WEBINAR TEXT: Official Yahoo! Store SEO Webinar
Item# 2009.10

Product Description

Introduction 

Rob Snell:  My name is Rob Snell and today I am going to talk about Yahoo Stores and search engine optimization, specifically how our Yahoo stores get millions of visitors a year that generate millions of dollars in sales from free search engine traffic.   

Several years ago I wrote a Dummies book.  I have been a retailer online since '97.  My brother Steve and I are in business.  We are second generation running our family business.   

We had 100's of questions come in through the forum.  If you go to Robsnell.com, I have got a forum on there.  I think it is SEO-Webinar.html where I got a lot of people who are on my mailing list and friends and clients to sign up and give me some feedback on what kind of stuff you guys were looking for today.  

And it was really interesting to me because most of the folks who filled out that survey have been in e-commerce for either two or three or four or five years, they have multiple Yahoo stores, they consider themselves intermediate search engine optimization folks. 

What I am going to do is I am going to talk about some stuff.  I am actually going to go through my Yahoo Store Summit presentation that was a five to seven minute presentation to kind of hit some high points. 

Since 1997 

This is Gun Dog Supply, a Yahoo store.  This is a business my parents started in 1972 on their kitchen table.  We have had this Yahoo store since 1997, since even before it was Yahoo Store.   

We sell training supplies for hunting dogs like Click.  This dog is Click.  This is one of my brother's 13 hunting dogs.  If you see the orange collar on Click's neck, that is a GPS tracking collar, which is how my brother Steve tracks Click when he is out hunting birds in the field.  Click is a big running bird dog.  He is going to run a mile when he sees some birds.   
 
 

Track your Converting Keywords 

It is kind of like analytics for hunting dogs.  Just the way Steve tracks his bird dogs, I want you to track your converting keywords.  How do you do that? 

Well nowadays it is extremely easy because Yahoo Store has Yahoo Web Analytics now baked in.  I have been running Index Tools, which is YWA, for almost five years now.  But now it is free for the upper tier Yahoo Store owners.  And there is tons of information in there.  We are going to talk all about that kind of stuff today. 

When someone is searching for something that you sell on a search engine, you want your store to show up in the search results.  So let's say somebody has got a dog and their pads on their dog's feet are hurting.  They say, "My dog's feet hurt.  I need to order Tuff Foot for dogs," which is a foot balm.   

Yahoo Search 

So they go to Yahoo Search and they type in Tuff Foot for dogs, and that comes up.  What you are seeing now is a search engine results page for a search for "Tuff Foot for dogs".  And if you want to follow along at home, feel free. 

I want my store to appear on the first page of search results.  Why?  Because 90% of all the clicks that come from search engines come from the first page.  And 80% or so of those clicks come from the first five results.  So you really need to be on the first page and above the fold in the first five or six results.   

Notice that on this search engine results page that the words that somebody searched for are bolded actually in the listings.  And if you will see our listings, we are actually listed three and four on this page right behind the manufacturer, which it is really tough to compete with the manufacturer these days. 

The words in the link to our page come from the <title> tag.  The snippet of text comes from the Meta description or text on the page.  Also notice that we have two listings on this page that are cracking the top 10, and that is extremely tough to do. 

Yahoo Web Analytics 

When somebody clicks on that, Yahoo Web Analytics tracks that keyword and says, "OK.  This person came from Yahoo and they searched for Tuff Foot for dogs, and now they are on the product page."  And let's pretend they go to the product page, they see it and they buy it, and the place an order.  Yahoo Web Analytics keeps up with it and they store this information.   

One of my favorite reports from Yahoo Web Analytics is the converting keywords report.  And the reason I like that is because it actually collects all the converting keyword phrases and it gives you not only the returning visitors, the number of orders that are placed, but also the revenue that is attached to those keywords so you can see that some keywords are more valuable than others.   

One of the things I like about all this information is that it helps you prioritize what things you want to work on when it comes to search engine optimization.   

Top Terms- 75% of sales 

The top three terms for this one product, "Tuff Foot," "Tuff Foot," and, "Tuff Foot for dogs" generate around 75% of the sales for that product, which is pretty typical.  You are going to see that across a lot of different pages and a lot of different products.  

39 Terms- 25% of sales 

But, 25% of our sales come from the 39 terms under that.  So you want to chase those terms as well.  How do you do that?  Well, you want to put the converting keywords in the caption.   

Put Converting Keywords into Captions 

What I have done here on this slide is I have taken a list of these 39 terms and I have just boiled it down to the unique words.  And then I deduped the list so that I made sure that I am just weaving these words back into the captions.  These are the unique words that I want to have in the caption page.   

Write Unique Product Descriptions 

Now that you know what these words are, I want you to write a unique product description.  And this is extremely, extremely important.  Folks ask me all the time, "How much should I write?"  I want you to write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price.  This is just a good rule of thumb.   

The main reason why I want you to write unique content is because it is good for your customers.  Folks are going to buy stuff…I mean you don't want to look like every other store online. 

 
Google loves Unique Content
 

But the other reason is it is awesome for SEO.  Unique content is one of the main drivers of all of our millions of SEO customers that come through our sites.   

For example, if you do a search for one of our best selling keywords, "Garmin Astro", it is a very competitive keyword and we rank on the first page, and we had 20 or 30 pages of content because of that.  Here is the Google search results page for the Garmin Astro. 

 
Don't be lazy (like most retailers)
 

Do you want to find out how many people are actually lazy retailers?  Most retailers are lazy.  They take a manufacturer's product description from one of their better selling products.  And it was really easy to find how many people are being lazy by taking the first sentence of this description, and there are 1,770 retailers who are just copying and pasting or getting their information out of a data feed.  1,770 lazy retailers and I am competing with these guys. 

Well so now that you know that you need to collect your converting keywords and write unique content, what do you do?  Well, I want you to create compelling content as well as unique content.   

We found that we got 50% higher conversions when folks visited our site and came in on a buyer's guide compared to coming in on a typical section page.  And man, we got religion pretty fast about this, so we started writing buyer's guides about everything.   

Tired of searching for your dog in high grass or dense cover? 

One of the best things that Steve does is he takes the conversations that he has on the telephone with folks and he boils that down into the most important stuff, and he actually puts it on the website.  And he will actually say, you know, "Tired of losing your dog?  Buy this tracking collar."  We put Steve's name on these things and it works.   

This is a sales graph of the past nine or 10 years on one of our stores.  You can tell when we started providing opinions on the website, telling folks what to buy, more content drives more traffic.   

Also, when you tell folks what to buy, you are going to increase conversion rate.  People are busy.  They don't have time to sort through hundreds and hundreds of similar products.  If you say, "This is the product that will solve your problem.  This is what you need," conversions go up.   

And the secret to creating this content is that we are always creating content no matter what we do or where we go.  Steve and I are riding around in his truck, we are on the farm, we are training dogs, and we are recording everything.  I have got a video camera.  I use my iPhone.  I have got some pretty high fallutin cameras.  We photograph everything.  We transcribe everything.   

Transcribe Everything 

I have got a guy in Alabama that about once a week I send him an hour or two of video.  He types it up and we put it on the website.  I actually get to play the straight man.  It is like, "How do you teach a dog how to sit?"  Steve says, "Well, blah, blah, blah, blah."  And I am like, "Well how long does it take him to learn?"  "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."  And this is stuff is keyword loaded.  This stuff is awesome for search engine optimization. 

Steal all Manufacturer Content 

Now I am about to tell you something that is the opposite of what I told you as far as creating unique content.  I want you to steal all manufacturer content.  What do I mean by that?  Well, manufacturers do a really good job of creating content, but they don't do a good job of getting it out there.  So I want you to liberate content that you are going to find in like owner's manuals and PDF files.  I want you to transcribe DVD's that come with products.  Online videos-I want you to get the text out of that.   

A lot of people have Flash movies.  I want you to go and look at their Flash movies and have somebody transcribe what is in that and get that information out in simple text HTML where people can see it.  

Another thing we have done is we have repurposed product packaging.  We actually will take a box and I will give it to one of the production assistants, and she will type up the information on the box.   

And the point of purchase materials are awesome.  Look at that little flip book down there.  There is tons of stuff in there that is not on the web or anywhere else. 

There is Sage looking at you there.  Steve's GSP. 

SEO Elements-Title tags and Text Links 

Search engine optimization elements haven't really changed in the past five years.  I mean ranking comes down to mostly two things: <title> tags, which is text on the page where you have your keywords inside your <title> tags.  And what I tell folks is when you are naming your products on the Yahoo store, make sure you use your best keywords, what folks actually call these things, in the name field of your products, because for most Yahoo stores, the <title> tags are created from the name field.  And it depends on who designed your Yahoo Store, and if you have a Legacy store, and if you are using a version 3 store.  It is a little bit different, but we are going to touch on that in just a minute. 

The second thing for ranking is text links.  You want other pages pointing at pages you want to rank with keywords inside the links.  That is how Google's tells what a page is about.  It is called Reputation Analysis.  It is what other pages say about your page.  It is <title> tags, text on the page, and anchor text. 

I actually went in last night and I completely redid my slides at 4 o'clock in the morning because I wanted to do some hands on things.   

If I could only do five things? 

This is the second part of the presentation, actually getting in and getting your hands dirty.  Paul, one of my good buddies over at Yahoo, he said, "Dude, don't be telling all this theory stuff.  Actually give them some stuff to do.  Give them some tactical things so they can go in and get their hands dirty.  What if you could only do five things on a Yahoo Store and you are starting from day one?" 

And some of this stuff is going to be basic, and I am going to go as deep as I can based on the amount of time that I have got.  It looks like I have got another 30 minutes or so.   

#1 Install YAW 

If you can only do five things on your store, what would you do?  Well the first thing I would do: install Yahoo Web Analytics.  You know why.  We talked about it a minute ago, so I will skip through this. 

Configure Domain Redirects 

The second thing I would do is I would configure the domain redirects.  Mr. [16:31] and I bumped heads over this about three years ago, four years ago maybe, about how important it was.  And it is like he got it.  It was awesome, because back in the day when ViaWeb was made, when Paul Graham made ViaWeb, you could have four of five different URL's pointing to the exact same content, like store.yahoo.com/accountname/pagename, and then yourdomain.com/pagename, and then www. 

Well now they have these domain redirects.  And I would be willing to say that half of the people on this phone call don't have their 301's configured correctly.  So I went in and did some screenshots this morning.   

You go to your store manager page, and they have a help file that is really helpful as far as doing this, but you then go under site settings to the domain names link and then you check the "redirect all host names to my domain," and you pick one domain.  And whether that is www.yourdomain.com or store.yourdomain.com, or just plain old yourdomain.com, you want to pick one domain and have one URL for your content so there is only one URL pointing to your content.   

And what happens is this means that instead of having three or four versions of your site in the Google, and in Yahoo, and in Bing, you are going to have one version, and one page is going to get credit for all of the links.  So you will get credit for the 301 redirect.  All the link juice flowing to the store URL's will get redirected to your main URL.  All of the link juice pointing to the non-www will get redirected like in our case of the www.  I mean it is really good for consolidating your link popularity.  And after about three months of doing this, you will see an increase in your Google traffic.  I mean this is probably the most valuable thing that I could tell.  Out of the 45,000 Yahoo Store owners, who knows how many people are not doing this?   

Homepage <title> tags 

If I could only do three things, the most important on page element for SEO is the <title> tag.  The most important page on your site is your homepage.  Therefore, your home page's <title> tag is it.  If I could only do one more thing, that is what I would do.  I would pimp out your homepage <title> tag.   

And <title> tags are hard.  I mean you get 65-70 characters to work with.  On your homepage you are working with broader keywords.  I recommend going for three or four overlapping phrases.   

One of my spammer buddies is awesome.  He said that a <title> tag is not a wish list.  If you are not ranking top 20 or better for the terms that are in your <title> tag, you are wasting one of your most precious resources.   
 
If you want to go check out and see how good an SEO is, take a look at somebody's homepage, like a Yahoo Store developer or an SEO, and go see on Google, do they rank for the three or four keyword phrases that are in their <title> tag?  And if they are not in the top 20, they don't know what they are doing, me included.
 

Homepage: Write intro text 500-1000 words of body text 

If I could do a fourth thing, I would put 500 to a 1,000 words of body text on my homepage.  So many Yahoo Store owners that I see, they have these beautiful graphics and they have these pictures with these specials, and they have their contents, and they have like maybe to or three sentences, and they have their final text, but there is no meat on the sandwich. 

On your homepage, I want 500-1000 words of text.  And one way to do it is to put snippets to explain what you sell and have a welcome message.  But load that sucker up with keywords. 

Here is an example on my homepage, Robsnell.com, where I just wrote an intro letter.  And I basically talked about what I do and have some information in there.   

The fifth thing corresponds with this.  This is so impotent nowadays because since you homepage is your most important page on your site, because most of your link popularity is flowing to it, the links coming off your homepage are your most valuable links.   

If I link to something from Robsnell.com with anchor text in it, I need it to rank for that relatively quickly.  I mean even really competitive phrases.  I use it all the time to get other pages on other domains to rank.  It is awesome. 

You want to link your 40 best pages using information from your Yahoo Web Analytics using you 40 best keywords in the anchor text.  And I just picked 40 out of a hat.  Google is going to count 100 or so links on a page, but if you don't know HTML, you need to learn how to hand code these little bitty links.   

Email me and I will show you a place.  I know it is in the book.  If you don't know HTML and you are just using "specials", you can throw you 20 best products and specials on the page, and you can use the contents to have your 20 best category links.  Here is an example further down the page on Robsnell.com where I have embedded these little bitty HTML links inside my body text.   

This is the most important thing.  This is why I didn't sleep last night.  I stayed up all last night because at about seven o'clock yesterday evening I had an epiphany on something I have been working on for the past three to six months as far as how to put a dollar amount on SEO. 

CKWP 

CKWP-you will see that in my notebooks.  If you know me, see me at conferences, every conference I have been to has a notebook.  I have dozens of these little black notebooks chalked full of SEO stuff.  And the thing that I finally wrapped my head around, CKWP is Converting Keyword Phrase.  That is a keyword phrase that if somebody searched for in a search engine, came to your site, and placed an order and bought something.   

I have 21,000 of those on Gun Dog Supply as of last night.  21,000 converting keyword phrases; little bitty oil wells.  Some are worth more than others.  The most awesome thing is now, because of Yahoo Web Analytics, now we know what the dollar amount is, the value of a visitor.   

There is a statistic called "revenue per visitor".  You divide the revenue by the number of visitors for any given keyword phrase.  And once you have 1,000 or so visitors and maybe 100 or more sales, you have a pretty good idea of what the value of a visitor is.

 
So on any given keyword you are going to see pretty consistent revenue per visitors.  If you got $5 revenue per visitor and you have 100 people coming to your site a week, you have a pretty good idea that you are going to be able to get…if you double that, you will be able to double your sales for that one individual keyword.
 

Well that is the first part.  The second part is, and I will talk about this more in a minute, is that we have a pretty good idea where folks click on a search engine results page.  If 90% of the people who are visiting a search engine results page are coming from the first page of results, and it is about 30% from number one, 12% from number two, 9% from number three, and it just drops off like a stone after that, most people are clicking in the top three to five places. 

I can tell you that you can double your traffic if you are in four, five, or six if I can get you up into maybe two or three.  And if you know revenue per visitor, you can multiply that and go, "Gosh.  I will make an extra $50,000 in sales off this one keyword if I go from number seven to number three."  And you can say, "Well OK.  What is my profit on that?  Gosh.  If I keep this up, if I actually do a good job of building up some content and getting some links, I could probably spend $10,000 on developing content just for one keyword phrase," one of your best keyword phrases.   

So what I want you to do is once you have Yahoo Web Analytics and you have got more than three months worth of data, I want you to go in and export all of your converting keywords.  And I do this about every 90 days, and I love this.   

Paul asked me what I was going to run.  I go in and under marketing in the tab, I go down to conversions and then I select "SEO and SEM", and then I click "by search phrase", and I get a list of my converting keywords.  This was early in the morning.  These were my converting keywords.  And normally when you log into YWA, you have that one day on your calendar.   

Well the first thing I want you to do is I want you to go set the date range as long as you can.  And in one of my index tools accounts I have got five years worth of data. 

The second thing I want you to do is I want you to go set the results per page to a number higher than 10 so you can see a whole bunch of stuff in one fatal swoop.   

I had to strip the keywords





out of here because I want to show you guys some real data.  I appreciate what you guys are doing.  You guys want to learn stuff.  Talking about theoretical stuff is BS.  You need to see real data.  I am actually going to show you stuff from a real store.  And once I get away from the super, super money keywords, I am going to talk real numbers on some real keywords.
 

Look at these different keywords.  Keyword number one: I have got 35,000 visits, $175,000 in revenue, my conversion rate for that one keyword is 2.4%, my average sale is a little bit over $200, my revenue per visitor is $5.  

Now go down and compare that with keyword nine where I have got one tenth of the traffic and it is a much smaller amount of revenue.  But look at my revenue per visitor- $12.  And I have got a pretty good idea of what keyword that is.  And I know that I can increase my traffic and sales by concentrating on that one keyword.  Look at that revenue per visitor and the average sale.  I mean I look through this and I am looking for opportunities inside all of these keywords.  I get real excited about this, and I apologize if I am going too fast.   

Look at keyword seven.  Not that much traffic, not that many orders, a pretty good revenue number.  I mean it is the seventh biggest keyword in the history of the company.  About a 1% conversion rate.  But that average sale is $639.  And I know for a fact that people are calling on the phone to place orders that aren't getting tied back into Yahoo Web Analytics. 

But this is the information that you can take and then match it up with your position in the search engines to figure out what your opportunity is, and this is the epiphany that I had.  And Whittaker, we have some work to do.  We got to build this thing out. 

One of the first things I do when I have these…I had 100,000 and I did a full export.  Not just a full screen; I did 100,000 keywords last night.  One of the first things that I did was I took out my company name and my domain name.   

Some people call these branded terms and navigational terms.  But they are keyword phrases that have your company name in them and then have your domain name in them.   

What happens is people come to your site and they don't bookmark you, and they remember they bought from you company, but they don't remember your URL, or they are lazy and instead of typing in your domain in the address bar, they will actually do a search for it and unfortunately overwrite that first keyword.   

So I am seeing about half of the keywords across Yahoo stores, all the different Yahoo stores, getting overwritten with these terms.  So I pull these terms out and I separate them. 

I had about $6 million worth of sales with these keywords I was looking at last night, and I can't remember what the date range was.  It was a pretty big…it was more than a year. 

$1 million of sales were tied to these company name/domain keywords, which was a pretty big amount.  I mean it was more than 20% of our sales, but it wasn't that many keywords.  It was only 200 some odd keywords. 

Getting this information out allows you to prioritize based on RPV, revenue per visitor, and average sales.  So you can go in and say, "OK.  Well gosh.  I made $20 per visitor on this keyword and I make $1 per visitor on this keyword.  What is the upside?  I am going to test that big keyword." You might be a little more competitive. 

All right.  This graph right here that is about to show shows my top 45 keywords during this time period.  Look how it drops off.  They talk about the long tail.  I bucket my keywords into anywhere from three to five different buckets.  Probably the first 15-20 keywords are what I call like the "candle" keywords; just the very…Oh, they are awesome.  I mean they are $20,000 plus keywords.  And then you will see this kind of levels off.  And then the next part of the…like the "candle."  And then the next batch is the icing.  The middle batch is the cake.  And then you have got the crumbs for like the onesie, twosie keywords.   

The next thing I do is I take these 21,000 keywords and I actually tag them by category and brand by doing some filtering in Excel.  And Excel is a tool that you need to know a lot about.   

This is actually one of the smaller buckets that I got out of these 20,000 keywords last night.  One of my programmer buddies came over last night and he was laughing about he could do this in five lines of code and it took me two hours to do it by hand.  But I learned a lot about my keyword phrases.  I got about 40 different brand buckets and about 20-30 different category buckets that help me look at these keywords.  So instead of looking just at the top of the mountain, I am actually able to take a specific keyword like "Odor Mute", which is a product that we sell, and get all the "Odor Mute" converting keywords in this one bucket. 

Look at the numbers on the left hand side.  You will see that Odor Mute…I mean it is number 143 in our converting keyword phrases for this time period.  It generated $4,000 in revenue from that one keyword phrase.   

The second base phrase is OdorMute without a space.  And then a more specific kind, "Odor Mute C", and then you will notice these numbers start getting bigger because there are not that many sales because they are pretty obscure keywords. 

But this is awesome.  Instead of just working with one or two keywords, I like working with about 20 at a given time, because you can optimize for multiple words at a time. 

All right.  Then you target segments with the greatest opportunity.  I talked about this earlier, but I actually go in and Revenue Per Visitor…I don't even know if you can get that out of Yahoo Web Analytics.  I never get it.  I just divide revenue per visitor and get these numbers. 

And you will notice that if you don't have a lot of visits, that RPV number is just unrealistic.  I mean there are some keyword phrases in there with one search and a conversion, like, "Odor Mute Kennels", and it has 100% conversation rate.  That is totally unrealistic.  You are not going to replicate that the next time somebody comes searching for "Odor Mute Kennels".   

But you are going to get all kinds of ideas for more ways to generate traffic, so I am only looking at the icing and the candle and the flame keywords for an accurate Revenue Per Visitor and conversion rate. 

All right.  I call this "SEO Upside", and I have gotten some of these ideas from Aaron Wall.  He is a guy that I follow.  SEO Book; I am a member of that.  I play around with SEOmoz.  They have some tools.  Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land has some really good articles.  And from all these different things I have kind of stitched together a….If I know what the revenue per visitor is on a given keyword, and I know how many searches there are on Google thanks to a Google keyword tool…

 
Google has a free keyword tool.  I use to have to pay $200 or $300 a year to get Word Tracker.  Well now with Google Adwords, anybody can just go to Goggle and search for "keyword tool."  You can put your keywords in.  And you type in your little ransom message there. 
 

One thing I do recommend is set your match type to exact so you are not seeing broad match.  I think exact is a lot more accurate as far as the number of folks per month searching on Google for these keyword phrases.  

And then under "show/hide columns," I like to see what the estimated average cost per click is, and sometimes that is even higher than my revenue per visitor, so I can't sometimes afford to pay for these clicks. 

But I just took one of our keyword phrases, "Doghouse heater", and threw it in there just to see what would happen.  And you can see, the estimated average cost per click.  I can see how many advertisers there are competing for it.  I can see the global monthly search volume.   

It is not a lot.  But if you do this for each one of these little bitty thimbles and add those into the buckets, and then you do the buckets, you can totally build your campaigns out because of this. 

The next piece of information that I want to know is, "How do I rank on Google?"  70% of my free organic search engine traffic comes from Google.  Yahoo is great.  I love Yahoo.  Bing is new, it is neat, it is shiny.  You know, it is Microsoft.  I mean I get a little bit of traffic from them, but it is like it is almost 10 times as much from Google, so I am going to concentrate from Google.  And if I get some Yahoo traffic, if I get some Bing traffic, that is great.  But I am not going to do anything that is going to mess up my Google traffic tracing these little bitty fish. 

What I do is I use some alternative methods for getting this, and you may know what I am talking about.  The search engines do not want you to pound them with thousands of requests per day to see what your rankings are on keywords.  So be very careful.  You can get your IP address banned from Google.  I mean Yahoo will ban me after 50 searches.  They are notorious for hating people looking at their search results. 

But I will go in and hand check these.  And look at the third line.  You know, I am number one and two for Odor Mute C.  The first two keywords on the first two rows, "OdorMute" and "Odor Mute", I am number two and three right after the manufacturer.  But if you go down to the fourth line, "Rider Odor Mute", I don't even rank.  I don't even know how I got a sale for that because I don't have the word "Rider" on the page.  Maybe from broad match PPC buys or something. 

But you can see a lot of these I am two and three, two and three.  And I will show you some search pages in a minute.  But these show me the opportunities I am…Look at Ryder's Odor Mute.  I am number eight.  I mean number eight

gets 3% of the traffic from the first page of results compared to 30%.  You can get 10 times the increase if I can get that up to the first or second position, and that is what I want to do.
 

Then I go over to my Google keyword tool and I want to see how many people a month are searching for these keyword phrases.  So I paste all of these Yahoo Web Analytics from my site, keywords that have generated traffic for me, over into this Google keyword tool, and there are only four keywords that Google even knows about, which means my competitors probably don't know about these, which means there is gold hidden inside your Yahoo Web Analytics in your converting keywords.  I mean there are thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars.  And if you are not interested in getting the thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars or the value of it, give me a holler.  We will set up a revenue share deal.  I will be happy to go in and mine the gold out of your land and split it with you. 

Look at the cost per click on some of these.  I mean they are paying $2 a click for Ryder OdorMute?  I will be getting the free traffic.  But I mean there are only 22 people a month searching for that according to Google, so who knows?  But I have got 21,000 converting keywords, so I am going after any keyword that has got Odor Mute in it. 

All right.  One of the most important things that you need to do, beginner or advanced, you need to start with a clean web browser.  Thanks to personalized results, if you are logged into your Google Adwords account, or Gmail account, or any Google account, or if you are on a computer where you have done multiple searches, Google starts to customize the results based on what things you click on and similar keywords terms.  Google is getting really smart about this. 

So if you want to see what most people see who are just starting to search in a category, you need to go clean out your browser.  And what I do is I use Safari.  And I am like a Macintosh person sometimes and a PC person sometimes.  But there is a version of Safari for the PC now.  And Safari has this awesome thing.  You go into Safari and you hit "Reset Safari".  And it makes all of you history go away.  It empties the cache and removes all of the cookies. And the only thing that you have in common is that you are on the same IP address.  You don't have to reboot your computer or anything.  So you just go reset Safari and you have got a clean version of Google.   

All right.  All positions are not created equal.  We were talking about this earlier.  When you look at a Google search results page…go to Google and search for "Odor Mute" and log out.  You will notice in this screenshot I am actually logged in, so I am kind of embarrassed by that.   

In the screenshot you see 10 results, 10 links, 10 blue links to different websites when folks searched for Odor Mute.  All right.  Odor Mute the company is number one in the free search results.  I don't know if you can see my mouse over here or not.  I am going to move my mouse, my pointer, because I haven't got everything checked. 

All right.  The second and third are me.  I have got clustered results, which is really cool.  You need to ask me about that.  I am above the shopping results.  And then you have all these others after that. 

And if you are a Yahoo store owner and you see, "Oh, I am number seven or I am number eight," and you go, "Well that is OK.  I am on the first page of results."  But if you realize, most people's browsers don't even show the stuff below the shopping results.  And what happens is what you see and what makes you sleep at night is different.  What your customers see is this.  And 30% of them click on that first big one, and 12% of them click on that second one, and then 9% on that third one, and then it just drops off like a stone.   

Look at those little micro…l just resized these based on the percentage of clicks that those actually get.  Seven, eight, nine, and 10 don't get any traffic at all.  You gotta get above that shopping results.  You have got to be in the top five minimum and you better be one, two, or three.  You better have two in there. 

The next thing I do is I check several keyword rankings.  I have got a new version of Safari opened and I pop on over to Google and do a search for Odor Mute, which we saw a little while ago.  It was a pretty good keyword.  And they are already trying to tell me that I don't know what I am looking for.  But I still rank.  I got two pages ranking two and three.  That is great.   

All right.  And then the next page comes up.  We do a search for "OdorMute" as one word, which was my second best phrase in this bucket, and I am ranking two or three.  And over on the right hand side you might see my safety out there, my pay per click ad.  I got broad match on OdorMute in case there is a keyword phrase I don't optimize for yet. 

All right.  And then here is one I don't even rank on the first page.  I am not even showing up for broad match.  What the hell is going on, Google?  Ryder OdorMute.  So what I did last night at about three o'clock in the morning is I started adding the word "Ryder" all over the OdorMute pages.  And I don't know if it is published yet or not. 

But you can see that all my competitors here are showing up.  OdorMute C; hey, I am number one and number two.  And every 10 or so searches I will go reset Safari, because I don't want Google to start thinking for me and I want to see what most other people see. 

"OdorMute dogs"; I am ranking two and three.  I am sucking over here in the shopping search results.  I have got to learn more about that.  For "Buy OdorMute".  OK.  Amazon does a really good job about ranking for "buy" plus a keyword phrase.  And I am not disappointed that I am three and four, because that is tough to compete with Amazon on a generic product like that.  And then "Buy Odor Mute" I am actually trumping Amazon there.   

All right.  I am going to throw Yahoo some love.  I will actually go search on OdorMute, and I actually got some good ideas for some more keywords here. 

All right.  So now we are moving on.  Actually, I know have this information.  I want to actually do the optimization.  I have all this data.  I have this spreadsheet that keeps crashing because it has got 100,000 lines in it.  I actually want to optimize on the page.  So what do I do?

 
Well, I find the most relevant page, the MRP's.  Sometimes you will see MRP written out like I write CKWP out.  The most relevant page, and that means that from any given keyword phrase on your site, there is one page that is the most relevant page.  And usually, that is the page that ranks the best in Google, because you are linking to it more, you have more content on it.  You know what I am talking about.  For any keyword phrase there is probably a most relevant page on your site.  And if there is not, that gives you an excuse to make a page.
 

All right.  The way I find the most relevant pages is I do a site colon query.  If you type in site:yourdomain.com and do a search on Google or Yahoo for a keyword phrase, it is only going to show you pages on your site that come back.  I have got 57 pages on Guddogsupply.com that have OdorMute on the page, and here is a screenshot of that just so you can see. 

And so you will see the first two or three pages.  I am like, "OK.  Well those are the pages I think I want to optimize for."  One of the things that I do though is I examine the Google cache.  If you will notice in the search results pages off to the right of the URL is a link that says "cache" sometimes.  And when you click on that, you actually see a copy of the web page.  And this is what Google saw when they spydered your web page. 

You can see the word OdorMute.  I counted 17 times where the word OdorMute appears on this page.  Frequency is a big deal.  You want to have multiple occurrences, a high frequency of converting keywords on your product pages.  You don't want to keyword stuff, but you know, you want to do a good job.  And actually, when I saw this page I was embarrassed, because this is not our text.  This is actually text from the manufacturer.  And I apologize if anybody is eating lunch, because we are talking about getting rid of pet odors here.  But this is a good product for us, and actually I can give you some real data here. 

One other thing when you are looking at the caches, I want you to look at the cache date.  And this is about two weeks ago.  This is a good indicator about the health of a page.   

Now the problem is that you could have your page…your page could be spydered once a year and it just so happens it was two weeks ago.  So I won't know until I look again that this is really a two week old page.   

Look at the cache date on your homepage, and that is a very, very high indicator of trust.  If you have a very short cache date, if it was yesterday or the day before, or even a week ago, Google thinks your site is good.  That is awesome to look at.  

One of the other things about the cache is that there is a link on the page two slides back that actually shows you the text version.  It takes away all the HTML images and just shows you the text.  And you can actually see on here what the Alt text is in images.  You can see my H1 tags.  You can see all my text.  And I wish I could scroll down, but it is in PowerPoint, not an HTML page.  But you can actually page down three or four times because there is so much text content below the fold here.   

All right.  I want to optimize this page.  I now know what the most valuable page is on my site.  I want to examine the default SEO elements, so I actually go to the page.  I don't know if you can see this on your monitor or not, but at the very top of the page that is about to appear on my other laptop over here is the actual product page.  There we go.  At the very, very, very top underneath my tabs here, I see that the <title> tag actually show at the top of the page.  So it is "OdorMute C extra concentrated for kennel use.  Well if you look in the red text above the picture, that is also the headline.  Well that is also the name.  This is my default built in RTML Isvan.  And Michael Whittaker taught me everything I know.  Dave Burke over at Visual Future has helped me a bunch, too.  But I mean most of this is my own RTML that I have done that is SEO friendly.  And you can get your RTML jockey to do the same thing. 

I want to look at the source, though.  So you see in the right hand corner I have got "View Source."  So right click and let's view source.  Let's look at the different original SEO elements.  Well the <title> tag.  There is my <title> tag.  That is coming from the name.  All right.  You see that.   

All right.  When the next thing loads, and the slides are a little bit delayed, the second thing that loads is the rel=canonical, which is a new tag that came out.  And if you are already doing your 301 redirects and you are an advanced store, if you are doing $1 million a year or $500,000 a year and you know what you are doing, you need to have canonical set up on your site.  Any RTML developer worth a flip can do this so easily.  I did a template in like 10 minutes.  I will probably give the template away at one time or something.  I just have that hard wired in there. 

The Meta description, I am just grabbing the name of the product…actually, the name of the company plus the name of the product, plus the first 200 characters from the caption, and then I add whatever items are in the contents field.  I got a funky RTML recipe for doing that.   

And then finally, I have got my Meta keywords tag, which I just have that in there.  Meta keyword tags don't really do anything for you, but they don't hurt you, and I just throw the name or some keywords in there. 

All right.  Let's jump into store editor.  Just so that I can make sure how these RTML templates are generating these very important SEO elements for me, I just throw in some things like, "This is the name" and, "This is the caption" inside the name and the caption fields.  All right. See how there is nothing in the headlines and there is nothing in the code?   

All right.  Then I go back to the…I hit update and then it actually shows me, it writes in, "This is the name."  You see it up there in the bread crumbs in the top of the page.  You see it at the very bottom with the start of the caption.  "This is the caption."  So I am like, "OK.  Well that is where the…I know it is doing this.  Let me look at it."  So I view source again a different way.  OK, well actually you can see.  This is the name, pipe, pipe, pipe, pipe, pipe, and then whatever was in there.  Meta description: you can see this is the name and then this is the caption.  So I am generating my Meta descriptions from my name plus my caption.   

All right.  So I want to override my SEO defaults.  And this is one of those things where it depends on who built your Yahoo Store, whether you are a Legacy store, whether you are a custom Legacy store, whether you are a Version 3, which has got some really cool SEO stuff built in, or a custom Version 3.  I mean there are so many ways that you could do this and a lot of them are very good, but you want to override your SEO defaults.  And one of the ways I do that, page-title, I create a new property on my edit page called "page-title".  I think it is built in on the Version 3 stores, but in the Legacy stores and in the new stores, I think this will trump and make this the title. 

Before I do that, I actually do some quick keyword research, because besides all these OdorMute keywords, I am like, "You know there are some other keywords that people are searching for when they are searching for OdorMute, like solving their problems."  And I found this when I was doing some keyword research, like Google suggests.  When you type something in the taskbar of your browser, Google will actually suggest different keyword phrases in ascending order by popularity.  So I am like, "Oh.  Well I might have to have the words ‘views" and ‘Canada' and ‘Ryder, which is not on my page, and ‘where to buy.'"  I actually might need to have that on my page.  So I grab those and then I go over to Yahoo, and Yahoo has got two different awesome things as far as…it is the "also try" stuff.  

Yahoo will actually suggest other keyword phrases for you to add to your site.  So go there and do a search and get some ideas for keywords there.  We talked about using the Google keyword tool.  If you go to the Google homepage itself and you have the right browser, it will actually do this.  And I was going to talk in "pet OdorMute" and all these other pet odor things come up.  I was like, "Dang!  That is a bunch of keywords.  I need to look at that." 

So I went in and did keyword research, three or four slides back, and per month there is $110,000 worth of pet odor smell removal keyword phrases that generate 70,000 visitors a month.  And I am spinning off a micro site. 

I was telling Paul that I don't know what to do with micro sites anymore.  But man, there is some serious revenue there.  There is multi-million dollar revenue because that is just one small niche inside this…you know, for one product.   

So I took all those keywords and actually sat down and spent five or ten minutes and wrote something for my caption and my Meta description.  And you will see here at the same time, I also wrote a compelling headline.  I said, "Hey Ryder's," and you see my keyword in there, "OdorMute C concentrated power works," and, "eliminate pet odors."  And there is a good keyword phrase.  "Remove dog urine smells from almost any material."  And I apologize if anybody is eating.  "Order yours.  In stock and ready to ship." You know I have got a benefit, I have got a call to action, and that is a compelling headline.  I mean I have got a dog.  I need to order some of that stuff today.  So I am pimping this thing out. 

Put your converting keyword phrases in the name of your products. On the left hand side you see my somewhat dynamic navigation.  Isvan helped me do this as far as figuring out in my head how to do it.  I hand code the RTML and it is hilarious watching him look at my code.  It is very bad code, but it renders awesome pages.   

Depending on where you are on my site, you get different navigation.  It is not just hiding with JavaScript.  It is actually hard coded different navigation.  You see the cousin pages and brother and sister pages as well as the parent pages.  And if you will notice the fourth keyword phrase from the bottom, "Ryder OdorMute C for dogs" is an alternate keyword phrase or a short name that is on the product we were just looking at.  But if you see the thumbnail on the right hand side, the picture of the thumbnail and the name underneath, that is actually the name.  So I have got multiple fields that I am pulling from.  And then finally, these are the SEO elements that I finally settled on in optimizing this one page.  And the <title> tag, it has got plenty of keywords in it.  Actually, I don't have Ryder in there.  I probably want to go back and do that.  And I actually hand wrote the description that went along with my caption.  And I still keep my Meta keyword name.  And I just took out rel=canonical that was in there. 

All right.  That is one bucket of keyword phrases.  That is 21 keyword phrases out of 21,000.  I mean it took me probably 15-20 minutes including keyword research with 75 tabs open on my laptop. 

You want to be able to scale your efforts.  And I want to give a shoutout to my scrapbook girls and Julie, who I wrote this template for her because I wanted her to see what her SEO elements looked like on her site.  And I have got this, and I will probably end up giving this thing away too because it is pretty easy to make.  You have to know how an individual store generates these SEO tags, but this is what I call a utility template.  It only shows up in the editor.  I have got one page.  I got take 100 ID's.  I dump them in this field and then it generates the SEO elements in text where I can see it.   

Then the cool thing, and I am really proud of this, is it actually counts the number of characters in the <title> tag and it tells me how much I have got left and if I am over.  It actually shows me what the Meta description is and it tells me if I need a caption.  And here are two pages…there are 98 more below this.  And Julie has done an awesome job of going in and actually writing out these awesome captions.  But Julie, your homepage needs a caption there darling.  But you are doing a good, good job.  And I have put that on several other stores, and it is just really helpful because you can see it all in one spot.  You can see the caption field is the body text.   

Let me start off from the top.  The big purple thing is the <title> tag.  You can see the Meta description, which is just the name, which that is not good.  That is using that old Solid Cactus Meta description.  Fix that.  Rip that sucker out.   

Then in the Meta keywords it looks like you are using the same Meta keywords across the entire site, which that is not good.  Actually, I don't know if that hurts you or not.  Meta keywords really don't matter, but it makes me a little nervous. 

All right. Optimize on site.  We have done optimize on page, but now it is optimize on site.  Time wise, I think I am running a little bit tight.  I am sure Mike will cut me out.  I got two minutes. All right.  Great.   

Basically, what that means is find good store pages for embedded links.  And so like if I wanted "remove dog smell"; if that was my keyword phrase that I wanted to rank for, I would search my entire site for that phrase for pages that don't already link back to my OdorMute pages.   

And what I will do is I do a query on Yahoo, which is site:yourdomain, which limits the pages returned to just your store, minus link to whatever URL that you want to get keywords to because you don't want to show pages that you already have links from, and then plus your converting keywords phrases.  So there are three elements that you search for on Yahoo, and this was one for "orange dog collars," one of my favorite pet phrases that gets no traffic, but the guys in the house of representative seems to like it.   

Then you want to optimize offsite, and here is an example of what we live with out here in Mississippi.  You guys think we all live out in the swamp and don't wear shoes, but actually, sometimes we do have possums everywhere.  We had a possum break into one of my brother's birdcages.  And you can see I have got embedded links.  This is on a blog that is off the site.  I like having multiple sites.  I have got my own networks of sites and I am real open about it.  They are not link farms.  They are actually different content sites and I do lots of text links back to my stores for my content.  You can see a link to Johnny House, and a Quail funnel, and a Predator proof funnel, and just a whole bunch of text below this and not that many links.  Tons and tons of pictures.  That is at Stevesnell.com if you want to see that. 

And that is it.  That is the end of my slides.  And man, I nailed it. I got one minute to go.  I am going 100 miles per hour.  Man, I have got 193 slides to cover.   

Yeah.  We got Mac, and we got Apple, and spam.   

Thank you. 

All right.   

Yep.   

Yep. 

If you have got $60, get an Olympus VN6200 PC.  It is my fifth digital recorder and it is the perfect one for recording content. 

Well the main thing is make sure that you got Analytics turned on.  And whether it is Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics, that allows you to…Once you turn it on, you can go on vacation for a year and come back and you have got a year's worth of data.  I mean it is always connecting data.  And since it is hard wired into the store now, you don't have to worry about the implementation being right.  Is it recording all my transactions?  And Whittaker had to do all these triple back flips to get GA to work with the Yahoo Store.  You guys have got it baked in now.  I run GA and Yahoo Web Analytics on all my stores so that I can kind of see two different kinds of reports and kind of watch things. 

But run Analytics so that you can collect these SEO...You can see other words in it, but I mainly use it for getting 21,000 converting keywords.   

Right.  Well Yahoo Web Analytics is so much more powerful than GA.  I mean GA is playing catch-up.  And let me brag here for just a minute.  Buying index tools was awesome.  I have used them for four years and it is so powerful.  I mean I fall off into it.  I have got 100,000 keywords.   

Now Google, it is easy.  It is kind of easy to use and there are some pretty graphs and stuff like that.  But man, if you want to dig in, get you an IT guy and let him dig into your stuff. 

But for my top tips, optimize your homepage.  Get your <title> tag, it is text on the page, like 500 to 1,000 words, and hyperlinks embedded in that text to your

most valuable pages with you most valuable keywords.  I mean if you do that, that is 80% of the battle for most Yahoo stores for SEO. 
 

Yep.  Yep. 

It is a never ending battle.  I mean the thing is I like to give a lot of this information away because we have been doing this for 12 or 13 years now and so many people helped us get to where we are, I feel it is my responsibility…You know that is why I wrote the book.  That is why I put a lot of information out there. 

Figuring out what the SEO website is, that is a $5,000 or $10,000 consultation with some of the guys that go to these conferences we have. 

Yeah, absolutely.  Go to Amazon and search for Yahoo Store and Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies.  It came out in 2006 but there is still some pretty good information in there.  I make $1, so buy a book. 

If you go to Robsnell.com you can sign up on my newsletter.  Email to info@ystore.com gets you on my auto-responder for six emails and then you are on my newsletter.  I send out two or three newsletters a year.  But that is probably the best way to get in touch with me. 

Let me add one thing.  I have about 100 people that I owe links to, and I will hook up with you all.  I have been up for 36 hours, and so I am going to bed.  And I promise I will email all of ya'll in 18 hours when I wake up.   

Thanks Mike. 

WHEN: Wednesday, October 14 10am PT / 12noon CT / 1pm ET

WHAT: SEO Tips & Tricks for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions with Rob Snell. You will learn SEO best practices for Yahoo! Stores. Drive customers to your store through organic search engine optimization (SEO).

BONUS: If you're one of the first 20 people who answer these 10 questions AND participate in my Webinar next week, I'll give you a free link with the anchor text of your choice -- ROB SNELL

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