Some of our merchants may have logged into their Product Details and suddenly wonder ‘Hey, where did my Keywords go?’

Here’s the lowdown on what’s happened with SEO Keywords.

Meta-keywords are no longer useful.

Search engines like Google and Bing are constantly updating their search algorithms to improve their organic search results – after all, their success hinges on delivering the most relevant results for search terms across the web.

What this means is that strategies and techniques that used to help with search engine optimization (SEO) are now obsolete. Such is the case with the attribute that was known as ‘meta-keywords’ (or what was essentially the keyword field in your Product Details). Spammers haev abused the function and put in keywords that were completely unrelated to their content in the hopes of improving their traffic numbers. Over time, search engines like Google have lessened the importance of meta-keywords in their search algorithms until the point where they were essentially obsolete.

This is why we decided to finally remove this field from Meta Tags completely in our latest Product Update.

So what can I do improve my SEO?

So without the SEO keyword field, how can you do to be sure your products are optimised for search?

As we mentioned earlier, search engines are constantly refining their strategies and they keep this information top secret, in order to minimize its potential to be abused. So there’s no real ‘secret sauce’ to get your page ranking at the top; SEO experts deploy different strategies and best practice techniques to improve overall rankings and visibility. These are usually devised from their own observations, testing as well as general industry knowledge.

With that being said, there are definitely a few best practices that every SEO expert can agree on. Here’s what you can do help improve your product rankings:

1. Descriptive Product Titles
The single most important thing you can do is to make sure your Product Titles are descriptive. What do we mean by descriptive? It means you should know what the product is just from reading its name.

If you’re selling a robotic pool cleaner that’s made by a brand called Widget and its model number XU74K  - a good descriptive Product Title is:

‘Widget Robotic Pool Cleaner (XU74K)’

or something to that effect.

A poor Product Title would be something along the lines of:

‘Model XU74K (Widget Brand)’

Why?

Because to Google the Product Title is the single most important indicator of what the product is. And it can’t tell that it’s a ‘robotic pool cleaner’ from the second example, so it’s very likely that the product won’t show up for relevant search queries such as ‘pool cleaner’ or ‘robotic pool cleaner’.

2. Write a clear product description
Just as you want to provide your customers with more information about your product, the product description also helps search engines learn more about the item on offer and what search terms might be relevant. So take some time to write a clear, informative and relevant description for your product rather than just dashing off some specs or leaving it blank.

3. Organise your products into descriptive categories
Creating descriptive categories for your store is a great way to let search engines know more about your products and relevant the keyword search terms you want to be target. It’s best to group products by clear category types – so all of your ‘candles’ should come under a single category rather than scattering them throughout the site. Take extra care in making sure your category names are descriptive. As with your Product Titles, a category name like ‘Summer’ might sound creative and whimsical but it tells customers (and search engines) nothing about the items that you’re selling.

Let us know if you have some more SEO tips to share!