Mix content & commerce, merchandising & SEO

Website shoppers who use search engines to find products to buy have a tendency to quickly bounce in and out of sites, as they click through search result links to a merchant's product category page and then back to the engine's search results page. Wouldn't it be nice to grab that shopper for a moment, and capture her interest in something BESIDES the price? "Take your time, listen to our story, hear what other satisfied customers have to say..." This is one of the goals of a new category gallery page template released today as part of a Total Blue System update.

The "Gallery Core Sortable - 2 Column" template is now available within your Catalog module in the Admin Area. See the screen shot at right for an example of what it looks like. The basic components are a sortable listing of products in two columns, plus a right side bar that features content from your website Articles module, Teasers, and Catalog module. Here's a breakdown of what's possible, as the right side bar has several conditional elements:

1. Display a Teaser, with an optimal width of 214 pixels. You can set this as a new "Teaser Spot" within the Teasers section of the Admin Area. The same Teaser will display regardless of which category this template is applied to. Use it for site-wide promotions that aren't unique to one category, like a special holiday shipping offer, for example.
2. Display a customer's product review. Sometimes shoppers aren't clear which product within a category is most attractive, until they read someone else raving about a particular item. This area pulls the 5 most recently approved customer product reviews, then makes a random selection of 1 review from that set. Note: there has to be at least 1 product review for a product within that category for it to display.
3. Display a featured product. From all of the products that are marked "featured within category" within the product's display options, within this category, this template displays one such product, pulling a random selection from that set of products.
4. Display an Article. From all of the Articles that are marked "related to this product category" within the Article's display options, this template displays one such article, pulling a random selection from that set of articles. If a photo exists for the article, it will display in a thumbnail size.
5. Display Top Sellers. The top 3 selling products within this category, calculated from a rolling total of the last two week's sales history (coming from your order fulfillment system or website, depending on the integration in place for you). Simple text links are used to highlight those products that sell best, identifying name and price only.

Improving the "freshness" factor of your category gallery pages is one of the underlying goals of this template. Yes, it's oriented around what human shoppers will see with their eyes when visiting this page, but it's also oriented around what a search engine bot or spider will see. In the latter case especially, it's important that each visit to this page communicate "new stuff" to the search engine. For this reason, we're pulling in a random display of content like customer reviews and articles that will always be different. The objective is to give the search engine spider the perception that this category gallery page changes frequently -- more frequently than you might normally add new products to this category. It's an example of blending search engine optimization with your site merchandising efforts, striving for a balance between the two.