Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer

What if there was a free tool for your Yahoo Store that:

• Suggests better keywords you could be using in each page in your store?
• Shows your PageRank for every product in your store?
• Shows your backlink counts for every product in your store?
• Shows how well you're using meta tags for every product in your store?

Wouldn't you jump all over that?

Yahoo Stores are a powerful and relatively simple to use ecommerce solution but they certainly don't go out of their way to help merchants improve store and product Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The only SEO tools that come with the store are the new Search Engines section and the new Keyword Finder. The search engines section allows you to turn on sitemaps and provides a link to Yahoo Site Explorer -- not exactly the pinnacle of SEO analysis for your store.

The Keyword Finder is interesting, but the limitation is that it only shows keywords that people used to come to your site. It can only show you the keywords that you've already been successful with. Wouldn't it be a lot more useful to find out the keywords that you should be using?

With Promote My Site's new Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer there is a solution to help you work through any page or product on your Yahoo Store. You can get an immediate feel for how well each of your pages are doing, and a deep insight into the keywords that are actually present on your page and perhaps some keywords that you could add in order to increase your traffic. At the same time you can see how your individual products are doing with backlink popularity.

In our next article we'll go into the operational details on how to use the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer but let's start with a high-level first....

How Does it Work?

It all starts with telling the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer where to find your exported page information (objinfo.xml). If you haven't make your objinfo.xml file public, go ahead and do that right now by going to the Search Engines link in your Yahoo Store manager and clicking "enabled" for objinfo.xml.

Unless, of course, you're trying to keep your store a secret from the search and shopping engines, in which case keep it unpublished. By the way, you really ought to have your sitemap.xml turned on too.

Depending upon the size of your store, it may takea while to load your store into our system. After it is loaded, you'll see your complete product catalog in a scrollable grid. You can sort the grid by clicking on the header fields, and there is a set of filters to allow you to focus on specific parts of your store.

Drill Down Process

For each product in your store, you'll be able to see this data:

• Pagerank
• Count of Yahoo backlinks
• Count Google backlinks
• AltaVista index status
• All The Web status
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

Just select the row with the product you're interested in and click "Get Data" and it will load the statistics for that record.

How do you know what pages to look at?

You Know Your Products And Competitors!

Well, of course you do.  You can scroll through your products and examine those which:

• Have strong or weak PR
• Have many or few backlinks
• Have strong titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords

Yes, there are a million reasons to look at a page - you might want to play offence and go after a juicy niche or play defense and strengthen your core money maker. You could also spot product pages with strong PR that you might want to cross link to products with less PR.

Of course this is super-cool, but what can you do with it?

Review, Improve, Rinse, Repeat

Dive into a page and do some keyword work for any one, two, or three word phrase:

• Google traffic estimator
• Google SERP location
• Yahoo SERP location
• MSN SERP location

One of my favorite features is the ability to click through any keyword or keyphrase and go over to Wordtracker and find out alternative phrases to place on the page for more potential google love.

We had one beta tester notice that they had "rolex watch" (266 google searches max/day) well represented, but when they hit the free keyword search on Wordtracker the found out that "rolex watches" was even better, wtih 847 searches day/max.  That's a five minute change that could triple the traffic on a $5K item.

They also noticed that one of their best moneymaking pages was very effective for "rolex watch repair" (28 hits/day/max) but didn't have the keyphrase "repair rolex watch" (15 hits/day/max).  Again, that may not look like a big deal, but it was potentially 50% greater traffic on an important page for them.

Start With Baby Steps

Go on over to the Yahoo Store SEO Analyzer, plug in your URL, and give it a whirl.  Drill down into your highest traffic and most powerful pages.  Find one thing you can improve on each page and make the changes.  Observe the traffic.  See the effect on the bottom line.