When creating product data feeds for your products and services or as an affiliate, there are ways to optimize the data feeds to get the most out of them. Most merchants who offer data feeds aren’t always offering clean code and valuable description terms.
Thankfully, as an affiliate you can alter and make the data feed code better. As a merchant, you can try to offer your affiliates the most accurate and best data feed code possible to save them from having to do extra work so they can get on the job of promotion.
Product Titles
Understand how Google ranks product titles and name your products accordingly. Just like with article and blog post titles, the first three words in the title are the most important and should comprise the keywords. Which keywords are the most important will depend on your niche, your products, and your audience.
Product Descriptions
Searchers like well-written product descriptions that make sense. Put the most important words first, before the 1000 character mark. Remember that some of the information is in your optimized title, so in the description don’t repeat the title of the item. Use other descriptive and important keyword terms.
Product Images
It’s very important to include product images that really look like the product and look good as a thumbnail image. Ensure that the image stored on your server also has the “alt tag” information filled out, as that will be an added benefit when customers are looking at your product in the feed after a search.
Product Type
The product type is an important field to think about. You want your product type to provide a description that will help it rank higher in the search engines. Plus, it helps your customers better define your product. It will be important to do some keyword research to ensure that you have the best product type listed for your audience.
Product Links
When creating your data feed, ensure that the link goes right to the product in the picture and not to a main page or other page. If your customer is looking for black socks, finds a product matching that description and image in the search results, but clicks through and sees red tights, they will not keep looking around on the site for black socks.
Correct Price Points
Don’t put a lower price in the data feed than is on your site. Better to have the price point higher on the data feed and lower on the site. So, if you have a retail price that is the maximum it could be, put that price, and let them be surprised to see a lower price when they click through. Better yet, update your feeds to match your price.
By making sure these factors are optimized, your data feeds will become more valuable to you because they’ll work better getting you the kind of traffic you desire. Remember, data feeds can be updated more than once a day, so if you see a mistake, you just fix the mistake, then re-upload. What could be more simple?
