When I speak with small business owners that run e-commerce sites about the need to have "enough copy" on each page, many of them respond by telling me there just isn't enough information about a product to create any amount of content. I can understand how it might seem that way, especially if you are taking catalog content and shifting it to the web. Nonetheless, it's absolutely essential that these types of companies learn to look beyond "product specs" as their source of online content.

There's no set number as far as how many words of content you need to have on a page for it to be able to rank well, but common thought is that you should have at least a couple hundred words. Anything less simply leaves the search engines with too few words to find a "dominant" keyword phrase and leaves them believing that your page isn't about much of anything.

Miriam Ellis over at SEO Igloo (Thanks Matt!) has a great post about this very topic. She talks about the work she did creating keyword rich content for a client who sells jewelry online.

Miriam goes on to explore five different perspectives you can use to view your product. Each of these perspectives can offer up inspiration for relevant content and at least one of them will apply to almost anything you can sell online.

In talking about coming up with content for her jewelry site, she explains how a writer might use the "psychology" perspective to brainstorm ideas.

It may seem like a daunting task to add content to all of your product pages. In fact, if you have a large site, it's almost guaranteed to be a daunting task. The good news is that you don't have to write all of this content at once. Miriam reminds her readers that even if they only tackle a single product page each day, they'll eventually work their way through all of them. In the meantime, every day will bring a new opportunity to rank and a new chance to convert customers that have been drawn in by the new content.

Don't let your product pages wallow in obscurity by limiting them to a short bullet list of product specs. Give your pages a little flair and let your products tell your customers a story.

Your search engine rankings will thank you for it.

There's an article today in the New York Times about how brands are working on new packaging designed to catch consumers eyes as they wander through the grocery aisles. The basic idea is that people are ignoring advertising. They get their news via feed readers, they digitally record their favorite TV shows and they surf the web with banner blindness. That's making it harder and harder for companies to get their messages across. It's also causing them to look for new ways to compete for your attention.

From the NY Times article:

The article goes on to mention products that speak when you pick them up (i.e. a package of Kraft cheese that says "I go great with Triscuits!") and that offer a "sensory experience." (Your can of Wild Cherry Pepsi might spray you with a cherry scent as you open it.)

I'll be honest with you, my first thought when I read the article was "no wonder every other person in America has ADD or AADD."

My second thought was "if every last product is shouting at me to buy stuff, or wafting me with cherry scent or flashing it's lights at me...I think I'd run screaming from the store."

Then I reached the end of the article and the author included a quote making the same point.

My third thought was "hmm...it's sort of like working keywords into a web site."

Sometimes small business owners have a hard time understanding why they have to limit their optimization efforts to one or two phrases per page. What they fail to realize is that something only stands out if it's different from everything else. Search engines can only recognize that a phrase is important/relevant if it IS the most important thing on the page. As soon as you start trying to optimize for three or four or five phrases, you confuse the engines.

It's like the person who tells you every movie is "their favorite" or "the best movie ever!" Eventually, you realize they don't have very high standards and you stop giving credence to their opinion.

So just as the idea of every last product shouting for your attention means that none of them will end up getting it, you need to realize that trying to make the search engines think A, B, C, D and E are all "important" will end up with the engine thinking none of them are.

Optimize your pages for the phrases that are MOST important. If you need to target more phrases, add more content. Otherwise, you'll end up looking like that grocery store from hell. One big flashing, smelling, shouting mess that engines and people run screaming from. (Ok, it might not be THAT bad, but still...it won't be good.)