How To "Sell" Your Products to Search Engines
by David Berky

So you have a great eStore setup but are nowhere to be found in the search engines. Why not?

The reason may be that the search engines can't find your product pages because of the way your eStore serves up its pages.

You have two alternatives. The quickest is to create a site map style page that has links to each of your products that the search engine spiders can follow. Put this map on your home page or on a site map page linked to on your home page.

This may work for some search engine spiders. But some have trouble following links with parameters or items after a "?" [question mark].

One surefire way of having the search engine spiders find your product pages is to create a second set of static HTML pages that are linked from your home page or from a site map page.

This may sound like a lot of work but there are several other benefits. For example, your eStore setup may not allow you to add a "keywords" or "description" META tag. You may not be able to change the <TITLE> tag or you may not be able to add <H1-3> heading tags.

Each of these tags is useful for telling the search engines what your page is about - or in other words, the places where you want to put your product's keywords.

If you have a lot of products, creating a special HTML page for each can seem like a daunting task. But we will discuss a way and a plan for making this task seem easier.

Ideally, your product "sales" page should have three elements. The first element is the keywords placed in the strategic locations mentioned before. The second element is two to three keyword-rich paragraphs describing your product. And last is a "call to action" (e.g., "Order today and start saving $1000s!").

Your call to action will be a link into the product order page in your eStore. You may also want to have similar or recommended "companion" products either mentioned on the sales pages or within the eStore.

You should make these sales pages have the same look and feel as the rest of your site's pages and each sales page should be linked from the home page so the search engine spiders can find the sales pages easily.

If you pace yourself and set a goal of 1-3 pages a week, the project shouldn't be too overwhelming or all-consuming. It can take months for the pages to get spidered/found and added into the search engine indexes anyway. The important thing is to establish a plan with reasonable goals and actually start working on it.

Here is a suggested plan:

1. Identify 20 (or however many) products you would like start with. I suggest you use your sales reports to identify your best money-makers, most popular products, or products that could use some extra focused marketing.

2. Prioritize the products as to which ones you want to do first.

3. For the first few products, identify the primary keywords related to the product. Try to also imagine what other people would search on if they were looking for the product: synonyms, acronyms, even common misspellings.

4. Create an HTML template that can be used for each product. You may want to take your home page and use it as a template. You will only be changing the text in the "page body" area of the HTML file, not the logo, navigation or footer code. You may want to consult an HTML programmer to help create your template page if you are unfamiliar with HTML code.

5. Decide where on your web site's home page you want to place the product page links. This will probably be an area lower down on the page where they are not as noticeable. The links are mainly for the SE spiders but should still look good and appear like they are part of the page design. Or you can have a site map page linked from your home page where your sales pages links will reside. But remember the higher your pages are in your site "tree" the more importance the search engines will give them.

6. Set up a schedule showing how many pages you will do in each time period. Your schedule can be by week or month or whatever you feel you can commit to. You may want to make a chart to track your progress and serve as a "To Do" list. A folder or binder could be used to keep all the materials you need together including lists of the products, page file names, a copy of your HTML template file printed out and marked where changes/customizations should go, product information, etc.

7. Take your time creating the first few pages and develop methods that can ease or speed up the process. Write down a set of sequential steps that you are taking to create each page. This way you can turn over the project to someone else without spending a lot of time supervising or helping that person get up to speed. Give the page a file name that incorporates some of the keywords (e.g., "widget-red-right-handed.html").

8. Place links from your home page (or site map) to each product page. The text of the link should contain your mail keywords first and the name of the product after, or the product name may be left out entirely. The important thing is to identify the keywords to the search engine spiders. Also try to have "title" attributes for each link which repeat the keywords and can also include the product name. And be sure the product image on the page has an "alt" attribute with the appropriate keywords and product name as well.

9. As you complete your pages, look for or be aware of pages on other sites where a link to your product page may be appropriate. For example, if a person has a web site with a page that talks about products like yours, you may want to email that person and ask if she would like to put a link to your product page on her page as an additional resource for her visitors. Or if you see an article in a newsletter about your product and the newsletter is archived on a web site, look it up and email the site's web master to see if they would like to link to your product page. The links will help the search engines know what your pages are about.

10. To help the page rank well, especially in Google, try to exchange links with other web masters with similar or complementary sites. Suggest links to your site that link to a specific product page using your primary keywords for that product. You may need to establish a series of links pages on your site to hold the reciprocal links. Group these links by categories and keep the number of links to 30 or less per page. This will encourage other web masters to link to your site. The more sites that link to your site or your pages using your desired keywords, the better your pages will rank when people search on those keywords.

Following these 10 steps can help your products become more prominent in the search engine results. You can increase your sales by first "selling" to the search engines.

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David Berky is president of Simple Joe, Inc., makers of easy-to-use PC software featuring the world's easiest accounting software, Income & Expenses. Visit the Simple Joe website at http://www.simplejoe.com/incomeexpenses/