needed.

One of the most common misunderstandings is that top search engine positions can be achieved overnight. Search Engine Optimization takes time, thus if you implement the above suggestions and don’t see any improvement in a week don’t jump the gun and revise everything.

SEO has changed a great deal since the mid 1990s. Today, sites such as FoxNews.com now employ small armies of search engine optimizers to make sure their site’s main pages appear at the top of search engine results. There are hundreds of factors that determine a site’s search engine positions, and the methods for achieving top rankings change often. With online competition heating up, many companies that begin optimizing their site have found that the SEO route is not as easy or clearly defined as it appears to be, yet it still offers one of the highest returns on investment of any marketing channel available.

MachInteractive, a peer division of GoECart, is a full-service interactive marketing firm that specializes in search engine marketing solutions. You can learn more about MachInteractive at http://www.machinteractive.com/.