Travidia is pleased to announce the release of several Marketplace Suite enhancements to greatly improve our newspaper partners' search engine ranking. Our engineering team has been working on search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for the past year to help improve the rankings of your shopping channel in popular search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!
 What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of designing and indexing a web site specifically for the search engines with the goal of achieving the highest possible rankings according to the selected keywords. Without top listings, your web site has little chance of gaining critical search engine traffic
Why is SEO Important?
Generating and maintaining traffic to your advertisers' messages online is the single most important item in creating a successful online marketplace. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is as important as choosing the right print or electronic media to promote your product or service. Creating a web site without SEO is like buying television ad time without consulting the market information provided by the television station. How do you know that your money is being well spent? How do you know whether you are reaching your target audience?
SEO is a critical part of online marketplace development. Without effective SEO the resources dedicated to making your online shopping channel a success may be wasted because that information is not reaching its intended audience.
Over 85% of Internet users use search engines to find products and services. SEO ensures your shopping channel has all of the necessary criteria to rank high in search results. Without high rankings, your shopping channel has little chance of gaining search engine traffic and your advertisers see less value in promoting their goods and services online.
What is Travidia Doing to Increase My Search Engine Ranking?
As part of Travidia's commitment to provide our partners with the most innovative and powerful solutions in the industry, we have started the year with targeting search initiatives for our newspaper partners.
Travidia recently announced the release of our Integrated Search and advanced search capabilities; SEO now follows to round out our Marketplace Suite, providing the most advanced newspaper shopping channel platform technology available.
Meta Tags
A meta tag is a hidden tag that lives in the <HEAD> of an HTML document. It is used to supply additional information about the HTML document. To use meta tags to your advantage in search engines, Travidia focuses on your description and keywords specific to your market.
The meta description tag is used to describe what your page is about. Engines that use it will supply the content of this tag when displaying a list of links. For example, if you do a search on "DFW Shopping," you will see the description listed on the search results page (see example below). Travidia continually analyzes data from your market, determines the most popular searched terms and caters your meta description tag accordingly.
The meta keywords tag helps search engines to categorize your site, and to allow people to find your pages more quickly. Again, Travidia analyzes your marketplace, determines the most popular keywords being searched on in your market and caters the meta keyword data accordingly.
The example above demonstrates a search in "Google" on the keyword combination "shopping dfw." Travidia has optimized the Fort Worth Star-Telegram site to rank high using popular keywords and repetition of market name in the meta tags, "Dallas - Fort Worth."
Title Tags
A title tag is essentially an HTML code snippet that creates the words that appear in the top bar of your web browser. The title tag is one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.
All search engines use title tags to gather information about your shopping channel. What you put in the title tag is a key factor in which search queries you will rank highly with in the major search engines. Travidia configures title tags in your shopping channel to reflect your market and help you achieve the highest possible search engine ranking.
Alt Text
Short form for Alternative Text, it is an <img> property that is used as a placeholder when the image is loading and for usability purposes.
Travidia uses alt text to describe images such as ROP ad sub-regions and thumbnails for special sections or inserts. In the case of a product image such as an ROP sub-region or catalog item, Travidia builds in alt text to describe the product in such a way that someone with a text browser or images turned off knows what the image is about and more importantly helps the search engine determine what the item is.
The example above demonstrates alt text for an ROP sub-region for Fry's Electronics. Having the alt text loaded with specific keywords related to the location, the item and the advertiser greatly increases the chances of a consumer finding this item when searching specifically for computers and accessories in a particular market.
Page Headings
Page headings are another way Travidia has helped optimize pages for higher search engine ranking. Depending on where a consumer navigates to in your shopping channel, the page is accompanied by a text page heading that describes the page they are on. The example below shows a page heading that is rendered when clicking on the "Automotive & Vehicles" category. Repetition is seen in the breadcrumb links, the page heading and the sub-category heading.
Important keywords or keyword phrases should appear at least three times on a page. Travidia has placed these important keywords in the title tag, the meta tags and lastly in the main content of the page.
By main content, we mean the text that falls between the <body> and </body> tags in the HTML document, in this case the page heading, breadcrumb link and sub-category heading as shown in the example above.
Working to Make Your Shopping Channel a Success
Travidia continues to improve our market-leading line of products and services. Search Engine Optimization is just one of the ways we are helping improve results for you and your advertisers. Throughout the rest of the year Travidia has scheduled product releases aimed at making your online shopping channel initiatives more successful. |
Monday, November 23, 2009
PHONE TRAVIDIA: 1-866-WEB-4ADS (932-4237)