Category page descriptions: weightlifting.

Today I had two main focuses.

1) I wanted to organize and make my store categories easier to understand. I have many items that were bulk uploaded that went into extra categories or the wrong categories that need to be fixed. By consolidating categories and clarifying them, I'll be able to submit a new google site map to the webmaster tools. Hopefully this will notify Google that I've changed my site and along with the little bit of product descriptions that I added recently, will entice Google to index my entire site.

I discovered that Big commerce allows me to maintain URL's Check out my video I made to show you how to do that!

The second thing that I did was to focus on content writing for my categories. I was able to get 14 product category descriptions written :) I have another 22 categories in my weightlifting section, plus the weightlifting larger category. Plus eight other large categories with sub categories to work on. This will definitely take me most of the week to work on and probably all of next week as well.

The items I added to my category pages:
1- A detailed description of the category. Sometimes that is difficult so I also include why that product is important, the health benefits, the uses, and types of exercises enjoyed with this product.
2- A detailed list of the products and sizes contained in the category.
3- A meta data description, Meta data tags, search tags, and page title.
Also here are two resources I found on Meta tags that was great info:
http://www.metatags.org/examples_making_meta_tags
http://www.code7.co.uk/blog/how-to-write-seo-friendly-title-tags-and-meta-descriptions
4- A thumbnail photo. That makes larger categories look nice like this: (You can tell which categories I haven't gotten to yet)

In this photo, you can see one of the sub categories with the description written out and more sub categories underneath. It looks good and it has information that makes the page more valuable for Google.

Tomorrow I continue.

PS I haven't had Google Index any more of my pages yet. I don't expect them to until I submit a new site map.

Adding unique content Stage 1

Today I exported my entire product list via BigCommers to a Csv file.

Then I took my description column and inserted a new column into it. I wanted to add my website, the product brand, and the product name to my description. My hope is that by doing this, I would be able to have a little more unique descriptions. My friend who started www.waketaker.com 1 month ago has gotten 14k pages indexed by google. My 7500 pages on www.healthyexercize.com have been published, but not indexed for the last 3 months. My pages have zero unique content (well all but about 500 of them) while www.waketaker.com has only the waketaker added to the description.

The formula that I used to combine 3 columns and words are:
="HealthyExercize"&"  "&C2&" "&G2&" "&H2  The " " are so that I had spaces between the info on the cells. It looked like this afterward (as an example)

This came out to HealthyExercize Champion 2 Lb Dumbbell This dumbbell is . . .
Without the " " it would have looked like this:
HealthyExercizeChampion2 Lb DumbbellThis dumbbell is. . .

There needs to be an & between each cell added and a & between any exact words added such as spaces and HealthyExercize.

You can see how the formula in the upper left translates into the first few cells under column J. Column J is the added column I added.

Then I drug the formula all the way down and copied it so it used the same formula

Then I Copied (CTL C) and right clicked and chose to copy the value. That replaced the formula and put the words in solid as a description.

I checked visually to make sure my description didn't have any duplicate words. For example Champion Barbells might show up and Champion Champion Barbells because I added the brand and the product name.

If I found a duplicate I highlighted the column (in my case Column J) and hit CTL H. Find: Champion Champion (the duplicate words) and Replace: Champion (only one of the duplicate names)

Once I knew I didn't have duplicate names, I uploaded it back up to Big Commerce with the new descriptions.

Checking Site:healthyexercize.com on google chrome, I can see that google has indexed 3170 of my pages. I did this 5 minutes ago and came up with 3200. So it varies a little depending on your internet speed. But about 3k of my pages have been indexed. That number has been the same for at least 203 months. Lets see how many are indexed with this change in the next few weeks. Brandon did this to his site and got immediate indexing (within a couple of weeks)

Daily Activity Log The Week of May 4-6

Daily Activity Log The Week of May 4-6

I know that my website hasn't been indexed by Google fully. About 3-4 months ago, I uploaded 6500 new products to my exiting 500-1000 products. Those first 500 products had unique descriptions, but the bulk uploads I did about February didn't. I kept the same descriptions just to get more pages on my site and increase my domain authority. It worked somewhat. My domain authority is up into the mid 20s, but google only indexed a little over 3,000 pages. For the last several months, it hasn't updated past those pages. I'm trying to redo my descriptions and categories so that I can get google to red index my pages. I'm going to focus on 2 items.

1- rewrite my descriptions
2- reorganize my categories. They are also in the original categories as well

May 4th- I rewrote 46 product descriptions in the Big Commerce Platform.
May 5th- I rewrote 25 product descriptions
May 6th- I rewrote 128 product descriptions, but half of them were copied. So I have products that are 1 quantity and then the same product, but with a quantity of 12. I wrote a new descriptions for each, but copied it for the 2 quantities. So I really only newly wrote half of those descriptions.

I worked on it in the http://healthyexercize.com/accessories/hot-cold-therapy/heating-pads/