Friday, February 8, 2013

Using Google Sitemap

Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can click on your website, and on the left side, click "Optimization" then "Content Keywords." Here you should see a list of your website's top 20 keywords.  These are your top keywords throughout all the pages included in the sitemap that you had uploaded to Google.  If you are using ShopSite's Google Site Map integration, then this is all of your pages and product more information pages. Take a look at these keywords. Do the top 20 keywords on your website reflect what your website is about?  Are the main keywords you use in your meta keywords, title, and meta description tags match those that are found here.  If not, you will want to do two things. First, is locate and replace the keywords you don't want in this list with ones that you do want.  Second, re-work your meta keywords, titles and meta descriptions to contain more of the top 20 keywords of your website.  This second option is more obvious, so below I will provide more information on the first fix.

If you go through your list of 20 keywords, you might wonder why some are coming up.  For example, some common ones I see when I do this for websites are "jpg" "product" and "page." The main reason for "jpg" is because your images may not have alt tags attributed to them.  When you upload an image via the ShopSite Image Uploader in the back office, if you don't specify an alt tag, then the image file name is used.  If I upload "blue-shirt.jpg" the default setting will have the image tag looking like:
<img src="media/blue-shirt.jpg" alt="blue-shirt.jpg">
This makes "blue-shirt" a keyword on your website, then "jpg" after the period, a keyword on your website.  You will want to change this by going to Images > Edit Image, and in the alternate text field, replace "blue-shirt.jpg" with "Blue T-Shirt" or whatever keywords you want.

The next big ones I see are "product" and "page." These keywords often come up because merchants will write intro paragraphs which say something like "This product..." or "This page contains products that are..." Often times this is used so that you don't sound repetitive when writing descriptions. There are two approaches to fixing this.  The first is manually going through all your page text fields and product text fields and replacing all the pronouns with the actual name or category.  This can take a long time if you have tons of pages and products.  The second approach is making the change with a text replacement equation within a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel. Don't be afraid that your descriptions are going to be too repetitive; many times customers ignore the text or just skim for bullet points.  The text is in large part for search engines.  You are still giving the customer useful page and product information, just using the full page/category/product name.

You can download your product (you can repeat this for pages) database with just the unique identifier field (either the product name or the product SKU) and the text fields. If your unique product identifier is the SKU, you will want to download the product name field just for pronoun replacement.  Open your database in Microsoft Excel.  You should have 3-4 columns.  In the first empty column, type "="the"&name-column-and-cell".  So for example, if your product name is in column 1, then the equation would be "="the"&A2". In your next empty column, type the equation "=(SUBSTITUTE(description-column-and-cell,"this product","the-name-column-and-cell")).  So for example, if you have the following:
Column A(name) - Blue Shirt
Column B(sku) - b-tee
Column C(description) - The blue shirt is great for crafts.  This product is made out of 100% cotton.
Column D(more information text) -
Column E(first empty column) - ="the"&A2
Column F(second empty column) - =(SUBSTITUTE(C2,"this product","E2"))
The end result in column F would be "The blue shirt is great for crafts.  The Blue Shirt is made out of 100% cotton." This is a quick way to replace text for all your products. When you upload the database back into your ShopSite store, ignore your original description field, and your first empty column.  have your second empty column be uploaded in your description field.

No comments:

Post a Comment