Page Titles SEO Title

[WillBlackburn]

Hi,

I run an e-commerce store and within the CMS I define the SEO title, SEO description and SEO keywords for each item.

I spoke to a SEO firm who advised me to start every product title with the colour, as this will reduce the duplicate page titles and serve me well in the future.

Whats everyones view on this?

Does naming something Grey Armani Jeans | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique stand up better against Armani Jeans Grey | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique?

Any help or tips on how to format the page titles and descriptions would be great.

Thanks

Will

[Marcus_Miller]

Hmmm, I am not sure the answer is that simple.

You certainly don't want duplicate page titles, so having the product page with a unique page title based on specific attributes of the product is a good idea so, in classic SEO example terminology:

• Grey Widget | Widgets Store
• Red Widget | Widgets Store
• Blue Widget | Widgets Store

But, I think you have to beyond page titles here. If you are going to have hundreds of product pages with the only real difference between being the introduction of the word 'grey' then you may have trouble. If you start to combine this with other standard ecommerce product page problems like generic descriptions that already exist on hundreds of other pages then you will have no better luck simply by adding the colour to your page titles.

You can't simply tackle your sites SEO in this reductionist way and rather than just concentrating on the problems with your page titles it may be a good idea to examine your product pages in more detail.

1. do other sites have the same page titles?
2. are you using generic product descriptions?
3. are the product pages all near duplicates? That is, do they just vary by a tiny bit of content on each page?

Ultimately, and I am not the first to say it, if you want great ranking product pages you need great content related to those products. If other sites already sell these products and there are tons of people with the same product descriptions then you have an opportunity to piggy back the duplicate massive but you need to work on those pages and give something unique and linkable.

There is a great article from Dr. Pete that is well worth a read that covers the different types of duplicate content. Read this and then see if you see your product pages in these descriptions:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

There is also a good whiteboard Friday with Rand covering killer product pages :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce-seo-making-product-pages-into-great-content-whiteboard-friday

So, not exactly an exact answer to your question, but I am not sure how much that would have helped.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

[WillBlackburn]

Thats great mate. Yeah I understand the problem putting just a colour in front of an item can course. For Jeans I use the following Blue Armani J31 Jeans Classic Fit Straight Leg | Armani Jeans from Designer Boutique. I try to mix the page titles up as much as possible.

The product descriptions are all unique, as we are aware of dup content, however the staff member who puts the descriptions on usually types 4-5 bullet points with about 6-9 words in each point. Is this sufficient?

Are keywords pretty much redundant now? Our CMS let us input keywords, but not sure of the value of these any more.

Cheers, Will

[EGOL]

I think that if you have pages for

Grey Armani Jeans, Blue Armani Jeans, White Armani Jeans, Black Armani Jeans, Brown Armani Jeans, Green Armani Jeans, etc. etc......

... the title tags are the smallest part of your problem.

[MatthewEgan]

All Armani jeans should have a specifc style name.  Not only does that help the stores identify the cut and the style, but it'll also help with your SEO.  If the jeans don't have a style name, maybe make one up?

The Armando, The Anibelle, The West, the Mark IV, etc.

[WillBlackburn]

As much as I apprieciate everyones comments, why does it seem that only in the SEO world do people reply to beginners questions with unhelpful, snide comments that offer no input or knowledge what so ever.

Its like reading a crypic code trying to figure out what people mean.

What problems do you forsee? Do you have any advice, guidance etc... that will actually help me and others who read this post, or is it all just simple one liners that leave the user thinking, what am I doing wrong and what can I do to get better?

I do not simply use the colour, I was more stating that putting it at the beginning allows the duplicate title problem to be sorted in some way.

All product titles will include a colour, brand, model, style etc...

Any help would be great.

Thanks

[WillBlackburn]

Hi, thanks for your advice.

Yes all procuts do have a style and in some case a model number. I am trying to use the following format.

colour, brand, product, model, stle

so Blue Armani T-Shirt Long Sleeve or Grey Cruyff Vanenburg Trainers Leather

Again any further advice on product titles would be great.

Thanks

[EGOL]

The problem in most cases is...  The content on each of these pages is identical except for the color of the product.  There might be 150 words describing the product and 149 of them are the same on every page.  The one word that changes is the color.

These pages very often are filtered from the search results.

The solution is to write entirely different content for every variation of every product.... or have one page for each different style of jeans where any of the colors can be purchased.

The choice between these can be made by determining the search volume for jeans of a specific color and how well your site already competes for the style.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Will

I believe the point being made is that the market is very competitive and where there are hundreds of existing search results for these types of queries, you have to give Google a damn good reason to bother displaying results from your site as opposed to from many other highly authoritative sites.

As stated by EGOL - these types of results are often filtered out as google wants to return a rich and varied set of results and not just hundreds of pages competing on price (the shopping filter allows for this).

It's hard to provide generic advice as there are so many variables here - what are your pages like? who is the competition? What do the results look like for the competition?

You say you are using unique descriptions on your product pages and that is great as most people don't but to really advise any further it would help if you could post a link to a couple of your pages and maybe we can provide some more targeted guidance.

Hope it helps

Marcus

[WillBlackburn]

Hi Marcus, Thanks for your help.

if you have a look around various product pages here: www.designerboutique-online.com you will see the descriptions that are put on for each item.

I am in the process of working with the lady who inputs the product decriptions to try and make them a bit more fulfilling and decriptive.

As for the SEO decriptions, these can at times be similar with maybe colours and styling changing.

What would you suggest for effective product descriptions and effective SEO descriptions? How long should each be, and what words should I be getting in there?

Cheers

Will

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Will

It's tough to advise you off the cuff on content for your products but do some keyword research, see what people are searching for in relation to these products and see if that gives you any insights.

It may give you blog post ideas to pick up pre-purchase search traffic and it may also help you flesh out those product descriptions as they are a bit skinny at the moment.

We want to think about the percentage of the total page that is unique and therefore having a longer product description, some reviews or other content that is specific to that page will certainly give you more scope for long tail search and help you stand out from the boilerplate product description merchants.

Fashion orientated blog posts about the different products may well be a good way to get some internal keyword rich links and pick up people searching before they are ready to buy. If you can then convert that kind of traffic to your twitter or facebook (or even email) then it all adds up to slowly bringing people in to the site and pushing out what you have to offer.

Hope that helps buddy

Marcus