From everything I have heard and read about optimizing your web pages for the search engines it seems to involve a bit of "black magic", and by no means do I profess to be an expert in these matters. So to learn more about how our product profile pages perform in the search engines I did a quick off-the-shelve comparison of two different product profile pages in our website. Both profiles were added in October of 2008 and are linked to the same vendor.
In the first example the product profile contains very little content. It's also interesting to note the vendor entered their trade name as the product name (more about this later). This particular page has generated 75 page views and 0 inquiries/sample orders to date:
In the second example the product profile page has been filled out with a lot of content, including pictures, applications and further details about the product. This particular page has generated 1183 page views and 9 inquiries/sample orders to date:
I admit I used an extreme example to make a point here. The better conversion is based on a simple fact that we do know to be true about search engines. They are setup to "crawl" for visible content like the keywords and phrases included throughout Example #2. It is one of the main reasons why this page has a more likely chance of appearing in the first 10 search results of a search engine like Google versus another similar page with far less content.
I also wanted to refer back to the other observation I made in Example 1 in regard to the vendor entering the trade name in the product name field of the profile. When it comes to entering a name for a product profile page on Inventables.com many vendors naturally tend to think in terms of their product's trade name, however, most people searching for something the vendor's product is a potential solution for don't. In combination with meaningful content, describing your product from the point of view of what people might be searching for on the Internet will also significantly improve the performance of a given product profile page.
In the first example the product profile contains very little content. It's also interesting to note the vendor entered their trade name as the product name (more about this later). This particular page has generated 75 page views and 0 inquiries/sample orders to date:
In the second example the product profile page has been filled out with a lot of content, including pictures, applications and further details about the product. This particular page has generated 1183 page views and 9 inquiries/sample orders to date:
I admit I used an extreme example to make a point here. The better conversion is based on a simple fact that we do know to be true about search engines. They are setup to "crawl" for visible content like the keywords and phrases included throughout Example #2. It is one of the main reasons why this page has a more likely chance of appearing in the first 10 search results of a search engine like Google versus another similar page with far less content.
I also wanted to refer back to the other observation I made in Example 1 in regard to the vendor entering the trade name in the product name field of the profile. When it comes to entering a name for a product profile page on Inventables.com many vendors naturally tend to think in terms of their product's trade name, however, most people searching for something the vendor's product is a potential solution for don't. In combination with meaningful content, describing your product from the point of view of what people might be searching for on the Internet will also significantly improve the performance of a given product profile page.
