Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/447632
22 FEDA News & Views Growing Your Business Online Part 4 By David Limon, eCommerce Solutions Specialist david@davidlimon.com A s one might expect, selling products online in the E&S industry has become more and more of a challenge, leav- ing all involved searching for improved ways to reach their target audience and grow their base. It can be a complex and tricky thing to do, but there are a few simple, and specific, steps you can take to reduce the complexity and give your business a great opportunity to grow online. Let's talk about feeds! Most of you may have heard of "feeds" by now. Understanding the different types and how they work can help you use them to their fullest capacity. Rich Snippets To begin, let's explore the most productive methods of improving the visibility of your online presence to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Two of the most impor- tant of these are Rich Snippets and Sitemaps. You won't need to worry too much about the terminology as we explore this topic, but just understand the general feel of each. As the name implies, Rich Snippets are bits of text or a set of hyper- links that make your listing on search engines much more attractive, more informative, and entices the reader to explore the listing before others. Notice the difference between these two listings. The one that draws your attention is the one with the color, the stars, a rating, and extra links to further information. There are many types of Rich Snippets, such as breadcrumbs, products, recipes, eCommerce Solutions Specialist By David Limon, eCommerce Solutions Specialist people, reviews, and videos. All are used to help search rank- ings by increasing your click-through rates and building your search engine ranking. Sitemaps Another very important method of increasing online visibil- ity is a Sitemap. This protocol allows your webmaster to note the URLs on your site that are available for ranking, which allows the search engine to view URLs in a more rational man- ner. There are specific common content types, such as Flash and Ajax—neither of which is processed by Google or Yahoo, so they would normally be ignored and potential visitors may never know about the content that these types provide. Sitemaps can include metadata about the webpage, such as how important the page is relative to the other URLs on the site; when it was last updated; and information about specific content types (image and video) on your webpage. Product Feeds and Comparison Shopping Engines Beyond improving your ranking in search engines, you'll want to highlight the great attributes of your products and allow the user to compare them to similar product lines using product feeds and comparison shopping engines. Let's consider product feeds first. One thing to note is that the data in your product feed is not necessarily what is communicated to the ultimate customer. It works a little like the whispering game because no individual merchant is obligated to deliver all of the data in your feed to the next merchant or customer down the line. Retailers will take the manufacturers' product data and use what is important to them in promoting the products and feature that their customers are interested in. Also, the search engines will compare data from multiple retailers to come up with a best result, which is not consistent in any way and may or may not resemble the original product data feed. A good product feed will help search engines display products in ways that are very informative to the con- sumer. Consider this search on baby formula. (See Page 26) Feed the Search Engines continued on page 26