If your store is underperforming, check to see if any of these common issues might be tripping you up: Dynamic site pitfalls Many online stores are large, dynamic websites and are susceptible to a specific set of problems. In the case of your store, dynamic site issues can take the form of duplicate content, dynamic URLs with too many parameters, and a lack of unique page titles and meta descriptions. Go back and reread the sidebar titled “Dynamic Site Smarts”, “Month One: Kick It into Gear,” and identify any issues that may be handicapping your site’s visibility in the search engines.

The product merry-go-round Are you constantly changing your products around on your home page? Do you regularly add new editorial content and new promotions? Good for you you’re keeping your home page fresh and encouraging repeat visits. But you also may be making your site vulnerable to shifts in rankings as your favorite keywords come and go with the new content. To counteract the effects of ever-changing product descriptions, make sure you’ve got at least one paragraph of permanent keyword-rich text on your home page, and make sure that the permanent navigation on your home page describes your products in keyword-rich, robot-readable text. Tracking multiple domains If the e-commerce component of your website is hosted on a different domain from the rest of your website, be sure to tell your analytics program! You don’t want your reporting to show that users have exited your site when they’ve actually entered your store. If this is happening in your stats, talk to your webmaster to determine how to track properly. It may be a bit of a hassle, but it’s absolutely critical to maintain accurate tracking when your site shuttles customers from one domain to another.

Product pages = landing pages Ideally, every one of your product pages needs to be a landing page. At a minimum, this means that each page should have a search-friendly URL, unique HTML title and meta description tag, and a keyword-rich product description. Write your product pages for the prospective customer who entered directly from the search engines. This may mean describing your product and your business in more detail than you think you need.

Link wisely Let’s say you’re selling 1,000 products in a competitive market. You probably won’t rank well for every one of those products, so why not concentrate your link authority to the products that have the best shot of breaking out of the pack? Five or so “top sellers” links from your home page might give your most promising pages a juicy boost.

Categorize with care Maybe your store divides your products into logical categories like blenders, frying pans, toasters, and so on. But rather than an inventory list of your products, why not create categories around your audience segments? “For Newlyweds,” “For Him,” “Gifts for Foodie Friends,” and so forth. Each of these segments represents keyword-rich categories, and some very targeted messaging, that you can use to your advantage. Be warned, however, that if you display the same product in more than one category, your web development team may need to do some fancy footwork to avoid creating duplicate content pages.

Now: Identify problems that may be holding back your online store.Think through priorities and identify who you’ll need to speak with in your organization to address them.

Spread Too Thin at Butterknife, Inc. Butterknife, Inc. (the company name and identifying details have been changed), is a labor of love for its longtime hobby chef owner.The site, built using out-of-the-box storefront software, offers about 1,800 varieties of artisan knives and kitchen utensils. Each utensil has something special to offer, and product descriptions are detailed and well written.

Despite all it had going for it, this site had almost no traffic coming from search engines, especially Google. Ranks weren’t great, and upwards of 80 percent of the site was in Google’s holding pen for unloved web pages, the Supplemental Index. (This index no longer exists Google combined its primary and supplemental indices in late 2007.We’re almost sorry they did, because the pages that used to be in Supplemental were easy to identify as disadvantaged.)

We think that Butterknife, Inc., had such a large percentage of underachieving pages because the site’s authority was spread too thin.With only a handful of inbound links, the amount of PageRank to go around simply couldn’t support a site with many hundreds of pages.This, combined with the fact that many pages did not have unique HTML page titles,was enough to get the site snubbed by Google.

The best way to handle a spread-too-thin site is described by Google engineer Matt Cutts on his blog:“The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g., editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”We also recommend a sitewide cleanup of duplicated HTML titles and meta descriptions, and a little extra attention to internal link structure strategies.

Butterknife got serious about making positive changes, and after six months its numbers improved: About 40 percent of the supplemental pages were migrated into Google’s standard index, and ranks rose significantly. Now that the company has a handle on page authority, they’ll soon be a cut above their competitors!

Shopping Comparison Engines

Today we’ll work on a more specialized family of search: shopping comparison engines. These search engines are primarily found in two different types: components of major search engines and independent shopping search sites. You’re probably familiar with all of the big independents, which include BizRate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and NexTag. Yahoo!, MSN, and Google all have their own shopping engines as well. In case you’re on a tight budget, take heed:

Google Product Search at www.google.com/products is one very free exception. Each of the major shopping engines requires you to submit a product feed. This feed may take the form of an XML document with your product information, such as product description, SKU, availability, and price. Creating a product feed can be a timeconsuming process, so for your hour-a-day plan, we recommend starting with a short list just 5 or 10 of your top sellers.

Shopping feeds have mandatory fields and optional fields. Just like anything else in SEO, the more time you spend optimizing your data feed, the better you’ll look compared to your competitors.

Data feed optimization, which is the practice of optimizing and managing data feeds to get the best possible exposure in search results, is a natural complement to SEO. You can read more about it here: searchengineland.com/070328-150116.php. If you don’t have the time for full-fledged data feed optimization (if you’re a glutton for acronyms, you can call it DFO), consider paying a few bucks a month to a service like SingleFeed (www.singlefeed.com) that will optimize and submit your feed for you.

Not sure whether shopping search is worth the bother? Here are some indicators that you may have success selling through a shopping comparison engine:

• Your prices are competitive. Many searchers use these sites primarily as price comparison engines. If you’ve got an appealing price (and this includes attractive shipping and handling costs), you might just get those customer click-throughs.

• You have attractive promotions that help your business stand out from the throng. Many shopping comparison engines allow you to enter messages such as “Free Returns!” along with your product information. Use this opportunity to tell the world why your store is better.

• Your website is attractive and professional. You’re likely to be shown in the same results set as big-name competitors. If most people using shopping comparison engines have never heard of you, you will stand up to your competitors better if your site has a designer’s touch and an air of credibility to it.

• Your product pages load quickly, and your shopping cart system works flawlessly. This may seem obvious, but you’re paying for clicks even if shoppers give up on your slow-loading page or abandon your quirky cart.

• You have time to optimize your feed or money to pay someone else to do it for you.

One Cheeky Yahoo! Store

We spoke with Dexter Chow, co-owner with his wife Anna of Cheeky Monkey Toys in Menlo Park, California, about their experiences running a website companion to a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Their goals for the website, cheekymonkeytoys.com, are twofold: first, to direct visitors to their brick-and-mortar store with hours and location information, and second, to sell products directly online.

With the heavy demands of running the shop on a daily basis, Dexter simply doesn’t have time to learn new web development technologies or search marketing strategies:“If there is a choice in where to spend time, the B&M side gets it.”That’s why he and Anna chose to use a Yahoo! Store for their website.The Yahoo! Store covers the HTML basics with a built-in editor that allows Dexter to easily maintain the store’s product information online, includes e-commerce tools such as order processing, and perhaps even more important Cheeky Monkey listings are automatically integrated into Yahoo! Shopping results.

Cheeky Monkey does well on Yahoo! Shopping searches “since we’re hosted by Yahoo! and get indexed by them and pay money for Yahoo!’s searching indexing.” Many small businesses find the ease-of-use and search integration is worth the added cost of a Yahoo! Store.We think this can be a great choice if it suits your needs. But you don’t have to stop there! Content on your Yahoo! Store site (and eBay stores, too) can also be integrated with Google Product Search listings. (For more information on optimizing your Yahoo! Store, read Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies by Rob Snell [Wiley, 2006].)

You already know that shoppers may leave your site and come back much later to make a purchase. You want to know if these buyers were originally paid shopping engine visitors, so do everything in your power to keep cookies tracking them as long as possible.