Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Marisa. That's good news. Keep in mind that it is not uncommon that you get an initial bounce with optimization. Keep an eye on the ranking as it may fluctuate and eventually settle after a few crawls to consistent rank.

Agreed on the silo groupings (neighborhoods). I've got some retooling to do. Thanks for that.

Its interesting on the sitemap deal. Some pro's recommend it always. Some don't like them at all. Now you're commonly seeing product indexes and category indexes.

I'm inclined to get rid of it (I'm just afraid my site was not set up optimally so I'm retooling there as well).

Thanks Brent. Here's a product page and here is our sitemap in the footer.

What's worse is paying a lot and getting nothing.

Here's a good quick reference for understanding the difference between broad, phrase and exact matches.

We've got about 1,700 products and 6,600 pages on our site. I recently finished up adding similar product links and popular category links to our product and category pages in an effort to juice up the pages that sell and make us money.

I also added a category html sitemap in the footer.

A couple of the targeted category rankings are moving down.

Am I possible accruing a penalty for overusing anchor text?

Is this internal linking strategy poor form?

Thanks.

I'll add one more thing that I forgot to mention.  How low do you go on competitive keywords? It's a rather arbitrary number, but I've heard it recommended that you should look for longer tail phrases that return a minimum of 500 searches a month and maximum of 10,000. If you have a lot of products that don't generate more than 500 exact phrase searches a month, you can only go with the best returns available.

Good morning Shara. Here's some observations and final thoughts:

I did a quick comparison look at both variations of keywords. The broadmatch of the terms is the same at 1,000 local searches a month each with a cpc average of .84 and .85 respectively. This data is not very helpful in that the broadmatch results suggests Google is seeing the phrase similarly (semantically) and does not help you make a wise decision.

"Preppy Monogrammed Gifts" phrase match returns 880 monthly results a month with an average cost off .88 a click. Better information for you, but better yet lets look at exact match results.

Finally, the exact match results for Preppy Monogrammed Gifts come back with 720 results a month with an average .92 a click. Exact match for Monogrammed Preppy Gifts returns only 12 results a month at .54 a click.

You could also put this information in the AdWords traffic estimator for more cost/benefit analysis but for the sake of time we'll go with results from Keywords.

I would interpret this data and optimize for the Preppy Monogrammed Gifts as it has a sizable (but more competitive) reach. The competition drops off so much for monogrammed preppy gifts, you have to ask if it is worth the time and effort considering your ROI could be so low because of the low volume. Once you optimize for Preppy Monogrammed Gifts you will probably rank well for the alternate phrase anyway because they are so close semantically and Google recognizes that.

Finally, when looking at Keyword results, I make decisions based on "phrase" and [exact match] with exact match having the most influence driving my decisions.

Wow, Shara. WAY TOO MANY keywords for any page. I'm concerned for you as it violates the most basic principles of SEO. You might consider this:

1. Spend time in Google Webmaster tools and glean all you can from its SEO instruction.

2. Spend time in the learning center here at SEOmoz.

3. Narrow optimization to the most relevent keywords by user intent, traffic volume and cost/benefit.

4. Understand principle of keyword cannabilization.

5. Understand principle of duplicate content.

6. Title tags are limited to 60-70 characters. Its a challenge for all of us to use that space as wisely as possible in conjunction with our on-page optimization. You've only got space in the title tag to optimize for 1-2 maybe three keywords depending on how long the phrase.

7. Typically, organic search results for an ecommerce site will land on category and product pages.

8. Category pages are typically made up of shorter tail 1-2 keyword phrases (preppy gifts or monogrammed preppy gifts).

9. Product pages are typically longer tail 3-4 (personalized dry erase board).

10. Good luck!

Here's a dated thread (2009) from Rand.

And another from a daily blog a few days ago.

Rand's blog #2 is what concerns me.

Take this page for example (Alan, hold your breath this is a CMS site). The intent is to channel the juice to those pages.

Every page on our site has a similar link strategy. I've tried to link according to the product "neighborhood" or to similar/related pages. The only exception is the link to our western horse tack page. I've tried to link to the western tack page from just about every other product and category page.

The result is a sizable increase in page authority, but just recently the page rank has dropped significantly.

My understanding from other threads is that a person can "stuff" anchor text and accrue a penalty for it.

Alan, is your article suggesting an html sitemap is not necessary if I'm conducting targeted linking on product and category pages?

I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.

Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer.

We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer.

Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text.

I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories.

If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site?

Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice?

Thanks.

Thanks Dr. M. We are like a Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Target and Feed Store rolled into one and we rank well locally across the categories.

I'm inclined to believe you are correct in that signalling city keywords would not automatically or significantly diminish ranking outside the city.

However, considering the input from others, specifically the volume of search as found in Google Insights/AdWords etc. and the length of the title and how it affects the other keywords, I'm inclined to think I should take the local tag off of those products that don't need to be sold locally - and we can identify those pretty easily.

Would others agree? Thumbs up if I should take it off or thumbs down if I should leave it as it could only help and not hurt.

This thread still says answered and now its buried in the forum. I think we're done.

I'm still very curious about something more definitive on this before removing the local tags from national products.

Same thing happened to Zuckerberg.....

Thanks to the both of you for the excellent feedback. There's a lot of strong suggestions here to dig into. Off I go!

P.S. Robert, if there's an app or something for texting address and phone numbers with a click, please share.

See ya on the threads.

Will do. Thanks Miriam.

Is there any way to quantify how an eCommerce site affects its respective brick and mortar store? I can show the owner of a brick and mortar store how much sales we did last week, month and year. However, I can't show him what it did for his brick and mortar store. What do I do? I want to claim credit for as much gravy as I can! Thanks.

Hi Miriam,

Is there any way to make this thread active again? Somehow it got answered - perhaps when you put a staff approval on Nick's response? I didn't tag it as answered as I'd like more input from others if possible.

As to your question(s):

We sell a lot  of products such as barn kits, lumber, timbers, fencing, hay, etc. that customers can pick up at the store or we can deliver within our state with our own delivery trucks. These products are primarily for in city/state customers that cannot be shipped via traditional carriers such as UPS.

When we got the site off the ground, I optimized those in-state "non-shippable" products with an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma tag in the title for a couple of reasons:

1. so local customers within the state will find it and buy it and

2. in order to get money rolling in rather quickly and it did (local optimization will do that).

As the site grew, I only put local tags on those products that were not shippable and took the local tag off the products we could ship out of state via commercial carriers (UPS, Post Office etc.).

Suggestions were made I should optimize locally for even more products (our horse tack for example). We live in a state called the "Quarter Horse Capital of the World" with lots of equine events, rodeos, Cowboy Hall of Fame etc. So I put local tags on all of our horse tack.

Thinking it wouldn't hurt anything, I put local tags on all of our products so anyone in Oklahoma looking for our products will find them. Whether there are 100 searches a month in Oklahoma for our term, or only 1- at least we'll rank for it.

Again, we rank very well locally for the vast majority of our terms. I'm just now beginning to wonder if this approach could backfire in any way regarding reach outside of our state.

We sell to people all over the US, so I'm inclined to think we're okay, but I'm not certain.

As we grow in authority and can rank for more keywords, I thought we could rein in the local tags and remove them as we won't need the localization as much since we'll rank better nationally with a more authoritative domain.

Is this a flawed approach?

Is localized optimization compromising our reach?

Does Google attribute less relevance to our titles for keyword queries that do not contain our city and state and therefor move others ahead of us?

Thank you.

Miriam, this is going to take some time so I will have to pick this up at home. In the meantime, feel free visit our store.

Thanks.

I'm a bit confused now. My question is: if "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?"

Nakul, what are you saying?