FREE RTML Yahoo! Store Template

If you’re a client or friend of mine PLEASE DO NOT DO ANYTHING THAT DELETES YOUR CUSTOM TEMPLATES. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then relax.

First, what is that RTML all about?

If you’re a retailer, I think that you don’t need to know RTML. I think you need to know what you can get someone to get RTML to do, but unless you want to get into the Yahoo! Store development business, don’t bother.

I’m about to start giving away tons of FREE Yahoo! Store RTML templates, not just because I'm a nice guy, but there are too many people who need these suckers and fast!

RTML is Yahoo! Store’s proprietary scripting language. RTML templates are a set of instructions that generate your store’s HTML pages from RTML templates. If your store is built in Store Editor, your store uses RTML whether you know it or not.

THE GOOD NEWS: To keep us all out trouble, Yahoo! doesn’t let us modify a store’s basic templates, but lets us copy the base templates and modify them all we want. Some folks create custom RTML templates from scratch, but most developers simply modify templates to do cool stuff.

If you want to know more about RTML, look at the YstoreTools forums, read all of the Istvan Siposs’ Books you can get your head around, check out Mike Whitaker’s Yahoo! Store blog, and search on your favorite search engine for Yahoo RTML -telescope. Search Google, Yahoo, and Ask. (Did I forget anything?)

RTML Utility Templates

Most folks use RTML for generating Store Editor pages, but I’ve always used RTML to make these stupid little templates I call Utility Templates to do neat little tricks like filtering products, viewing all the elements of a group of products, or doing funky exports. I’ve written so many RTML Utility templates on the fly, I can’t remember all of the things I’ve gotten them to do! (Note to self: Make a list...)

I’ve talked about these kinds of templates before, but in the next few posts you’re going to learn all kinds of cool stuff! An RTML Utility template is a lot like a Swiss Army Knife. You can use these tools to do almost anything you need to do to maintain your Yahoo! Store.

WoolyBooger is born…

IDEA: Sometimes it’s hard to see the real content of your site for all the pretty pictures and links and logos and other “chrome” on your site. What if you could see all your CAPTIONS (Yahoo! Store for body text – product/section descriptions) on one big honking page? What could I do with that!

It’s easy to divide your Yahoo! Store into two parts: the template and the content. As you would guess, the template part is the boilerplate stuff that stays the same from page to page and the content part is the unique text (and images) that fits inside the spaces in the template

A typical Yahoo! Store template usually consist of a header with logo, branding, and store functionality, the side navigation with links and text and special offers, and the footer with the fine print and copyright info. A well-designed template can stand alone with no content and almost pass for a “real” Web page. See http://www.gundogsupply.com/template.html.

When it’s naked, some content looks a little bit lacking! Strip a template off the content to see the difference between a Web page with plenty of content and a page with a NAME and a few measly sentences in the CAPTION field. See http://www.gundogsupply.com/content.html. ACK! That page is blushing!

OK. My experience is that search engines, especially Google, can quickly determine what part of a Web page is a template and then strip that off, and ignore that to see the true essence of a Web page’s content. This pagelet or nugget of content is what I think the engines look at to pick the winners in the search engine optimization game.

Google reminds me of those fancy new airport security devices with X-Ray vision-style imaging capabilities! Stand naked in front of the Googlebot!

And you want your pages to look good naked, right? So it’s time to get your content whipped into shape! Imagine there was one little RTML Utility template that you could upload and then make a single page on your Yahoo! Store to see all your content in one place. Enter the WoolyBooger…

What can you do with the WOOLYBOOGERTM?

1) First, see all your naked content in one place. It makes great reading! See how much, (or how little!) content you actually have. It’s a wake-up call for most merchants! Time to start beefing up those CAPTIONS!

2) Print out your entire site. Then grab a highlighter and a red pen and start making notes about changes you want to make to your product descriptions.

3) Spell check your entire site. Copy and paste the entire document into Microsoft Word and run a spell check on your store’s text. (I got this idea from Brian Bock of Bock.com. Hi, Mr. Bock!)

4) Check your keywords. Quickly see if keywords or phrases actually appear anywhere in your body text. If not, you have some writing to do.

5) Find keyphrases for good internal linking. When you have CONVERTING KEYWORD PHRASES, go to the WOOLYBOOGER page and use CTRL+F to find pages with those keywords in the CAPTION. Go edit those CAPTIONS and make those keywords text links to the most relevant page on your site. For more about CAPTION LINKS, read this (coming soon!).

6) Do advance keyword analysis. Check your keyword density (overrated), keyword frequency (underrated) , and just see if a keyword appears on your site.

ADVANCED: I have a new keyword tool that allows you to compare the content of one Web page (or even an entire site) to another body of Web pages. I compare my WOOLYBOOGER content to my CONVERTING KEYWORDS to see how “deep” my converting keywords go in my content. I also compare my WOOLYBOOGER content to my PPC TERMS. Export the words you buy in your Paid Search campaigns in Google Adwords and Overture / Yahoo! Search Marketing and check to make sure these words appear in your content.

Some things you need to know before using WoolyBooger:

• I removed the HTML formatting from text in the CAPTIONS to get rid of all the BS formatting and images, so your CAPTIONS may look differently on the WOOLYBOOGER page.
• WOOLYBOOGER doesn’t work if you use a ton of custom text fields instead of the CAPTION field for most of your text unless you modify WOOLYBOOGER. Feel free to do so!
• I made the NAME a link to each item so you can easily use CONTROL+F to find a keyword phrase on the WOOLYBOOGER page, click the NAME link in the EDITOR, and edit that page to your heart’s delight.
• This version of WOOLYBOOGER only shows in the EDITOR so your site will publish faster. It’s also hidden from competitors & search engines. Thanks to Istvan Siposs for showing me how to do that at his Yahoo! Store Seminar.
• You get what you pay for! Use this WoolyBooger at your own risk. No guarantees, folks. (My lawyer made me say that!) And no selling the template!

How to get WoolyBooger. What to do with it...

First, get the RTML template. The WoolyBooger TM (patent pending) template is free to friends and clients. If you don’t help make my house payment on a regular basis, just post a review of my Yahoo! Store For Dummies book on Amazon (be honest!), or a post an insightful comment on any of my Ystore Blog posts here or here. Then email me, and I’ll send you the latest version of WoolyBooger.RTML for your personal use.

1) Put WoolyBooger.RTML in your Store Editor. Use DON COLE’S RTML Template uploader to upload Woolybooger RTML template or build it by hand in the STACK EDITOR. If you don’t know how, read these instructions or pay someone to do it for you, but NOT $2500.00, ok?

2) Make a WoolyBooger.html page. In the STORE EDITOR, go to the CONTENTS page and click the NEW button. The CREATE NEW PAGE screen appears. Make a page with the ID woolybooger, and type ITEM and click CONTINUE. The EDIT page appears. Change the TEMPLATE field from “Page.” (or whatever it is) to woolybooger and click the UPDATE button.

If my RTML works the way it’s supposed to, the WOOLYBOOGER page loads with all your CAPTIONS almost like magic. If you have a big site, WOOLYBOOGER is kinda fat. It takes awhile to load sometimes, but it’s worth the 10 second wait or so! I use WoolyBooger on client sites all the time to shame folks into writing more content for their stores’ section and product pages.

Keyword to your mother --

P.S. Please email me what you like about WoolyBooger, what you don’t like, how you use it, suggestions for more utility templates, or anything else you want to rob at ystore dot com.

Comments

[Brett Tepper]

A must have for small business owners!, July 4, 2007
By B. Tepper (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

After reading this book, I no longer have to guess how to edit my own store! It breaks things down clearly with examples, and pictures.

[Laura Helvey]

Rob, you are awesome! Thank you so much for all of your help, you have taught me so much about my own yahoo store! MUCH better than the yahoo help pages by FAR! The blogs, posts, books, I hope everyone who has a yahoo! store will find your words of wisdom. Thank you again :) Laura~

[Joan]

Very interesting blog on keyword conversion. This is a frustrating part of increasing sales on the web sites I manage! Google Analytics has been a help in identifying those specific keywords that bring customers to our site to make a purchase. An issue I have is that some of our keywords take customers to our home page instead of our product page, so they have to look for what to buy. We're working on this so hopefully sales will be increasing!