What is Lorem Ipsum? Is my website in a foreign language?

What is Lorem Ipsum? Is my website in a foreign language?

What’s “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed mi est, congue pharet….” ?

Have you ever seen a website where the product descriptions, introductory text and about us pages all have text in it that looks like this? If so, don’t despair. Your web designer has not created your site in a foreign language.

Lorem Ipsum is a defined standard of “fake” or filler text that is used in websites, publishing, graphic designs and in the printing industry to fill up space and show customers what a page would look like once the customer has added their actual wording.

Because Lorem Ipsum text approximates the character distribution of letters in the English language it is a good way of filling a page up when real text is not available. But when you get your website back you will need to replace this text with your real text – like your shipping and payment policies, website terms and conditions, and product descriptions.

Writing good content for your online store

With so many other online stores seeking the attention of your potential buyer, the content that you write into your pages can be the difference between leading a visitor to your website from browsing into buying or then clicking away from your site or abandoning an existing shopping cart. Many parts of an online shop product or content page will be the same as others in your site (like common menu links on a page, footer links, side bar content that repeats from page to page), so the unique content that you write is very important if you want your website to rank effectively in the search engines.

Research studies suggest that people read web pages like product or content pages by scanning down the page in an “F” format, so it is important to have useful and relevant content that doesn’t repeat too heavily from product to product, and is also broken up with headings, images and bullet lists.

When writing product descriptions, don’t:

  • Don’t use the manufacturer’s description – whilst human visitors may take your descriptions at face value, your competitors may also be using the same descriptions so search engines like Google won’t know which one is the authoritative use of that piece of text. Your page may not be indexed which reduces the chances of people coming to your site. That’s why using a manufacturer’s data feed for a product list might be a quick way of populating your site with data but ultimately not be a good idea for growing your business. Instead, make sure that your product description information is inviting, interesting and imaginative. Encourage your customers to think about what it would feel like to have or use your product – and what the product could do for them. Don’t assume that customers know the obvious, sometimes you need to re-state the main benefits of the product. Assume you’re talking to a customer who knows very little about your products.
  • Don’t include information on your shipping and product policies unless these are part of the product itself (e.g. a specific shipping method is required for just that product). If you later want to list your products on Google Shopping, this will also be important because including information about your shipping and payment policies in a product listing is against the Google Shopping terms of service and could lead to your page not being included in the Google shopping index (and not indexed means no views, no clicks and no sales).
  • Don’t use product names that are too long – your product name is treated as a major heading in search engines so it’s important to make the title descriptive of your product, but not too full of non-descriptive keywords. Google and Bing call titles that do not make sense, “keyword stuffing” and do not attribute high rankings to pages that use this technique.
  • Don’t overuse promotional words like ‘great’ and ‘magnificent’ – Google may consider words like exceptional, excellent, best, fantastic, great or magnificent as gimmicky and leading which could result in your listing being considered as less authoritative. By all means be inviting with your customers, but you need to have authority and seriousness in your product descriptions as well if you wish to gain a top ranking for your product pages.
    If you do use promotional words like the best, then back them up with evidence. Are there awards you have won? Statistics or Scientific research proving your statement?
  • Don’t go overboard with features – look at benefits instead – customers buy things based on whether they will meet their needs so it’s up to you to sell your site visitors on the benefits of your products not just listing what they do and getting customers to figure it out themselves. The exception here is where your buyers are highly educated and aware of the products that you sell – for instance a shop that’s for your distributors who are already experts and just want to search for products based on their technical specifications.

Product Description writing resources

For a detailed overview of naming your products or writing relevant product descriptions that help you sell more, see :

Ozcart Ecommerce

Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart. https://ozcart.com

No Comments

Post A Comment