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As a developer or project manager, making your information work for you is extremely important when trying to get a project done with less headache and information traffic jams. You want to make sure all of your bases are covered when receiving requests for work, with any project - not just a website or SEO related project.

For example, if you receive a bulleted list of 200 items to be completed on your client's website you may find yourself in a situation that is less than productive.  To help avoid headache, you'll want to make sure each instruction you receive has the following key elements. Where, what, when and why:

Where

It's usually best to have your clients group their instructions based on where the updates should happen on the site. Grouping by website page or URL will generally work well from a developerʼs point of view. You could also set a group of tasks that will apply to a range of pages, such as site-wide or within a category of a site.

If the requested work or updates are not separated by where the work will be done, a developer can end up spending extra time flipping back and forth between pages as they go down a list of items to complete, which could possibly run into other issues such as conflicting instructions (ugh), and repeat work.

What

It's always nice to have explained in detail what the task is.  If the task is described incorrectly or has missing pieces, you can't expect to complete it correctly and are prone to require back and forth for clarification along with the possibility of work that has to be redone.  Try to make sure you inform your client to send all materials (images, documents, etc.) required to complete the task - your changes will be implemented a lot faster this way!

When

Setting a task priority can also help improve efficiency.  If you've got a list of many items but only a half dozen or so are critical then knowing which are most important to the client will allow your team to better engineer a game plan to get what you want done, in the priority you and the client want done.

Why

What is the client's end goal in the tasks assigned? Are they asking to add a flash piece to gain more attention to a page? Sometimes asking your client to specify their intentions can tell help you understand what a better approach might be (making you look really good :) in the process).  As an example, if you're client tells you they want to add flash graphics to a site to create more interactivity... but their real intention behind the anticipated move is to convert more leads you might suggest investing in content creation, a traditional SEO campaign or maybe just some time with an SEO  consultant to figure out what might be a better bang for the buck.

An example task list of revisions:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary:
Small correction changes here and there.

Change 1
Where:
URL: http://www.bestrank.com
Right column, “New to SEO?” box
What:
Change border color to grey.
When:
This is medium priority.
Why:
We want the siteʼs colors to be uniform throughout.

Change 2
Where:
URL: http://www.bestrank.com/office-address
Content column, “Solana Beach Office:”
What:
Update Solana Beach Address to “x”
When:
This is urgent, please complete ASAP.
Why:
Address incorrect.

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In addition to the where, what, when, why... project management tools can also help cut down on communication errors and help improve information organization between clients and a dev team.  Basecamp is a pretty simply yet effective tool for organizing files, messages, comments, users, etc. around the current project at hand.  Some other decent ones we've looked at include Fogbugz, info@hand and activeColab.

So if you're a developer or project manager, do try and request information in a structured format else you may end up burning time and money.

At least once per week I get approached by a potential client who wants us to run a pay for performance search engine optimization (SEO) campaign for their site.  I always entertain the idea and I unusually try to figure out a model that would make sense for both parties. However, most of the time we decline to take these types of deals…even though the potential upside is huge. I know that Best Rank isn't the only company that struggles with how to efficiently formulate a pay for performance SEO model...so, I thought I'd throw the discussion out to the community.

Below is a study of the pros and cons of pay for performance SEO pricing models. This post is meant to be more thought provoking and not necessarily a guideline for why or why not…so, all comments and suggestions are welcome.

Pros for Client:

• The Client’s risk is significantly reduced with a pay for performance model. SEO service is not a very tangible product…it’s hard to predict results and even harder to base a pricing model around those results. So, traditionally, clients are asked to assume a lot of the risk by paying a monthly retainer.  A purely performance based SEO campaign places the majority of the risk squarely on the Company’s shoulders.
• The Client pays for performance!  That’s a pro in and of itself.  They pay whenever some type of predefined action occurs. For example, traffic from an organic search for a targeted word, a sale conversion, a newsletter sign-up, a phone call, etc…  There are different acronyms used for these models, for example: CPA (cost per acquisition/action); CPL (cost per lead); CPC (cost per click/call).
• The Company is highly incentivized to show you results. If a company enters into this type of agreement, then you can bet the farm that they are going to try their hardest to get you results.

Cons for Client:

• The Client is now tied to the Company. This may not sound too bad initially, however, depending on the deal structure, this could be a nightmare later. Imagine signing a performance based contract with a company, and the relationship doesn’t work out for whatever reason…but the company still gets a piece of every sale.  This can make for a very stressful situation; one which must be accounted for in the negotiation phase.  Keep in mind that the Company must be incentivized for offering its services on a performance base, so they will be more likely to want an ongoing piece of the revenue.  Do you really want that company tied to you for the next XX number of years?
• Fraud!!  Many unscrupulous companies will generate fraudulent clicks, calls, form submissions, or whatever in order to get their performance based fee. A company will never admit to doing this…so, it’s on the Client’s shoulders to monitor and track the conversions (or whatever the performance trigger is).

Pros for Company:

• The Client assumes less risk, which means that they aren’t as stressed out and probably aren’t really hounding the Company (versus a retainer based model) to show results, so that takes a lot of pressure off the Company…which is good! 
• There can be significant upside in terms of revenue from a performance based model.  If the deal is structured properly, then the Company can get a large percentage of the overall profits from every sale.  If the campaign does extremely well, then the Company can get much more revenue than they would have in a retainer model.

Cons for Company:

• Tracking!!  Clients may not be able to track conversions correctly, which will lead to bickering over money at the end of each month. This is especially true for service based businesses where it’s difficult to track the source of a lead/sale. Ecommerce is much easier to track.  Clients have also been known to fudge numbers so that they don’t have to pay the performance fee. This is another point that must be addressed in the negotiation stage…how both parties are going to track and monitor the performance triggers.
• The Company assumes the bulk of the risk. The Company must be very confident in its skills and forecasting ability in order to enter into this type of agreement. The Company must allocate labor and marketing dollars in the beginning of the campaign; it can take 3-6 months before a site gets any traction in the search engines, which means the Company is shelling out cash (in the form of labor and direct costs) to get results, with no promise that the results will actually yield conversions.

Cons for Both:

• Traffic vs. conversions. An SEO company’s main focus is to drive relevant traffic to the Client’s site via the search engines.  If the site is not set up for conversion, then all the traffic in the world may not garner any results.  If the Client is not willing to invest in a website upgrade, then all of the Company’s efforts may be futile.  Most companies cannot justify rolling the cost of the website upgrade into the performance based model…it must be compensated for directly since the Client owns the site.
• Privacy issues!!  There has to be a lot of transparency of both companies to properly formulate a pay for performance model. Both companies will need to be more transparent with their accounting, back-end systems, and tracking in order to facilitate a good working relationship.  If either company is nervous about this, then a solid non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is needed.

Other Thoughts

Hybrid pricing models – Direct compensation coupled with a performance based arm is starting to gain some traction in SEO.  Since so much work goes into the initial campaign, SEO companies should be directly compensated for that work. Then the SEO Company can craft a performance based piece for the ongoing campaign.  There are still lots of pros and cons to the performance piece, but at least most of the up front work has been compensated for.

Performance based SEO is still in its infancy...for that matter, SEO is still in its infancy.  Many companies are actively trying to figure out how to accurately structure a performance based SEO model. However, there’s one inherent flaw…all of the predictions in the world are predicated upon the fact that you must get the Client’s site to the first page of major search engines in order to drive the traffic.  There is no accurate model that can predict the exact timing and effort required to get first page results. Thus, there can be no accurate performance based pricing model. 

SEO is complex in nature and it takes a lot of up front work in order to do properly. The benefits of this work are ongoing for the Client’s site. So, until a solid software platform is developed (similar to Enquisite) where SEO companies can accurately map out the revenue they can expect to receive (based on performance), then retainer based models will continue to be the norm.

What do you think? Do you know of good performance based models that are fair for both parties?

I build websites and consult on SEO - it's what I do!  

Often times I use Drupal to build websites and utilize a plugin to Drupal called "Ubercart" to build e-commerce websites... so I've decided to create this ~10 minute video tutorial on Ubercart and the general things you can do with it.  

Some of the items I cover in this Ubercart video are products, taxonomy, lightbox (with products), product classes, shipping and shipping zones, payment options, order management/tracking, coupons and discounts, taxes, stock settings and user roles.

The video isn't meant to be exhaustive in terms of modules and features but rather a basic introduction to those looking into building or having an e-commerce shopping cart built.  So sit back, relax and you'll start to see how powerful Ubercart really is. 

Like it's name, Ubercart is uber - just awesome.  

The real power in Ubercart is in building a community around whatever it is you end up selling.  And a lot of the time a community of people is exactly what drives a great SEO strategy.  Why?  Because a community drives

• user generated content (spider food)
• usability signals (click throughs, analytics feedback) to the engines
• brand evangelism (people doing the marketing for you)
• ...which leads to, well, higher rankings and more search leads

Last night I attended the monthly San Diego Drupal Group meeting, a roughly two hour session targeted at drupal enthusiasts and companies looking to find solutions using drupal :) and must say that I enjoyed the gathering.

It's been a while since my last blog post but for good reason - our web development work load has grown quickly in the last 6 months.  Here at Best Rank, our core competency is SEO, but we also develop web sites and sometimes I feel that we don't often blog about our expertise in that area.

I've moved our dev team into drupal over the last 18 months and have found developing websites from scratch is a snap, meaning we're able to build sites from the ground up using a combination of drupal and custom configurations in a matter of minutes - and then of course building custom modules, themes, views, etc. for special features is more of an efficient process than I ever could have hoped for, using drupal.  For example, with drupal we can build static, simple web pages or dynamic, database driven applications using a single framework and without much effort.  So, to say the least, we're pretty thrilled :)

Back to my drupal group meeting: some of the topics that came up last night were

• geocaching - kind of a fun "you hide this item in a random geo location and pin point it on the web then other people can go and find it" type of game (if you have free time that is)
• the views bulk operations module - a very interesting addition to drupal that lets you edit multiple nodes in place and or perform operations on N number of nodes at once in a view (smell an inbox/email application in the works)
• geocoding - this was my quick, 5 minute speech where I discussed how we solved the bug in the Location drupal module that prevents the zipcode search from working right out of the box.
• a look at the features behind rifftrax.com
• an in-depth look at css and floating for cross browser compatibility
• and a nice presentation on Drush.  Drush looks nice because we can run complex operations such as download the latest drupal core release or activating modules, etc. using simple alias commands right on the command line and instead of going through the s-l-o-w web interface.

I'm going to try and make the monthly drupal group meeting so if you'd like to listen to me talk about drupal or just want to say hi, then see you there!

I just sat through a session here at SMX Advanced titled "SEO Ranking Factors for 2009", which was led by a couple of industry heavyweights: Rand Fishkin (CEO of SEOMoz), Laura Lippay (Director of Technical Marketing at Yahoo), Marty Weintraub (President of aimClear) and moderated by none other than Danny Sullivan.

Rand started off the presentation by showing us some very interesting, yet not too surprising, survey results. SEOMoz sent out a survey to 100 industry experts, 70 of whom responded. The data suggested that not much has changed w/ respect to on-page ranking factors and their correlation to high-ranking websites. These data points are NOT to suggest that these factors alone are the sole cause of good rankings; these data simply show that high ranking sites have a certain correlation to the factors in the survey. Below is a summary of some of the more interesting data points.

• Very high correlation of the targeted keywords appearing in the url string - This was voted as the number one item (of on-page factors) for high ranking sites. It's much better to have keywords in the url than in the text of the page.
• Keywords in the title tag have a high correlation. Also, having the targeted keyword as the first words of the title tag have a high correlation.
• Images w/ alt text have a high correlation to high ranking sites.
• The META Keywords tag has a very low correlation to high ranking sites. This means that most people don't feel this tag is important and is largely ignored by the search engines.
• The number of domains linking to a site is more important than the quantity of links.  It's great to have 10,000 links, but if 9,500 of those are from the same site, then it's nearly pointless and doesn't affect the rankings. It's better to have 500 links all from different domains.
• Subdomains are likely not inheriting all of the ranking factors of the root domain....HOWEVER, there is evidence that subdomains are not completely separated and DO inherit some of the root domain's ranking factors.
• Links will continue to be the most important factor of ranking. But, links will continue to decline in importance in favor of more social channels, social buzz, usage data, and user generated content.

Rand also stated that "Google is out to please its users, not destroy SEOs (and the sites they work on)." As Rand was stating this, Matt Cutts was nodding his head in the affirmative. What does this mean?  Well, it means if you build a site that is relevant and useful to your target audience, that generates a natural following and buzz, then you will be rewarded. Easier said than done, right?? :)

After Rand spoke, we were treated to a very lively, and entertaining presentation by Marty Weintraub. If you've never seen Marty speak, then it's definitely an experience worth my recommendation. Marty talked a lot about how to evaluate which ranking factors ARE really important vs. just taking the advice of others. He discussed ways to test all of your sites by developing spreadsheets of data points. This seemed to be a somewhat cumbersome process, but definitely valuable if you can afford to dedicate the time to it.

Laura Lippay from Yahoo talked last and really harped on the fact that Yahoo is looking for sites that generate social buzz....sites that have content that goes viral are the sites that will be rewarded. She stated that "the more you have of these (social buzz and viral content), the less you'll need of technical seo (on-page factors)". In that same breath she talked about the fact that TECHNICAL SEO ISN'T OPTIONAL NOWADAYS....IT'S MANDATORY FOR ANY SITE THAT WANTS TO RANK WELL!!!!  However, technical SEO alone is not enough...you have to offer a great product and generate natural buzz.

Laura also made an interesting point: "SEO is not a band-aid for a run-of-the-mill product".  I thought this was very insightful...clients come to us all the time looking for SEO to turn their business around, yet they don't have a great product or an innovative idea for us to build upon.  We can build a site that shows their product in a different light, but that requires much more than just your standard SEO campaign...it requires more than the SEO basics.  

Overall this was a really good session and eye-opening in many ways. Please feel free to shoot me any questions.

Hello from SMX Advanced in Seattle. I traveled up here for the 'must-attend' SMX Advanced. I've only been to one session so far, but as expected the content was superb. There's already lots of buzz around here about social media and, of course, Twitter. I'll be posting regular updates through tomorrow evening that will include session specific topics and general thoughts.

If you're up here at SMX Advanced, then please shoot me an email and maybe we can meet in one of the sessions. I'm actually speaking at a session on Wed. the 3rd titled "How Much do I Charge for SEM, Especially Now!: Search Marketing Agency Pricing Models". On the panel with me are Chris Sherman (Moderator), Marty Weintraub (President - aimClear), and Andrew Beckman (President - Location3 Media). It should be a great session..stop by if you have a chance.

Please feel free to shoot me any questions or comments: matt AT bestrank.com.

Google released a number of new features yesterday to make your search experience that much better.  With the recent explosion of Twitter (a micro-blogging platform), much criticism has been addressed regarding the relevancy of Google search results.  Twitter and OneRiot have development advanced real-time search engines to provide you with latest trends which are virtually instant.  For example, if you search for BNP on Twitter, OneRiot, and Google, you get completely different results.  The latest BNP page found on Google was 9 hours ago, while Twitter provides pages that are just seconds old.  How is Google going to keep up with the latest trends and real-time search results that users are becoming accustomed to? This is main concern Google Marissa Mayer addressed at Google’s Searchology event May 12th.

Google's Biggest Concerns

• finding the most recent information
• choosing which type of results you're looking for
• modifying the results by your determined relevancy
• knowing what you’re looking for
• expressing your searches in keywords

Google's New Features

If you haven’t noticed, Google has released a new “search options” feature or as Marissa Mayer calls it the "tool belt" which enables you to sort your results based on videos, forums, and reviews. You can also sort your search results by the time the page was discovered: recent results, past 24 hours, past week, and past year.  This is essential when searching for the latest news on a specific topic.  You can also enable the "image from the page" feature which displays 2 images on the right side of the page title if the page contains images, otherwise it will be removed from the search results.  Another great addition is the "more text" feature which expands the current description to about double the characters.  This allows you to read more about the provided page without visiting it, this feature is similar to the Google Reader RSS feed platform.  Please refer to the video below for a walk-through of Google's new "tool belt."

How will Google's new features impact SEO?

Typically, businesses will try to achieve 1st page rankings with at best #1 rankings on Google.  With the implementation of Google's new features, SEO experts will need to change their strategies as front page ranking won't funnel in 100% of your targeted audience.  SEO campaigns will become more complex with the addition of videos, images, forums, reviews, and time sensitive searches.  Users are given more resources to find the exact information they're looking for.

Instead of solely depending on 1st page rankings as a measurement for success, SEO professionals may move to overall presence across the web including: rss and e-mail subscribers, back links, conversions, registered users, and user participation.  Are you involved in your targeted niche using blogs (Wordpress, Blogger), forums (Sitepoint, Digital point), local business reviews (Yelp, Local), videos (Youtube), pictures (Flickr, Photobucket), and other social media elements (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook).  With the rise of user contributions to overall online experience, for example blogging, anybody can address their opinion or expertise on any given topic.  So the best bet is to always create an unique SEO campaign based on the website's sytle or niche.  Are you developing a SEO campaign for an online shopping cart, strictly services website, magazine, blog, tool, search engine, or new social network? 

The social element will continue to grow as more and more users become involved in social networks.  Expect a huge shift from traditional searches to real-time search feeds.  I'm anxious to see what platforms Google will release next, as Google Squared is being released later this month with many others in the pipeline.

As you know Twitter has taken the web by storm with a traffic rate increase going from roughly 1 million to 20 million unique visitors just in the last year. (Compete.com)

  
Launching in March 2006, this social networking and micro-blogging service enables users to send short 140 character text based posts (tweets) to their followers.  It is popularly used by celebrities, executives, bloggers, and anyone who wants to keep in close touch with their friends.  In recent months, many applications have been released to increase the usability of Twitter's fuctions (and make a few bucks while they're at it).  These apps let you easily group and manage your friends, retweet, reply, e-mail, translate, favorite and search for friends:

Adobe Air Twitter Applications - Windows and Mac

• TweetDeck - Adobe Air 1.5 desktop application that allows you to customize your Twitter experience by categorizing your friends into niche groups: personal, co-workers, health, etc.  It also syncs up with popular Twitter applications: Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now most recently Facebook.

  

• Twhirl – One of the most popular and user friendly Twitter clients to date.  This application also uses Adobe Air and is compatible with both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX platforms.  It integrates with your friendfeed, identi.ca, laconi.ca, and Seesmic accounts and uses Twitter Search and TweetScan for searching tweets.

  

• Snitter – Adobe AIR desktop application that displays your most recent 20 message, replies, and tweets in an easy timeline.

  

• Spaz – Open source twitter application that is pure Javascript, XHTML, jQuery, and CSS.  Customizable themes and URL shortener included for quick tweeting.

  

• Twitterriffic - A clean twitter client that allows you to publish tweets, shows unread tweets, and view twitter profiles. You can easily toggle between public or friend timeline.  This is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and the iPhone or iPod Touch.

  

Standalone Twitter Applications

• TwitBox – Supports multiple twitter accounts, easily view and submit tweets, view replies and direct messages, and delete unwanted tweets.

  

• Twitterlicious – Easily update your Twitter status, check replies and direct messages.

  

• Twiteroo – Update twitter status from you desktop, URL shortening via rurl.org, notifications, toggle friend and public timeline, and much more.

  

• Pwytter - Pwytter is a standalone Twitter client. Available in 14 languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

  

• Teletwitter - Experimental open source client available for download via Google code.

Twitter iPhone Applications

• Tweetie – Easy iPhone twitter application that lets you manage multiple twitter accounts simultaneously.  View your timeline, replies, direct messages and favorites.  Post tweets and direct messages.

  

• Twinkle – A unique iphone application that allows you to discover, connect, and send messages to people nearby. Upload photos and update your Twitter account.

  
   

• Twitterriffic – As mentioned above: “A clean twitter client that allows you to publish tweets, shows unread tweets, and view twitter profiles. You can easily toggle between public or friend timeline.  This is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and the iPhone or iPod Touch.”

  

Web-Based Twitter iPhone Applications

• Twitter – The official application released by Twitter.com.  This iPhone application handles all the same functions: add new friends, recent posts, message friends, and more.

  

• Hahlo – Web based iPhone and iPod Touch twitter application that allows you to easily update your status and check your friends tweets.

  

• Pocket Tweets - Web-based application that allows you to update your Twitter status from anywhere using your iPhone, view friends' twitter status updates , view direct messages, and the public timeline.

  

When it comes to marketing, the only thing that matters to most business owners is ROI.  They want to know that their marketing dollars are producing a profitable return for their company - and rightfully so.  What makes search engine marketing (SEM) unique from many other traditional marketing techniques is that there are several ways to determine a campaigns success in addition to ROI.  At times, these other measurements can actually be better indicators of success than focusing solely on ROI, particularly for a new website, brand, product, etc.

Below are a few ways to track the success of your SEM campaign other than ROI.  Keep in mind that search marketing is a subset of traditional marketing and can be thought of as a long-term investment, and the measurements below may be indicators that your investment is on the right track.  Be patient, and success in the following areas can lead to a positive ROI for your business.
 

• Traffic - This one is pretty self-explanatory.  If you're site is experiencing an increase in traffic, then your SEM campaign is doing something right.  More visitors mean more potential leads and sales.  Having a steady up-swing of visitors to your site will also improve your site's popularity and go a long way in building your presence on the web (this could be huge for a brand new company).

  
   

• Rankings - Having your site consistently rank well in the search engines for terms related to your product, service, industry, etc. is another way to measure SEM success.  Often times, high rankings can translate to higher traffic, which means more eyes on your products.  Ranking well will also help create top-of-mind brand awareness for your business among web users, as they consistently see your website and brand name near the top of the search engine results.  An improvement in long tail rankings, rankings for keywords around 3-5 in length, is also a good indicator for newer sites.

  

• Time On Site - This is a great way to determine if the traffic you are getting is actually looking for what you offer.  A low time on site (and/or a high bounce rate) is a good indication that the people coming to your site are probably not qualified visitors, and will most likely not be purchasing customers.  However, if your visitors are staying on your site for an extended period of time (3-5 minutes are greater), you are attracting the type of people who are interested in your business and are more likely to buy. There are instances where a high bounce rate would be good, say if you run an affiliate based website and want to sent visitors to your affiliates...

  

• Indexed Pages - The number of indexed pages your site has and the ratio of indexed to actual pages is a reflection of your brand's reach on the web and the trust engines place in your site, respectively.  An increase in indexed pages means that your web presence is growing, and shows that search engines view your site as relevant and up to date.  You can think of indexed pages as "tickets" in the search engine "lottery"- the more tickets you have, the more potential traffic you can expect to receive.

  

• Contacts/ Calls - If you're getting calls or emails contacts via your website, you are definitely on the path to SEM success.  More contacts means people are aware of your business, have come to your site, and are interested in making a buying decision.  People contacting you directly is most likely a hot lead that is ready to be closed.
   

In my last post, I discussed Google Base very generally as a Google service on the rise. Please take a look at my last article if you are not familiar with Google Base. Now that we know a little bit about what Google Base is and how it works, we should focus on using the service successfully to increase sales and website conversions. It is one thing to simply add a product to Google Base, but how can we optimize these products to be as successful as possible?

Why should we spend time optimizing products for Google Base?

Let’s start by discussing why we should even bother with using Google Base. First and foremost, let’s look at the placement of Google Onebox Results when compared to organic search results. OneBox results are actually placed above the organic search results. As far as page real estate goes, this is extremely significant in terms of the number of impressions and clicks you will get on your product listing.

It is also important to note that Google Base uses the information from Base listings for more than just Google OneBox results. This data may also be displayed in Google Product Search (previously Froogle), organic search results, Google Maps, Google Image Search and more. That adds up to a variety of exposure your site could potentially receive from a single Google Base listing.

How to Optimize your Data Feeds

Now we will get into some specific guidelines that will help you increase the effectiveness of your product listings and thus increase your product conversion rates.

Do Your Keyword Research: Before filling out any information on your data feed, use Google’s Keyword Tool External to find out what people are searching for. You can then optimize your product title and description accordingly. This is very similar to SEO for title and Meta tags. Limit your title to about 65-70 characters and your description to about 160 or so. Also be sure to include your desired keywords, about two or three of them, in both your title and description.

Automate Your Data Feeds: Schedule to have your data feeds automatically sent to and updated in Google Base. Create an xml or txt data feed on your website and then simply supply Google Base with the location of this file. You can then specify how often (daily, weekly, or monthly) you would like Google to update you product listings based on the information from this file. To create the xml or txt data feed for your products, try using shopping cart add-ons such as this one for Drupal or this for osCommerce.

Product ID: Each product in your data feed will have a unique product id. Be sure to keep this id consistent when updating your data feeds.

Product Type: Google Base uses product taxonomy to categorize your products. Be sure you use the correct categories and are as specific as possible. You can view the taxonomy structure here.

Include Relevant Information: Be sure to provide as much relevant information as possible. Google Base has three categories of product attributes; mandatory, recommended, and optional. Include all of the mandatory and recommended attributes and as many of the optional attributes as possible.

Important Attributes: There are a few product attributes that are very important to include in your listings. The first is tax and shipping information; Google Base will often give better listing placements when these two attributes are clearly defined. The second is a quality picture for the same reason. Do not include a general picture or company logo. Finally, include the Manufacturer's Part Number (MPN) or Universal Product Code (UPC) when possible. This will assist people who search for a very specific product.

Target Country: Make sure you select a target country for your listings. This will both increase the relevancy and quality of your traffic as well as lower your bounce rates.

Custom Attributes: This is extremely important for achieving good results on Google Base. You can define any custom product attribute you want that will help customers find your products. For example, if you are selling an LCD TV you could define the following attributes; model number, screen size, resolution, aspect ration, brightness, response time, etc. That way when someone searches ‘LCD TV 52” 1080p’ your product will have a better chance of coming up versus other listings that have not included this information.

Data Feed Format: Make sure your data feed is formatted correctly. Simply review Google Base Help for formatting guidelines to be sure you don’t have any errors in your data feed.

Track Your Listings: Make sure you track your items through Google Analytics. You can then find out what is successful and what is not. Be sure to adjust your listings based on feedback from Google Analytics. You can find information on tracking your products with Google Analytics here.

Build Up Your Seller Rating: Simply put, Google Base will give priority and higher rankings to products sold by a seller or store with a lot of positive ratings. One suggestion would be to encourage your customers to leave feedback for your store on Google. Offer them a small discount or free shipping on their next purchase if they leave a review.

Final Thoughts:

By providing Google Base with a lot of specific and quality information, your products will tend to rank for longer tail keywords, such as ‘Samsung LCD TV 52” 1080p.’ When searchers are typing in these longer tail and highly specific keywords, they are more likely to be in a position to buy the product rather than just browsing. This is what will separate product listings that do ok from the ones that absolutely kill it with very high conversion rates. Now that you have a basic guideline, you are ready to optimize your Google Base data feeds.