Rather than crawling the Internet every 28 days, Google is now continuously “reindexing” the Web, according to Madison, WI-based e-marketing agency Netconcepts. This change, says Brian Klais, vice president of e-business services at Netconcepts, is an early holiday present of sorts for online marketers.
In the past, Klais says, retailers would optimize their Websites, wait for Google’s monthly crawl, and then wait another few weeks before any changes could be seen in their rankings and sales. “Not this holiday season,” says Klais. “Google’s new, deeper daily crawl lets retailers iterate changes and sales much faster, since Website changes can be reflected in Google within a day or so.”
I.merchants with online efforts planned for the peak weeks of holiday shopping, then, should not abandon optimizing their Websites during the next 30 days. Among the improvements that Klais suggests:
* Rewrite “dynamic” URLs to appear “static.” Complex dynamic URLs (containing “?”, “&”, or “=” characters) can result in a database-driven Website’s content being excluded from Google.
* Focus on your home page. Include links to products in competitive markets, opt for textural rather than graphical links, and avoid embedding content or links within Java, Javascript, or Flash.
* Tweak your templates. The category and product templates that serve up each category or product SKU must reflect not only the new URL structure, but also optimization of the HTML code as well. Extraneous HTML, such as inline Java scripts and style sheets, should be removed. Title tags should contain product names or related popular keywords. Descriptions should be located high up in the HTML code to give more prominence.