Here is the summary of Day Two from the Webmaster World Conference. Note: not every discussion is summarized, only those that will impact your business. The majority of feedback received was the discussions were all kept at very high level and not very many “gold nuggets” were revealed.
Proactive Linking:
When engaging in a new linking campaign, it is best to test ad creatives via PPC test campaigns before executing the linking campaign. Linking should not only be done to increase search engine relevance, but also to increase traffic to your site from visitors clicking on those links. Note: This is exactly what I have been advising for years, perform link campaigns to bring traffic to your site first, and if search engine relevance spills over, that is an added benefit. Everything you do should be two fold: increase traffic and increase conversion ratios.
Shopping Search Engines
Andrew Chen of Yahoo! Shopping described main visitor behaviors, and the functions of shopping search engines as browsing and searching for products. Chen noted that most users actually used both the search and browsing capabilities nearly equally.
According to both Chen and Matt Cutts of Google, relevancy isn’t just keywords and how you rank for them. It encompasses picture quality of your product, freshness, and price. With users being able to browse so many products, or the exact same product, from so many companies at once, it’s imperative that you set your listing apart from the others.
Requirements to get into the Yahoo! Shopping search engine are that you have the title of the listing, the price, the description, and an image of your product. Additionally, your products may get in via a Natural Search crawl, Yahoo! Shopping’s Product submit, Overture, and by CPM advertising through Yahoo! Shopping.
Chen outlined four distinct ways to optimize your Yahoo! Shopping listings:
1. High quality product images
2. Include as much information as possible in your listing; category, brand, model number, part number, UPC, and age or sex specific information, if applicable
3. Product names and descriptions should be concise, accurate, and follow manufacturer conventions
4. Freshness of your listing
Cutts stated that it is possible to get into Froogle via AdWords, sending a product feed, or via a natural crawl. He emphasized, later, that the best way to get into Froogle and maintain a successful listing was to submit your product feed on a daily basis. Froogle will drop your listing if it has not been updated within 30 days. An added benefit of using a feed to send your products to Google lies in that feed results are shown first.
The benefits of Froogle goes to both the end users and to the merchants. For users, not using a paid inclusion model insures both results by relevance, and broad coverage since it is open to all merchants. For the merchants, the value comes in that there is no cost involved, and that brings more free traffic to your site from Google.
Froogle has recently implemented a merchant rating system that factors into relevance of listing. Additionally, Cutts noted that Froogle now has the ability to automatically convert your Froogle data feed to your AdWords account.
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