DistributorCentral Updates and Tips

Hello DistributorCentral website users! As you are aware, you can create a website within your DistributorCentral account to market to your customers. While DistributorCentral does not provide assistance with SEO, here a few tips that can help you optimize your website in DistributorCentral so that it can be properly indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Website Title – This is located in the Sidewide Settings area of the web editor. It’s somewhat of a mystery regarding how many characters Google and other search engines actually index, but it’s probably around 70 – 150 characters. The website title is one of the first things that the search engines will index for your site. It also displays as the link in the search engine results (see example image below).

Page Names – This is located in the Page Editor area for each of your pages on your site. The Page Names would be considered as an extension to your Website Title. What this means is that if you use a long Website Title, your Page Names might only partially get indexed by the search engines. To compensate, you may want to have a shorter Website Title, maybe something that you feel is relevant to be on every page, and then put the bulk of the information in the individual Page Names on your site. You can also opt to leave the Website Title completely blank, and just add information into each of the Page Names on your site. Each of your pages should have unique Page Names, and they should not be exactly the same on multiple pages (see example image below).

Image Descriptions (ALT Tags) – Whenever you upload images to your website, you can give them descriptions. This is also known as an ALT Tag, which generally means the alternative tag. ALT Tags are the HTML tag that tells search engines about the images since search engines cannot read text in actual images. To add Image Descriptions to your current images on your site, go the Content Manger, and then click on the Edit link for an image, and then add the text in the Image Description field.

Meta Tags – Meta Tags help search engines find out important information about your website. For example, related keywords or a description of a specific website page. You should add unique Meta Tags to each of your individual website pages. This is contrary to our previous advice to add Meta Tags to the Footer of your site so that the same Meta Tag information would display on all the pages of your site, which has been found out that Search Engines actually do not like repetitive Meta Tag information on multiple pages of the same site.

- Description Meta Tag – This should be an actual description of what is on your particular website page. It’s a short pitch where you can put strong keywords to entice viewers to click on your site in the search results. Again, it is a mystery here as to how many characters that the search engines will index for your Description Meta Tag, but it should be fairly short (around two sentences) and should be somewhat readable like a sentence, as opposed to just random keywords (see example image below).

- Keyword Meta Tag – This can be random keywords that can help the search engines determine what’s on your site. It’s a rumor that Google’s crawlers may totally bypass the Keyword Mata Tags, since oftentimes, website owners would just load this area up with 100’s or even 1000’s of keywords. Whether that’s true or not, the idea for keywords would be relativity versus quantity. They can just be random keywords that are separated by a comma (i.e. custom apparel, imprinted apparel, screen printed shirts)

Here’s how to add Meta Tags to your site:

- Go to the Websites menu and select Add/Edit Websites
- Click on the Edit link for your website
- Click the Add/Edit Web Pages tab
- Edit a page for your site (i.e. the Home page)
- Add a Block to your page
- For the content type for the block, select Meta Tags
- Follow the on-screen instructions to set up your meta tag block

Additional Tips

- Heading Tags - The <h1> to <h6> Heading tags are used to define HTML headings. <h1> defines the most important heading, and <h6> would define the least important heading. Heading Tags are important for on-page SEO purposes. Furthermore, H1 tags should be used only once per page. The opening heading should be an H1 tag that describes the whole theme of the page. Any sub information or more specific topics should go under separate headings in the form of H2 Tags, filtering down appropriately.

Here’s how to add Heading Tags to your site:

- Go to the Websites menu and select Add/Edit Websites
- Click on the Edit link for your website
- Click the Add/Edit Web Pages tab
- Edit a page for your site (i.e. the Home page)
- When adding text to your site in the Written Content area, you can highlight the text that you want to make a heading, and then select a heading from the Format drop-down menu (see example image below)

- Add actual text to your site – Search engines will index the text on your site, so be sure to add descriptive text along with strong keywords to the individual pages of your site.

- Create a WordPress blog – And then blog like crazy about particular promotional products, and all the different ways about how they can be used. You can then feed that blog into your website using our RSS News Feed tool (see example image below).

Here’s how to feed you blog into to your site:

- Go to the Websites menu and select Add/Edit Websites
- Click on the Edit link for your website
- Click the Add/Edit Webpages tab
- Edit a page for your site that you’d like to have the blog display (i.e. the Home page)
- Add a Block to that page, and then select RSS News Feed from the content drop-down menu.
- Next, enter in the blog feed URL (you can also adjust how many records to display and length of the descriptions)

- Create Product Specific Websites – It’s been proven that if you create a website in your DistributorCentral account that caters to a narrow niche in the Promotional Product Industry, that those sites get organically indexed far better than sites with 1000’s of products or our standard All Products Catalog. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. For example, if you create a site that just has Eco Friendly Tote Bags, when someone searches in Google for those particular products (which they will), your site (if you follow the techniques above), will have a more likely probability of displaying higher in the search engine results. Your DistributorCentral account makes it easy for you to create custom catalogs with specific products that you can add to a site that you’ve created. Click here for information on how to create a catalog with specific products for a site. You can even customize the website to have your own products using our Fulfillment Account feature. Click here for more information on Fulfillment Accounts.

 - Have your domain name include keywords – When you purchase a domain name for your site, it’s good idea to have keywords related to your site in the actual domain. For example, if you are going to create a site in your DistributorCentral account that focuses on Eco Friendly Tote Bags, it’d be logical for you to purchase a domain name such as EcoFriendlyToteBags.com, or Eco-Friendly-Tote-Bags.com, or EcoFriendlyTotes.com, etc.

DistributorCentral does not provide assistance with Search Engine Optimization, but following the steps above to apply unique and relevant content to your site will most definitely improve your organic search results in Google and the other major search engines. If you don’t have time to do the research for unique content to add on your site, you can hire a SEO specialist, but be prepared to spend a considerable amount of money. Also, be cautious of hiring a SEO specialist since there are literally 1000’s of sites that claim to know how to get your site organically ranked in the search engines, but they may not provide you with the results that you want, since variables that affect SEO can be relative to different Search Engines (i.e. techniques that might help you in Google, may not help in Yahoo or Bing). Furthermore, the rules (by the search engines) are constantly changing and virtually impossible to keep up with…so what gets you organic results today, may not tomorrow. If you feel that you’ve developed a great site, don’t be afraid to try Google AdWords.