Conversations API: Retrieve and submit consumer-generated content (CGC), and retrieve your product catalog and statistics about your CGC.
Search Engine Optimization
The Conversations API lets you programmatically retrieve and submit Bazaarvoice Conversations data for use in your applications. To learn more, go to the Conversations API documentation home page.
Contents
This tutorial introduces developers to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) concepts for clients using the Conversations API which can improve your rankings in search engines.
Introduction
Search rankings matter. When searching, people click the resources nearer the top of search results. It is therefore beneficial to have your webpages rank near the top of search results. SEO is making sure your web pages have the ingredients that search engines look for when determining search results rankings. SEO can have a strong influence on the success of users' search results.
The SEO techniques in this tutorial will improve your search rankings. One such technique is to identify products, ratings and reviews and also provide consumer generated content (reviews, questions, etc.). Consumer generated content is a source of new relevant content which search engines value. Identifying products, ratings and reviews also assist search engines in categorizing data.
The techniques described in this tutorial affects only organic search results.
Schematic vocabulary
Schematic vocabulary is a kind of structured metadata that helps search engines return relevant results. Bazaarvoice suggests using Schema.org markup due to its broad acceptance.
Reviews, ratings, aggregate ratings and products should be tagged on web pages. Schema.org documents three different formats that can be used to markup data:
- Microdata
- RDFa
- JSON-LD
and are used in the samples below.
Products
Schema.org considers tangible and intangible goods and services to be products. For example, a pair of shoes, a concert ticket, the rental of a car, a haircut, or an episode of a TV show streamed online.
This format uses the itemprop, itemscope, and itemtype attributes.
Acme product name
Rated 3.5/5
based on 11 customer reviews
$
1,000.00
In stock
Product description:
Product description with some meaningful text about the item. Customer reviews:
Best generic product review name -
by Tommy,
April 1, 2017
4/
5stars
This is the generic review of the product
Value purchase - by
Lucas,
March 25, 2017
4/
5stars
Great product for the price. It is small and fits in my house.
...
This format uses property and typeof attributes
Acme product name
Rated
3.5/5 based on
11 customer reviews
$
1,000.00
In stock
Product description:
Product description with some meaningful text about the item.
Customer reviews:
Best generic product review name - by
Tommy,
April 1, 2017
1/
5stars
This is the generic review description of the product
Value purchase -
by Lucas,
March 25, 2017
4/
5stars
Great product for the price. It is small and fits in my house.
...
Instead of HTML attributes, this format uses JSON identify the information relevant to search engines.
There are more possible attributes for product through schema.org. Read more about http://schema.org/Product markup.
Ratings
Schema.org defines a rate as an “evaluation" a rating evaluation on a numeric scale, such as 1 to 5 stars.
This format uses the itemprop, itemscope, and itemtype attributes.
4/
5stars
This format uses property and typeof attributes
....
Review Title here -
by Author_Name,
April 1, 2017
1/
5stars
...
Instead of HTML attributes, this format uses JSON identify the information relevant to search engines. This code sample displays 2 ratings
Read more about the ratings schema http://schema.org/Rating.
Aggregate ratings
The overall average rating of the item.
This format uses the itemprop, itemscope, and itemtype attributes.
Some Product is rated
out of
5 by
1581.
This format uses property and typeof attributes
Some Product Name
4
out of 5
based on 24 user ratings
...
Instead of HTML attributes, this format uses JSON identify the information relevant to search engines.
Read more about the aggregate ratings schema: http://schema.org/AggregateRating.
Reviews
The review of an item.
This format uses the itemprop, itemscope, and itemtype attributes.
This is the review Title -by
Some Review Author,
April 1, 2017
1/
5stars
This the the long descriptive text of the review. And it ususaly has more text of all the other fields. Some times there are images that are included too.
This format uses property and typeof attributes
....
This is the review Title -by
Some Review Author,
April 1, 2017
1/
5stars
This the the long descriptive text of the review. And it ususaly has more text of all the other fields. Some times there are images that are included too.
Instead of HTML attributes, this format uses JSON identify the information relevant to search engines. This code sample highlights two reviews.
Read more about the reviews schema http://schema.org/Review.
Questions & Answers
A specific question - e.g. from a user seeking answers online and the answers. Both suggested and accepted.
This format uses the itemprop, itemscope, and itemtype attributes.
Which is better XXl or XL & why?
196
I am having difficulty understanding what size to get.
asked
SomeoneWhoAsked
2 answers
3
(The text of the accepted answer goes here...).
answered
someExpertAnswer
2
That is a good question. The XXL and 256GB are how much internal storage your device has. 256GB is better as it has about 4 times the storage space for apps, pictures, videos and anything else that takes storage space on your device.
answered
SomeoneWhoAnswered
This format uses property and typeof attributes
Which is better XXl or XL & why?
196
I am having difficulty understanding what size to get.
asked
SomeoneWhoAsked
2 answers
3
(The text of the accepted answer goes here...).
answered
someExpertAnswer
2
That is a good question. The XXL and 256GB are how much internal storage your device has. 256GB is better as it has about 4 times the storage space for apps, pictures, videos and anything else that takes storage space on your device.
answered
SomeoneWhoAnswered
Instead of HTML attributes, this format uses JSON identify the information relevant to search engines. This code sample highlights two answers to a single question.
Read more about the question and answer(s) schema .
Tools exist to test webpages where schematic vocabularies have been incorporated. These tools include:
- https://seositecheckup.com/tools/microdata-schema-test
- https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
Ideal count of content items per page
Items of content refers to questions, answers, or reviews. We recommended that 8 items of content appear per page on the initial product overview page load. If a user indicates a desire to read CGC, by paginating or filtering/sorting, up to 30 content items should be displayed.
Rich snippets
Rich snippets are the stars that appear in search engine results, as shown in the following images:
Above, rich snippets as displayed in Google search results
Above, rich snippets as displayed in Bing search results
Search engines awards rich snippets to web pages that contain social review content with correct schema.org markup, and that do not hide important details. Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate search rankings can be seen as deceptive and this negatively affect page rankings. This includes:
- Using white text on a white background
- Locating text behind an image
- Using CSS to position text off-screen
- Setting the font size to 0
- Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph
Freshness of content is good
When you can update your site more frequently, the better it is for your overall SEO efforts. Attracting visitors through compelling and useful content is the goal of most sites. Yet search engines cannot distinguish between the content users value. But they, search engines, can identify how often content is changed.
Search engines value changes to a page's primary content over smaller less important content update (comments, ads, navigation). One simple way to frequently update a web page's content is to include recent consumer content, i.e. reviews, questions and answers.
Canonical tags and pagination
Ideally, only one version of a web page would exist on the web. That is often not the case. Content may be duplicated to multiple locations. This is often seen on product pages that show the same product details (description, price, sizes) but use pagination to display consumer generated content. When this occurs there may be negative consequences in search result ranking if a search engine considers pages to be too similar. One solutions for this is using canonical tags.
Canonical tags inform search engines that a specific URL identifies the master copy of a resource. These tags prevent problems caused by duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs. The tag helps consolidate duplicate content caused by issues such as:
- HTTP and HTTPS
- www and non-www
- parameters and faceted navigation
- session IDs
- trailing slashes
- index/default pages
- alternate page versions such as mobile or print versions
The following is an example of a canonical tag:
When developing product detail pages (PDP) that require pagination, canonical tags should only be present on the first PDP and not the subsequent pages. This is so that all the reviews are in the search engines index. Canonical tags that point away from the paginated URLs will cause search engines to ignore the paginated content.
When providing pagination to a subsequent page specifically for the purpose of showing CGC, you should include the content type (i.e. "reviews" or "questions") in the page title since the client is obviously navigating to the next page.
You can read more about canonical URL's on Google's guide to consolidating duplicate URLs.
Best practice - all pages
- Page Titles - Create unique accurate page titles. Use the title tag. Titles are used in search results. Avoid a single title that is used throughout the site
- Meta tags - Use the description meta tag as a summary. Do not copy title and not too long. Avoid generic descriptions. Avoid using keywords only. Unique description for all pages is ideal.
- URL structure - descriptive categories help bots. External links to hierarchical pages are good. The URL is also displayed in the results. Use words in URLs. Simple directory structure. Avoid deep nesting of folders. If there are 2 versions of the URL use 301 to point to the featured/dominant one. Avoid using capitalization.
- Navigation - Make navigation simple. Plan on navigation from the homepage. Think category pages to product pages. Use bread crumbs
- Site Maps - Create two site maps. One for users, one for search engines (XML sitemap for search engines).
- 404 page(s) - Have useful 404 page(s) set up. Consistent with the design of the site. Do not index 404 in search engine. Avoid vague 404 messages.
- Anchor tags - Use simple anchor tag text that is descriptive. Not 'click here' or the URL. Be concise. Make links look like all links (internal and external).
- Images - Use meaningful alt tag image filenames. Store images in the same directory and use the same format when possible. Create an image sitemap file.
- Headings - Use heading tags sparingly and appropriately.
- Robots.txt - Create a robots.txt and tell what you want indexed. Avoid indexing search results like pages.
Additional resources
- Bazaarvoice knowledge base articles on SEO best practices
- Bazaarvoice blog: Getting to five-star SEO
- Google's SEO Starter Guide
- Google Webmaster Guidelines