Detailed product descriptions help retailers rank higher on Google, an IRCE speaker says.

Traffic to OneWayFurniture.com dropped by two-thirds last year after Google Inc. introduced its Panda product. The search engine’s algorithm favors web sites with original content and those without suffer in search results.

“Suddenly all the old things that were working stopped,” says Mitchell Lieberman, OneWayFurniture.com founder and CEO. “Traffic fell off a cliff.”

Since then, One Way Furniture Inc., No. 433 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, has implemented a number of changes to its e-commerce site that have contributed to the web-only retailer placing higher in Google searches.

Lieberman will provide tips for managing Google’s changing search engine requirements at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2012 in June in a session entitled “How my SEO dropped overnight and what I’m doing to fix it.

Since last year, OneWayFurniture has hired four copywriters tasked with remaking product descriptions that were previously supplied by manufacturers and contained very little material written in-house.

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OneWayFurniture also has focused on increasing site performance, as Google rewards sites that contain pages that load quickly.

“It’s been extremely challenging, but exciting, too,” Lieberman says. “Even in a downturn like this, it is exciting to see the effects of what you are doing to get you back to where you were.”

Internet Retailer’s editors asked Lieberman to speak because he has practical experience in digging out from Google’s Panda update and can provide tips for preparing for these algorithm changes in the future. He also has grown OneWayFurniture.com to more than $10 million in annual web sales.

IRCE $200 early-bird discount expires March31.

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