Landing Pages

[Cartesian Bear]

While looking at my stat counter, I noticed search engines are directing people to odd landing pages.

For example, someone searched on "Rainbow Shirt". Instead of going to the Hexidecimal Rainbow section, which lists all the products, they were sent to the Hex Rainbow Wmns Fitted Fine Jersey page. Had this been a large man, I may have lost a sale. [BTW, this shirt wasn't listed in the top 5 pages on Google.]

Any clues to how I can direct traffic to my section pages, not my landing pages? Most searches do go to the right place.

I'm afraid I don't understand this stuff at all.

--Liz

[PatrioticTees.com]

Well, I am no expert, but looking at your hexadecimal rainbow section, it would probably help to have in the section description the words "rainbow" and "shirt". You have a blurb there that really doesn't mean anything (at least not to search engines). You could have the sentece that you have there now... followed by something like "Unique hexadecimal rainbow design on T Shirts, apparel and gifts for men, women & children."

That way you get a lot of keyword combinations in there that someone might type into a search like...
hexadecimal shirt
rainbow t shirt
rainbow apparel
rainbow design
shirt with rainbow design

There are people here that know way more about this stuff than me... but it's been my experience that the search engines are trying to give the most relevant result possible. So the page they landed on probably contained the exact words they searched for.

You can never really and truly control where someone lands, but you can try your best to make the site as descriptive as possible to improve your chances of having people land in the most relevant spot to what they are looking for.

I work hard at it... and it seems to work for me. Like in my main shop, which is one main patriotic theme. I am careful to vary my descriptions, because the products are so similar. I could easily just call everything "flag tees".. but I am carelful to sometimes say "american flag t-shirts","patriotic apparel","4th of july shirts"... even within the same design. I will generally name everything the same when I first create the section, but then I'll go back and change the names a few items to reflect "other things" that a searcher might look for. If I called every shirt a flag shirt... then only people typing "flag shirt" would land there.

get me? Maybe someone else here can help you better.