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.
For those of us that have been doing Base feeds since it was only Froogle and were accepted early into the beta, this game has changed a lot. When I first entered the Froogle Beta program, there were a lot of feeds that were just database dumps. Those didn’t do much against what a good feed was doing, and I started optimizing pretty much right away. That would have been 3 - 4 years ago.
Danny Sullivan recently had a post pointing out a change to the product OneBox. Not only are they promoting products, but there is a link for just those results available through Google Checkout. I guess that means if you want maximum exposure, you’ll need to start accepting Google’s payment option.
While doing some research last week, I came across some rather interesting information about base feeds appearing in the OneBox. You can view it here.
Google – Items may appear on Google under the following conditions:
Google Blogoscoped recently posted screen captures of all of the onebox options that are available. No need to repost it, just check it out.
If you’ve submitted a Google Base feed and your product doesn’t show up in the Google OneBox, you’re sunk, right? Not necessarily.
The main thing you want to do if nothing shows up is give Google a helpful hint. This especially works if you have something brand new that they don’t necessarily know is a product yet. It’s comprised of a few simple, yet effective steps.
The quick answer is no. You can’t directly contact me for hire.
The full answer is yes, but you’ll have to go through the firm I’m contracting through.
This is a funny question I get from time to time. Funny because the answer is that doing feed optimization is really a totally separate task and has very little to do with on-site optimization, and much less to do with off-page optimization.
Organic optimization is all about what you put on the page and the off-page factors that influence rankings as well. Feeds don’t necessarily need to have any data from on the page. In fact, you could do a feed for phrases that aren’t anywhere on the product page. Not that Google would like it for long (their quality bots seem to have hit Base just a bit lately, which seems like a good thing), but it is possible.
Not everyone sells products online. I don’t understand why they don’t, but some people just create content. I’m joking of course, but I thought it was worth mentioning that there are other options for appearing in the onebox. In fact, there are quite a few ways that non-product items can show up in OneBox results. There are enough that I doubt if I’ll get them all covered. I’m also looking for some guests to share some insight on optimizing the other results.
As I was chatting online with a friend a few days ago, he asked how he gets multiple feeds set up for the same store. The answer is you don’t, but what he was really wanting to know is how does he target multiple phrases within the same feed. The answer was simple enough that I’m sure he’s still got a bright red hand print on his forehead. I hope he doesn’t bruise easy - his wedding is coming up soon.
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.
