I have recently received a lot of questions as to how retailers and other sellers can rank their products in Google. As you know, this place is called Google products or Google product search - formerly known as Froogle and Google Base. It is the leading comparison shopping engine for retail products launched by Google Inc. It is the process of searching for products online and is Google’s attempt to squash eBay. But again, as with all Google lists, there are many ranking factors that can help get your product onto the top of the - and into the hands of potential clients.
The first step with Google product search is to create a Google account - I am sure you have one, if you don’t then climb out from under that rock and get on it. Once that is done then you need to sign up for the Google Merchant Centre where you can upload your product feeds and make them easy to find on Google Product Search. There are, however, steps that must be taken before you can upload to Google product search.
Firstly you must decide how you are going to post items, you can do them individually or a bulk upload at once. For an individual upload it is very straight forward and there is a how to task wizard that will give you a step-by-step that any computer literate person can easily do. For the bulk upload, you need to create a tab-delimited spreadsheet (you can use XML), but the prior is easier. There are explanations on how to easily do this. Once this has been done, you need to register your upload and tell Google what you are uploading, what is coming and what it is named. Then once it is complete, you can upload to Google (limited to 100 000 items, which is not a problem for most)
First you need to download the template from http://base.google.com/base/products.xls and then follow the steps:
TITLE (your product name, kw, what you will be found on)
Description (Key phrase rich description, we all know the Google loves to crawl info)
IMAGE Link (URL of product Image)
LINK (product URL)
Price
You can fill in more if you would like, but these are seen as the essentials. The more info only benefits you, as with all Google ranking factors, the more content the better.
From there you will need to save as a txt file and upload – remember, Google only accepts txt files. Once you have uploaded, be patient as it can take up to 24 hours for the product to be listed in some cases. Products expire every thirty days so if you still want those products up there you will need to continue uploading.
Things to Note Title tag i.e. the product title is one of the most important pieces of information.
Product listings expire every 30 days, so updates are needed monthly - this may seem highly annoying, but it is Google’s way of keeping products fresh. New content is always valued, so if you keep updating and making sure everything is always correct, Google will be sure to look kindly on you. You can upload up to 100 000 products. You can also integrate it with Google Checkout and connect to Amazon, eBay and Yahoo.
What’s nice about submitting to Google Products is that it is a source of free search engine marketing, as now all your products are able to be viewed with the help of Google. To further increase the rankings, take all the above into account, such as description and title tags, and you will get the push the you need.
Updating Data
Similar to Places, updating your products and their info can give you an edge. The more it is updated, the more Google will recognize it as unique and fresh content.
Price
As said above, listing the price is important as Google gets a read of where to bracket your product. It has been said that the lower your price when compared to competitors, the more you move up the rankings - I think this is false though as you can just simply check this for yourself and see that it does not hold. More so, with Google’s new product search you are able to define parameters pretty finely from price, categories, in stock and even locate in area.
Reviews
There are two things that are similar to how you rank in Google places - and that is making sure that the info on the Google products page matches your product details on your site (citations); the second, which I feel is an important ranking factor, is Reviews. Positive reviews, as with place reviews, are very important to good ranking. As with traditional ranking factors, trust of a domain plays a big role (backlinks), but with a product the reviews play a huge part. Aside from also giving backlinks, they add that trust that Google wants to see in order to push your product listings to a higher ranking. So on my list, reviews would defiantly rank high on the on how to get your site ranked. There are plenty of methods to getting reviews, and I am not going to go into all of them, but besides from uploading reviews yourself (or employees), suppliers and clients are always a good source of a good review.
I’ve added some of the sites below that Google look at with regards to reviews being submitted - I haven’t listed them all, but I have given you enough to get a good start.
US Google Base Review Sites
www.dealtime.com
www.pricegrabber.com
www.cashbaq.com
www.epinions.com
www.flamingoworld.com
www.mrrebates.com
www.readprint.com
www.resellerratings.com
www.shopzilla.com
UK Google Base Review Sites
www.pricegrabber.co.uk
www.reviewcentre.com
www.shopzilla.co.uk
www.ciao.co.uk
www.dealtime.co.uk
www.truste-marketing.co.uk
www.webuser.co.uk
www.maxxsave.co.uk
www.dooyoo.co.uk
Cale Pissarra is an avid writer concerning anything about internet marketing and seo services. The world of seo marketers and Google algorithms keeps him busy for hours on end and he doesn't deny it.