One of the simple changes you can make to your feed is the product name, which is similar to a title tag on a website. It ends up being the hypertext people click on, so it can affect clickthrough rates just like good ad titles for PPC or good page titles and snippets for organic results. But what exactly makes for a good title?
Well, just like PPC and Organics, your results may vary. However, what I’ve found to work well is a combination of things.
I’ve been sort of wondering this for a while, but at SES I heard a response from a Google rep in a session that made a lot of sense.
Since we know that onebox refers to the fact that there is just one search box, Universal is technically onebox results. He said to think of Universal as “Onebox Version 2″. Universal, which has a lot of people really freaked out, is just an evolution of the onebox results that we’ve been seeing for years and really isn’t something to fear, but rather something to learn, understand, love and dominate. Don’t look at it as something getting in the way of the organic results… think of it as opportunities to do something different for once to end up on the same first page of search results.
I’m not usually one to try to predict exactly what’s coming down the road. So I’ll use the concept that Danny Sullivan has shared many times at SES and online.
Danny says that one day - probably before too long - Google is going to flip a switch. At this point, for searches that they have a certain level of confidence that the searcher is wanting to buy a product they will just show Google Base results. So what exactly does that mean for those of us already doing OneBox optimization?
If you’ve launched a new site lately that’s in a competitive industry, you probably know all about Google’s sandbox. Sure, there are ways around it. I will admit that they’ve been documented well enough that it isn’t a problem for an SEO firm that takes the time to do things right. But what about those of you starting a retail site for the first time, or even starting one in a totally unrelated field and you don’t want to jump through all the hoops?
Brian Mark is a forum regular around the web and a speaker at Search Engine Strategies. He has worked at ToolBarn.com since 1999, taking the online retailer of power tools from a few orders per week to an Internet Retailer Top 500 company.
