Optimizing for Google Onebox

How do I target many phrases for onebox?

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.

To get to the point, every product doesn’t have to be optimized for every phrase. Each product should try to hit a different target phrase in the onebox. The reason I try to include each variation as much as possible is for those that do search on froogle.google.com. That’s also why I want the descriptions to read for humans - in case the description I wrote gets picked for the product feature page. I’d rather not have people pull that up and see a list of keywords and the text “Description from ToolBarn.com”. That’d be bad in my mind.

So how do I optimize a product for a phrase? Well, quite simply, use that phrase in the name, description, and anywhere else it fits. If I can work it into the URL, image name/path, categories, and anywhere else that it’s allowed. There’s no point in doing things halfway. You can always back down if there’s a problem (you’ve got to really push hard to get that far with Base), but for most situations it’s acceptable to use the main keywords being targeted everywhere.

I’ll continue to have some optimization tips down the road, but this should give you some ideas to get started. Just treat it sort of like old-school SEO - use your phrase everywhere - and you’re going to beat most of the competing sites.

January 8th, 2007 Posted by Brian Mark | Strategies | 2 comments