After working with the Google Base Merchant Feed Mod from Numinix these past couple of months, I realized it was time for some instructions for entering product names and descriptions for Zen Cart.
This is not just for folks who plan to use or are using the Google Base (formerly known as Froogle). These instructions will benefit anyone with an ecommerce site – or even for that matter with any WYSIWYG editor interface. That interface is present in nearly all CMS scripts – makes it easier to add content on your website.
There are limitations to all those editors and that will be part of this conversation.
First, the images.
Naming images properly can be helpful for SEO (search engine optimization) and will prevent possible problems in the future.
Length: duh, there is a length limitation and since no one is going to count the character length of the image name, I’m not even going to mention what it is. Just know that keeping the name to 2, 3, 4 or so words is reasonable.
Spaces: remove all spaces, replacing them with either an underscore or hyphen.
Leave out common words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, and ‘or’ as well as characters such as &, parentheses, slashes, etc. Search engines ignore those common words. Some servers won’t accept the special characters and outputting the images names with ampersands to an xml feed, such as for Google base – Froogle, kills the feed.
Lowercase: some servers are case sensitive and it’s easier to remember image names (and file names) if you stay with one convention. Image.jpg, image.jpg, image.JPG are not the same files.
Some of that carries over to the product names.
If you use an ampersand in your name or description, your pages don’t validate. Not a big issue and since urls frequently have ampersands, links don’t always validate either. I just prefer to see the substitute used: ‘&’ The google feeder mod makes those changes for you in the names and descriptions so won’t break the xml feed.
Don’t use parentheses in your product name. The google feeder does not clean those out but may create havoc in google. It has never occurred to me to use parentheses but some folks do obviously. If you really want the separation from the rest of the name – just use dashes instead but you might also just rethink your naming conventions. There are better ways of naming.
For example, here’s an actual product name: Bronze (Silver Plated) Art Deco Pheasant. He’s trying to differentiate this one from the real bronze products but all he needed to do was use Bronze Silver Plated Art Deco Pheasant instead. Think of work arounds for your parentheses.
The google feeder mod does change the <, >, and curly quotes that may get pasted in from Word which brings up my next point.
Product Descriptions
First, one warning about the google feeder I just ran into. The google feeder mod does not recognize the use the space substitution of ‘ ’. It changes it to unusable and kills your feed. These sometimes get pasted in from html editors without the user realizing it. Then sometimes the user tries to get smart and add in many spaces for formatting. Ixnay, folks!
Zen Cart uses css (stylesheets) formatting for its pages and if you don’t like the way your product descriptions look when you just put text in, the css should be changed.
Many site owners will use that WYSIWYG editor to massively format their products or else format in Word and then paste in the formatting. The main result of these 2 practices is code bloat and sometimes even causes the formatting to fail online. Bear with me a minute here – got to get technical. When you paste in Word text, sometimes the paste includes all sorts of crappy code. It does paste in with extra unnecessary code. The more code on your pages, the harder it is for search engines to find the relevant text.
Also, that extra code sometimes makes it impossible to change that formatting at all, leaving the website owner tearing out hair and moaning, “What in the blue blazing h— did I do wrong?” or cursing computers, technology and Zen Cart. The more you format and play with text in Word, the more likely this is to happen, by the way.
Then if you spend a lot of time formatting in the editor, that also adds in extra unnecessary code.
It’s reasonable to either bold your text and maybe even italicize (not always very readable in a browser). If you want something larger, try changing the paragraph type. (FCKeditor names that dropdown as Format. HTMLarea shows the Header 1 at the top of the dropdown.) The choices are mainly the heading styles.
Heading styles such as H1, H2, H3 are read by search engines as more important parts of your text (so is the bold). Normally each heading is progressively larger the lower the number with H1 being the largest and therefore most important. So if you are needing something larger, I have to assume it’s more important than the rest of the text. It should important enough to have keywords in it to give the search engines something worthwhile to index.
For example:
‘Important Note’ has nothing of importance in it. You may want it to stand out to whoever views the page but making it really big is akin to shouting and is jarring and unattractive.
“Product Specifications’ might warrant an h3 or h4 or bold but that also has no strong importance. ‘Calligraphy Quote Author’ is more specific and carries 2 keywords I want to use on my calligraphy products. That’s worth an H2 or h3. I tend to chose the smaller by the way.
Zen Cart uses H1 and H2 tags but not so many h3 tags. So using H3 or H4 tags is actually more appropriate.
Don’t change the colors. Don’t change the font itself.
You already have enough colors for use on the web site. Don’t add in anymore; it’s confusing and unattractive.
Font changes may well not have the results you want. Fonts can only be viewed on someone else’s computer if they have the specifically named font. Let the CSS stylesheet control that – and don’t change stylesheet to something like Lucida or Comic Sans. Stay with Arial and it’s variations or Times and its variations. Your visitors are more likely to see the same thing you do.
Fix those long descriptions!
If you have a lot of information in your description and that page goes on forever, consider using the Tabbed Products Pro mod. That breaks up the information with tabs instead of all of it on one “page”. That install is not easy and it’s not a easy mod to configure but the results are really nice.