photo credit: shutterback

For any e-commerce website, a perfectly optimized product name can be a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal. But how do you satisfy both your human and robotic visitors? Here’s one strategy that can help you get the most out of your product names.

Two Names

For each product in your database, you want to create two name fields. I’ll call them Long Name and Short Name. The Long Name works well for your product pages and title tags, while the Short Name can be used in your section pages and other internal links.

Long Name

In the Long Name field, you want to include as many relevant, searchable words as possible in roughly 65 characters or less (including spaces).

• Start by typing in the “official” name of the product.
• Unless you have a compelling reason to do so — perhaps to hinder comparison shopping in highly competitive niches — add the name of the manufacturer and the part number or model number.
• Using keyword research and old-fashioned common sense, add relevant keywords that your customers are searching for.

For example, my company sells a product that’s officially called the Plum A+ Infusion System. But on our website, we call it the Hospira 12391-05 Plum A+ Pole-Mounted Infusion Pump System.

This product name is great for search engine spiders, but what about your human visitors?

Short Name

In addition to making your customers’ eyes glaze over, super-long product names can wreak havoc on a beautiful section layout, turning lovely white space into a text-heavy mess. By using the Short Name field, you can reduce the clutter to provide a concise, clear and ultimately clickable link to your product.

On section pages, our product name has been reduced to Hospira Plum A+ Infusion Pump. It’s long enough to be descriptive, but short enough that it’s not overwhelming.

Making it Happen

photo credit: abbyladybug

In a perfect world, each product page in your store would be carefully constructed with SEO in mind. In the real world, e-commerce store owners tend to discover search engine optimization later in the game, when hundreds or thousands of products have already been added.

If you don’t have time to rewrite 3,000 product names today, don’t despair. Break the project into small, manageable chunks … an hour here, half an hour there. Start with your bestsellers and work your way slowly down the list.

I’ve found that using the concatenate function in a spreadsheet can save many, many hours of repetitive data entry. And if you lack time but not money, you can always hire a temp to do the grunt work.

Have a better strategy for optimizing product names? Let me know in the comments!

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