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Ask the Experts: How Do I Optimize for the…

May 20, 2009
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: I’m a newbie reading your “Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day” book, and I had a question. On one hand I’d like my target keywords to be general and broad. However, these are highly competitive terms, and the big boys already have a leg up on them, so I was considering going after more specific keywords, [names of individual products] that I carry. Problem is that I have over 6,000 [individual products].

Should I be going for more general terms? Should I go after specific product names? Do I choose my 10 most popular products to optimize for? What if those products change in popularity over the months, and I just spent months trying to optimize for them?

A: Your situation is well-suited to a “long tail” approach to keyword optimization. This means that rather than selecting a short list of 10 or so keywords, you will dedicate your site to ranking well for a wide range of keywords, with all pages following site-wide general optimization guidelines. Each of the many thousands of product names may not get much of search volume, but in aggregate, this “long tail” provides a large amount of traffic.

For example, let’s say you have a shoe store and you decide that optimizing for specific shoe model names is the way to go. Do some keyword research on a sample set of product names (perhaps 5) to determine how people are searching. Are they searching for just the name, or something like “buy XXX online,” or any other variations? Do they include a brand name too? (as an aside, these patterns might change seasonally, so be sure to look at year-round numbers rather than just current numbers). Once you know what word patterns you’re targeting, you work on optimization for a TYPICAL product landing page. For this page, you make up general rules such as:

HTML Page Title always follows the formula “Joe’s Discount Shoes: Buy [shoe name] Online” (or whatever your chosen formula is)
Product Name always follows the formula: “[brand: shoe model]” (or whatever your chosen formula is).
Description always includes “buy [brand: shoe model] online…”
URL is always /brand-shoe-name.html
Product photo always includes an ALT Tag: “Shoes: [Brand]: [Shoe Model]”
Navigation text always includes shoe model name

(Note these are all examples and you should develop your own list).

In addition to the above, you may wish to choose a small number of generic, highly popular terms and to target these on your home page, or even include them sitewide, by incorporating them into your formulas. This combination of “queen bee” keywords (popular terms that get royal treatment on your site) with “long tail” keywords (lower volume keywords with a large number of different landing page possibilities) is often a powerful SEO strategy.

The basic principals in the book don’t change, but you’ll be applying them to ALL your pages rather than just a set number of landing pages.

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Ask the Experts: Why is Google Giving My Privacy…

May 20, 2009
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: In organic search, Google is coming up with my legal statement and privacy statement pages for certain unrelated terms. These two pages do not house any of the search terms in their copy. How can I get Google to see other more pertinent pages for these keywords instead of these two pages which have nothing to do with the terms?

A: This is a common problem, because so many websites point links from their footer or global navigation to their privacy & legal pages. Google and other search engines interpret this as meaning that these are very important pages on your site. There are a few ways to remedy this – review the list, and choose the method that’s best for you:

Using the robots.txt file, you can exclude these pages from being listed. This option is the most extreme, and will also cause any previously accumulated search engine “power” (aka PageRank) to be lost for these pages.
Add the following code to the links to these pages: “rel=”nofollow”” This code will cause the search engines not to follow the links, thus focusing power onto other pages of your site This is a good solution if you have links to undesirable landing pages in your global nav, and you don’t want to pass a lot of search engine power to these pages. Here is an example of what your link would look like: Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/legal” rel=”nofollow”>privacy</a> page.
Change the pages to make them into decent landing pages. Perhaps adding navigation, links, or other information at the top of the pages would be an option?
Create a Google XML Sitemap, which allows you to give the various pages on your site your own relative level of prioritization. (We have yet to see this work in practice.)

In addition to the above, be sure that your preferred landing pages are linked from the home page as well as the global navigation if possible. That will help inform the search engines of what pages are most important to you.

Ask the Experts: How Do I Optimize for the…

Should I be going for more general terms? Should I go after specific product names? Do I choose my 10 most popular products to optimize for? What if those products change in popularity over the months, and I just spent months trying to optimize for them?

Ask the Experts: Why is Google Giving My Privacy…

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