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Shopping Portals, Datafeeds, Product Feeds, Comparison Sites
Datafeed Management and Submission Services
Data and catalog feed submission and optimization is the process of correctly submitting product descriptions from your online catalog to comparison shopping engines (CSE's), such as, Froogle, Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping, Shopzilla and PriceGrabber. If done correctly, then your online product catalog will be optimized for the best possible rankings both on these CSE's, and possibly the general search engines.Optimization services generally mean achieving higher rankings on the search engines. but in this case, "optimization" on comparison shopping engines also means getting the most out of what you are allowed to list, thus creating better value to the user. Have you ever paid more for a product you were comparing to another, simply because you perceived more value from that site. Could it be that you trusted the site more and are more confident about what you were going to receive? Cheapest is usually not the best course. Studies consistently show that websites with more content receive more visits and higher conversion rates.
There is no doubt that it is vitally important that your ecommerce website site rank well on the search engines. At Industrial Traffic, we are capable of designing and building an interactive website that will do just that.
However there are dozens of shopping portals out there that you can take advantage of. Using these can obviously be used to enhance your web site and product exposure, but also can help your search engine rankings for your ecommerce website.
It is much more than simply signing up or linking on a few comparison portals you happen to be familiar with. It is about finding out the general profile of the web users on these portals, the overall traffic, traffic of your headings, and exploiting all available tools given to you to use on that web site. If you find that they don't match who you are targeting, then you are wasting your time. There are also many lesser known portals that use others to build traffic. They all require the same basic information, however each, if done correctly, can be used to target specific niches, and help different products get noticed in places you never thought possible. Doing this requires thorough knowledge of this ever changing web world, search optimization skills, technical writing ability and knowledge of the marketplace. You also need time. If you possess all of these, then you are in luck. However, if you are a small business owner, chances are you are limited in at least one of those attributes.
Industrial Traffic is well versed in the different shopping portals, from well know ones like ebay.com and cnet.com to lesser known, non vertical portals like edealinfo.com. Some comparison and shopping portals serve vertical markets like etsy.com, for example, is for merchants with hand-made items only. So what is different about each of these and how can they help you?
Solutions for Your Websites Success Online!
How are shopping portals different?There are 5 main categories of shopping and comparison portals. Your products may belong in all or some of them. Each category has an array of options by way of different website offerings their services to list your products and online company info. Here are some brief summaries of them all:
Product, Price, Brand and Seller Comparison Shopping Networks
The websites here tend to be the most popular and easiest to use.and sometimes FREE. They simply require or allow merchants like you to add items or upload their catalog to their shopping engines with no delay. Getting listed is easy, all you have to do is decide where you want to begin and follow the links on their pages for instruction. Some of the portals listed below are designed for niche industries or only allow certain kinds of products to be listed. Depending on what you sell, you may or may not want to include your catalog in all the shopping engines.
Some Shopping Portal and Comparison Shopping Sites Include:
| Google Product Search Live Product Search MSN Shopping The Find Shopping Deal Time Ugenie.com BrowseGoods.com Amazon.com Pronto.com Yahoo! Shopping Ask Shopping |
Lycos Shopping CNET AOL Shopping Pinpoint Netscape Shopping Smarter Like Shopzilla Bizrate Calibex Nextag |
Pricerunner Become MyTriggers Shop BIG BuyersEdge Price PriceSCAN PriceShaker PriceFish PlanetOnline and more… |
Product Marketplaces and Comparison Shopping Marketplaces
These are generally free, but some do charge a small fee. Well worth it though. The marketplace is different than the comparison shopping networks because the "listing sites" section features popular product and comparison shopping marketplaces for the merchants to include items sold through an ecommerce enabled store. For instance, the halfvalue.com marketplace is for halfvalue.com store owners and their products only. To be included you must own and operate a halfvalue.com store that has products listed for sale and opt in through an online form. These marketplaces usually made up of many merchants using the same technology and offering similar goods, which levels the playing field. This is important, because even large box retails like Walmart and target have stores on these types of portals. Your store can look just as good and have even better content, if only the time was put in. I guarantee target.com has someone creating content for their portals almost continuously... if you hire Industrial Traffic, you will too. These niche marketplaces are great for attain more search engine exposure and links to your website. Some marketplaces do charge a fee, but you can generally get listed for free either by using other services or selling through one of the individual marketplace storefronts. Some examples of these marketplaces are: buy.com, shop.com, shopping-power.com, shopify.com, monstermarketplace.com, lemonade, blujay.com and more.Online Auction Shopping and Bid Based Selling
Of course if you have left your house in the last 3 years..or at least used the internet, you have heard of ebay.com Internet auctions and ebay.com are as synonymous as coke is to cola. Many Online sellers have made a great living selling in these online auction marketplaces alone. You do not need to be an established retailer. Many of these sellers are simply selling stuff out of their house..and in some cases, they never even see the product, but I digress. Online auction shopping sites are for merchants who wish to run and maintain a number of listings over many auctions or other inclusion programs offered by the site. You list a product, including text description and images, and people place bids on what they want to pay. They are allowed to outbid each other. The bidding ends at a pre-determined time and the highest bidder wins the product..after they pay you of course. That is simplifying the process quite a bit, but you get the point. You can use CSE's (comparison shopping engines) and internet auction sites to help saturate search results with your product listings. These web auction sites do extremely well all over natural search results and spend millions on PPC campaigns. So you can use their marketing dollars and robust link base and content goldmine of a website to help your own products get found. Remember, you have to monitor each listing. So once you have 25 or more, the task can get daunting. That is where Industrial Traffic can come into play. Some internet auction sites that offer these services are: ebay.com, ubid.net, epier.com, begmetobuyit.com (I didn't make that one up), mightybids.com and more
Classifieds Listing and Product Classifieds Shopping
Online classified listing websites are a largely untapped avenue for SEO that is very effective in creating exposure for your products. The reasons why they work so well are many. One reason is that they are often not cluttered with graphics, so the search engines can read them much faster. Often, internet classifieds rank a well written description higher than some websites that spent $1000's for their page to optimized. They are very basic and to the point..an attribute that many like. Online classifieds have made it easy to list and sell your items with simple interfaces and easy ways to track results. The costs are either little or non existent. Some of the more popular online classifieds are: craigslist.com, google base, yahoo classifieds, kijiji.com, half.com, etsy.com and sell.com
Online Deal Finders, Bargain Hunter and Discounted Shopping Portals
These website portals specialize in listing discount, bargain and special deal products. These sites are a great way to unload a lot of inventory in a hurry. You can get great exposure for a lot of items... quickly. While people joke, that ebay.com is like a world-wide yard sale, I believe these sites match that description better. This avenue is relatively unknown..and definitely untapped... but that is one of the reasons why you are hiring Industrial Traffic..to find every possible opportunity to get your product relevant exposure. These discount shopping portals can be one of the largest money makers for merchants who sell these types of items online. Their submission and editing processes run fairly standard. Some more popular bargain hunter sites are: dealspl.us, dealtagger.com, dealbundle.com, shoplocal.com, pricewatch.com, streetprices.com, overstock.com, and more.
Consumer Reviews, Product Ratings and Consumer Guides
While a few of the above sites mentioned offer opportunities for you to place a review or feedback about a merchant or product, the following websites exist solely for that purpose (and to make their owners $$). Obviously, we cannot write reviews about your products or store for you. The idea is that this is info written by others.This poses a challenge. What Industrial Traffic CAN do, is make sure that your company is listed with a great description / company profile on all of these just in case someone who is there wants to write about how great you are. People will be a lot less inclined to enter a positive comment if they have to create a whole profile on you first. If there is already one there, then the forms are usually simple to use and takes the user at 5 minutes..depending on how much they have to say. These can be EXTREMELY powerful. For example, if your listing appears on a search engine and a review or 2 appears a few places down (a positive review), then what do you think will happen to your conversion rate? I recently stayed at a ski lodge with my family and the owner asked that if we were satisfied with our stay, that could we go to a particular review site and enter a good word about them. They provided me with a card with all the info. including the URL, steps to get to their listing and where to fill stuff in. I probably could have figured all of that out, but how many people do you think found it useful (those that don't live on the internet like me) to have that, and thus, filled out the review? I can tell you about 50! I saw 4 from the week we were there alone. This is a small place that just started doing this.and it has already netted them incredible exposure. Industrial Traffic would create ways to make it easy for people to want to place a review of your business or products, and make sure the listing is well written and optimized. Some product review websites are: epinions.com, pricetool.com, sprenzy.com, consumersearch.com, wize.com, buzzillions.com, resellerratings.com and more.Niche Shopping Portals and Specialty Product Engines
These have gained quite a bit of popularity recently due to people's frustration with being overwhelmed by these large websites that seem to have EVERYTHING. While those sites are great, they can be a bit daunting. These niches sites often have industry news and information that is interesting and useful to the user. This content helps them get ranked high under relevant phrases, and thus takes your listings with it. There really isn't much to say about these. They are a great way to list your products, but hard to find sometimes. Industrial Traffic will research your industry thoroughly to make sure your products are listed under every applicable shopping portal available.
Social Shopping, Product Sharing and Recommendations
These sites use the viral marketing method or more commonly known word-of-mouth. These websites allow users to recommend products to other members and in some cases some offers are made to people if they are a member of that social shopping network. These work well because there is an innate trust among member. So if you have a product(s) that can serve a large audience, and can get "in" on one of these, your sales should soar. The sites listed below are ideal for merchants who want to leverage and use social shopping networks, product sharing communities and merchant recommendation sites to help spread the word about the items they offer. Social shopping sites are growing fast and Industrial Traffic has been watching the trend since the beginning..implementing our clients where appropriate. Some of the more well known general social shopping portals are: stayhive.com, thisnext.com, crowdstorm,com, favoritethingz.com and more.
How can a shopping portal help my search engine rankings?
Specifically, each one of the above mentioned avenues can help in various ways, but what they all have in common is that they all allow you index fresh relevant content without the fear of being penalized for duplicate content. Out of all the algorithm changes that occur with the search engines, the one thing that has remained consistent, is that they rank well written, established, content filled websites higher than others. Of course all of the other factors matter, and we will take care of that, but this is the factor that has remained consistent, but is also the most tedious.
How can Industrial Traffic help me with this?
Because constantly updating your site and its listings with fresh content is tedious, people simply ignore it because of a lack of time. Industrial Traffic will put you on a schedule where you can be guaranteed that someone is looking at your website and updating it and its listings appropriately..so that you can process orders. We will also filter out any duplicate and undesirable content, optimize the titles, descriptions and keywords for all of your feed URL's, update your other tags, and start the process over again. We analyze your results; including your conversion rates and then we make appropriate changes where necessary. How will you know we are doing all of this. Sure, you will get reports... but mostly, you'll see results.Industrial Traffic does not specifically endorse any of the mentioned websites. We are merely mentioning them as examples. We have no relationship or partnership with any of them. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for anything that occurs on their website.
Custom Website Design, Development, SEO and Internet Marketing
If you don't see it on the list above, it doesn't mean we can't help you. Industrial Traffic, LLC has been providing our clients Search Engine Optimization, Website Design, Development, Web Hosting, Link Popularity, Pay per Click (PPC) Campaign Management and Internet Marketing and a variety of Web Services all over Maine (ME), Massachusetts (MA), New Hampshire (NH) and Vermont (VT) and the United States since 1997.Call 603.623.8006 ›› Email Us
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