The Original Shopping Cart Search Engine Optimization FAQ
Version 1.01: A Living Document with a last Revision Date of 7/1/04 by Mike Randolph, Shopping Cart Guru.
2. Identify issues that might cause the search engines not to crawl or index you website. Such as excessive use of JavaScript, linked images and ‘?’ (Question marks) in your URL’s. Confirm your pages are not more than one directory level deep from the root of your home page. Don’t join or participate in unknown link exchange strategies as you could be ‘judged’ by your neighbors content and activates. Be sure your page names match the linked text. For example the product ‘My Blue Widget’ should have a link of ‘My Blue Widget’ and the page it’s linking to should be named ‘My-Blue-Widget.htm’. The page extension doesn’t seem to have an effect. Research URL re-writing tools such as Apache mod_rewrite and for Windows 200x servers ISAPI_Rewrite by Helicon Technologies is an excellent tool. ISAPI_Rewrite is incorporated deeply into the IIS 5.0/6.0 layer. It’s possible to use these tools create more search engine friendly page names. For example the following rule and some modifications to your shopping cart pages your stores URL’s could be dramatically improved.
<add key="(.*)/.*-P(\d*)(?:C(\d*))?\.aspx(?:\?(.*))?" value="$1/product1.aspx?Product_ID=$2&Category_ID=$3&$4" />
Your product page name goes from un-friendly:
/product1.aspx?Category_ID=27&Product_ID=122
To Friendly:
/My-Blue-Widget-C27P122
SEO Hint $5: If your site utilizes frames get rid of them yesterday as some search engines don’t seem to like to index framed sites.
3. Optimize your web page, product and category titles to be keyword rich and of the correct length for the length of the keyword set for each page. A good page title for our product ‘My Blue Widget’ could be ‘My Blue Widget: Free Shipping on Widgets’. Web Position Gold says that for 2 keywords a page title of 3 to 5 is correct and for 3 keywords 5 to 7. Don’t overuse identical page titles. Re-work your product descriptions to obtain keyword densities, prominence (early placement of keyword sets in the webpage) and page lengths (number of words) appropriate for the number of keywords in your set. Carefully consider the keyword densities of your competitors during this process. WebPosition Gold is an excellent tool for this as it will give you many helpful hints and keep you out of trouble with the search engines as well.
4. Speaking of keeping out of trouble confirm your NOT spamming or doing anything that the search engines deem inappropriate.
5. Begin to improve your page ranking at google.com by increasing the number of pages (which are indexed in google.com) that link to yours. Page ranking is very important at google.com and without it you’re site will not reach its full potential. AbleCommerce users can add a store listing in topsites.com to help drive page ranking up. This is especially helpful for new stores or domains as it’s typically difficult to get indexed by google.com unless there is a link pointing to your site from a page ranked 4 or better in the google.com index.
6. It’s likely time to begin monitoring your keywords in the search engines if a month or two has gone by. WebPosition Gold has tools for this but I prefer the WebTracker tool at the www.gorank.com site as it access the Google’s API directly and bypasses the possibility of Google misinterpreting your excessive queries. Don’t be too itchy to change any single page as it’s important to have consistency between your pages, continue to work your important base keyword sets intoyou’re your web pages.
7. Re-visit your website log files and identify which keywords are bringing traffic to your site. Be especially careful to identify trends such as which page titles seem to get more clicks than others. Even if you do get a high ranking listing you could still be losing click because your page title isn’t inviting or interesting enough. That even though you’re listed in 100 search engines only 3 seem to have any traffic (Google, Yahoo and MSN).
8. Advanced SEO: Learn how the linking strategy you’re employing effects the distribution of page ranking between your websites pages. A sound linking strategy can help ‘focus’ your websites page ranking to important pages such as your home page, so to speak putting them in the search engine spotlight.
9. Advanced SEO: Gateway pages with unique helpful content for hard to crack keyword sets. For example consider the document your reading.
10. Constantly stay up to date with search engine changes, monitoring your important keyword rankings daily. Stay up to date with what’s happening by monitoring sites such as Search Engine Watch.