eCommerce and Shopping Search Engines

By Gord Collins
Posted Friday, September 17, 2004

Froogle is a grandchild of the eCommerce revolution. It is one of many shopping search engines specifically designed to serve the growing consumer product market and will no doubt make an appearance in the B2B marketplace at some point. Search engine optimization practitioners still don't know what to make of Froogle and its eCommerce potential, yet they're at least beginning to get their product feeds into Froogle.

Froogle Search Engine

Froogle is an excellent eCommerce resource for consumers and web publishers, providing quick access to specific products, pricing and related product information. Froogle is an important asset to e-commerce sites who desire to achieve wide search engine visibility and direct sales opportunities.

Let's take a closer look at this revolution in the making.

Search Engine Optimization for Froogle?

From the Froogle Web site; "Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online." To be in Froogle's search directory or search engine results, you must sell your products online. Your sales pages may be picked up as they appear when Googlebot visits your Web site or you can send a "feed" to Google to identify your products and sales pages.

Your loss leaders can generate cross and up-sell opportunities, so it makes sense to optimize for Froogle. Estimates of Froogle usage are from 10 to 20% of Google users. That is a lot of shoppers.

Optimization of Product Pages

Yes, search engine optimization of your product pages can be beneficial to your rankings. Optimization is similar to what you would do for Google, however in this instance your optimizing the project page content and how it links. This is very high level optimization and best left for a professional search engine optimization pro who knows how to wire together this complicated matrix.

Part of the optimization matrix is using the price factor to your advantage. So there's more to Froogle optimization than page content and links. Since price is a key factor in how pages are indexed and how consumers seek products, you'll have to know how to use your loss leader pages.

The key information consumers seek is unfortunately, price. However, products that have unique value and attributes that are important to buyers, are resistant to price-based marketing. Since price is a key criteria in the Froogle search page, you can use price ranges to your advantage. Get your loss leaders in and present value added offers on whatever page visitors are landing on.

Price-based competition is something most marketing companies seek to avoid and Froogle appears to intensify consumers ability to enforce lowest possible prices. As a business owner, you want to avoid commoditization of your products yet Froogle will make price-based shopping a reality. It's how you deal with it that will determine your eCommerce success.

If your businesses future depends on retail eCommerce sales, Froogle will have an impact on whether your products achieve visibility and therefore get purchased. It makes sense to get a jump on your competitors and get to know this new "sales portal."

Froogle organizes its database according to fields whose content ranges from product type to price to URL. When you provide all this information in your feed text file, this search engine indexes your pages accordingly. You can create your feed file in excel where it is easy to your data fields and organize them optimally.

How are pages or products ranked? Froogle uses the Google Pagerank system with some modifications. Your SEO expert should have a good understanding of the Google algorithm and how to get a high Google Rank as this will allow them to help you get your products well placed in Froogle.This ranking system is still in Beta testing and will no doubt change as they try to perfect results. Froogle is fast and has a huge database from which to draw upon.

Froogle Optimization Tips:

* Do send a request to Froogle to accept your text file feed
* Make sure the first heading and sentence level copy on your page is related to the product on that sales page; in fact make this copy benefit rich sales copy because you only have a few seconds to get the visitor's attention and make the sale.
* Ensure your product picture is right beside your buy button and not in another cell or table.
* Ensure the correct keywords are in the page title and in page links.

Professional Search Engine Optimization

Do you need professional search engine optimization services? Today, old SEO tricks and techniques aren't producing the results they once did. Search engines have progressed. Amateurs and spammers alike resort to link exchanges which the search engines have realized contaminate their indexes. This means SEO must be done differently. The task is without a doubt more difficult so you must consider putting the right amount of resources to get the job done. Search engine optimization fees are a fraction of the revenue they can produce so consider carefully where you're placing your online marketing investment.

About the Author
Gord Collins
SEO Specialist
Bay Street SEO
(http://www.bayst-search-engine-optimization.com)