If you want a challenge, try writing e-commerce product descriptions. Within a typical 60 to 70 words, you must concisely convey the benefits and selling points of your product while including search engine keyphrases that engage your target audience… all while working within the constraints of your content management system (CMS).

How do the pros do it?

We understand that balance and organization are vital.

Using the following simple, seven-step process will help you quickly master the art of e-commerce copywriting. Once you do, you will then be able to generate enticing copy that drives sales and boosts search engine positioning.

1. Get Familiar with the Target Audience
Amazingly, most people completely ignore their target customer when writing product descriptions. However, the site visitor is the key to shaping copy; the tone it takes and which angle is used to communicate the benefits.

For example, if your target audience consists of gourmet chocolate lovers, you will want to focus on the distinctiveness of your products’ flavors, the quality of the ingredients or perhaps the luxurious texture. But what if your target audience consists of — in part or in whole — those seeking gluten-free treats?

Added ingredients in gourmet chocolates may cause problems for those with celiac disease. These consumers are regularly forced to stick with ordinary, plain chocolate candies due to their condition. By doing a little research, you will find that gluten-free items are some of the most sought-after, up-and-coming grocery products. You will want to make certain this segment of your gourmet site visitors understands that you have products that meet their dietary needs.

Knowing your audience as a whole and understanding each segment within that audience is imperative to creating e-commerce copy that hits the mark every time.

2. List the Biggest Benefits
The steps in this process are progressive. So, while keeping your target audience and its needs in mind, make a list of the benefits that are most important to your customers. You may want to include various segments in your list.

Continuing with the example above, let’s create a mini-list for a boxed collection of international chocolates.

Gourmet Chocolate Lovers — Distinctive ingredients imported from across the globe.

Health-Conscious — Organic ingredients, premium dark chocolate, high-quality nuts.

Gift-Givers — Attractive, boutique-style gift boxes wrapped in a silk bow. Gift card included at no additional cost. A style(s) appropriate for both personal and business gifting.

3. Predict the Future
Good copywriters look past the buying experience toward the future. After the customer purchases this product, how will his or her life be different or better? What will be the specific end result of a purchase?

In the case of gourmet chocolates, the end result for those purchasing for themselves might be breathing a sigh of satisfaction as these divine confections melt in their mouths. For gift-givers, the end result could be a positive impression on the recipients (whether business or personal) with a truly distinctive collection unlike any they have ever received.

Whatever the end result, it is important to give your site visitors a glimpse into the future so they can see how purchasing from your company will improve their lives.

4. Know the Limits of Your CMS
Content management systems (CMS) can be frustrating. Before you set out to write product copy 150 words long with a catchy headline, you will want to verify what can and cannot be accomplished in your system. Some have limited room in the copy field. Others force the headline by pulling information from the product specifications. For example, the headline on each product page might be automatically fed from the title of the product.

Knowing what obstacles and limitations must be overcome will make the process of writing copy much easier. A few common areas to check include:

• Maximum word or character count in the product copy field

• Additional fields below the fold (i.e. if you run out of space in the product copy field, you can add a link for ‘more information’ that drops the reader to a space further down the page)

• Forced information (headlines that are automatically inserted, product copy automatically fed to category pages, etc.)

5. Incorporate Search Engine Keyphrases
Depending on your site design and your CMS, product descriptions could conceivably be hundreds of words long. However, you are most likely looking at around 60 – 80 words. That doesn’t leave much room to incorporate keyphrases.

While longer Web pages benefit from the use of multiple search terms, I recommend sticking to one keyphrase for short product descriptions. Start with the framework of your page including the title tag, description meta tag, file name, page name in the navigational structure, breadcrumb trail, forced page headline and other elements. Then move on to the content. Use search phrases in:

• Headlines — If your headline is not forced by your CMS, make a point to include your keyphrase; provided it doesn’t detract from the message. It is usually very simple to incorporate a keyphrase into a headline, but — if for some reason it just doesn’t flow — leave it out.

• Product Image Captions — Too many e-commerce sites simply shove “Product #12345” below graphics. Instead, underneath the hero shot of your product enter a short, keyword-rich sentence that briefly describes the item. This assists your visitors with learning about your product and gives a little nudge to your rankings.

• Product Copy — Even within 60 – 80 words you should be able to comfortably include your best search term at least two or perhaps three times. Read the text out loud. If it sounds redundant, take out one instance of your keyphrase.

6. Write the Copy
It’s time to put all the pieces together. Start by reviewing the previous five steps. We have our target customer base, benefits, end results and keyphrase. Combine everything you have to create a compelling product description that will capture plenty of clicks.

While there are dozens of ways to write copy for any given product, here is one version of sample copy for our gourmet chocolate product. Our keyphrase is [gourmet chocolates].

Tour the World with International Gourmet Chocolates
Do a little culinary globetrotting with our collection of gourmet chocolates. Only 100% pure ingredients from across the globe are used. Organic Hawaiian coconut, Australian macadamia nuts and other exceptional treats blend with the richest dark cocoa from West Africa for distinctive gourmet chocolates that truly indulge the senses. This assortment of 16 truffles is gluten-free, elegantly packaged for personal or business gifting, and wrapped with a silk bow.

7. Tweak, Test & Track
Satisfied? You shouldn’t be. There is always room for improvement. Change a word or two in the headline or alter the focus to one particular segment of your audience. Gradually make small tweaks to your product descriptions and test them against the original version of the copy. Track your results in order to gain the best conversion ratio possible. This is an alltoo- often skipped step that — when done correctly — frequently results in tremendous gains.

Once you understand the components of good product copy, it’s easier than you think to put together descriptions that garner more sales. Keep this simple outline handy and you will quickly gain speed when writing high-converting e-commerce copy.

About the Author: Karon Thackston is author of the forthcoming e-book, Wordtracker Masterclass: Ecommerce Copywritiing, Proven Strategies for Boosting Sales & Search Rankings, available in September, 2010.

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What is Google Caffeine?

Google Caffeine is the name for the new method that Google uses to index web pages. In contrast to Google’s old method, Caffeine can index new web pages faster:

“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

Google changed they way in which they index the web because they want to show new pages more quickly in the search results.

What is the difference between the old system and Google Caffeine?

Google’s previous system updated the search index in batches.

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks.

To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.”

With Google Caffeine, Google’s search index is updated continually:

“With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index.”

That means that new pages will be displayed in Google’s search results sooner if they are relevant to the search query.

What do you have to change on your web pages?

Caffeine is not a ranking algorithm update. It does not change the way Google ranks web pages. Caffeine just means that new pages will be shown much quicker on Google’s result pages.

To get your own website on Google’s first result page, analyze the web pages that currently have top 10 rankings on Google. The pages that now have a top 10 ranking on Google have done everything right to please Google’s latest ranking algorithm.

Analyze the top ranked pages and check how and where they use their keywords. Also check which web pages link to the top ranked pages and how they link to the top ranked pages.

Doing this is a lot of work if you do it manually. For that reason, we developed the Top 10 Optimizer. The Top 10 Optimizer automatically analyzes the web pages that currently have high rankings for your keywords and it compares them to your own website.

You will also get detailed instructions on how to change the content of your web pages and the links to your site so that your site will be listed in Google’s top 10 results.

This changed the game significantly for SEO Specialists like us here at MHS. We now have more information at our disposal to get better rankings without so much guessing. I’m sure though that Google is leaving out an intricate part of the equation, otherwise how could they keep charging us $10,000/yr to attend Google College.

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Some customers might write negative comments about your company in their blogs or some of your competitors might like to damage your reputation by creating fake comments about your site.

What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on Google’s first result page for your company name?

1. Fix the problem
If people write negative reviews about your company, the first thing that you should do is to fix the problem that caused the negative review.

2. It doesn’t hurt to ask
Send the webmaster of the web page with the negative review a polite email and ask for removal of the negative comments. Many webmasters will cooperate if you explain the issue.

3. Give web pages with positive comments a boost
If the webmaster does not want to remove the negative review, find websites that contain positive comments about your site. Link to these pages from your own website to increase the link popularity of these pages. The more links the pages with the positive reviews have, the higher they will be ranking in the search results. If appropriate, bookmark web pages with positive remarks about your website on social bookmark sites such as Digg and Delicious.

4. Ask for testimonials from happy customers
If you receive positive feedback from customers, ask them to write a review on ConsumerReview.com, Epinions.com or similar sites.

5. Add your website to company wiki pages
Websites like AboutUs.org allow you to create an article about your company. If your company is important enough, you might even create an entry in Wikipedia. These Wiki pages will also appear in the search results when someone searches for your company name.

6. Make sure that your own website tops the search results
If your own website comes first for your company name then most people will click on your link and don’t look further. Use MHS to make sure that your own web site has position 1 in the search engine results.

Removing negative comments from the search engine results can take some time. It’s best to avoid negative experiences at the outset by providing high quality products and good customer support.

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For example, if many people use the text “buy blue widgets” to link to your website, then it is very likely that the linked web page will get high rankings for the keyphrase “buy blue widgets” in Google’s search results.

The link text (also called anchor text) is the text that is used in text links. Example:

• <a href=”http://www.example.com”>this is the link text</a>

Unfortunately, not all anchor texts will be used by Google. Check the following things to make sure that the links to your website pass the correct anchor tag:

1. The nofollow attribute

• This is a no-brainer. Links to your website that use the rel=”nofollow” attribute don’t pass the link text to Google. Example:
• <a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>great keyword</a>
• You can use SEO Trade News to find out if the websites that link to you use the nofollow attribute.

2. Invalid characters in the URL

• If an URL contains invalid extra characters then chances are that search engines won’t be able to index the link correctly. Example:
• <a href=”http://www.example.com “>great keyword</a>
• In this example, there’s a space at the end of the URL. Some webmasters found out that anchor text is not passed to Google if the link contains an extra space character.
• Note that most browsers are able to correct this link and they will display the web page correctly. Unfortunately, search engine spiders seem to have more difficulty with malformed links (or they take them as a signal of low quality).

3. The links use 301 redirects

• Google’s Matt Cutts recently confirmed that Google won’t consider all anchor texts that are used in 301 redirected links. Example:
• <a href=”http://www.example.com/page.htm”>great keyword</a>
• The web server redirects “http://www.example.com/page.htm” to “http://www.example.com” with a 301 redirect. In that case, it’s likely that Google won’t use the link text.

4. The first link passes the link text

• If a page links twice to the same page then Google will use the first link text and discard the other link texts. Example:
• <a href=”http://www.example.com”>This</a> is an example. The link text <a href=”http://www.example.com”>great keyword</a> will be ignored by Google.
• The first and the second link go to the same URL. In this example, Google will use the link text of the first link, which is “This”. The link text of the second link will be ignored by Google.
• If the second link points to another page of the linked website, then both link texts will be used by Google:
• <a href=”http://www.example.com/page1.htm”>This</a> is an example. The link text <a href=”http://www.example.com/page2.htm”>great keyword</a> will be ignored by Google.

Links are the most important factor when it comes to getting top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines. Details about how to get links to your website can be found in the SEO Trade News.

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In an online forum, webmaster discussed their experience with Google latest ranking algorithm update that has been given the name Mayday. If your website gets fewer visitors from Google, the update could be the reason for that.

What exactly has happened?
Many webmasters have seen a huge drop in traffic from Google for keyword phrases that are three or more keywords long (so called “long tail keywords”).

Some webmasters have lost 90% of their traffic from Google because they cannot be found anymore for the long keyword phrases.

The ranking drop did not happen to spammers. Among the affected websites was a 13 year old site with a Google PageRank of 7 and 400,000 backlinks.

Why did it happen?
It seems that this is not a penalty but a change in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google might now be able to index longer keyword phrases more accurately. There’s a new Google patent that deals with this topic.

• Identifying phrases requires a lot of computing power and a lot of memory. A webmaster explained it in the discussion:
• “For example, on the assumption that any five words could constitute a phrase, and that a large corpus would have at least 200,000 unique terms, there would be approximately 3.2.times.10.sup.26 possible phrases.
• Clearly more than any existing system could store or otherwise programmatically manipulate.”
• It seems that Google guessed the best pages for long keyword phrases until recently based on other signals and keywords on the indexed pages.
• The new Google patent indicates that Google now has the computing power to index longer keyword phrases on web pages instead of guessing them.

Do you have to change your web pages now?
If you experienced a decline in traffic to your website from Google you might have to change your web pages. For example, if you want to be found for “personal injury lawyer london” then these words should appear in that order on your website.

If you use other variations such as “london lawyer personal injury” then you’ll probably get listings for that variation but not for other word combinations.

If you want to know how to get top 10 rankings on Google for the keywords of your choice, analyze the web page that you want to see in Google’s search results with MHS’s Top 10 Optimizer.

MHS’s Top 10 Optimizer will tell you how to change your web page so that it will get top 10 rankings on Google for the keywords of your choice.

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Depending on how your website’s navigational links are structured, some pages can get higher rankings than others. Here are eight things that you can do to guide search engines to the most important pages of your website:

1. Make the web pages easy to find

Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important is that web page.

2. Link from your own pages to your own pages

The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website. Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page.

3. Use the right keywords in your navigational links

If you want to see a certain page of your website on Google’s first result page for the keyword “blue widgets” then the links that go from other pages of your website to that page should contain the keyword “blue widgets”.

This does not guarantee that the linked web page will be listed for that keyword but it increases the relevancy of the page for the keyword.

4. Use absolute links on your website

Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites.

5. Use the nofollow attribute

Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines.

6. Remove unnecessary links

The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is a single link to another page on your site. Remove unnecessary links from your web pages.

7. Exclude irrelevant and duplicate pages from indexing

Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages the other pages of your website will get more attention.

8. Recover lost pages

Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages on your site. You might want to use our link checker.

Optimizing the links on your own website improves the position of your web pages in search engines. In addition to optimizing the links, you should also optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that Google and other search engines list your website for the right keywords.

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Allagash Guide Service

Andralyss Valley Photography

Bill Phinney Site Planning & Landscape Design

Bo-Mar Transportation

Brunswick Airpark Corporation

Dodge Oil, Gorham, Maine

Fully Involved LLC

Great Lakes Fulfillment Service

Maine Roofing, Inc.

Mckenzie/Mosley Adjustment Services

Quahog Bay Inn, Harpswell, Maine

Raft Maine Association

Rogers Ace Hardware, Bath, Maine

Simply Elegant Catering

Taurus Plus

Twin Town Homes

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Last week Google’s Matt Cutts gave an interview in which he revealed some things that will help webmasters to better optimize their websites. Here are the most important things that Matt Cutts said in the interview:

1. The more relevant links you have, the more pages of your site will be indexed

• Matt Cutts said that the number of pages that Google indexes from your website is roughly proportional to the PageRank of your website. That means that more pages of your website will be indexed if your website has many inbound links.Google does not have an indexation cap, i.e. they will index all pages of your website if you have enough inbound links. Remember that the PageRank that Google uses in its ranking algorithm is not the PageRank that is displayed in Google’s toolbar.

2. Slow servers can cause problems

• If Google can only crawl two pages at any given time due to a slow server, Google can set some sort of upper bound on how many pages they will fetch from that host server. This can be a problem for websites that are hosted on shared or slow servers.

3. Duplicate content can cause problems

• “Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that?s why it looks like it has less good content.”As mentioned above, Google will index your web pages based on the PageRank of your pages. If you have duplicate content, some pages of your website will be discarded and you’ll waste ranking opportunities.

  Matt Cutts also indicated that if you link from one page to a duplicate page, you can mess up your PageRank. Google also tries to pass the PageRank and other link signals from the duplicate pages to the original page.

  If you use the rel=canonical tag on your web pages then the pages needn’t be exact duplicates but they should be conceptual duplicates of the same product, or things that are closely related.

  “It’s totally fine for a page to link to itself with rel=canonical, and it’s also totally fine, at least with Google, to have rel=canonical on every page on your site.”

  However, Google does not always obey the canonical tag:

  “The crawling and indexing team wants to reserve the ultimate right to determine if the site owner is accidentally shooting themselves in the foot and not listen to the rel=canonical tag.”

4. Affiliate pages don’t get high rankings

• If a website is an affiliate website that is very similar to other pages (only with a different logo, etc.) then this page won’t get high rankings.If Google detects an affiliate link than this link won’t pass any PageRank power.

5. Redirects work but they don’t pass the whole PageRank

• If you change your domain name and redirect old pages with a 301 redirect from your old page to your new page then the link power will be passed to your new domain name but the overall power of the links will decrease. 301 redirects do not pass the full PageRank.

6. Low quality pages can cause problems

• “If there are a large number of pages that we consider low value, then we might not crawl quite as many pages from that site, but that is independent of rel=canonical.”If you have a lot of web pages with thin content then Google might stop crawling your website. Matt Cutts also suggested that it might help to be wordy:

  “You really want to have most of your pages have actual products with lots of text on them.”

7. PageRank sculpting and website navigation

• Google does not want you to sculpt your website for PageRank reasons. The best way to pass link power from one page to other pages is to have a good website navigation.”Site architecture, how you make links and structure appear on a page in a way to get the most people to the products that you want them to see, is really a better way to approach it then trying to do individual sculpting of PageRank on links.”

  “You can distribute that PageRank very carefully between related products, and use related links straight to your product pages rather than into your navigation. I think there are ways to do that without necessarily going towards trying to sculpt PageRank.”

8. You still shouldn’t use JavaScript links for your website navigation

• “For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript.I wouldn’t say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don?t execute JavaScript.

  We do have the ability to execute a large fraction of JavaScript when we need or want to. One thing to bear in mind if you are advertising via JavaScript is that you can use NoFollow on JavaScript links.”

9. Google does not like paid links

• Matt Cutts said they Google doesn’t want advertisements to affect search engine rankings.They might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. Matt Cutts said that Google “does a lot of stuff” to try to detect ads and make sure that they don’t unduly affect search engines.

If you want to get high rankings on Google, you should use search engine optimization methods that lead to lasting results. Don’t try to cheat Google.

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It’s not possible to get top 10 rankings on Google by focusing on a single strategy. Getting listed on Google requires you to work on all elements of your website. Here are the top 5 factors that influence the position of your website in Google’s search results:

Ranking factor 1: website accessibility

It doesn’t make sense to optimize your web pages if search engines cannot access your web pages:

• Your robots.txt file should allow search engines to visit your web pages. If your robots.txt file contains errors then many search engines won’t list your website.
• The HTML code of your web pages should be error-free and your web server should return the correct response code. The contents of your web pages should be readable to search engine spiders. Details can be found here.

Before you start to optimize your web pages, check if search engines can read your web page content. You can do this with a spider simulator. Double-check your robots.txt.

Ranking factor 2: site architecture

Google wants to show relevant websites in the search results. Your website shouldn’t be a collection of random web pages. If you want to get top 10 rankings on Google, the pages of your website should be related.

Your web pages should show Google that your website is relevant to a certain topic. All pages of your website should be linked. If possible, web surfers should reach any page of your website with a maximum of three clicks.

The links and the directory structure of your website should make it easy to search engines to categorize the contents of your website.

Ranking factor 3: keyword

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps. If you choose the wrong keywords, you won’t succeed with your campaign.

• Optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.
• Start with very targeted keyphrases that consists of many words, for example “find inexpensive hotels in brussels“.
• When you have top rankings for these targeted keyphrases, proceed with more general keywords such as “hotels in brussels“.
• When you have top rankings for these keyphrases, you can proceed with very general keywords such as “hotels“.

In general, targeted keywords have a much higher conversion rate than general keywords, i.e. you will get more sales per visitor with “find inexpensive hotels in brussels” than with “hotels“.

Also think about the type of visitor that you attract with a keyword. Are these people interested in information or do they want to buy?

Ranking factor 4: content

Your website won’t get high rankings on Google if it only offers articles and affiliate links that can be found on dozens of other websites.

Separate your website from the rest by creating unique and trustworthy content. Write your own articles about the topic of your website, publish them on your own website and make your website a useful resource.

Ranking factor 5: links from other websites

It is not possible to get high rankings on Google without having links from other websites.

The more links point to your website, the more likely it is that your website gets good positions in Google’s search results. The links to your website should be from trusted websites, not just link building sites.

If a web page that links to you is related to your own website then the effect of that link on the search engine rankings of your website is higher than the effect of an unrelated link.

It also helps if social bookmark websites link to your website, like Digg, Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, Twitter etc…. If many people bookmark your website on social bookmark sites, then this is a sign that your website might deserve high rankings.
A small error in one element can destroy your effects in all other ranking elements. For that reason, it is important to use the right strategy when optimizing your website.

Seem to complex? Have us take the wheel and do your SEO for you. Check our popular SEO Plans!

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The latest version of  WordPress (WordPress.org) – version 2.9 – has just been rolled out to users. WordPress is used by hundreds of MHS users. To find out more about WordPress please our WordPress Web Hosting page.

This release is called “Carmen” and includes a number of notable additions, including the beginnings of a WordPress image editing tool (cropping, scaling, and rotating), simpler video embeds, and batch plugin updating that should save you a bunch of time.

Writing on the official WordPress blog, founder Matt Mullenweg says that this release saw a total of “over 500 tickets, bugs, and enhancements” addressed. The release comes a little more than six months since the last major WordPress release, version 2.8.

With a major snowstorm expect to blanket the east coast this weekend, thank Automattic for giving you something you can do indoors  The release is available for download here. For an in-depth overview of what’s new, you may also want to check out WordPress guru Aaron Brazell’s 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9.

While this update is not critical, it does add greater functionality to your WordPress driven website. Upgrading to WordPress 2.9 is optional to MHS WP Users.

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