Yahoo! Stores Auto-Authorize for Submission to Yahoo! Site Explorer

The major search engines all have tools that help website owners inform them of all current site pages and any updates to those pages. Since last year, we’ve enabled users to submit their sites using a standard format. Now we’re making it even easier to submit sites to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the site submission tool for Yahoo! Search.

Previously, the process of submitting a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions site to Yahoo! Site Explorer required users to register with Yahoo! Site Explorer and then enter keys for authentication in Store Manager. Now, all you have to do is make sure that you have enabled sitemap.xml and your site will be submitted to Yahoo! Site Explorer automatically once it is open for business.

You can opt-in to enabling sitemap.xml from the “Search Engines” link within the Store Manager. For more information about the Sitemap feature, consult the Sitemap help.

By automatically authenticating your site in Site Explorer, and submitting your content, you are ready-to-go to use Site Explorer for its many other features. You can:

• Find out which pages are indexed by Yahoo! Search and when your site was last visited by the crawlers. This gives you a picture of the current state of your site’s presence in search.
• See who is linking to you. You may be able to build even stronger relationships with these sites by reaching out to them personally. You can even look to see who is linking to your competitors. This can give you leads for generating more traffic.
• Delete pages you don’t want indexed from Yahoo! Search
• Let Yahoo! know about the dynamic URL parameters that you want us to rewrite. This can help reduce duplicate pages and link fragmentation from your site.

Auto-authentication for Yahoo! Site Explorer allows you to spend less time on site submission so you can focus on more important tasks to drive traffic such as building better internal links in product descriptions or optimizing your product pages with converting keywords.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Editor’s Note: At the SES Site Clinic a few weeks back, Rob Snell, Yahoo! store owner and author, made extensive use of Site Explorer to diagnose linking issues. Not only should you use the tool to view links for your own site, you can also use it as a competitive research tool to check which links your competitors are getting. You may then be able to get links from the same suppliers, groups, or people. Rob will be posting more tips from the Site Clinic session shortly.–Paul

Knowing What’s Right to Write for Product Page Content

All too often I see merchants with stores that have recently opened (or have been open for a while but are complaining about lack of natural search traffic), with product pages that lack sufficient original content. Now while writing for the web means you write less (and make your text scanable with bullet points and shorter line lengths) than you would for a catalog, embracing minimalism with your product content is a sure way to rank poorly with search engines and also deter visitors from becoming buyers.

So how much product content is enough? I have seen sources that list 200-300 words as an ideal and others that recommend 500 words; the trend seems to be moving towards higher word count but use conversion and not just traffic as your overall success metric. The next question then from newer merchants is typically, “How do I write that much?” or “What do I write about to get that many words?”.

Realize though that it is not simply the volume of content you write for products, but the quality as well (hint: keywords). Assuming you have done your homework on keywords and keyphrases research for which you wish the product to rank in search engines, I would recommend two articles with helpful tips on what to write about and the questions to answer for your various buyers.

Writing Smart Copy For Your E-commerce Product Pages

The folks at SEO Igloo have put together an article about 5 topics you can use to shape product content. The topics include:

• Historical
• Modern
• Trends
• Psychology
• Scientific

Some of these will work better than others depending on the type of products you sell, but at the very least they hint at the ways you can transform simple product pages into content-rich pages which search engines may rank higher.

Dishing Out What the Customer Really Wants

This is a great article from the smart marketers at Future Now. I was fortunate enough to hear Howard Kaplan from Future Now speak at the Internet Retailer conference this year. Kaplan talked about the different personas of online shoppers:

• Competitive: cutting edge, early adopters
• Methodical: research and compare, need all the details
• Humanistic: speak to emotional benefits of the product
• Spontaneous: impulse shoppers

The article lists the various questions these visitor types have when shopping. Imagine your job as a copywriter is to be the sales person on the page answering the questions asked by these different personas. The spontaneous buyer may need only a persuasive headline and a compelling price to buy. The methodical buyer will want to see all product specs, any testimonials from other customers, and why to trust you with the purchase. You may not have all of these personas but viewing your product pages in this framework can help overcome any writer’s block and when done properly can boost search traffic and drive additional sales.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Finnish Gifts Blog Interview

I conducted the following interview with Chad Trent, marketing manager for Finnish Gifts. I had met the owner of the site, Ben Horn, at the Internet Retailer show. After reviewing their store I noticed how they had incorporated a blog. I wanted to find out their reasons for starting a blog and the results they have seen as I’m sure many other merchants have wondered about using a blog with their store.

Finnish Gifts Blog helps to drive product awareness and targeted traffic to Finnish Gifts store.

Tell me a bit about Finnish Gifts and what you sell there? How long have you been with Yahoo!?

As a company, we’ve been on the Yahoo! platform since 2002. FinnishGifts.com is our 2nd store with Yahoo! (it was previously on a different platform) – we now have 3 stores with Yahoo!, and are working on #4 and #5. We sell modern Finnish products; from home accents and tableware to fabric and jewelry – really a wide variety of items. Our most popular and recognizable products are made by Finnish companies iittala and Marimekko.

In looking at your site I noticed you are using a blog. How long have you had a blog and what made you decide to start one?

We’ve had our Finnish Design Blog for about 1-1/2 years. We decided to start a blog as a way to introduce new products and get additional exposure on the search engines.

Which blogging platform did you choose to use and why?

We use the WordPress platform that is part of our hosting package with Yahoo! There are several reasons we chose to go with WordPress: it’s easy to install, easy to customize, and there are many add-ons available, among other things.

Are you using any blog plug-ins to engage with visitors such as polls or send page by email?

At this point, we’ve only been using plug-ins that assist with administration, statistics, and other back-end issues. However, there are many interesting plug-ins available and we plan on experimenting with some more in the near future.

[Paul] Check out my list of YStore blog plug-ins at the end of this post.

What do you discuss on the blog? Is it mainly for showing off new products or do you feature other content as well?

For the most part, we concentrate on introducing new products. It allows us to get our products up quickly and provides another avenue for the search engines to find the new product pages at our website. In addition to showcasing new products, we occasionally will post promotions and product/industry related news.

What sort of results are you seeing with the blog? Are you getting new visitors through the blog or are you mainly connecting with return customers? Are you seeing a higher order conversion rate from visitors that started from or visited the blog?

We have seen good results. Almost all of the visitors to our blog are new visitors that aren’t familiar with our company, so as a vehicle to introduce our company and products to potential new customers it has been a huge success. The conversion rate has been slightly higher than that of visitors who go directly to our website – and many of these visitors are searching for information and are not quite as far along in the buying cycle – so we are happy with the results.

Have you seen any tangible effects on your search engine rankings from using a blog?

Absolutely. Our search engine rankings have improved in a couple areas. First, on the blog itself we use terms and product combinations that we might not typically use on our website. This has resulted in increased exposure for many “Long Tail” terms that we weren’t previously ranking for. Second, we include descriptive links on each post back to the product pages on our website. This has improved the ranking of existing pages on our website.

Any tips or advice you would offer to a merchant thinking about starting a blog?

First, determine the purpose and goals for your blog. Our goal was simply to increase the exposure of our products, but yours might be to interact with customers more or to be an informational resource. Second, decide where you want to put your blog. We chose to use a subdomain (blog.finnishgifts.com), but others might use a different domain, a folder on your domain or a subdomain at a blogging website. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these options, so it’s important to choose what works best for you. Lastly, get to work and stick with it. The sooner you get content on your blog the sooner you’ll start seeing results. It was a slow process for us at first – we were only getting about 10 visitors a day early on – but eventually you will start seeing results as long as you continue to work at it.

Big thanks to Chad for sharing these insights. Merchants should know that in addition to WordPress, which is as noted built into the Web Hosting portion of your account, you can also choose Movable Type, another leading blogging platform.

The hardest part of the whole enterprise will be finding the time and creativity to write new content to keep your blog fresh. However, if you are an expert in your product area (and hopefully that is the reason why you decided to jump into your own particular space in the online retail world) you should have plenty to discuss. Don’t be afraid to show your opinion on products. As Chad notes, the work you do here can reap benefits in terms of search engine rankings so if you are spending too much time trying to improve those, this is one thing you can do to help yourself out, and likely drive a new set of more qualified traffic to your site.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

• Don’t even think of having a blog without activating the Akismet spam plug-in. It catches the vast majority of comment spam.
• Customizable permalinks allow you to share static links which will not change.
• WP-Cache–helps speed up your blog by caching

Karl Ribas Recaps SMX–Search Marketing Expo

The following post comes from search engine marketing consultant Karl Ribas of All Web Promotion. At the same time that the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions team was busy at Internet Retailer 2007, the elite of the search marketing world gathered at the first Search Marketing Expo conference. Karl provides an excellent recap of his experience in this full-length post. –Paul

As some of you may or may not know, last week in Seattle was the very first ever Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference… a conference for the experienced and more advanced search engine marketer. Unlike other search marketing conferences that you may be familiar with, SMX is all about providing an atmosphere where sessions, exhibits, and after-conference networking events start and remain at an advanced level. In other words… the basics of SEO and PPC are thrown right out the window.

I was fortunate enough to have attended this conference, and so as a Yahoo! Store developer, I was asked to step in and share some of the sights and sounds of my experience. With this post, I am hoping to provide readers with a quick run-down of the conference itself, as well as some of the many tips and strategies (those that will be most beneficial in your marketing and development efforts) that were shared.

SMX Advanced kicked off strong on Monday morning with a Q&A session with the ever-so-popular Google engineer Matt Cutts. Members of the audience were able to pose search related questions directly at Matt, and he of course would attempt to answer them. I was actually impressed by this session. Going in, I thought Matt would be pleading the 5th on almost half of everything that was asked, but he didn’t. He did a tremendous job of addressing near every question.

The conference proceeded on with a 2-track schedule where attendees could choose to follow a track focused on organic SEO, or one on paid search advertising (Pay Per Click). Personally speaking, I was quite happy with only having two tracks to decide between. I’ve been to a couple of conferences in the past where the schedule had as many as four or more tracks going at one time… which makes it very difficult for attendees with interest in multiple areas to be able to catch all that they’d like to.

SMX Advanced ended on Tuesday late-afternoon with the “Give It Up” session that featured an all-star panel of search marketing professionals. During this session, speakers (including Matt Cutts) provided the audience with some of their better industry tips and tricks. Unfortunately, due to an embargo that was formed just before the session got underway (it was the only way the panel would share their goods) we, the members of the audience, are not able to share with you any of the details presented during that session. Sorry guys.

However, as I mentioned above, I do have a few other take-a-ways that should prove to be useful in your marketing efforts:

Duplicate Content Issues (SEO)

Duplicate content was a pretty big concern at SMX, as having non-unique content on your website is quickly becoming a bigger and bigger problem for online merchants. Website’s with duplicate or similar sets of content are often at times filtered out (ex: Google’s supplemental results) or, in some cases, may even be banned entirely from the search engines. And rightfully so.

From a search engine’s point-of-view, their one and only goal is to serve a variety of quality results per query, not multiple versions of the same content blasted across different websites. With that said, my suggestions for merchants (as backed from conversations at SMX), is to either write or hire a copywriter to write brand new, keyword-focused copy for each of your pages and products.

One of the bigger problems I see when optimizing a Yahoo! Store is that merchants will “borrow” product descriptions and such from the manufacturer’s website. This is among the worse things you can do for two reasons. One, the manufacturer is the originator of that content and Google, Yahoo!, and other engines are most likely going to rank them over you. Second, every other merchant that resells that product is no doubt “borrowing” the same product descriptions as you are… which in the end provides you with even less of chance to rank high in the search engines. The easiest way to overcome this is to just write your own product descriptions.

Quality Linking (SEO)

Linking is a big part of the search engine optimization process, as I assume most of you understand quite well. Search engines use links to help them understand what a website, more specifically each page within that site, is really about. Therefore it is in your best interest to encourage others to link to you.

However, what most people fail to realize is that it’s not the sheer number of backlinks pointing to your website that merits a boost is search engine rankings, rather it is the number of quality backlinks involved. A website with 1 or 2 quality backlinks can, and most likely will, out-rank a website with 1 or 2 hundred backlinks.

So now the question becomes “what constitutes a quality backlink”? Well, aside from being a relevant source, one thing that was mentioned at SMX was that the page linking to you should have several sources linking to it. This makes perfect sense, right? The stronger the page is that links to your page, the stronger that page will make your page. So the next time you go out and exchange links with a website, request a link on a popular page, such as an article or resource of some kind, rather than a website’s link page… which most likely has no links pointing to it.

Using Day Parting (PPC)

Day parting was also a pretty big topic of discussion at SMX Advanced. Day-Parting, for those of you who don’t know, is a Pay Per Click term which means limiting your PPC campaigns to only a few hours per day. For instance, depending on the target-audience that you’re trying to reach, you may find it worthwhile to have your PPC advertisements run only during morning hours, as opposed to the entire day. And vise versa for other markets and audiences.

The ultimate goal with day-parting is to decrease the amount of wasteful spending (times when clicks lead to little or no conversions) and re-focus that budget on times that are most valuable to you. The common suggestion at SMX was to review over your website’s stats (number of visitors, conversion data, etc.), and find out which hours of the day (or even days of the week) your visitors seem to click and convert most. Now knowing this data, you can test those measures and limit your ad campaigns to only those time periods.

On an extra note: most PPC platforms offer some type of Day Parting program which makes it easier for you to set and monitor.

Using the Keyword Insertion Tool (PPC)

The keyword insertion tool is a small little tool that resides within every major PPC platform (Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter), and its sole function is to automatically implement your individual keywords into your ad copy. For instance, let’s say that you have an ad group with 100 or so keywords in it (quite common really), and let’s also say that you only have one ad running in that same group. Well instead of running just a general ad, the keyword insertion tool will automatically implement your keywords (when searched) into the ad’s title and description.

At SMX, there were quite a few discussions on whether or not using the tool might actually increase one’s quality score. I will say that it probably doesn’t influence your quality score directly; however, because of the nature of the tool, I’m thinking that it creates a much better ad, which in return boosts your quality score.

Elements of Quality Score

Quality score, which is the engine’s secret sauce for ranking a PPC advertisement, was probably the most talked about topic on the paid search track. It seemed like with every session, someone new was sharing their thoughts on what elements they believe make up the quality score algorithm… and you know, some of the theories were way far-out, while others could very well be dead-on. That’s the beauty of this whole thing… there’s no, nor will there be, validation from the engines.

However, some of the more common elements which are believed to affect your quality score are as follows:

1. Click-Through Rate: The number of times your ad was clicked on vs. the number of times it was displayed. Tip: Create compelling ads that attract people’s attention… to the point where it is being clicked on regularly.
2. Keyword Relevance: How well the keywords you’re bidding on reflect the products or services you’re selling. Tip: Use a combination of broad and specific terms that describe your products and services for each adgroup.
3. Landing Page Relevance: How well the page that you’ve specified (via the destination URL) reflects the keywords (products and services) that you’re bidding on. Tip: Send traffic to the appropriate category pages and not just the home page. (Ex: the term “Nike hats” would do better if it sent search users to the “hats” page of your Nike store, rather than the home page).
4. Ad-Text Relevance: How well your ad copy relates to the keywords (products and services) that you’re bidding Tip: Include keywords in your ad’s titles and descriptions.

And that’s that. Overall, I’m going to say that the conference was very successful. SMX provided an atmosphere where veteran search marketers could learn, share ideas, and even interact with others as proficient in the industry as they are. I was very pleased with how the conference was scheduled (location, time of year, times of sessions and breaks, etc.), and I very much enjoyed the smaller, close-knit atmosphere that was emitted.

Karl Ribas
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business