Creating a product feed is simple if you have a e-commerce site. If you don’t have one yet, I’ve seen Yahoo stores do well in Google product search, but I imagine most e-commerce platforms are suitable. It helps to have a unique URL for each product; like quality score in paid search, the level of similarity between your product information and the page on which the user lands is an important factor for determining product search ranking.

I’ll walk you through the creation of a tab-delimited feed to upload to your site and enable data input to Google’s Product Search. To create a feed, use your Google account to access Google Merchant Center.

Then use Excel or another spreadsheet program to begin creating a product feed with the following specifications set up as column headers. Use the exact specification as header, i.e. copy and paste the text that appears in brackets on this feed specifications page.

Required

• id – an internal code to identify items. This could align with your e-com platform and product database or could be a made up number (i.e., just autofill these cells with 1, 2, 3 or 0001, 0002, 0003) as long as it is an alphanumeric code unique to each product.
• title – the title of your product. Be short and sweet here while including keywords where possible. The biggest mistakes here are to go over the 70 character limit or to attempt to over-standardize your product listings. Remember to write for the users, not the search engines. For example:
  • Bad: Medic Bracelet Jewelry – Premier Stainless Steel | American Medical ID
  • Good: Medical Bracelet – Premier Stainless Steel
  • Best: Premier Stainless Steel Medical Bracelet
• link – Google states URLs must link directly to pages about your product with no popups and redirects.  What Google finds when crawling this URL is likely the most important aspect of determining product rankings. You’ve got to land the user on the most relevant page, preferably one with a title tag that includes the title you provide in your product feed. I’ve seen clients show up in product search using a landing page that directs users to more than one product, but they did not rank very well with this strategy, most likely because the title tag of the landing page could not accurately reflect the titles of the listings themselves.
• price – the lower, the better; however, it must be accurate. Thus, items with variable prices don’t qualify for inclusion into the product feed. Sorry currency exchangers, gold traders, and ticket resellers – you’ll have to hock your variably priced wares somewhere else. For bulk quantities, include the smallest quantity available as a way to compete in price. I’ve got a client who sells custom temporary tattoos who is decreasing their minimum order quantity in order to compete in Google Product Search.
• description – remove all mention of “free” anything from the descriptions. Your descriptions should be accurate to the individual product and should not include any boilerplate sales information.  Err on the side of descriptive rather than sales-y; that is, include factual physical descriptions like color, size, material, and leave out less quantifiable adjectives like “perfect,” “pristine,” and “best.”
  • Bad: Classic medical ID alert bracelets offered in 14Kt gold. Personalized engraving is free; add all of your medical information.
  • Good: Classic style bracelet, with flat plate and curb style chain, in 14kt gold. Designed to contain critical medical information of the wearer. The bracelet’s plate comes engraved with a Star of Life to denote that it is a medical bracelet.
• condition – values are new, used, or refurbished, but you’ve gotta include one of them for each item.

Not required but recommended

• gtin – can be a UPC, EAN (European), JAN (Japanese), ISBN (for books). If you resell products from a manufacturer, you can contact that manufacturer for a UPC. Unfortunately, Google leans on this data point quite heavily; previous experience shows me that product feeds with UPC values rank better in Product Search than those without. A UPC or other identifier helps Google group your products for price comparison.
• image_link – use images. You will not rank as the top result without an image. Use an image bigger than 400 x 400 so Google can make decent looking thumbnails. I recommend that this is the same image you use on the URL provided in the ‘link’ column.
• product_type – include the category closest to your own in Google’s taxonomy. It only recommends multiple categories for rare situations; in most cases, it’s probably better to create your own category:
  “Clothing & Accessories > Jewelry > Necklaces > Medical Identification” where only medical identification is custom and all else is within Google’s standard taxonomy
• quantity – if you can somehow automatically update this to reflect data from your product database, it will be helpful for ranking your products in search.
• availability – in the same vein, this also helps Google ensure that you’ve got something available. Include “in stock” as the value here if you want to compete in Product Search. I can think of rare occasions where you would use the “limited availability” option, like for a rare book, but you’re probably not going to have trouble competing in product search if your inventory is actually that rare. If you’ve set up the quantity field to automatically reflect your product database, you should set up this field to change to “out of stock” as soon as quantity reaches 0.
• shipping – four sub-fields here represent a shipping estimate for the product: country, region, service, and fixed shipping price. You can leave out region if you have a fixed price for shipping as such:
  US::First Class Mail:7.00,US::Priority Mail:12.00,US::Express Mail:24.00
• tax – tax works similarly to shipping except your quantitative field is a percentage of the item price rather than a fixed rate. The sub-fields are country, region, tax rate, and a ‘y’ or ‘n’ for whether tax is charged on the price of shipping. If you don’t charge tax, you’ll still want to include ‘::0:’ in this field. If you charge tax only in one state, like many US e-com companies, you’ll have ‘US:TX:8.25:n, US::0:’ in this field.
• shipping_weight and size – two separate fields that you’ll want to include if you have this information available.

That covers most items. There are more fields available at the Feed Specification page that will be specific to certain product categories like electronics or clothing. There are also fields available for on-site product review data if you’re using something for that.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet, save it as Text Tab Delimited and upload it to your web server. Go back to Google Merchant Center and let Google know where your product feeds lives.

Outside of filling up all the fields in that spreadsheet, the quantity and quality of shopping site reviews associated with your domain name come into play as well. Tom Critchlow wrote an article for YouMOZ that does a pretty good job explaining where and how to get these reviews: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-rank-well-in-google-products-search-a-big-list-of-places-to-get-reviews One strategy is to encourage users to rate their site experiences at one of a few sites from that list; to keep it fresh, it could be auto-rotating a short list of links from a longer set of these site review sources.

Coming soon: how to get into Yahoo and Bing product searches (hint: it’s more confusing but less competitive)

I’m a CG artist studying at The Art Institute of Austin and recently transferred here from The Art Institute in Portland, OR. I’m currently studying 3D development and strive to create work that is  applicable to all types of  media. This includes, but isn’t limited to product visualization, game development, animation, and logo design. Since arriving in Austin I have been given the opportunity work with Tony here at  Branded Statement doing various design jobs.  I will be posting 2D and 3D projects here as things progress.

“Jump” is a term that describes a continuation of an article or other text on another page, first used for newspapers. I always liked the jump in newspapers because it generally uses the first word of the article’s second headline, which could make for some funny jumps (i.e., “see INTERCOURSE, page A5″).

Since nobody reads newspapers anymore, “jump” now applies to the link one must click to read the rest of a blog post. When I posit the question “to jump or not to jump?” I mean “should I put the entire body of my blog post on the page, or should you have to click another link to read it all?”

On the one hand, my beautiful content would get cut off. After years of being forced to write in an inverted pyramid format, I’ve developed a more stream-of-consciousness style writing that presents the most important information last. Thus, my posts would not benefit from a jump like some news posts would.

On the other hand, my posts are too wordy. I can’t even get my mother to get to the end of one, much less an uninterested reader. Having a jump-off point will help cut this down to a digestible size. Plus, the fact that nobody is reading my posts at this point in time means nobody is going to notice the change.

So to jump or not to jump? In my case, it’s going to involve a major shift in writing style to switch to the jump. But starting with my next post, I’ll start implementing the jump. There may be some pictures as well; but, alas, my sizable audience of dedicated readers, do not hold high hopes for this promise.

For example, a client may have a detailed product explanation and technical specifications for their Widgetbot 3000, and this information exists in the user manual, in some sales material, and on Amazon.com in the product description. My role is to find these various bits and pieces of similar content, create one detailed product writeup for the Widgetbot 3000, and ensure that this is used across all marketing for that product (currently and in the future).

I’ll be honest here: playing librarian for a company’s writing is incredibly boring. Creating a well-organized library for content, though, is the fastest route to a working content strategy for a business that already has a good amount of content written.

In the case of Branded Statement, though, I’m at the foundational level of content. Whereas my client work right now is unifying various versions of pages and pages of content, the word I need to perform to improve my own business is creating the first versions of the first pages of content.

Maybe I should be a little more defined in the initial writings: our mission statement, our 2010 goals, the type of clients we deal with, our processes. And to be fair, I’ve done some of this on the ‘about us’ and ‘what we do’ pages. It’s one of the things I’ve been working on improving, from a business perspective: create clear and (over)structured communication – you know, business writing.

On the other hand, I don’t think a blog is a place for that. At least, this blog isn’t a place for that. This blog is a place for readers to posit and to ruminate, while better getting to know the people behind Branded Statement.

To us, the brand encompasses – or should encompass – all communication with customers and potential customers. The tone and message of all this communication should be constant and persistent. The sum of these touchpoints is the brand; the brand is a product of what your consumers think and feel about your company.

So when we say branding, we mean everything. Your business name, logo, slogan, business cards, website, traditional advertising – even your product or service itself – affects the way consumers think and feel about you (i.e., your brand). If the message is not consistent, the brand is insincere; if the message doesn’t appeal to the customer, the brand is irrelevant.

We see it every day: local companies that can’t afford to update their marketing to be consistent and/or appealing. Some companies put effort into their presentation, but don’t have a website. Others have a web presence so outdated that it probably dissuades more potential customers than it manages to persuade.

My latte’s running low and it’s probably too late in the day for another, which means I’m leaving my post at the Austin coffee favorite La Tazza Fresca.

Note the lack of a website for LaTazza Fresca. I know I did.