In successful merchandising we look at writing your product descriptions. Not rocket science, although there is an art to writing product descriptions that sell. While that art form is too wide a subject to cover properly in this book, we will look at writing effective sales copy in Chapter 6, Killer SEO.

What is also regularly overlooked or at least put off until later, is the aspect of Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO to a large extent takes place after the website is launched. But the most basic and fundamental building block of any SEO campaign should ideally be dealt with before a single line of sales copy is written.

What is your keyword strategy? What are the words you will target in your forthcoming SEO campaign? You need to know that before you write your category and product descriptions, because you need to use those words in your product and category descriptions. Therefore it is worthwhile considering at least dipping into some of the recipes in Chapter 6, Killer SEO before this chapter.

Furthermore, with regards to SEO, in this chapter we will constantly be coming across opportunities to enter our metadata and search engine friendly (SEF) URLs. That is our keyword lists, page titles, and most importantly, meta descriptions. If you have already planned your keyword strategy and understand exactly how to write and implement this metadata, you can enter it all as you proceed through the various recipes in this chapter, saving time coming back to it later.

As just implied any discussion of keyword strategies, copy writing and metadata, and so on would be out of place in this chapter, but if any of the subjects are alien or unclear, you would save time and write better sales copy by looking at parts of Chapter 6, Killer SEO first.

Just do whatever works best for you.