Tiberiu-Bazavan

(Evan Kramer is a guest blogger for SEO.com. He has successfully launched consumer websites AjcJobs.com, Kudzu.com, AutoGuide.com, VacationRoost.com, GoHoming.com and ezprints.com. He writes his own blog, The Chief Internet Officer. He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and daughter. If you are also interested in guest blogging opportunities, e-mail marketing @ SEO.com. Guest posts may or may not reflect the opinions of SEO.com.)

For consumer product businesses on the Web, managing data can often be difficult because of all the data constituents involved (Marketing, IT, Operations and all the sub-managers under each).

Search engine optimization needs to be accounted for as part of your data architecture planning. Whether you are dealing with inventory, classifieds, information, etc., there are ways to manage your product data to better optimize your SEO efforts. Managing product data is often at the intersection of Marketing and IT Infrastructure.

I often refer to this as your “Markestructure.” Your Markestructure can be evaluated in more ways than just enhancing SEO efforts, such as CRM, customer acquisition, data hygiene, etc. But for this post, I will focus on four major ways to manage your product data (as part of your Markestructure) for SEO.

1. Creation of unique product data

2. Online Distribution

3. Customer Segmentation

4. Data conversion

Creation of Unique Product Data

We all know how Google loves content to be unique. Over the past few years, social media has facilitated unique content as user generated reviews appended to product information has helped grow companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor and others. However, outside of user-generated content, how do you make your product data more unique? Retail businesses will often struggle with having to merchandise the same products as competitors — whether it is refrigerators, cars, apparel, etc. A great way to manage differentiation is the utilization of third party data or branded content on your product details pages.

For example, if you are selling appliances online, you can utilize great data from data.gov to mash-up government benefits attached to each type of appliance. Let consumers be aware of the benefits to buying an energy efficient appliance. In addition, you can utilize content staff to enhance the messaging around the product details of the appliances to match of the voice of your brand. For example, if you are selling automobiles online, it is often difficult to differentiate yourself from competition on anything other than price. To a search engine, you can add content on the product page associated with your brand such as testimonials, statistics about your dealership customer service or quirky facts about the make/model of the car using strong keywords.

Online Distribution

Your website is merely one Web page or a group of Web pages from which to market your product data. Depending upon your industry, make sure you have a viable syndication and RSS program in place to proliferate and your product data to the highest degree possible. Once syndicated, you can create SEO programs around your data.

For example, back to the automotive example, there are great syndication outlets for your product data such as Googlebase, Oodle, Vast, etc. Once deployed, you need to assess the meta data associated with each data feed that is impacting search results for that channel. As an example with Googlebase, you may need to have stronger ALT tags on your images, increase the updates (freshness) of your data or merely add more content description with keywords in order to differentiate your product data.

SEO is not only about managing your product data results directly to high SERPs but also your marketing channels that indirectly impact SERPs.

Customer Segmentation

The great thing about SEO is how it is now converging with consumer marketing. The search engines now want to not only consume content like a reader, but also evaluate content like a reader. As such, it’s better if you you can work with marketing to create customer segmentation and integrate strategic keywords into your segment product data pages.

For example, back to the automobiles example, it would be great to utilize the same product data for a Make/Model (say, BMW) against several customer segments in order to generate several unique content pages. You may have a luxury buyer, a mid-life crisis buyer, a speed racer type, etc. For each segment, you can generate a specific landing page to filter to your product data in order to merchandise to that particular customer segment. I know my wife will not be buying a mini-van any time soon for our family because she refuses to be labeled a ‘Soccer Mom.’ Perhaps have a “Cool Mom Car” selection instead?

Data Conversion

Data associated with your products — whether it is retail commerce, classifieds, etc. — should not be tied to a specific format when it comes to generating SEO. At first, you should cover your bases and create an XML file to include all pages with your product data. However, you should explore options on how to convert your data into different formats, such as video, in order to create new unique content for the search engines using the same data. Perhaps take images and convert them to video files. There are sites like Animoto or companies like Liquidus Marketing that can generate great content with static jpeg images. You may also explore text to speech options where you can convert your data into audio files. Whether you create video or audio files, you can syndicate and index these new file types and generate user content against them over time to further enhance the uniqueness of the data.

Overall, these are merely four ways to evaluate product data as part of your Markestructure in order to better manage SEO. The process of search optimization is ongoing and requires constant attention. However, this post is a reminder to evaluate the origins, architecture and uses of your product data as part of your overall SEO strategy.

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SEO.com is hosting the Utah Tech Council’s industry breakfast Thursday, July 29 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at its corporate headquarters at 14870 Pony Express Road in Bluffdale.

Tim Sullivan, president and CEO of Ancestry.com, will speak on “How to Execute a Big Idea.”

He will tell the story of Ancestry.com’s experience of landing the hit NBC TV show, “Who Do You Think You Are?” and will discuss how to tackle similar big ideas and projects that may seem insurmountable. The show, which will return in August, features celebrities such as Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon, Emmitt Smith and Sarah Jessica Parker using Ancestry.com’s software to trace their roots and discover their ancestors. It has brought massive exposure to Sullivan’s company.

WHEN:
Thursday, July 29
8 – 9:30 a.m.
COST:
$15 for UTC Member
$30 for Non UTC Member
REGISTER NOW:

Event location:
SEO.com
14870 Pony Express Road
Bluffdale, Utah

Driving Directions:
Take I-15 to exit 288, 14600 South. Keep right at the fork and follow signs for Bluffdale. Merge onto UT-140 West. Turn left at I-15 Frontage Road/Pony Express Road. SEO will be on the right.

Event date: 7/29/2010 8 a.m.

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One of the things we constantly have to do as SEO experts is give recommendations to companies on how they need to change their site so that they can be better optimized.

The sad thing is that a lot of the things we recommend should have been done during the Web development phase the first time around.

No matter how much the SEO world tries to get the information out there, a lot of Web developers don’t understand the basic concepts of SEO. This in turn leads to sites being developed that an SEO team will later have to tear apart and fix.

So whether you’re designing a new site in-house, using some kind of template site-building system, or hiring an outside firm, here are 18 things that you’ll want to make sure are in place before you launch your site. It will keep us SEO guys from giving your site an overhaul later. By following these guidelines you’ll have a much more search engine friendly web design from the beginning.

1- Perform Keyword Research Before Developing the Site

SEO starts with keywords. And if you’re planning to market your site in the search engines, you should know what keywords you want to rank for before you even start building the site. Make sure this is done FIRST.

Here are some other posts that talk about how to properly do keyword research:

• Keyword Research Gems from PubCon
• How to Create a Huge Keyword List
• Use All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy

2- Put Non-www to www Redirects in Place

It amazes me how many sites load with and without the www in the URL. The problem with this is that it creates an automatic duplicate of your site, and can waste a lot of link value as people link to both versions. Decide which version of your URLs you want to use, then 301 redirect everything else to the preferred version.

3- Use a Static, Keyword Based URL Structure

Dynamic URLs can cause a lot of problems if not handled right. So rather than going through all of the headache that they cause us SEO-types, just set your site up with good URL rewrites so that you don’t have dynamic URLs in the first place.

More posts about URLs:

• Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure
• 3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix Them
• Absolute URLs – Better Safe Than Sorry?

4- Have Unique URLs for Each Product/Service

Even if a product or service can be found multiple ways on the site, make sure that there is only one unique URL for each product or service your company offers. This helps to eliminate unnecessary duplicate content problems.

5- Include Redirect Capabilities

You never know when you’re going to want to take a page down and redirect it to something else. The mistake a lot of sites make is that they just take a page down when they don’t need it any more. When this happens you lose the link value that page may have gained while it was live. So do yourself a favor: make sure you can 301 redirect that old page to a new page that can use the juice.

6- Create a Custom 404 Page

Having a custom 404 page makes it so that if someone lands on a 404 page, they at least know they’ve reached the right site. Without a custom 404 in place, they may just assume the site is down and move on to your competitor’s site.

Here is an example of a custom 404 page:

7- Include Keyword-Rich Alt Attributes

Alt attributes are very easy to overlook. But if you use them the right they can be another signal to the search engines to tell them what a page is about. One quick tip on this one: don’t abuse this attribute by using a keyword phrase on every single bullet point image or stuffing a bunch of keywords into the attribute.

8- Make Room for Sufficient Content

Sometimes designers and developers get carried away with the look and feel of the page and forget to include room for text-based content. That’s what the search engines read, so you have to make sure there is a logical place for that content. Ideally, plan on having at least 150-200 words of optimized content on any page you want to rank well.

You should also make sure that your content is structured right. Have one H1 tag at the top of the main content, and then break out other sub topics with H2-H6 tags as appropriate. Make sure to use your keywords in these headings and in the content, but once again don’t overdo it.

9- Set Up Internal Linking Structure

I think that internal linking is one of the most commonly overlooked things for most sites. In fact, Ken Lyons wrote a great post about it that goes into more detail than I can in this post: Want More Link Juice? Here’s an Easy Way to Get It

10- Decide on a Consistent Title Structure

A site should use the same title structure throughout the site. Pick your convention and stick with it. A good format to follow is to have a phrase that includes main keywords for the page and describes what the page is about, followed by a separator (- or | are common), and then your brand name. For example, “Professional SEO Services for Organic Website Optimization | SEO.com”. Keep these titles to under 65-70 characters so they don’t get truncated in the search results.

11- Include Meta Descriptions on Every Page

Since most of the search engines can choose to use your meta description as your snippet in the search results, you should have a unique one written for every page. Include the main keywords and a call to action to encourage clicks. DON’T just make this tag a list of keywords.

12- Allow Inclusion for Other Meta Tags (canonical, robots, etc.)

If you’re using any kind of tracking codes or other things on your site that create duplicate URLs, you’re going to want to be able to include a canonical tag on those pages. Also, depending on how your site is built you may need to include other meta tags like a robots tag and others. Make sure your site’s back end allows for this when necessary.

13- Incorporate Social Media Sharing Buttons

In case you missed it, social media is a pretty big thing right now. I’m not a big fan of the generic ShareThis button, but you need to have some kind of social media sharing buttons on your products and other important pages. Do some research to decide which social networks are best for your site and then stick with those.

More general information about social media:

• 4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media
• So Your Industry Is Boring – Don’t Let That Keep You Out of Social Media

14- Install Analytics Tracking

If you don’t have any kind of analytics tracking installed, you have no way to tell where you traffic is coming from, what’s working, and lots of other crucial information. Pick a solution and get it installed. Popular ones include:

• Google Analytics
• Omniture
• Mint
• StatCounter
• And a lot more…

Make sure that the software you go with will allow you to block your office IP address, track conversions, ecommerce revenues generated through different online sources, and anything else that will help you to understand what is actually affecting your bottom line.

15- Set up and Verify Webmaster Tools Account

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can find out a lot about how Google sees your site, and can give them indications on how to handle certain parameters, submit your XML sitemap, and be notified of problems they find with your site. Bing’s Webmaster Center is coming along, so it’s worth it to go ahead and verify that one as well.

16- Follow Web Standards for HTML, CSS, and Database Programming

The more you follow standards, the easier it will be for someone else to come along later and make changes or modify the site. It’s a real problem when a site’s backend code or database is so complex that it has to be rebuilt later in order for it to be changed.

17- Generate an XML Sitemap

It only takes a few minutes to do it, but once the site is live make sure you create and XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines through their webmaster tools accounts. It’s even better if you can set this up so that it automatically updates and pings the search engines whenever a change is made.

18- Create a Robots.txt File

When you create your robots.txt file make sure that you are disallowing any pages or directories that you don’t want the search engines crawling. Standard examples would be login pages, search results pages, and shopping cart pages. You should also include a link to your XML sitemap as well. Also, make sure you test this file in your Google Webmaster Tools account to make sure it is working correctly.

Here’s a great site that talks more in detail about how to create a robots.txt file: About /robots.txt

If you follow these 18 guidelines you’ll launch a site that is in great shape as far as SEO is concerned. If you’re an SEO, feel free to add anything else to this list in the comments.

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