The importance of search engine optimization cannot be stressed enough. High rankings on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and the others ranks amongst your top priorities when putting yourself or your business online. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is exactly how you do this.
The first thing you need to know about search engine optimization is what search engines are exactly and how they work. Frankly, I have no idea. From what Ive heard and from what Ive observed, Google and its inner workings rank up there with the greatest inventions of all time. It might even possibly be a greater invention than the entire universe.
Kidding. Just seeing if youre with me.
All we really need to know is that search engines have a little spider, or bot (short for robot) that goes out nightly or daily or whenever and scans sites on the internet. In the case of Google its Googlebot, while Yahoo!s robot is called Slurp! and MSN uses MSNbot.
These little bots go to your site and read it in much the same way as a human does, left to right, top to bottom. What these robots find they bring back to the mothership, the search engine database. If Googlebot finds your site about kittens, it will report the site, its location (URL), its contents, etc. to Googles database where it is stored. When someone then does a search through Google for kittens, Google looks to its own database for search results. This is what makes search engines so fast. All the searches you do call upon data already in the search engines database, not from a brand new search of the entire internet.
There is something else to mention as well. Search engine bots will search your site whenever they darn well feel like it. You can go to Google and tell it to search your site by telling it manually that you exist, giving it your URL, etc. That doesnt mean Google will go check it out right that instant or even that night. In fact, sometimes it takes weeks or months for Googlebot to actually go and sniff out your site. And when it does all it means is that you are now in Googles database which is HUGE. You may not even show up in Googles listings for a while.
Thats where Search Engine Optimization comes in. Search Engine Optimization has two purposes really.
To make the search engine bots happy by providing them relevant information,
To make the search engine bots happy enough to place you high up on search rankings.
See, Google and Yahoo! and all the search engines make money on relevant searches. If every time someone searches for kites Google comes up with a bunch of pages on iguanas, nobody is going to use Google anymore as the results just arent accurate. This explains a couple things: what the bots are looking for when they sniff your site (good and relevant content), and why search engines will penalize you, sometimes for life, if you try to fool them.
Well get to all this in the next few pages, but suffice it to say now that the bots are looking for tasty subject matter, good writing, relevant content, etc. If you want to know how to really make Googlebot happy, give it what youd give any human visitor to your site. Think of Googlebot as your best friend and design with him in mind.
C. Pabst is an author, entrepreneur and the owner of . He is also the creator of the revolutionary money-making system Internet Triple Header, based on simple, applicable and practical concepts, not positive thinking or luck.
This is a topic I havent seen much information about online. I was shocked, because in the Internet world of 2005, forum posts and articles usually come up for any kind of optimization topic. But it could be that those who are Amazon marketplace merchants are a more select group of internet marketers... and that no one wants to share any of the secrets theyve learned, if theyve learned any.
Well Im going to spill the beans, because thats my policy as far as the web goes- what would an info-site be without info-beans
So here are the basic points about optimizing your Amazon marketplace feed to increase your chances of appearing, or appearing high in search results:
1. The most important elements to optimize are the product title and the 5 search-term fields (search-terms1, search-terms2...)
2. Your product name, if its already SEOd on your website and elsewhere, should already be several words long. For example, instead of calling it the Mavica CD1000, you should be calling it the Sony Mavica CD1000 Digital Camera. Some might consider it excessive to add digital camera to the end- I dont have any data either way. My experience has been that 4-5 word product names are ok with the search engines.
3. The search-terms fields can only have one word in them, so in this case, a keyword really is just one word. Its up to you whether youd repeat a word thats already in your title, but since you only get 5, Id suggest you dont, unless you really cant think of 5 search-terms.
4. To choose keywords for the search term fields: First look at the products name, brand, model, features, and benefits, running those through the overture search suggestion tool and adwords keyword tool, or some other metatool, if you have one.
5. Which keywords to choose The most popular words The most unique words If you really want to get competitive, see how many competitors you have in the search results for each of these, and occupy a sparsely populated niche. If you want to know the most popular words in your keyword list, run over to Mark Horrels Keyword Density Analyzer (I think its inaccurately named but an awesome tool- Id call it a Word Frequency Analyzer), and paste your whole list in there, dont show stop words, do it by frequency. Now you have a numerical portrait of the most common and most unique words.
6. Stemming: According to Technical Support at SellerCentral (in an email to me 11/16/2005), Amazons search appliance will take care of plurals and singulars- meaning if you put moisture you dont have to put moisturizes- but does not get any more sophisticated than that- so if you want moisturizing youll have to use another field for that word.
7. Now experiment- Id suggest using a combination of general and unique words.
8. To fine tune, search Amazon on the keywords youve targeted, as well as your product names, and see how visible you are.
9. Experiment, tweak, and win!
Brian B. Carter, MS is an internet marketing consultant in San Diego, California. His broad background and diverse talents uniquely qualify him to provide and teach solutions that yield results online.