Advanced Search Engine Options and Ideas

Search engine features help search engine spiders find your product pages easily and help you increase search engine ranking. Search engine traffic, besides pay-per-click, is free, and these are qualified leads that are looking for your particular product or information:

• Related Items section Similar to the cross-selling function, other related items appear next to the product. This helps create internal keyword-rich content for search engines.

• Breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs not only help customers navigate through your site, but they also contain keyword-rich content and keyword-rich internal links (refer to Figure 6.9).

• Multiple breadcrumbs Multiple breadcrumbs shows multiple product paths (refer to Figure 6.10) and add keyword-rich internal links.

• Text-based menus Instead of image menu buttons, text-based menus help with search engine ranking, especially if you have keyword-rich text in your menu. Search engines cannot read images. Switching to a text-based menu also helps create your menus dynamically.

• Change page name to text By default, Yahoo! creates an image for the page name. Although it looks like text, it's actually an image. Changing the page name to text helps with search engine ranking. The page name usually contains keyword-rich text describing your product.

• Image alt tags Some of your images do not have alt tags to describe your product. Adding a text description of your images helps with search engine ranking. Adding keywords in your alt tags helps with keyword density.

• Dynamically generated metatags This feature scans your page to pull unique keywords and places them in your meta page description and keywords. This is a great solution if you don't have the time yourself to customize your meta descriptions and keyword phrases.

• Custom 404 "Page Not Found" A custom "Page Not Found" message helps customers get to your site even if they clicked on a link that no longer exists on your site. Instead getting a blank "Page Not Found" message, they arrive at your custom page. This allows them to still navigate through your site.

• Categorized site map A site map has categorized links to all your products. Search engine spiders can get to your pages from a link off your home page. This increases your chances of getting more pages indexed by search engines (see Figure 6.22).

  Figure 6.22. A categorized site map not only helps customers find your products, but it also helps search engine spiders scan all your pages and hopefully index more product pages.