products per page

[frankb]

Question from a real novice (ive just figured out that the posts about spp are about what im asking), I have seen posts saying -1 product per page - I really wanted to stick to the 24 I've got, it gets custermers to the product in 2 clicks, and I just 'like it', Can it be made to work practically with search engines or have I really dug myself a 500+ product Hole. thanks

www.past-reflections.co.uk

[leehack]

If you shout loud enough and you're quick, the Chillean miner rescue team might be able to bail you out. SPP tutorial on my site if you're not fully clear on how and why.

[cbarling]

I think that you will find that many sites have been successful in search engines without SPP, whilst others need it. It depends on the products that you are selling and how people search.

For instance, if people often search on a specific model number, it is probably the case that a single page optimised for that model number will do better.

If people search on more general terms, a single page containing several prdoucts relating to those terms may rank higher.

Chris

[Mike Hughes]

Generally, the concensus is that the closer people are to buying the more specific the search terms they use.

So they might start searching for 'old car adverts' while just looking around, but once they've chosen the kind of thing they want they're more likely to search for '1936 ford poster' (in order to price check, see if there are other versions, colours, etc).

If you have the '1936 ford advert' on a page called 'cars' with 'cars' in the page title and meta-description tag (hint) and 'cars' as the anchor text that links to the page then it's a bit tough to expect a search engine to rank it very well for '1936 ford poster'.

So, yes. Having each product with it's own page will do better (you can still have it on the 'cars' page anyway so you get two chances at the search results).

You already have the extended info pop ups for more info, so you're most of the way towards SPP anyway. Have a read of Lee's info. He knows what he's talking about.

Mike

[leehack]

Without technical knowledge you cannot get extended info pages solution to have the same power/ease/functionality as what we call SPP. In an ideal world this functionality would have been in place years ago and what we now do as SPP to circumvent those issues would never have happened in the first place. Suffice to say that didn't happen, BUT we heard very recently that Actinic are going to be working on SPP for v11, this was first earmarked to be in v10.

If Actinic's first solution (products with extended info pages) is the perfect solution, i'm not sure why any development time into SPP will be occurring in v11.

The search terms is a bit of a red herring IMO, if you have a parent page marketed to the generic search phrases and then the SPPs marketed to the specific phrases, that setup cannot be bettered or at least i cannot see how it can be (as Mike outlined). That setup with what we have available for 95% of sites has to use SPP setup to maximise its success/effectiveness and more importantly its ease to setup.