SEO, shopping engine tips for retailers

To stay competitive in a crowded online marketplace and bring online 
shoppers closer to the point of purchase, retailers should complement 
traditional paid search programs by advertising on shopping engines 
and improving organic search rankings through search engine 
optimization.
Shopping engines. Empowered by powerful comparison shopping tools, 
more consumers are relying on shopping engines to deliver the best 
deals online. However, most retailers are not including shopping 
engines in marketing efforts.  Here are six steps to gain a 
competitive edge:
• Focus on high-margin areas to maximize return on advertising 
spending and enable the flexibility to test and optimize feeds 
without detrimentally affecting the bottom line.
• Actively manage cost per click across campaign, category and 
product to improve the click-through rate and conversion rate of 
listings.
• Measure progress against goals by calculating account returns, 
chargebacks and incentives in return on advertising spending or key 
performance metrics.
• Recognize how pricing and bidding factor into performance objectives.
• Maintain accurate data feeds that include all fields – not only 
required fields – to improve the performance of listings.
• Take advantage of enhanced listing opportunities such as featured 
placement, product and company logos and images, merchant reviews and 
customer testimonials.
SEO for retailers.  To boost site traffic and revenue use the 
following key SEO tactics:
• Choose a flexible content management system that allows customized 
page titles, meta tags, category naming and page copy, and one that 
provides liberal space for product descriptions and in-context links.
• Optimize crawlability by allowing spiders to access all non-
sensitive content, store session IDs in a cookie instead of a URL, 
and limit URLs to one or two dynamic variables.
• Choose keywords that are most frequently queried on major search 
engines, are relevant to current site content and are targeted 
specifically to the individual page.
• Focus on content that gives search engine spiders quality keyword-
rich text to spider – search engine algorithms reward informational 
content over sales content.
• Build quality links to attract more relevant and higher ranked 
search results.
Additionally, create unique product descriptions across a product 
line to ensure Web crawlers don’t exclude “copycat” pages.
If a site includes dynamic content typically invisible to search 
engines, provide text links as part of your main site navigation. And 
create in-depth text descriptions to ensure spiders accurately 
catalog content.
Consider hosting blogs and microsites that are rich in keywords and 
link to product pages to attract search engine
spiders.