- Log into your Dashboard with your username and password.
- Click ‘Add New Products’ on the left side.
- Click the ‘Create New Product’ button
- Enter the product data in all tabs.
I will go into detail what to enter in all of the tabs that will maximize search engine crawling and indexing for ranking.
- ‘General’ tab
- Product Name: Only put the name of the product here. An example would be ‘Alaskan Salmon Fillet Knife’. Having an insanely long product name with the full description of the knife in the title actually hurts your rankings.
- Part No. / SKU: I have found with manufactured products like from Milwaukee Tools you can rank more easily for the products by including the SKU and/or Part Number to the product description and the short description.
- Sort Order: Not relevant for the search engines, but if you want certain products displayed in a specific order or any products you want to show along the top you will have to utilize this.
- Mfr Part No: I have found with manufactured products like from Milwaukee Tools you can rank more easily for the products by including the Manufacturing Part Number to the product description and the short description. This will be grayed out if your product has variations.
- Manufacturer: Select or create the manufacturer for the product. This needs to be added to all of your products! This is Brand Recognition that will be picked up by the search engines. Another thing to do is to add schema tags to all of the products of the website. This will have to be done by using the ‘<Head> HTML’ tab under where you enter the ‘Full Description’ below. You can learn more about schema over here at Google.
- Stock Quantity: Add the information you want here. The only thing SEO here is to not delete the product but instead just mark it out of stock. If the product has variations then this will be grayed out.
- Product Image: This is an important one. Obviously it has to be a high-quality image but the file size of this cannot be very large where it will take a long time to load up.
- All images should be under 800×600 pixels. If you need to resize the image from your computer you can utilize a free online resize tool like this one.
- Before uploading the image to the shopping cart rename it to reflect the product. For example, if the knife is an ‘Alaskan Salmon Fillet Knife’ then name the file alaskan-salmon-fillet-knife.jpg. Don’t worry if you have the same file name for another product. Network Solutions will add a 1, 2, 3, etc. to the end of the file name for you.
- Save files as .jpg files for speed loading.
- When you click on ‘Manage Image’ it takes you to the ‘Image’ tab where you can enter in the alt tag here. Alt tags are for website readers for the blind. Don’t abuse it just enter something like this. Example: Alt tag: Picture of our Alaskan Salmon Fillet Knife with a sheath. I have found with other eCommerce shopping carts that if you have the ability to enter a description of the image like in WooCommerce then you can start ranking for the images by themselves.
- When you click on ‘Manage Image’ it takes you to the ‘Image’ tab where you can enter the Caption Text. This text will appear below the image on your website. An example here would be just to put ‘Alaskan Salmon Knife’. Save the full description for later.
- All images should be under 800×600 pixels. If you need to resize the image from your computer you can utilize a free online resize tool like this one.
- Weight: Enter the weight and dimensions of the product here. If your product has variations then this will be grayed out.
- Pricing: Pretty self-explanatory here, but you have a checkbox here that enables you to make the product for sale or not. One of the things I noticed on your shopping cart was a large number of products that cannot be found so in the past they must have been deleted. I have a ton of 404 errors that should be taken care of with 301 redirect links. Instead of deleting the product make the quantity zero or uncheck the box along the bottom (Product is hidden and unavailable for sale.) to make it not for sale. The top box that has a checkbox ‘For Sale’ seems to do nothing and is useless.
- Choose a Category: Select all categories that relate to this product, not just one. The more ‘real estate’ we have for one product with multiple categories the better. Just make sure that they are genuine relevant categories. More ‘real estate’ will also increase the chances of ranking for a specific product multiple times. However, if you have the exact same text with the exact same product on multiple category pages then you may trigger a duplicate content warning so don’t overdo it.
- Short Description: This will show up as a snippet on the website and possibly as a snippet that will be displayed if it becomes featured on a SERP (search engine result page) so keep this short description under 180 characters long. An example would be ‘Alaskan Salmon Fillet Knife with Leather Sheath included.
- Full Description: A very detailed description should be added here. If Google pulls a snippet of information form either the short description or the full description it will only pull the first 180 characters so be sure to display the selling point and main product description within 180 characters. Do this under the ‘Design’ tab. The ‘<Head> HTML’ tab can be used to add schema code. Below this, you also have the option to hide the product below the description box. It is preferred never to use this option because it also hides the products from the search engines.
- ‘Advanced’ tab
- There is nothing relevant to help you with the search engines here.
- ‘Images’ tab
- This was explained in detail above under ‘Product Image’ of the ‘General’ tab.
- ‘Variations’ tab
- There is nothing relevant to help you with the search engines here other than to put good descriptions of the variants.
- ‘Personalization’ tab
- You may create custom templates to save you time, but if the same text is used over and over exactly throughout your website then it will hurt your rankings so it is NOT advised. Unique content is key.
- ‘SEO Info’ tab
- Friendly URL: This is another important one. You can create a search-friendly-URL here. An example I found is 20gaugeleathertasselshotgunnecklace.aspx. Something like this should be changed to 20-gauge-shotgun-necklace.aspx. Don’t add a ton of hyphens and keep it short and simple.
- Page Title: Another important one here. Put the name of the product here and it is very important to keep the page title unique. A big no-no is to have the same page title used over and over again.
- Meta Keywords: This is useless for rankings but go ahead and enter in something like ‘fillet knife’ for fillet knives just in case they ever start to use the meta keyword tag again. It is better to do it now instead of adding it to 10,000 products later if it ever becomes relevant again.
- Meta Description: This is an important one. You can copy and paste your short description here. Make sure you keep in under 180 characters long. If they cannot find your short description to display as a snipper in the SERPs (search engine results pages) then the search engines will pull it from your meta description tag. Normally they do not pull it from the meta description tag, but it has been found to be still useful for ranking.
- ‘Add-A-Store’
- There is nothing relevant to add here for search engine optimization.
- ‘Related Products’
- Select Products: This is an important ‘upselling’ technique. For example, if you have a fillet knife here for related products you would add sheaths and other accessories that go with fillet knives. This SHOULD be utilized and can be helpful for the search engines to crawl and index even more products from your website.
- Define Rules: You can add a rule here where adding related products can be done for you automatically. If done wrong this could be a disaster. For example, if you created a rule that adds the keyword ‘sheath’ to all filet knives but if someone purchased the sheath and it doesn’t fit then that would cause problems. Manual is better but if you are sure the rule would not fail then you can create one to help you save time. One safe rule to create would be adding the keyword ‘necklace’ for any earing products. Or would it? Check to make sure.
Leave a Reply