How To Optimize An Ecommerce Product Detail Page

By Joe | Published: March 15, 2010

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Ecommerce, the final frontier! The Internet is growing at an annual rate of over 20%. There are over 1 billion users on the Internet and that number is expected to double in less than 10 years and eCommerce sales are expected to double in less than 7 years.

Today marks the 25th anniversay of the first .com registration. The anniversary coincides with research by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) that found that the internet economy drives more than $1.5 trillion (£990bn) in global annual economic activity. Do you sell your products online? Do you want a piece of that trillion dollar pie?

The key to successful eCommerce starts with the product detail page, optimization, picture file size and presentation and usability. With the rise of social media and Web 2.0 came the social bookmarking, fan pages, add this and the most important of all – user reviews. Below, I have outlined my process for optimizing eCommerce product detail pages. It is simple, yet a time proven tactic that brings solid success everytime I’ve used it.

  • Product Title – Have the product name / service first, then your brand name, Air Jordans | Nike
  • Product Name – Always use hi tags for the product name
  • Product Description – Whenever you can, always try to standardize the description with at least the product / service name and category name. The more detailed information you can provide, instructions, how to’s, the higher the conversion rate from viewers to buyers.
  • Product Image – Always name the image with the full product name. Never resize the image using html code, resize it with your editing software and repost. Always include image size in the html and make good use of alt tags. Use a picture size that serves the product well, 250px by 250px is a good size if only using one. Best practice is the more pictures the better, but utilize smaller sized images on the product page.
  • Product Image Detail – Always make the product image clickable opening a larger image.
    Amazon and ebay suggest no smaller than 1000px for the detail image.
  • Store your images on a cookieless subdomain or content delivery network for faster loading and parallel downloads.
  • Bread Crumb Nav – Include a Bread Crumb Nav on all product pages showing ever level to the product.
  • Social Bookmarking – Always include social bookmarking and promoting buttons or an add this bar to enable users to promote and bookmark your products.
  • RSS Feed – give users the opportunity to subscribe to your product rss feed.
  • Site Navigation – Ensure site navigation is clear, concise and consistent.
  • FAQ or Help pages – Ensure the process to get assistance or access the FAQ is simple and obvious on every page.
  • Policies and Returns – Ensure all policies and return procedures are clear, concise and fair.
  • Price / Value – Carefully consider your pricing v.s. the competition. If you cannot compete on the price, ensure that you offer superior service, detail pages and easily accessible shipping options.
  • User Product Reviews – Positive reviews are probably the single biggest call to action for any product. Todays’ shopper is 5 times more likely to purchase a product that displays user reviews than products that do not display reviews.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is a full service Design, SEO, Marketing and Ecommerce Consulting company. Would you like to expand your market, increase sales and grow your ROI? Contact Advantage Ecommerce Solutions for a free site analysis and review to help take you to your next level of success.

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Using Keywords – Important SEO HTML Basics

By Joe | Published: February 21, 2010

A graphical despiction of a very simple xhtml ...

Year in and year out we see adjustments in search engine requirements and new scripting techniques. The later part of 2009 brought many quiet changes in SEO and some major announcements as well. Being good at something starts with being ‘Brilliant At The Basics”. HTML and how a page is coded should follow some basic standard guidelines to ensure search engine readiness and optimization. Most if not all of these should be rock solid before a site is launched. They seem simple but without them, you face search engine uncertainty. Google announced earlier in 2009 that it no longer reads the meta keywords. Don’t write them off though, they are now more important than ever.

Follow these basic SEO coding standards and utilize your keywords to ensure proper search engine placement.

Title Tag – No more than 70 characters

Recommended Title Tag Syntax Keyword < Category | Website Title

Meta Description - No more than 155 characters

Common Canonical Homepage Issue -
Great – http://www.mysite.com/
Unacceptable – http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com/
http://www.mysite.com/index.html
http://mysite.com/index.html

To condense the four default homepages into one homepage, use 301 redirects to correct for erroneous incoming links and make all internal links point to your domain using the syntax ‘http://www.mysite.com/’. Always include trailing “/” on folders.

H1,H2,H3 -
<h1>Most Important</h1>
<h2>Second Most Important</h2>
<h3>Third Most Important</h3>

Bold, Strong – <b>Keyword</b>

Image – <img src=”keyword.jpg” alt=””keyword”/>

Hyperlink – <a linkindex=”334″ href=”http://www.mysite.com/webpage.html” title=””keyword””>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Hyperlink – <a linkindex=”335″ href=”http://www.mysite.com/webpage.html” title=””keyword”>(No Followed) rel=”nofollow”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Page File Size- No more than 150 kilobytes (Before Images, and other Attachments)

Amount of links – No more than 100 unique links per page

As you can see, keywords are still very important. Its best to use what would be your meta keywords for each page as your outline or frame of reference from which to write. I try to keep a list of my targeted keywords on my desk as I write pages and posts. then as you layout the coding for your page, your keywords will remain consistent. So while Google may not read your meta keywords, blatantly ignoring the inherent advantages may be a fatal mistake. Did I miss anything obvious?

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How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign

By Joe | Published: January 13, 2010

We are often asked ‘how do I calculate Return on Investment(ROI) on a Pay Per Click(PPC) campaign?’ Or ‘how do I calculate whether I should invest in a PPC campaign or services?’

Advertising for McDonald's on the Via di Propa...

Assuming you know some statistics about your site, I will explain using the following example:

Lets say your budget affords you to be able to allocate $2000. per month to Pay Per Click advertising. After bidding, your average cost per click is 35 cents. Assume you generated enough clicks to use your entire budget. $2000 divided by 35 cents is 5714 clicks to your site.

Historically 5% of your site visitors converts to a sales lead (sale, lead generation, goal attainment, etc..). 5% of 5714 is 286 sales leads generated. You also know from your own historical data that your average sale is $72.00. 286 sales at $32.00 each is $9152.00 in sales generated by your PPC campaign that month, minus the $2000. initial investment and you have a Return On Investment of $7152. for the month.

In general, most PPC Services will give you an even higher ROI because we focus on your campaign while you do what you need to do – run your business. Lets say that instead of a 5% conversion rate, the PPC Service generates 8.5% conversion. Starting with the same 5714 clicks, 8.5% is 486 conversions @ $32.00 avg sale equalling $15552 in PPC sales for the month or a ROI of $13552. That is an additional $6400. by using the PPC Service.

There are plenty of companies out there that will try to charge you that kind of money for this service, but reputable ones do not on that size of an initial budget.

To request a FREE website consultation & analysis, contact AES. Be sure to ask about our January Blog Specials.

Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.

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Elements of Successful Pay Per Click Advertising

By Joe | Published: January 13, 2010

Pay Per Click advertising is a Search Engine Marketing Strategy that requires that you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad taking them to your site. The fee is the amount that you pre-bid on how much you are willing to pay per click based on a selected keyword or keyword string vs. the other bidders. Your bid affects placement of your ad in relation to the other bids. You only pay each time someone actually clicks the ad and visits your site.

Paying people to hold signs is one of the olde...

Optimally, the ultimate goal with any PPC campaign is conversions. Conversions are the amount of click-throughs that are converted into your goal, normally making a sale or receiving a lead etc…. Since 80% of all searches online are done on search engines, the more exposure that you receive on search engines, both naturally and paid, the more traffic you should receive. Search engine placement naturally for any given term where you want the listing to appear can both take a lot of your efforts and take a long time to achieve. PPC cuts the time to time invested setting it up and monitoring the bids. Hence, producing traffic and conversions much faster.

The key objectives of any PPC campaign are to maximize impressions, clicks and conversions once they are on your site while minimizing cost per conversion.

Four ‘Best Practices’ to enhance to any PPC campaigns success are:

Keyword Research and Targeting – prior to launching any campaign you must research your keywords and phrases. It is also to your advantage to analyze what keywords your competition is targeting. Target the ‘long-tail’ phrases. For example, bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard’ is going to be both expensive and very competitive. The person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard’ may or may not be just beginning their search. Bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ will cost less, have less competitors bidding on the same phrase and the person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ has most likely already narrowed down their search and be closer if not at the final decision stage of their searching.

Creative Ad Copy – research PPC ad copy strategy. There are plenty of tools available like Keyword Spy, Link Diagnosis, Wordtraker and others that will help you analyze the current ads including performance stats. From this information, you should be able to formulate a reasonably successful, creative Ad.

Bid Management – If you cannot manage your bids daily, most people cannot, hire a service like ours or if necessary, use a 3rd party bid management tool. The 3rd party tool is much better than not monitoring it at all, but using a service usually more than pays for itself just in bid savings. Why pay 75 cents for even 1 click when the next highest bidder just dropped his bid to 25 cents?

Tracking, Reporting and ROI Analysis – Without feedback, you cannot improve. The amount of data that can be retrieved and analyzed from a PPC campaign can be mountainous. Look specifically a keyword performance, specific Ad copy performance, conversion rate and of course, ROI.

In conclusion, the money that you spend mounting a PPC campaign and specifically utilizing a PPC service such as the service offered by AES through our site will far out weigh the loss in sales that you are experiencing and your competitors are reaping by not having a PPC campaign and letting then reap the rewards.

Look for our next post titled ‘How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign’. Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.

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