So far we’ve looked at keyphrase analysis by focusing on the most important phrases from a ‘search volume’ and ‘business importance’ perspective.

There’s another very important aspect we need to deal with relevant to ecommerce sites and/or large database driven sites.

What we need to do here is ensure that the ‘product pages’ in such sites have the relevant metadata in place to ensure appropriate search terms are captured.

For example – lets say we’re in the outdoor clothing business. We might surmise that people will search for brand, type, colour, size, gender etc when trying to find such products – eg ‘Black Berghaus womens Arana jacket’ or variations thereof.

In this case it would make sense to include all these terms in the ‘title’ tag.  The general approach would be to look at each ‘product’ page in your site, think of the different variables that people may use to search, then include them in the ‘title’ tag of this page. Of course you may want to optimise the other metatags as we’ve previously discussed – but at the very least the title tag will ensure you get visibility.

The variables will differ dependant on your types of product and the particular page in question – but it should be relatively simple to decide what key variables are relevant -quite often even model numbers will be relevant on some pages – eg  ’30CDI Worcester Greenstar Combi Boilers’ – so this would be a suitable ‘title’ tag on such a product page.

The same rules as peviously regarding title tags – so no more than 10 words to be included.

If you are lucky your content management system (CMS) might automate this for you and generate suitable tags as you enter product information. If not you’ll need to edit each tag accordingly.

The big advantage of this is that you will capture the ‘long tail’ – that is a large number of very specific phrases. As surprising as it may sound these phrases make up collectively at least half of the total search volume of relevant phrases. (as opposed to to ‘head phrases’ which are more generic).

These phrases tend to convert much better as well – for example someone searching for ’30CDI Worcester Greenstar Boilers’ and landing on a relevant page is much more likely to convert to a sale than someone searching for ‘combi boilers’.

Hopefully your CMS will help with this – if not its still worth doing manually over a period of time.