How To Create The Single Product Per Page Setup (SPP)
Understanding Sections And The SPP Setup
If your knowledge of how sections work and how you should set them up correctly is not the best, have a read of our Actinic sections tutorial before reading this tutorial. This will provide you with the fundamental information you require and ensure that you setup your sections to adopt the SPP approach in the best possible way.
Googlebase And Improved Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Over the past few years providing each product with a page of its own has become more popular, there are two main reasons for this - Googlebase and much improved SEO. Google's free shopping portal, specifies that each product must have exist on a page of its own. This means that when a user chooses to go see one of your products, they will be presented with only that product on screen.
With more and more websites springing up, competition on search terms is at an all time high and this is the second reason why the SPP setup has become the 'norm'. If you try to market one page towards one product, it is far easier to be successful than trying to market one page towards multiple products, as the key SEO (marketing) elements on the page are focused solely towards the one product. As you have less products on a page, you have less product images to be downloaded, so this opens up the possibility to have larger, more crisp images as there is only ever one image to download per page.
How Do We Implement the SPP Approach?
In the 'Hard Back Books' TLS section on the left hand side of the below image, you can see it contains 4 products. To convert that section to adopt an SPP approach would mean creating a sub-section for each of those 4 products and then dragging the product into it's newly created sub-section. You can see this illustrated on the right hand side of the image.
That is SPP setup in a nutshell, one product per page or one product per section in Actinic terms. A perfect example of a website using the SPP setup is Byretech. Their Shower Curtain Rails page presents visitors with a thumbnail of all products available, along with with the price. Scroll through the thumbnails, find a product you like the look of and click on it, the page you are taken to is devoted solely to marketing that one product. There is a couple of ways to implement the SPP setup, however the above is the best, quickest and most efficient method and therefore I will not explain any of the others.
Should All Products Be Setup Using The SPP Method?
It is important to be aware that not all products should be setup using the SPP method, as they do not all offer themselves to be marketed in this way. If you would be struggling to find 70-80 words to describe a product, chances are it should not exist on its own page. A typical example could be a printer cartridge company, after you had selected your printer model, it would be sensible to have all cartridge options on one page. Likewise if you visited a spare parts website for your washing machine, it is much better to see all products together on one page, so you can scroll and compare information. 95% of products should adopt the SPP approach.
Key Points To Remember
- ALWAYS fill in all fields when you create a section, do not leave certain parts to finish later, they rarely ever get finished and you end up with a half complete website which search engines start visiting and ranking accordingly
- To use Googlebase and for improved SEO, it is almost certain that an SPP setup is what you need to use, but please investigate before doing so, as not all products should be setup in this way. 95% of products should use the SPP approach though
- When you create a section, Actinic takes the section name and uses it to produce the page name automatically for you (you can override what it does for you though). There are certain characters not allowed in html page names, if you have used any of these in the section name, then Actinic will replace them with an underscore. Often you can remove these unnecessary underscores and make the page names more concise. Always take the opportunity to do this as the page name is a key part in SEO
- DO NOT copy-paste an existing section to quickly create yourself a new one, unless you go through each of the above steps and manually control the contents in each of the fields. Each time you copy a section, Actinic adds 'copy_of_' to the page name, which means if you copy a section a number of times, you can end up with a hideous page name such as 'copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_Hard_Back_Books.html'. This is terrible for SEO and should be avoided at all costs
- BEFORE setting up a section, make sure you have the name, the section image (often a smaller version of a product image), the section description (if applicable), the page title and the META information all prepared before you start to set it up
Extra Tips & Tricks When Managing Sections In Actinic
- If you try to change the order of sections in your content tree, as you drag and drop them you will find that they move down a level and become sub-sections of where you drop them. To ensure that they stay at the same level, hold down the shift key while you drag and drop
- If you have a section currently being worked on, but you do not wish for that section or anything inside it to be uploaded to your site yet, simply select the 'hide on website' checkbox on the 'general' tab of the section, until you are ready for it to go live. This is a good idea if you either want to be adding new content or if you want to prepare a new product range, but do not quite want it live yet. Seasonal sections are another good example of using this facility
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