In the previous chapter, we reviewed several methods of getting more visitors to the website. In this chapter, we will emphasize probably one of the most important tool for an e-commerce store—Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What is SEO? SEO is a set of methods, techniques, and actions intended to make the website (online store) easily accessible and indexed by search engines, so that the search engines list the website higher in search results on certain queries run by visitors and prospective customers.
We will discuss why SEO is actually so important, the main benefits of having the online store optimized for search engines, and of course review tips and tricks for how to optimize an osCommerce online store for search engines. We will also review aspects of performing website's SEO on your own, and hiring a professional SEO consultant.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an important part of a marketing strategy of almost any e-commerce website. But why is that? Why SEO is so important?
There are at least two reasons for this. First of all, SEO helps to increase the number of visitors to the website by positioning the website higher in the list of matching websites produced by the search engine. It's based on how we read the web pages—from up to down, left to right. The higher the website is in the search results, the higher the chances that the users will notice it. Of course, if search results take more than one page—websites listed in the first page will receive more clicks than the websites listed on other pages, simply because the users will most probably find one or several interesting links on the first page and will not bother to check other search results on other pages. The more descriptive the title, URL, and the actual short description are—the more chances there are that the user will click the link, becoming a visitor.
And not just visitors are brought by search engines, but in most cases—visitors interested in the products and services advertised on the website, visitors who are more likely to become customers or subscribers.
It's important to note that the visitors who can find an answer to their query on the websites they are visiting will more likely become customers of those websites.
The second reason also seems obvious from the first glance—unlike paid advertisements SEO is free. Not the process of optimization of a certain website, but rather all visits made by the prospective customers do not cost a penny to the online store owner because the customers search in publicly available directories and search engines and are presented with the list of matching results sorted by relevancy to the query.
Since it usually takes quite some time to see the results brought by SEO, paid advertising may seem more effective in the beginning. SEO is really a long term perspective solution for an online store—it takes a while to pay back the initial investments, but then, once the website is optimized for search engines—it keeps working on its own and usually only requires modest upgrades and improvements from time to time.
So unless you're selling a very unique popular product or are not interested in getting more prospective customers to the website—consider SEO for your e-commerce website.
One important note to be made here is—search engines are not human beings. It seems obvious, though some store owners seem to forget about this and concentrate on making the websites best for search engines and not for the visitors and prospective customers.
We will discuss possible methods for search engine optimization further in this chapter, but it's important to remember usability of the online store should not suffer due to the SEO efforts. Otherwise, you may end up with a very popular online store with a very low visitor to customer conversion rate. An online store owner should always remember the main goal of any online store is to sell products or services. That is why after applying changes related to SEO, each time check if the customer conversion rate has stayed the same, increased, or decreased and act accordingly.
This also relates to so called "ethical SEO". Obviously, from a business point of view, it's better to have as many website visitors as possible. Though for better customer conversion, the path the visitor has used to come to the website should be straightforward, and also the user should always find what has been searched for.
A distinction between Ethical SEO techniques and methodology, and Ethical SEO firms should be made. While an SEO firm may behave ethically towards its client, it's important to ensure it uses ethical SEO techniques and methodology.
The goal of a search engine is to return documents that are most relevant for a particular search query. Ethical SEO will make your page as relevant as possible for a targeted keyword or set of keywords.
It is ethical to have the website promote and sell products and services that are advertised in search engines. It's not ethical to use some popular search terms, like for example movie titles, to get more visitors to the website that doesn't sell or advertise this kind of products.
It is ethical to sell products and services for the advertised price. It's not ethical to list low priced products in the search engines and not have them listed in the actual online store.
It is ethical to have backward links from real websites (portals, forums, blogs, directories, other online stores). It's not ethical to use specially created so called "link farms" to increase a website's page rank by having fake / "SPAM" websites linked to it.
By giving visitors the information they are looking for, you will increase the conversion rate of visitors to customers. By using unethical SEO, it is likely that you could well be losing sales to your online competition.
Not only does it distract the visitors and decrease the chances of converting a visitor into a customer, but also is bad for SEO—search engines try to fight non-ethical search engine optimizations. Un-ethical SEO may result in a drop of the page rank, and even a temporary block put on the website by the search engine.
Ethical SEO produces the most positive results and does the least harm. It should be applied so that it improves online sales and at the same time leads towards better customer satisfaction. Ethical SEO should respect products, online stores, websites of competitors, search engines, customers, and their desire to find products most suitable to address their needs.
When building a new online store based on osCommerce, it makes sense to plan for search engine optimization in advance. Of course, the store owner may want to wait before investing in SEO and see if the website is picking up customers on its own, using other ways of online advertisement than in search engines. But to achieve maximum results it's recommended to start with defining SEO strategy and performing at least the technical part of search engine optimization while developing the website.
By defining the strategy for SEO we mean:
Determining keywords and key phrases that the target audience might use to find products sold online
Creating a list of updates to the website that are necessary to be performed to have it optimized for search engines
Setting priorities on which updates will be performed when and in which period
Setting up a budget for SEO and splitting it by the updates
Listing websites you would like to get backward links from, finding webmaster contact information, creating a promotion email template for webmasters
One thing that's very important when optimizing a new website for search engines is patience. Even a well optimized new online store will not be listed or fully and properly indexed by search engines for a certain period of time. It makes sense to spend this time testing the online store, collecting feedback from the customers, and improving the site and product catalog.
Once a new online store is put live a certain amount of time is required for the search engines to get to it, scan all pages, and index all keywords. During this process, search engines will also locate links pointing back to your online store and give it a so called Page Rank.
According to Wikipedia, Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. In other words—the higher the Page Rank—the more important the website and higher the position in the search results it will get.
Even though PageRank itself was developed by the founders of Google Inc., other search engines use similar methods to determine how popular this or that web resource is and to sort search results.
It may take up to three or four months for a new website to become visible in search engines like Google, and to get some positive Page Rank. It may take even longer (six to eight months) to get to some relatively good positions in search results, if the web pages contain corresponding keywords and if there are a good number of good quality backward links. There's no strict definition on what actually is a "good number"—sometimes even a couple of links from pages with high Page Rank is enough to make a good number.
Good quality here means not only a high Page Rank of the linking page, but also its content, that ideally should be related to the content of your website/online store pages. Each search engine has its own schedule of updates of its page ranks. For example, Google performs such updates three or four times a year.
It should be noted that Yahoo! and MSN may not have a delay in putting your online store into search results.
A website will become visible in search engines as soon as it has been visited by special bots (web crawlers), and its pages have been indexed. But even after that it may be almost invisible in the search results until its Page Rank is calculated, and until its Page Rank is greater than zero. By almost invisible, here we mean it may still appear in the search results, but somewhere in the very end of the list. Even if the search engine comes back with 100 links in response to a certain search query, the user will most likely check the first 10 or 20. So why would a new website, your new online store, be invisible in search results? And for how long will this be happening, and is there anything to do about it?
If you plan to launch your new osCommerce online store, better plan ahead publishing of some relevant pages under its domain name. Actually, the more pages with relevant content you will have published—the more chances are that the website will be reached, indexed, and ranked by search engines by the time you decide to go live with the online store.
There's no real proof of existence of this phenomena except for how new websites appear in Google search results. It is often noticed that a new website, even though relatively promptly indexed by Google or other search engines, may not do well in the search results for quite some time. It looks like a website is put on "probation" by the search engine, and no efforts on improving its position in the search result would make any difference at that time.
It has been also noticed that the more common, competitive keywords are used in the website—the longer it stays in this status. The more unique keywords and contents the website has—the less time it appears to be ignored by Google and other search engines and the sooner it will appear in better positions in search results.
This phenomenon was called the "sandbox" and it is assumed that all or almost all new websites are put into a "sandbox" for a certain amount of time by Google, and only then they can join other, "approved" websites in the search results.
While a website is "in the sandbox", no real attempts to improve its Page Rank will affect its position in the search results.
It is understood that Google has come up with this idea to fight the so called "search engine spammers". Before this update had been introduced, it was relatively easy to use spam websites to affect the Page Ranks of real websites. Search Engine spammers just needed to build yet another website that, even though it would break Google policies as to the content and keywords usage, would help to increase the Page Rank of the websites to which it had hyperlinks. Once that spam website was found and blocked by search engines bots, the spammers would easily build yet another website on a different domain, with slightly different content, and would repeat the trick an indefinite number of times.
Now, with new websites getting into the "sandbox" automatically, Google runs a series of anti-spam tests against new websites and only pulls the website out of the "sandbox" after that. The whole process takes time, and Google also waits to see what is happening with the website during that time. Again, the more unique keywords are found in the website—the more chances for it to either pass the "sandbox" or get out of it sooner.
It should be understood by website owners and webmasters that the "sandbox" filter is not a punishment in any way. It's just a method that is used by Google and other search engines to prevent search engine spam and provide users with the most appropriate and accurate search results.
Once the website is out of the "sandbox" its Page Rank will soon become visible and it will start to appear in better positions in search results.
You can consider the time your online store spends in the "sandbox" as yet another opportunity to test the website in real life conditions but with only a few real customers, i.e. with no risk of upsetting a larger number of customers if anything goes wrong with part of the online store. You can see how the website performs, collect feedback from the first customers, and promptly update the online store accordingly.
You should also spend this time building up all SEO elements that may still be missing there, optimizing the content, product catalog, and design. You should spend this time getting more inbound links to your online store, partnering with the websites that can bring you more customers and at the same time can improve your online store's Page Rank. Once the online store is pulled out of the "sandbox"—you will see it performing quite well in the search results, if all search engine optimization has been done properly.
Finally, try to not rely solely on Google traffic. Appearance in other search engines, such as Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL can also bring you customers, and results may be visible sooner than with Google.
Basically, the main reason for a website to appear in the "sandbox" is for it to look un-natural to Google.
Google seems to analyze inbound links, density of keywords in the texts, titles, META tags, and other web design and layout elements. Where it suspects anything un-natural—it will increase the chances for a website to fall into the "sandbox".
Even textual content can be analyzed for if it's created by human or if it's a specially generated content for SEO purposes.
There can be some other assumptions made, but it should be noted that even a website with unique high-quality design and content, and top inbound links may still be put into the "sandbox".
Here are some tips on how to determine if your online store is in the "sandbox".
First, you need to make sure the website is not banned by Google. Check HTTP access logs to see if Google bot is visiting the website. If it's not—there are high chances the website is banned. Also, try searching for your domain name in Google. If it can't be found—this either means the website has not been indexed yet (i.e. it's a very new website) or it has been banned. If your online store is well ranked in other search engines, but doesn't perform well in Google, then it may have been put in the "sandbox".
In order to get the site out of the "sandbox" the easiest and fastest way is to ... wait until Google has pulled it out of there. Eventually their aim is to index as many sites as possible and provide their users with the most appropriate valuable results based on the quality of content. If your online store offers high-quality content—your website will be out of the "sandbox" even sooner.
Google maintains two indexes—the so called Main and Supplemental. Since it can operate with a limited (but still huge) number of websites/pages, it has to have the most valuable websites and pages listed in the Main index, and put all the other ones into the Supplemental index.
When searching for a match to the user's query, Google first checks the Main index. If it cannot find enough information there, it will then check the Supplemental index and will display search results from both indexes.
Being in the Supplemental index should not be considered as a punishment or a penalty, though it may affect the number of visitors to one's website.
The main reason for a website or one or several of its pages to be included into the Supplemental index is that Google doesn't consider them as important as other sites and pages that are included into the Main index.
Here we have prepared some tips on how you get into the Supplemental index (of course, you should try to avoid this from happening!):
Having not enough high quality inbound links
Having "not important" pages within the website—i.e. pages that are not linked with pages that the Search Engine considers to be important
Having too many keywords in the title tag, META descriptions and keywords tags
Having duplicate contents that can be also found on other websites/pages in the Web
An online store owner or a webmaster can check if some of the website pages are in the Supplemental index. In order to do this, just open Google website and type in the following search string, and then press Enter:
site:your-site-name-here.com.
In the following screenshot, we can see a green "Supplemental Result" mark on some search results. This means that links have been taken from the supplemental index and brought into the search results page along with the links taken from the main index.
Alternatively, if the Google search result page doesn't contain links marked with "Supplemental Result", it's possible to still get the list of supplemental links by typing in the following search string, and then pressing Enter: site:your-site-name-here.com/&.
There is no straightforward way to get out of the Supplemental index back into the Main index. It can be said that it's all about continuing with ethical SEO efforts, building valuable inbound links to multiple pages of the website, optimizing the website, creating additional content, validating the website for errors...
Often with osCommerce, an online store, in particular a recently launched online store, that has a relatively large number of products and categories may have many links to its categories and products added to Google's Supplemental index even though a number of well ranked inbound links are pointing to its main page. In such a case, a possible solution would be to first concentrate on promoting category pages of that online store in Google. It's possible to submit a Google map containing only links to category pages using Google Webmasters tools, and not include links to products in that submission. Once category pages have been given at least some Google PageRank (even zero!), products of each category, category by a category, could be submitted too. It may take a while to see the results (several weeks), but this method can actually work! Also it's important to note that once a link to category or a product has got into the supplemental index, it may be a good idea to remove it from the online store and re-instate it again with another ID or name. If a link from the main page (most often the page with highest PageRank) of the site points to that newly reinstated category or product, it will most definitely get out of Google's supplemental index. The Search Engine needs to be shown that category or product is important.
It can also be said it's easier not to get into the Supplemental index than to get out of it, so it's better to think carefully and properly design the whole new online store link structure, and hopefully all or most of its pages will get listed in the Main index.
It's very important to ensure the online store has no duplicated pages, or at least pages with duplicated content will not be indexed by search engines (see further regarding robots.txt directives).
When switching an existing e-commerce (or static brochure-like) website to an osCommerce-based online store on the same domain name, search engine optimization becomes crucial for the success of the new website, the same as its usability and advertising.
Before the actual switch, the most popular and successful (well performing in search engines) pages of the old website should be identified. They will more likely have a good page rank in Google and other search engines that rely on similar technologies. Not depending on how well the new osCommerce online store is optimized for search engines, preserving URLs of such successful pages is an essential task.
In order to preserve good page rank of certain pages, new online store based on osCommerce should do one of the following:
Have its own pages on the same URLs as the old website
Have special redirect rules in place to point all requests to the old URLs to the new ones
There are two main reasons why it is important to hold or implement redirects for such URLs. First, the search engines will still consider such pages existing, and having good ranks, and will give them good positions in the search results. They will also continue to parse the website from time to time to check the pages and re-index them, so it would be good to have links to older pages in place until the new pages have become known by the search engines. Secondly, as links to such pages keep appearing in search results, users will keep clicking the links and of course each such click should lead the user to the expected page.
What information can be on popular and well performing pages of the old version of the website? First of all, it could be category and product pages, it could be manufacturer information pages, buying guides, or other pages with additional information. It could also be pages with terms and conditions of trade, and other static pages.
As was said above, one of the options is to create pages with the same URLs as on the old website. But it may be difficult to maintain both old and new versions of the same pages on the same URLs. Therefore it's more reasonable to use the redirects method. The search engines, or browsers of the visitors of the new online store should be redirected to the new URLs seamlessly and without any delay.
In order to do it properly, the so called 301 redirect can be used. In this case, the web browser or a search engine bot is sent a special command to open another URL instead of the one requested. The code "301" reads as "moved permanently" and this method is considered to be the most efficient and search engine friendly method of web page redirection.
If the online store is hosted by Apache web server, and the rewrite engine is turned on, the following commands can be inserted into the .htaccess file to implement 301 redirects from old URLs to the new ones in the safest way for search engine positions:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^oldpage.html$ http://www.domain.com/newpage.html [R=301,L]
or:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^oldpage.php$ http://www.domain.com/newpage.php [R=301,L]
It is also possible to use another redirection command in .htaccess file to redirect website visitors and search engines from old URL (the first value in the example below) to the new URL (correspondingly the second value):
Redirect permanent /oldpage.html http://www.domain.com/newpath/newpage.html
The "permanent" parameter in the above sample is important for SEO and should not be forgotten.
The .htaccess file should be placed in the root folder of the website. In osCommerce you would most probably already have a .htaccess file there, so it will be even easier to edit the existing file and add some commands as described above (please do not forget to replace domain.com with your actual domain name, newpage.html and newpage.php with corresponding file names, and newpath with the corresponding path to the new page, if any).
If the domain name of the new website also changes, it is possible to fix this situation for search engines by adding the following code to the .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This code above effectively redirects all requests to the files and URLs of the old domain to the same files and URLs of the new domain. It should not be forgotten to contact every backlinking website to modify their links to point to your new website or web pages.
Search engine optimization is a complex chain of actions, approaches, and techniques that are intended to position the website and its pages higher in search engine results brought to users.
It is possible to logically split SEO into two pieces—internal and external SEO. While internal SEO makes the website and all its pages search engine friendly (i.e. as easy to index and parse as possible, rich with keywords that prospective customers would use), external SEO works on improving the website's position in search engines.
As said above, the so called external SEO is a set of actions, approaches, and techniques intended to improve a website's positions in search engines. It looks at the website's external relationships, and tries to achieve higher results by improving the quality of such relationships with other websites and by getting involved in new relationships. It is possible to say that external SEO is working dedicatedly on making the website more popular and on increasing the number of visitors to the website.
But first, before improving it, it's important to understand the current situation with the website's positioning in search engines.
The popularity of a website can be measured by the number of websites that point back to it, and by the number of visitors it receives, directly or from other websites. Obviously, the more visitors and more backward links a website has, the more popular it is.
To measure the number of visitors, there are special software packages (like Google Analytics, Webalizer, etc.) that can be installed on a web server (or often come pre-installed with a hosting package) and provide statistics on all visits—see the Tracking SEO Campaign Results and Web Traffic Analysis sections of this chapter. It is possible to check the number of visitors each month or even each week and put it into a special Excel file or a database table. It will help the store owner see the trend in the change of the number of visitors over time. Another useful tip here would be to keep separate statistics for visitors that come from search engines, websites that have backward links to your online store, and the ones that entered your website's URL directly.
A website's popularity and positions in search engines depend on the number of backward links to the website. To check the number of backward links that the search engines know of, a special query should be sent into the corresponding search engines.
Google/MSN (Live Search)/AOL:
link:www.domain.com
Yahoo!:
linkdomain:www.domain.com or link:www.domain.com
Note that there's no gap allowed after the colon. The following screenshot shows a sample results page for a search of link: www.oscommerce.com.
By keeping the statistics of the number of backward links, the store owner can measure its popularity in the Internet and particularly in the search engines.
Instead of querying search engines, some prospective customers prefer to use online directories of sites, where websites are sorted by categories and it may be easier to find a website that advertises products or services the user is looking for.
There are multiple online directories. Some of them are dedicated to a particular industry/theme only. Some of them contain links to websites of various types and categories. Also, inclusion into some directories is free of charge, and other online directories would charge the website owners a certain inclusion fee.
Listing in an online directory can bring more prospective customers to your online store. Those prospective customers would more likely be your target group of customers, as they would already be interested in the products and services that you offer on the website. This works like the Yellow Pages, and in fact Yellow Pages are available online too.
Also, listing in online directories may help to improve popularity in search engines, page ranks, and eventually positions in the search results, because online directories are parsed by search engines and backward links to the listed websites are recorded.
How should you decide which online directory is good for your online store? There could be several tips given:
Check which online directories your well performing competitors are listed in.
Check which online directories are popular (have good page ranks) themselves.
Consider being listed in very specific online directories as well as in some very general ones; specific online directories where all sites are dedicated to a specific theme of content are more likely to be found by your prospective customers.
Check how well the websites category tree is built.
Check the information about other websites listed in the same category you would like to have your site listed in.
Consider if your budget allows for being listed in certain paid online directories.
Do not expect an immediate result—it may take a while for search engines to parse the online directories again and get links to your online store.
See if listing in an online directory adds some value to the website—for example, if the directory website itself is actively advertised in the Internet, or if the editors of the online directory give reviews of the websites listed, etc.
Since many similar websites are listed in online directories, your online store should participate in a competition for winning the prospective customer's attention when the user is browsing through the directory. That is why the information about your online store should:
Be the most accurate and correct
Be as detailed as possible
Be relatively short
Contain a call to action
If it's possible—try to also give information about the company, including addresses and phone numbers to demonstrate to the prospective customers they are dealing with a real business. Also it will most probably make sense to have the website listed in multiple categories that are appropriate. For example, an online store can be listed under several categories related to its products, and also under a category related to its geographical location. Finally, for the sake of search engine optimization it makes sense to apply for inclusion of your online store into an appropriate category with the highest page rank.
To complete this section, we will review some of the most valuable online directories for websites:
www.dmoz.org is a free online directory that is regularly used by search engines like AOL and Google to get to know about new or updated websites. Since inclusion into Dmoz is free, there are a lot of websites being added to this online directory every day. Each inclusion request has to be approved by the moderator (Editor) of a certain category first; then it will be actually included into the online directory. There are so many of such inclusion requests received every day, that it may take a month or even more for a website to appear in the corresponding category.
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html describes the submission process.
A website can be submitted to the Yahoo! Search directory. There are several submission options, free and paid. More information can be found at http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.
Google also provides a facility to submit the website to its online directory. But as its Directory is based on the Dmoz directory, the process actually repeats the one described above for Dmoz.org. It is possible to notify Google about your new online store by submitting a link to the main page of the website at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. It is not actually submission to a directory, but rather a way to let Google know about the newly launched website earlier than the Google bot gets to it.
In a similar way, it's possible to let MSN (now powered by Live Search of www.live.com) know about your new online store at http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.
For European store owners, and also for international companies looking for a presentation of their websites in Europe, the Europages business directory (www.europages.com) can be an optimal choice. Inclusion is not free and the prices are quite high, but besides the inclusion into the online directory, the company also offers inclusion into the printed version of the online directory, inclusion into the national Yellow pages in several European countries, inclusion into the www.lycos.com directory, and many other services (like, for example, registration of several keywords associated with the website).
Back links play an important role in External SEO by improving a website's positions in search engines and by providing more visitors from linked websites. Those visitors are more likely to become customers as they have been referred by partner websites that advertise similar or complementary products, or provide users with information in some way related to the products of your online store.
Three key success factors for a backward linking strategy are:
Quality of links should outweigh quantity
Link partners must relate to your site content
Partners should link to you from pages listing as few links as possible
The rule of thumb when starting to build the backward links profile to your online store is to check which websites have backward links to the sites of your successful competitors.
Also, it is very important to ensure the backward links are set up on websites that have a proper reputation, and not just "SPAM" websites that will disappear in the near future. In the latter case, search engines may not only ignore the links from "SPAM" websites to other pages, but also assume the linked website's participation in a "SPAM" network and somehow ban or decrease ranks of such sites.
It's always good for SEO and for getting more targeted visitors to have backward links from portals, forums, and blogs that contain information about products that are advertised on your online store.
Of course, the more non-"SPAM" websites are linked to your pages, the better it is for the business. It should be also noted that it's better to have backward links pointing not only to the main page of the online store, but to several different pages (like categories, or even individual products), so that search engines and prospective customers would be able to see exactly the information related to the pages of other websites they have been visiting just before they clicked the link to your online store. Also, try using various keywords and key phrases associated with particular pages of your site when asking other websites to place a back link to your online store.
Let's consider several types of backward links and compare the benefits of each type:
Brochure-like, and other static and dynamic information websites—websites of other companies or websites containing information about particular products and services may be well ranked in search engines, and a backward link from such a site may well improve the position of your online store in search results with time.
Other online stores—if an online store sells products that are complementary to the products sold online in your online store, a backward link may not only improve the position of your online store in search results, but also provide you with customers who are already interested in buying products and services similar to what you offer.
Forums—even if you don't receive many prospective customers referred by such a website, a backward link will be quite important if the forum contains topics where the members of the forum either write about products similar to those that are offered in your online store, or discuss pros and cons of buying and/or using such products. Usually, web pages with extensive comments will be full of keywords associated in a certain way with your product catalog, which has high importance for search engines.
This is also applicable to online blogs.
The less links to other websites located on the page, the more important the backward link to your online store. Also, it's preferable to use text phrases that contain important keywords to be linked back to your online store, so that the search engines can notice the relation between those keywords and the website. For example, a "Wide Range of Apparel" is much better for a backward link than "Visit our site now!".
Internal SEO cares about optimizing the pages of the website, their content, and structure to provide the easiest way for search engines to parse the pages and to extract keywords that the store owner wants to have associated with the website.
Content is the core and the main part of internal SEO of any website. Websites get parsed by search engines and content gets extracted from the website. Then the search engines determine main keywords and key phrases and associate pages of the website with certain keywords. So when the user is searching for a certain string in the search engines, the website appears in the search results.
It is important for search engines to provide the users with the best, and the most accurate results. Therefore a website with unique content that has keywords and key phrases similar to what the user is looking for has more chances to appear in a good position in search results than a website with not much content that can be parsed by search engines (i.e. with not much textual content), or a website with non-unique content (i.e. content copied from either another website, or content from the same non-online source), even if its full of keywords and key phrases.
It's better to have natural unique descriptions for the online store, its products and categories, its manufacturers, and all other entities associated with the products. Even if product description comes from a product catalog that is shared between multiple merchants, it would do good if the store owner added some unique comments and descriptions for each product and category, so that the search engine would deal with the pages of the online store as web pages holding more or less unique content.
Actually, the best content for both search engines and end customers can be provided by the store owner. Having a very good, if not ultimate, knowledge of the industry and products that are sold online, the store owner usually can describe them in the best way, in a simple, straightforward, and keyword-rich manner. Almost any store owner can create such descriptions better than a hired writer. Here are several tips to writing SEO-friendly descriptions for products, categories, and other pages of the online store:ghg
Write descriptions so that the target audience could understand them.
Use professional language and terms—most of the users will find it easier to understand.
Include details, but at the same time try to make descriptions shorter—users tend to ignore longer descriptions.
Structure your writing well; feel free to use additional elements (images, tables, etc.) if required, but try to avoid them if possible.
Concentrate on details (features) that would help to sell the products you offer, but do not forget to add information about other details (features) as well.
Keep an emotional link with the content you write, write naturally, make the content of your website an additional value for your customers.
Use paragraphs to separate parts of the descriptions; use the most important keywords and key phrases as close to the start of each new paragraph as possible.
Feel free to highlight (with HTML header tags or bold tag, for example) certain parts of the descriptions you write—this will not only make it easier for you to make your customers concentrate on those parts, but will also show the search engines those parts are important (use this to highlight keywords and key phrases your customers will be more likely to use in search engines).
Do not forget—almost no one knows the subject you're writing about better than you do.
Most of the search engines nowadays are able to not only index web pages, but also files and documents that are parts of websites. For example, PDF files can be indexed if they contain text content. Therefore it is possible to have a part of the web pages in the PDF format (for example, a more detailed description of certain product) and still have it indexed by search engines.
One of the most important tasks for an online store owner is to define keywords and key phrases the prospective customers may use to search for products and services advertised on the website.
For an osCommerce online store, the most obvious keywords to think about are the keywords and key phrases that contain:
Product names, product attributes' names
Category names
Manufacturer names
A combination of all of the above
For example, using one of the products of the demo osCommerce store (http://demo.oscommerce.com/product_info.php?products_id=21), we can get the following keywords and key phrases: "SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle", "Software Stimulation", "Sierra SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle", "Sierra Software", "Sierra Stimulation", "Sierra Software Stimulation".
Since some of the customers may be looking for cheap, or luxury options; they may add the words "cheap" or "luxury" (or similar) to their queries to the search engines. Some customers may be looking for "cheap Sierra Software".
Many customers try to refine their search queries by adding territory names. For example, a customer may be looking for "Hewlett Packard printers in Chicago".
By identifying the most popular, best selling, or most profitable manufacturers, categories of products, and products that you offer on your online store, you can refine the list of the most important keywords that are relevant for your website.
But how can you ensure the keywords and key phrases that you think or want to be popular are really popular among your prospective customers? Once the list of the keywords and key phrases is compiled, you can test it in search engines like Google or Overture using appropriate keyword suggesting tools. The good news is that these keyword selection and suggestions tools are usually free and rely on real-life data collected while the customers searched for certain keywords.
Overture's keyword selection and the suggestion tool not only gives the number of searches for a specified keyword per month, but also provides the most popular key phrases used by the customers during a certain period of time, sorted by popularity among the customers. For example, for "Hewlett Packard Printers" it suggests:
hewlett packard laser printer
hewlett packard all in one printer
hewlett packard photo printer
hewlett packard printer ink
hewlett packard printer software
hewlett packard color printer
hewlett packard printer cartridge
hewlett packard deskjet printer
hewlett packard printer software download
hewlett packard printer ink cartridge
Inclusion of all or some of suggested key phrases into the list of keywords may help to attract more customers in the future, and also cut down costs on advertising.
Overture's suggestion website is located at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.
Google provides a free to use Keyword Tool for external users and a similar Keyword Tool for its AdWords customers. The tool is based on Google search statistics, and can generate key phrases based on the given keyword or on the given website. The tool is located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. For each suggested keyword, it gives two estimates—of advertiser competition (i.e. how many other advertisers are using the same keyword in their paid advertisements) and search volume (i.e. how popular this keyword or key phrase is among the prospective customers).
For example, for the example already used above "Hewlett Packard Printers", it suggests a list of 25 keywords. Of the following list, the following keywords can be used by the osCommerce store owner:
packard deskjet printer
all in one printers
canon printers
best printers
photo printers
inkjet printers
laser printers
scanner printers
plotter printers
deskjet printers
laserjet printers
multifunction printers
printers ink
colour printers
fax printers
color printers
Keywords in the list should be updated regularly. Those keywords should be broadly used in the content of the web pages of the online store. Also, those keywords should be used with names, news pages, and editing page properties (like titles, etc.). We will show how to utilize the identified keywords further in this chapter.
Search engines may get incorrect indexes when they find the same content duplicated in several pages of the same website, or in several completely different websites. Search engines strive to define the source of the content where the authentic copy is located. Once it's done, the search engines tends to ignore other pages or websites where duplicate content is present.
The main reason for this is to provide users of search engines with the most appropriate and comprehensive search results. So instead of providing users with a list of links matching the search query but containing the same or very similar content, the search engines would rather list matching but diverse authentic links.
We will call completely identical or very similar blocks of textual information on different pages of one website or different websites duplicate content.
So what does this have to do with an osCommerce online store? There are several potential issues that an osCommerce store owner should be aware of. Let us consider them and also consider how to deal with these issues.
Quite often, one and the same product can be put in two or more categories in osCommerce. For example, a new MP3 player can be put into the Music / MP3 Players category and Gift Ideas category as well. This is correct from the marketing point of view, but may be considered wrong from the search engine's point of view. It all depends on how osCommerce generates product page URLs.
If osCommerce adds category path (cPath) into the URL, search engines will consider one and the same product included into two different categories as two different URLs, two different pages, i.e. as duplicate content.
osCommerce uses the cPath variable to extract the category path from the URL and open the category tree accordingly, and also print the so called "breadcrumbs" in the navigation part of the page, so that the customer will know what are the parent categories of the product.
There are several possible solutions when a product gets included into two and more categories in osCommerce:
Use "301" redirects in the
.htaccessfile to redirect users, and search engine bots from all URLs of the product information page in various categories to only one chosen product information page URL. The inclusion into the.htaccessfile may look like this:Redirect permanent /index.php?cPath=2_20&products_id=24 http://www.domain.com/index.php?cPath=3_23&products_id=24
If you have almost all products duplicated in two or more categories, you may want to remove the cPath part from all URLs, leaving only the products_id part there. You can do it by modifying the
/catalog/includes/modules/products_listing.phpfile, in the part of the code where it sets the value of the$lc_textvariable. One has to be very careful when editing that.phpfile as the Product Listing class is used in a number of places in osCommerce (including the search results page, category listing page, etc.). In fact the$lc_textvariable contains the complete HTML description of the product listing, so you would need to locate the place in the code where it adds category ID (cPath) to the URL that leads the customer to the product information page and comment/remove that piece of PHP script.Using
robots.txt, it is possible to tell search engines not to crawl or index certain pages (product pages or category pages) of the osCommerce online store. It is possible to find more information about usingrobots.txtat http://www.robotstxt.org/ and we also cover it in a bit more detail, later in this chapter, but here's a sample of such instructions that will prevent search engines from crawling and indexing certain product pages and category pages:User-Agent: * Disallow: /catalog/index.php?cPath=2_20&products_id=24 Disallow: /catalog/index.php?cPath=99 Disallow: /shopping_cart.php
Sometimes product listing pages contain complete or almost complete descriptions of products that also appear on the product information pages on the same website. Search engines may consider such pages to have duplicate content, and ignore either the product listing or product information pages.
This situation is relatively easy to fix. Instead of displaying the complete product description on the product listing page, it's better to either display a special short description there, and then have the long product description displayed exclusively on the product information page, or display only a part (let's say 100 characters or 10 words) of the product description in the listing, and display the complete description on the product information page.
If all products have very short descriptions, too short to be split between the product listing and product information pages, why is it necessary to include links to the product information pages at all? Why not leave the product listing pages only, and let the customers see complete product descriptions there and buy products directly from the product listing?
Yes, sometimes such an approach will work. But there are at least three reasons not to do it and to leave the product information pages on the website.
The first reason is SEO, keywords density in particular. It's obvious that on the product information page, keyword density will be higher for product-specific keywords than on the product listing page (because of other products listed there). The second reason is all those extra images that some or all products may have besides their main product image. Extra product images in osCommerce require additional contributions to be installed, and we will cover this in more detail in further chapters of this book. The third reason is attributes—if the online store uses attributes, the customers should be able to select certain attribute values on the product information page. Although there are certain updates for osCommerce product listing pages that allow for listing product attributes there along with the products, should products have more than one or two attributes the page will become very crowded and customers may become confused. Also, it won't be a positive improvement for search engines because of the amount of extra HTML code required to display selections of attributes.
Either way the owner of an osCommerce online store needs to make sure the usability of the website doesn't suffer from SEO improvements.
Some higher advanced e-commerce solutions based on osCommerce may include multiple front ends linked to the same product catalog and back end. Such solutions are much easier to manage than multiple, completely separate online stores. Each front end may be on a separate sub-domain or domain name, and have different designs. Each front end may be dedicated to a certain group of products, or be optimized to address the expectations of a certain target customer group, so that the system of several front ends may be more successful in online sales than one online store with all categories and products listed under one front end.
But while improving online sales and making management of multiple front ends just as easy as management of a single online store, such e-commerce solutions may lose in SEO because of the duplicate content issue.
Then the following may be of help:
If possible, have different product descriptions entered for and displayed in every front end. This way search engines will stop seeing duplicate content, and the customers will still be placing orders in literally one and the same online store independent of how many front ends the system has.
If it doesn't conflict with the marketing strategy—use
robots.txtas described earlier to tell the search engines to ignore certain parts of certain front ends.If there are multiple languages installed in osCommerce—make sure product description in each language is different from product description in other languages. If product description only exists in the default language—it may make sense to disable the multilingual feature on the website until the translations for all languages are ready.
It is often the case that osCommerce is used as an e-commerce solution by those retailers who receive product feeds from suppliers, and as a result list products that other retailers also list on their own websites. In this situation, search engines may ignore the product pages of the osCommerce online store as they will be containing duplicate content, as well as the product pages of the websites of other retailers.
Such cases are different to the ones described above because here osCommerce store owners cannot amend the product descriptions and specifications that come from suppliers except by creating new unique content (description) for each product. Taking into account the amount of time required to do so, most online retailers would prefer to use some other method.
A possible solution would be to improve the product pages of the osCommerce online store by adding manufacturer information, category buying guides, size charts (if applicable), and other additional information based on product data. This will help to make each product page look more unique compared to the product pages of other websites that use the same product feeds.
Finally, we will consider a situation when other websites (affiliates for example) download product information from osCommerce online stores and list it on their pages. This situation is opposite to the one described above, and here the main concern is if the search engines correctly identify the source of the content being your osCommerce online store.
First of all, it may not be a reason to worry too much. Search engines will most probably correctly identify the source of the content, and will continue to parse and index your website accordingly.
However, a link back to the corresponding page of your website from each page where your content is published may help search engines to understand that your website is the source.
If you see a website that uses your content that you think is affecting your SEO, and the website owner refuses to remove or alter the content, you may want to contact the search engines and ask for exclusion of the other website from the search results on certain keywords. For example, for Google the procedure is described at http://www.google.com/dmca.html.
Since HTML formats are issued by W3C.org, a valid web page complies to the W3C.org HTML formats and recommendations.
It has almost never been the case that web browsers require the pages to be 100% correct and valid HTML. Almost any web browser allows for certain inconsistencies in HTML script that webmasters sometimes use to create impressive looking websites. Web browsers always try to find a way round such inconsistencies and compensate in different ways that merely depend on each particular browser. A web page with no inconsistencies is valid.
If this is so, and if they allow certain freedom in authoring HTML pages—does it mean the search engines ought to do the same? Actually the answer is—yes, this is how the search engines try to perform. Search engine bots try to extract as much content and textual information from websites as possible to perform the most precise analysis of the extracted data. But what if a web page is not valid HTML, but rather a freely designed HTML pages with some parts of it not being valid accordingly to the formats? In that case, search engine bots may incorrectly extract information from the website, or miss some textual information that contains important keywords.
So there are at least the following reasons to have website pages valid:
To make web pages look the same in different browsers that support the same HTML formats
To avoid confusion and incorrect processing by different Search Engine bots, and allow all of the important information to be properly extracted and indexed from the web pages
Even though there are certain reasons not to validate the website (valid pages may not look and work as intended originally; time and costs involved may be quite considerable), for SEO purposes it's recommended to keep your osCommerce online store valid HTML.
All osCommerce online stores are similar, at least in the file and website structure. Whatever the actual names of the files are, it makes sense to have the following pages/files as valid HTML:
main (home) page
category listing page
advanced search page
product information page
shopping cart page
information pages (like About Us, Terms and Conditions, etc.)
There exist multiple validation services in the Internet, paid and free. Paid services may suggest useful tips on how to fix this or that validation error, while the free services mostly concentrate on spotting validation problems and reporting them to the customers.
The best known free HTML pages validation service is provided by W3C.org, and is available at http://validator.w3.org. It allows for submission of HTML scripts and also URLs and returns the list of found issues or a confirmation about the page being valid.
In order to validate an osCommerce online store, its URLs could be submitted to the W3C.org HTML Validator. You will receive a list of issues you need to tackle. The web pages should then be modified until the last reported error is gone and those pages are considered valid by this service.
There may be some situations, though, when it's better to not fix an error reported by the Validator, for the sake of desired look and feel of the web pages. There may also be situations when a reported HTML validation issue is caused by the description of a certain product that is listed on the page. In that case, the product's description should be corrected in the Administration panel of the online store.
Let us consider typical issues reported by the validation service and ways to fix them using the example of the osCommerce demo website, http://demo.oscommerce.com/.
The first attempt to validate the main page returns 12 errors, which is relatively few compared to over 90 issues per page reported on the main pages of some osCommerce online stores.
The very first error message tells us the Doctype element of HTML is missing. The strange thing about that is when we open the HTML sources of the main page of the demo osCommerce online store, we can see the doctype tag in the very first row. So what exactly is missing? It seems that the character case matters here a lot. Changing the following string:
<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
to
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
can solve this very first problem. Alternatively, the Validator allows overriding the doctype parameter before the validation, manually.
The following five errors are related to the <body> HTML tag format. They are not crucial for SEO. The easiest way to fix them would be to remove all the non-standard attributes of the <body> tag attributes at all (i.e. get rid of the marginwidth, marginheight, etc.).
Then until the very end of the list of errors, warnings, and advises, Validator prints occurrences of the uncoded & character in the page script. As suggested by the Validator itself & can be changed to & , even in URLs, to fix this error.
Note
The validator report usually contains very detailed and helpful comments and even suggestions on how to fix those reported issues. You can fix all or most of those reported issues by simply following given suggestions.
The same or very similar issues can be seen and fixed in the category product listing page, such as, for example, http://demo.oscommerce.com/index.php?cPath=3 The W3C HTML Validator reports about 16 errors on such pages. The exact number of errors may also depend on the exact content of each individual page, and which product names or product descriptions are a part of it. The product information page contains as many as 25 errors (may depend on product description) according to the W3C.org validator.
Again, it contains a number of errors related to the <body> HTML tag format. But first comes an issue related to the format of the <script> tag—it requires Type, which has not been specified in osCommerce by default. It is easy to fix this by adding: type="text/javascript" to <script>.
Then follow the issues caused by the & characters in the URLs. Those can be easily fixed by replacing & with & in URLs through the page.
Some of the errors are caused by occurrences of attributes that are not allowed in certain tags according to the HTML format (like the border attribute in the <input type="image"> tag).
Note
It should be noted that some of the problems reported by the Validator will disappear after the original problems that caused them are fixed. For example, fixing the type issues with the <script> tag in the product information page will also fix an issue of the end tag for element <a> which is not open.
Even though validating the search results page (we searched for an "a" in product description in the demo site) results in 91 errors and multiple warnings, almost all of them can be easily fixed by fixing the & problem as already explained. The reason for that page having so many errors is in just the number of products it has found—the more products per page it shows, the more errors will be reported by the Validator.
Other pages (like the Shopping Cart page, or Privacy Notice, etc.) contain the same 12 errors according to the Validator as the main page.
It looks like the demo version of osCommerce is quite OK according to the W3C.org Validator. But each particular osCommerce online store should be validated from time to time to ensure its pages can be easily parsed by search engine bots and proper content can be extracted and used by search engines.
It has been a while since the search engines were not able to index pages other than .HTML or similar. With the increase of computer facilities, the search engines do not make a discretion between dynamically created pages (like .PHP) and static pages (like .HTML) anymore.
So what would be the benefits of modifying product, category, and other pages URLs in osCommerce for search engines? The main reason to change URLs in osCommerce is search engine optimization. Yes, URL matters a lot to search engines, and, should it contain keywords typed in by the user in the search engine, it increases the chances of the website (or this particular URL) to be listed higher in the search results.
A URL is optimized for SEO when it contains important keywords that are related to the content of the page, and that the potential user would type in a search engine trying to find information and/or products offered on the website. So in the case of osCommerce optimized URLs would contain all or some of the product name, category name, manufacturer name for products and category name for categories, and also page names for additional pages, like Privacy Notes, etc.
For example, instead of http://demo.oscommerce.com/index.php?cPath=1, an optimized URL would look like http://demo.oscommerce.com/Hardware.html.
And instead of http://demo.oscommerce.com/product_info.php?cPath= 1_5&products_id=27, an optimized product URL would look like http://demo.oscommerce.com/Hewlett-Packard-LaserJet-1100Xi.html or like http://demo.oscommerce.com/Hardware/Hewlett-Packard-LaserJet-1100Xi.html.
Coming back to a demo osCommerce website, we will now look into several ways that product, category, and other pages URLs could look, and how to implement this SEO feature in osCommerce. But first we will briefly study how exactly the process works; how it is possible to receive such static-looking URLs from dynamic database-driven ones.
Of course, there is a method that allows for manual compilation of as many redirect instructions from static-looking pages to the dynamic pages as there are products and categories in the database. But we will be more interested in a solution that works automatically, once put in place. For Linux-based web servers, the method is based on mod_rewrite, which is installed as a part of the Apache web server. Following certain rewrite rules (RewriteRule) specified in the .htaccess file, the web server (Apache) can be "told" to output contents of a different page than the user's browser has requested. So if the rewrite rules are set up properly, when the user's web browser requests contents of the "static" page, the web server will actually read contents of the corresponding dynamic database-driven page.
So what can "static" URLs look like in osCommerce? Here's the list of suggested URL formats for category pages:
categoryname.htmlcategoryname.id.html
Here is the list of suggested URL formats for product information pages:
productname.htmlcategoryname-productname.htmlcategoryname/productname.htmlcategoryname-manufacturername-productname.html
Other combinations of parts of these URLs can be also used. Having product names, category names, and manufacturer names helps the search engines to easily understand what the website in general is about and understand its pages in particular.
Now when we know what the URLs should look like in osCommerce, let us see how to implement this feature with "static" URLs, used instead of dynamic URLs throughout the site in osCommerce. There is a free contribution called "Ultimate SEO URLs v. 2.1", which can be downloaded from the osCommerce website http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2823. This contribution does its job by converting dynamic URLs into "static" looking URLs, and allows for certain flexibility in URL format. It comes with a detailed installation guide and a handful of various options. After installing it to an osCommerce website and configuring it properly, this is how the corresponding menu of the Configuration section in the Administration panel looks:
And this is what the improved "static" URLs look like:
category: http://www.myonlinestore.com/hardware.html
product: http://www.myonlinestore.com/hewlett-packard-laserjet-1100xi.html
What becomes obvious is that not only product or category URLs matter, but also URLs of product images, category images, and other additional files (like .CSS or .JS). Here it makes sense to rename product and category image files according to the product and category names. It is better to use some terms related to the content of the online store when renaming additional files (.CSS or .JS). For example, instead of the standard stylesheet.css the name of the .CSS file could be changed to kitchen_appliances.css or silver_jewelery.css.
Session IDs are added to the URLs by default so that the customers can log in, register, and make a purchase. But search engines do not need to log in or purchase goods online. It's a great relief as session IDs can have a negative effect on the search engine optimization. Each time a search engine bot indexes a category or product page with a session ID, it will consider that page to be a completely new one, that has never been indexed before. So instead of giving it a good page rank based on the backward links and its well indexed content, it will only give such page some low rank as if it was a very new one. The situation worsens when users find links that include session IDs in search engines. Clicking such links will automatically bring a session with the corresponding ID to live. This means that two users who have found a link to a certain page of the osCommerce online store in the search engine, and clicked that link in more or less the same time, will share one and the same session. This effectively means one user will have access to the account of the other user and vice versa!
To avoid issues with SEO and with users having access to each other's accounts, it's recommended to remove session IDs from the URLs in osCommerce for search engines.
To disable session IDs from appearing in the URLs when the website is being parsed by search engine bots, the Prevent Spider Sessions parameter should be set to TRUE in the Configuration section of the Administration panel | Configuration | Sessions menu item, as shown on the following screenshot:
The method used by osCommerce to recognize search engine bots is based on the names of those bots. In osCommerce, the list of known bots is located in the /catalog/includes/spiders.txt file.
Webmasters can further extend the list of known spider bots by editing that file. Usually, this will not be required as the list supplied by default is quite comprehensive. But webmasters of online stores based on previous versions of osCommerce may find it useful to download the latest version and update the list of spider bots in their online stores.
Optimization of web page properties such as Title, and META tags is an important part of the SEO process of any website. Search Engines use page tittles and META tags to find out what the page is about along with parsing the actual content of the page.
Title and META tags are sometimes considered to be the most important for search engines, as the title is the first part of the page that the user sees in search results, and META tags can contain a special description, which is used by search engines to describe the found page.
If the page title is not specified, search engines will use the website URL instead. If the page description is not specified, search engines will try to extract a part of the page's content and display it in the search results.
Obviously, the more relevant the page title and its description are to the user's query in the search engine, the more chances there are that the user will choose to open the page. Also, the more relevant those properties are to the content of the page, the more chances there are that the search engine will list the page higher in the search results. This doesn't mean page title and META tags outweigh the value of the contents of the page. Rather proper usage of these page properties together with original keyword-rich content powers up the position of the website pages in search results.
An off-the-shelf installation of osCommerce doesn't really use titles and META tags to ensure the best visibility of the online store in search engines. By default, all pages have one and the same title "osCommerce" and no META tags for keywords and descriptions.
This is bad for SEO, as titles and META descriptions should always be unique for each page, without duplication. Also, since the title is the first thing the visitors see on a page, it should give the visitor the very description of what the page/site is about.
In the following screenshot, one can see what an osCommerce's product information page source code can look like. Page title and META tags are properly defined and describe the page, so that search engines and Internet users can easily understand what is offered on that page of an online store:
Also, in the following screenshot, one can see how the same product page is displayed in the Google search results page, and which elements of the page's header are utilized there:
Moreover, page title and META descriptions should be easy to read and understandable for the website visitors, and search engines should not consider them as SPAM while parsing the pages. Here are some suggestions on how to prevent giving a SPAM impression:
Title tag—only one element per page, preferably not more than 80 characters, without comas and any other signs, preferably with 1-2 target keywords or key phrases in it.
META description—only one tag per page, descriptive phrases with total text length up to 250 characters, at least one or more target keywords or phrases, and preferably a call to action.
META keywords—only one tag per page, all target keywords and key phrases but preferably not more than 20 words.
In order to achieve the best results, the following pages need to be given proper page properties.
Its title should be identical to the name of the online store, plus it's recommended to mention some of the most popular products or categories there. For example, this is a good title for a website that sells yoga and fitness products online: "Yoga Super Store - Pilates Exercise, Props, Equipment, Mats, Ball, Band Pilates, Magic circle, Pilates Ring, Roller, Reformer, Machines, Cadillac, Spine Corrector, Arc Barrel".
A rule of thumb with the page title, the same as for the rest of the SEO process, is to make a page easy to read and understandable for the online store customers, and not only optimized for SEO. Therefore the title should have up to nine words (about 80 characters or so), with no fluff and get straight to the point.
The META description tag should contain a general description of the online store, rich with keywords that prospective customers would use to find an online store like this in search engines. One can be willing to also put some location details in the META description if the marketing strategy of the online store includes advertising in the local market. This is a good sample of a META tag description taken from a website that sells drives and motors online: "Shop Drives Super Store for the best AC and DC drive selection and superior customer services. Buy Variable frequency drive or Variable speed drive backed by 12 months warranty from manufacturers such as Hitachi and Polyspede. Also get quantity discounts!".
Finally, the META keywords tag should contain all general keywords related to the contents of the website, to the products, and services it promotes. These keywords are used by search engines in addition to page contents, title, and description to better index pages and sort search results by relevancy. For the Main page of an online store, it makes sense to list keywords that are related to the whole website and product catalog, like the online store name, and the names of the best selling categories and products. As an example let's consider keywords used by a website that sells MP3 players and similar products online: "advanced mp3 players, mp3 players, portable mp3 players, cd mp3 players, mp3 accessories, dvd players, hard disk mp3 players mp3 players, mp3 player, uk mp3 players, mp3 player uk, mp3 players uk, buy, uk, portable, rio, microdrive, compact flash, wma player, compactflash, mp3/cd player, mp3 cd player, digital audio players, digital audio".
The category listing page may contain category description, featured products, and also the list of sub-categories.
Therefore its title element and META tags should mainly contain information related to the product category and its sub-categories and related categories of the product catalog.
We will use the same websites as we used in the previous sample here, and for a couple of other pages.
For example, the category listing title can look like the following for a website that sells yoga and fitness products (category Yoga): "Pilates Exercise, Props, Equipment, Mats, Ball, band Pilates, Pilates Ring - Yoga Super store Online Yoga supplier".
The category listing META description can look like the following for a website that sells drives and motors online (category AC Drives): "We specialize in Variable frequency AC drives and AC motor drives. Get the largest inventory of AC drives and Variable frequency drives online and choose the best AC drive suiting your requirements. We offer drives manufactured by Hitachi and Polyspede".
The category listing META keywords can look like the following for a website that sells MP3 players (category Portable MP3 Players): "Portable mp3 players, mp3 players, Portable Audio/Video, Electronics, MP3, Prices, Cheap".
Correspondingly, all product information page titles, META descriptions, and keywords should be related to a particular product. It also makes sense to mention the category it belongs to, the manufacturer, and other properties and attributes if they are to be useful for the users of search engines.
Product page's title for a website that sells yoga and fitness products could look like (product name is Cotton Yoga Rug): "Trident Cotton Yoga Rug Yoga Mats Yoga super store Online Yoga supplier".
The product page's META description for a website that sells drives and motors online could look like this (the product name is M3006): "M3006 Shop Drives super store for the best AC and DC drive selection and superior customer services. Buy Variable frequency drive or Variable speed drive backed by 12 months warranty from manufacturers such as Hitachi and Polyspede. Also get quantity discounts!".
The product page's META keywords tag for a website that sells MP3 and similar products could look like this (the product name Apple iPod Nano): "Apple iPod Nano - 4Gb Green, Digital Audio/Video Players (MP3/MP4) Portable Audio/ Video Electronics".
Now we know what should be put in page titles and META tags for a better performance in search engines. Let us consider ways to improve osCommerce script so that it allows the specifying of title elements and META tags manually for each particular page and for each category and product or generates them automatically.
There is a contribution that allows the editing of title element contents and META tags (keywords and descriptions) for specific osCommerce pages (like the main page, shopping cart page, category listing page, product information page, etc.) and also for specific categories and products.
It is called the "Header Tag Controller" and can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/207.
This contribution not only allows us to specify manually default titles and META tags for pages of an osCommerce website, but also allows the use of product or category or manufacture name and/or description for each individual category, product, or manufacturer page.
It is also possible to set titles, META descriptions, and keywords for pages with New products, Special products, Product reviews, etc.
Many websites suffer from a main (home) page that has low page ranks in search engines, even though other pages are ranked well. The main reason for this is that there are multiple links to different URLs of the main page of such websites from other websites and from internal pages of the website itself.
Page rank then splits between those multiple URLs, and thus none of them usually gets high rankings. If there was only one URL to the main page of the website, it would have a higher page rank in the search engines.
This problem often appears in osCommerce online stores, when the main page can be referred to in multiple different ways. For example, the main can be referred as http://www.mystore.com and as http://mystore.com and as http://www.mystore.com/index.php.
Effectively the page rank that could have been given to the main page of such an osCommerce online store is split between the three URLs, as search engines consider those three URLs to be different. Moreover on this, a duplicate content issue may appear as well since all three different URLs would be pointing to one and the same page with one and the same content.
To avoid such issues in osCommerce the following can be implemented:
First let's solve the http://mystore.com and http://www.mystore.com issue by adding the following redirect command into the
.htaccessfile, which is located in the root folder of the osCommerce website:RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mystore.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mystore.com/$1 [R=301,L]Secondly, in the
/includes/configure.phpfile make sure the website's URLs are properly specified. Like, for example:define('HTTP_SERVER', 'http://www.mystore.com'), define('HTTPS_SERVER', 'https://www.mystore.com'),Finally, get rid of the http://www.mystore.com/index.php links and change them to http://www.mystore.com/ by modifying the
.htaccessfile again:RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mystore.com/ [R=301,L]
These fixes above, assume osCommerce is running in the root folder of the website. But some store owners prefer to put osCommerce into a sub-folder, or even on a sub-domain.
Even though it may look easier to create a sub-domain with some target keywords used as a name (http://mp3-players.mystore.com for example) it may not be such a good idea after all. The reason is that sub-domains are considered as completely separate websites by search engines. Correspondingly, the page rank of the main website will not increase if its sub domain's page rank increases. Even worse, should there be too many links between the sub-domains or between the sub domains and the main site, the search engines may penalize the sites for improper cross linking! Also, as new sub-domains are considered like separate websites, Google may put them in the "sandbox" for some time before they start to appear in the search results.
If it's an option, get a new domain name for the online store to avoid such issues.
It's possible to use folders without any fear of being penalized for cross-linking. If the main website is well promoted in search engines, newly added folders will automatically start receiving popularity and page rating of the main site and will rank very high once they have been indexed unlike sub-domains, where each one would have to gain the same amount of popularity and page rating as the main site on its own. Using folders also increases the count of the pages of the main website, when pages belonging to sub-domains would not count as pages belonging or related to the main website.
Even though external links are considered to be more important, internal links (i.e. links from page to page of one and the same site or links within the same page) are still a good weapon in SEO arsenal.
What are internal links in osCommerce?
First of all, these are links from the main page to further pages, like category pages for example, and eventually to the individual product pages.
In order to use all features of the internal linking, it is possible to link such internal pages back to the main page of the website. Of course, there should be links to only one main page used through the website as described in the previous section.
This way search engines will know the online store's main page is related to the content of all product and category pages. This will not only improve the page rank of the whole website, but also give the search engines a better understanding of the content of the site.
The more descriptive phrases used, the more beneficial and powerful they are in the results. Using words like "read here" or "go there" is not the way to do it.
Links to the main page and also to the parent categories are implemented in standard osCommerce as "breadcrumbs" in the header section of the page. However, it's recommended to change the text of the main page's link from the standard "catalog" to either the name of the online store, or better to the most important key phrase/best selling product or category name. In order to do this, one has to edit the /includes/languages/english.php file, and edit the HEADER_TITLE_CATALOG text constant there.
Besides linking back to the main page, categories and products may be linked to similar categories and products, or to categories and products of the same level in the product catalog hierarchy. This way, if one of the categories or product pages gets ranked well in the search engines, other pages will be boosted by that one. This also helps visitors to stay on the website longer when they can browse similar/related products and categories.
Such internal links between product and category pages should use link text that is similar to or the same as certain key phrases the online store is targeting for ratings. Internal links of this type can be either added manually for each product or category, or generated automatically listing sibling products or categories correspondingly, as on the following screenshot of a category page:
and this screenshot of a product page (with links to similar/related products put in the very bottom of the page):
An extra improvement of page rank in search engines can be given to a category or product page by placing a "direct" internal link on the main page of the website. Such "direct" links from the main page increase positioning of the linked pages in search engines, and also improve page ranks of the related (linked) pages. Of course, the main page should still look attractive and "direct" links should not look like a mess.
Besides category and product pages, pages that contain additional product information like what each option in the specification means, technology used, user manuals, installation instructions, i.e. every bit of information naturally related to the products have a great value for SEO.
It is possible to create static HTML pages or use one of the Content Management Systems developed for osCommerce (like this one for example: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1026) to add pages with such content to the website. Additional information pages containing manufacturer descriptions can be added to the shop, and linked with the corresponding products.
Good for SEO is the <acronym> tag, and links to the pages explaining terms from product descriptions. Acronyms are often used in technical specifications, where the language is rather reminiscent of some jargon rather than natural language.
So acronyms do not only give search engines an opportunity to read and index additional keywords-rich contents, but also help users a lot!
Finally, buying guides intended to help the customers make their choice can be prepared for each category as separate information pages and linked with corresponding products and categories, either manually when editing product description in the Administration panel, or automatically by modifying the product information page script and also the category editing routine in the Administration panel.
Site maps help the users to find information they are looking for on the website, and also help search engines a lot to index all pages of the website. A site map is usually represented as a tree starting from the main page. A site map is like a navigation help for visitors of online store.
A site map for an online store would include:
Main categories
Sub-categories of main categories
Best selling/featured products in a separate branch of the tree
Information pages
There is a contribution for osCommerce that generates site maps. It can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2208 and can generate site maps automatically based on the product catalog tables:
In osCommerce, a link to the site map can be put into the footer or into the Information box.
Google and other search engines have introduced their own site maps to get more precise and up-to-date information about changes in the website structure. Updates to the site maps are provided by webmasters and store owners directly.
Since the site map is submitted into the search engine directly, it is processed promptly, and the pages it consists of are indexed promptly as well. Again, any changes in the product catalog structure will be known to the search engine once the latest version of the site map is submitted. Therefore the search engine site map needs to be regenerated (preferably automatically) each time anything changes in the product catalog.
A Google site map is an XML file that should be submitted into a Google Webmaster's account. In order to become an approved webmaster for a certain website Google usually requires the webmaster to either upload a file with certain name to the website, or add a temporary META tag to the website pages. Once the ownership/editing rights are approved by Google, the webmaster can submit an XML site map of the following format for Google site map index file:
for Google site map categories file:
and for Google site map products file:
Of course, the files generated by the script can be altered if need be, in order to highlight certain products or categories that are likely to change more often than the others (the <changefreq> tag), or are far more important than the others (the <priority> tag).
A contribution is available on osCommerce that can generate site maps for Google. It is based on the product catalog. It can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/3233. It's preferable to use a contribution like this than third-party site-map generation tools. Having this contribution installed, the store owner receives control over the process of site-map generation and flexibility for further modifications.
In order to submit a site map in Google, you would have to create an account with Google and then log in, enter the Webmaster Tools section, register the URL of the website there, and then verify your ownership over the website. This will not only allow for submitting the site map(s) but also for getting access to a number of useful tools and reports.
Yahoo! site map submission service is a simpler solution that only accepts plain CSV files with only one column—web page URLs. The site map file can be uploaded to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.
robots.txt is a special file that contains commands and directives for search engine bots and tells them how to deal with the pages of the website. Using robots.txt, it is possible to tell the search engine bots to index or not to index certain folders and individual pages.
In osCommerce, robots.txt can be used to avoid duplicate contents being parsed by search engines. For example, if one and the same product is listed in two different categories, a command can be put into the robots.txt file to let the search engine bot know it should not parse the product page that is a part of certain category.
It should be noted though that even though the search engine bots won't parse such pages, neither robots.txt nor any other method can forbid the search engines to index the pages. So even though the page won't have its title or description, it may still appear in the search results.
Additional instructions can be given to the search engine bots to avoid entering certain folders. So, for example, the /images folder can be restricted for search engine bots if the store owner doesn't want the search engines to index it.
One should be very careful with robots.txt—as it can prevent access to a certain part of the website, it can prevent access to the whole website too! If for some reason the website has disappeared from the search results after the robots.txt file has been modified, check all commands in that file in the first place!
The .htaccess file is used for multiple purposes, including giving directives to web server, protecting folders with passwords, or not allowing access to certain file types or whole folders, and so on.
In osCommerce, the .htaccess file stored in the main folder of the online store is used by default to adjust the SSL protocol settings for MS Internet Explorer browsers.
The.htaccess file is an essential part of osCommerce search engine optimization, as it contains all main "rewrite" directives that allow for having search-engine friendly URLs on products and categories of osCommerce. It can also be used to reduce or completely get rid of the issues related to duplicated content as we described earlier in this chapter.
osCommerce navigation usually includes a clickable category tree, which links back to the main page or links to other pages (like the "about us", "contact us", "terms and conditions" and other pages). Navigation is an essential part of the site that the customers use to get to the products they are looking for. Therefore, its optimization should be done in a way that doesn't make it inconvenient for customers to use it to navigate on the website.
Since search engine bots "read" the page in the same way humans do—for example from top to bottom, from left to right (or vice versa—it depends on the locale installed in osCommerce)—it's recommended to put the navigation in the very beginning of the page if the store owner wants the search engines to process product catalog first, and in the very end of the page if the store owner wants the search engine bots to first process the content of the page and then process further pages (including category listings and product information pages). The choice here may depend on what content is displayed on the page, how important it is for customers, and how important it is to have the page indexed in search engines, or if individual product and category pages are far more important.
For example, menu-style navigation—links to the top categories—can be put in the header of the page, and also the category tree can be put in the left column as in the following picture:
Drop-down menus in JavaScript or DHTML often look good and work well for customers, but they may be confusing for search engine bots. Therefore the amount of JavaScript should be minimized and it's recommended to use CSS-based drop-down menus as much as possible. If you decide to still use JavaScript to allow for some extra features or visual effects, it may be sensible to add plain links to menu items somewhere else to the same page (into the bottom of the page for example) so that search engines can easily find and index all those menu links.
Regardless of whether the category tree expands to show parent and child categories or if it only shows the top categories, the breadcrumbs are a must-have element of navigation for SEO. Breadcrumbs are usually put just under the header of the page, but before the actual content. The breadcrumbs categories are usually listed in the parent-child order, i.e. first comes the top category, then its sub-category, and so on. It is recommended to include a link to the main page of the osCommerce online store in the first position in the breadcrumbs for internal linking purposes. Also, such links to the main page of the online store should be named appropriately—it's recommended to use the most targeted key phrase there, so that search engines would associate that key phrase with the online store after they've indexed all the pages, as in the following sample:
Kitchen Appliances " Cookers " Freestanding Cookers " Electric Ceramic Cooker "
where the first key phrase ("Kitchen Appliances") is pointing to the main page of the online store, and all the other ones are actual links to the corresponding categories and product listings.
In osCommerce, customers can also navigate through the website by using buttons. Even though text links may be preferred by the search engines, for customer convenience and design purposes it's better to have nice looking buttons of the pages of osCommerce online store.
Therefore, it is recommended to add at least some text content to each such navigational button as title and alt properties of the HTML <img> tag.
For example, instead of just having "Add to cart" as title and alternative text of the "Add to Cart" button, for SEO purposes the product name can be added to the title, like this: "Add Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer to Cart" (and do not forget leading and trailing gaps in the title, so that it looks nicer). The same goes for the "Reviews" button; its title can be changed to "Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer Reviews". Where on the pages like "Conditions of Use" the "Continue" button's title is "Continue"—it is recommended to add the store name to the title of that button as it points back to the main page of the online store. So its title could look like, for example, "Continue to MP3 Players Super store".
This last advice is actually a part of another quite important recommendation, all pages of the online store should be linked back to the main page in this or that way. This improves internal linking and eventually, online store's positioning in search results.
Another good piece of advice is pretty simple—if it is required to put a link to an external website—better do it closer to the very end of the page. This will ensure that search engine bots first spider the content of the online store and then navigate away. Of course the minimum of external links is a suggested option.
For SEO purposes, it's recommended to put links to the most important pages underneath the page, in the bottom, where they will be found by search engine bots and also by some of the customers. Those links can point to specific categories or even products, which depend on how important certain categories and products are and how important good position of those pages in search results is. A direct link from the main page of the online store to certain category or product helps improve the page rank and popularity and is much more effective than links from parent categories to the same page.
The final recommendation in this section is about the situations when an online store runs from a sub folder. In this case, the sub folder should be used as a benefit for SEO. The sub folder should be renamed into the most targeted key phrase related to the online store. By default osCommerce runs in the "catalog" sub folder. For a website that sells Celtic jewelry, the obvious choice would be to rename "catalog" into "celtic-jewelry". Then all URLs of the online store will contain the most important key phrase "Celtic jewelry" by default.
It is a good point for those merchants who do not own a domain name yet to make a decision about it; so that the domain name itself should contain the most important keyword(s).
The context is the most important part of the website for modern-day search engines. Search engines use algorithms that assign relevancy rankings based upon the context within a page's title and body. Proper placement of keywords on all your pages is essential for good listing.
The context that works best for customers is usually the best context for search engines. The texts should be original, keyword rich, and explain the exact benefits and features of products and services sold online.
If the task to write product description is given to an expert in a certain industry that text, created even by a non-professional writer, will usually be best for search engines as it will be full of professional terms (keywords) and definitions that search engines relate to. With more context come links, and with quality contexts come even more links!
Of course, some work on such text should be performed further to make it look right from the marketing point of view. It may make sense to hire a professional marketing writer to make sure that your website is conveying the message you want, in verbiage that your visitors will understand. Assuming a fine writer is chosen, you will not only have a well-written site but will also gain the advantage of having an outsider, who is more likely to write for people who aren't experts, creating your content.
Ideal context will both grab visitors' attention and at the same time, make them want what the online store has to offer. To test how good it is, the best way is to ask somebody who belongs to the target audience to read and comment on it. The more comments you get, the more extra money the online store will eventually bring.
Each product and category description should contain an answer to what the target audience want to find. It should contain descriptions of the main features and, which is more important, how those features address the customers' needs. Even though the main purpose of the online store is to sell products, additional contexts that contain answers to the customers' questions and can "help" rather than just "sell" would be appreciated by customers and well indexed by search engines. This is covered in depth in the next chapter of this book.
There can be no harm in adding new contexts and improving existing texts. If the online store changes contexts often, on its own it doesn't guarantee better positions in search results, but gives an advantage since search engine bots will visit such websites more often, and important changes in the contexts and structure will be recognized faster by search engines.
There exist several contributions for osCommerce that allow for advanced contexts authoring within the Administration panel of the online shop.
One called Information Pages Unlimited can be downloaded from the osCommerce Contributions website at http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1026. Its installation is pretty easy and it allows for authoring pages that will be later listed in the Information Box of osCommerce.
In the Administration panel, it allows for context pages authoring. A page can have a parent page—it becomes really easy to group similar pages together, or to publish contexts in several pages all related to the same topic.
The contribution not only allows for context page authoring, but also simplifies the process of editing certain osCommerce greeting and heading texts:
Another solution called FAQDesk allows for creating series of questions and answers for customers. It can be used for sales support and technical support, and also to explain to customers how to use specific features of the advertised products. The contribution can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1106.
Yet another contribution that allows for article authoring is NewsDesk. The administrator of an osCommerce store can create any number of category levels and post news and articles into each news category. The link to the news categories tree appears on the main page of osCommerce. A relatively simple bit of osCommerce programming can create a new box for either left or right columns where the latest news will be displayed. The contribution can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/934.
There are several tips and tricks that can be utilized to improve visibility of the online store in search engines:
Keywords and key phrases—put them close to the beginning of each new page or paragraph (
<p>) within the page. This way it will be easier for search engines to find the keywords, and also more importantly such keywords will look for search enginesUse header tags (
<H1>,<H2>, etc.) within the pages where appropriate. For example, the product information page will benefit from the product name being enclosed in<H1>tag, and also it is possible to use the<H2>tags to print the names of the related products and categories on the same page. Header tags are important to search engines. Note that only one<H1>should be placed per each page; several<H2>tags will also look appropriate. If some part of the text needs to be highlighted, use some other methods to do it rather than re-using the<H1>tag.Special/highlighted text—if a part of the text (often just several words or a phrase) needs to be highlighted, do so by either using quotes, bigger font size, or bold style of the text. Avoid using too much highlighting as it does not look good when a user reads the page, and it also can lower the importance of the main highlighted keywords for search engines. There's no need to bold each and every instance of the selected keywords in the text of the page—common sense should guide the context's author in establishing what should and what should not be marked as special text. To provide the maximum effect, the highlighting should be achieved by using corresponding tags in the text content of the page, so that search engines can understand it. Using CSS will not really help to "explain" which part of the text is highlighted to search engines.
Only use highlighting when appropriate for both users and search engines.
Keyword density is in other words the number of keyword occurrences per page compared to total size of the content of that page. Different SEO consultants suggest different "optimal" keyword density levels, though on the average it's recommended to use keywords and key phrases as from 3% to 10% of the page content. It seems reasonable to aim to achieve 5% keyword density on product pages and additional article pages.
The best advice that could be given is to place keywords in the context as often as possible keeping in mind the text is created for customers in the first place and only in the second place for search engines. So it should be readable, understandable and look natural. Use variants and synonyms too; search engines will understand this. Do not be afraid to see the keywords and key phrases stand out, as it's what the customers were searching for and seeing the terms they searched for on the page will improve their confidence in the page having exactly what they need.
In order to improve keyword density, it is recommended to minimize the size of the non-textual part of the page as much as possible. For example, all JavaScript additions, if any, should be put into
.jsfiles and linked to the page as external files. The same should be done with CSS entries; fortunately in osCommerce CSS classes are already gathered in one file.
A store owner may want to outsource search engine optimization of the online store to concentrate on other aspects of the business, or maybe because there's no SEO specialist among the staff.
Choosing an SEO specialist can be a real problem considering the number of offers on the market.
But first, it should be decided what will be outsourced to the SEO specialist, and what will still be done in-house. SEO is often critical to the success of an online business, so it's essential to have the most important processes in control.
So what can an SEO specialist do for an osCommerce-based online store?
Develop online marketing strategy in search engines, including both paid advertisement and natural searches
Manage paid advertisement campaigns, editing the keywords, marketing pitches, assigning maximum CPCs on keywords
Optimize the website for search engines
Write contents for the website in general, and individual products in particular
Create and publish press releases
Continuously monitor the success of the online store in search engines and continuously improve it to win the competition with other players in the same market
Two major problems have to be solved by the owner of online store when choosing an SEO specialist company—the problem of choice and the problem of false promises. Google.com gives over 38 million results when searching for "Search Engine Optimization". How can you know which SEO company is the right one for you?
First of all, define your SEO budget. This is the total amount of money you're ready to invest during the year into SEO optimization and marketing.
Secondly, define the goals you are aiming to achieve within a month, 6 months, a year. Also describe your target audience, and work out a preliminary list of keywords you want to be found in search engines.
Then, find several SEO companies and ask them to quote on improving your positions in search results within a certain time frame, taking into account your target audience and the keywords you've prepared.
You may want to come up with some of the following questions and ask them to answer in detail:
How many years in the industry does the company have?
Will you sign a contract indemnifying my company from brand damage in case of unethical SEO?
Is there any minimum term on the contact?
What technical and marketing expertise do you have? In particular related to online stores and osCommerce?
Can I see what monitoring reports look like?
Can you train me to do some of SEO work in the future?
Can we meet in your offices to discuss details of the deal?
Will you be outsourcing any part of work on my online store?
I have other services providers working on my online store, will it affect your work in any way and how do you plan to resolve this issue?
Can you offer copywriting services for SEO? Press releases?
Is SEO your main source of profits?
Will I be able to get contact details of some of your clients?
When comparing the quotes, make sure you compare identical services. Sometimes some companies just would not be able to provide proper paid advertisement management or copywriting and will not include those services into their quotes.
Ask the SEO company of your choice what kind of control you will have over the optimization process, and what kind of reporting and monitoring tools you will have access to. A really good SEO company would not like to hide any information about the performance of your online store in search engines.
Once you've chosen a handful of the best quotes, check what customers of those SEO companies have to say about the services they've received. Prepare a list of their questions and make some phone calls—it's not a big time waste anyway, and especially when choosing a consultant that would be dealing with your online store, and on whom improvement of online sales will depend.
A good idea would be to read success stories carefully and check if the mentioned websites can be still found in the top positions in search engines.
One should be very well aware that search engine optimization is a time-consuming continuous process, which is unlikely to be substituted by a cheap software product or cheap services that some companies tend to promote on their websites. Very cheap services will be most likely based on illegal or unethical practices and will only harm the positions of the online store in search engines. So double-check the cheapest options to ensure your online store will only get the best service.
A successful SEO campaign will result in increase of the turnover, which is obviously easy to notice. But how is it possible to measure the success of an SEO campaign more precisely? Also, how can we identify weaknesses of an SEO campaign to improve it accordingly?
An online store owner will require the help of certain tools to monitor the following parameters of an SEO campaign:
Overall website popularity in search engines
Positions and dynamics of position changes on specific keywords
Statistics of clicks and orders by search engines and referring websites
Users to customers conversion for all users and for users referred by search engines
Positions in search engines on specific keywords affect popularity of the website and its individual pages. Therefore those positions should be monitored and changes should be tracked in order to make a decision about if the SEO campaign is successful or not and if it requires any tweaking.
When hiring an SEO specialist, one of the requirements should be to provide access to either a real-time statistics of exposure in search engines, or reports that can demonstrate changes in the search engine exposure over a certain period of time.
There are several software packages that allow for this kind of functionality.
One of the free tools available in the Internet is WatchRank from www.rankquest.com. The software (less than 1 MB) can be downloaded from http://www.rankquest.com/watchrank/download.php and is very easy to install. Once installed, it asks to specify a web page that it will be monitoring and then proposes to either extract keywords from that page or type them manually. Once the keywords have been specified, the tool is ready to query the search engines for the specified keywords. As soon as it finds a link to the previously specified page in the search results, it adds a record to its history database. It can display the dynamics of changes from a certain time until now.
Based on the overall dynamics of position changes during the specified period, WatchRank displays the overall page performance to date.
Google Analytics (formerly known as Urchin) is a free tool that can be easily integrated into osCommerce and provides probably the most comprehensive and detailed statistics on website popularity, e-commerce performance, success of marketing campaigns, conversion rates, best performing keywords and pages, etc.
It can be accessed at http://www.google.com/analytics/. In order to have Google Analytics integrated with osCommerce, one has to first register for an account with Google Analytics, and then create a "Website Profile". Google Analytics will then generate a special tracking code that should be integrated into each and every page of osCommerce. e-commerce statistics should be enabled for a website profile.
Using an osCommerce contribution that can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/3756 the tracking code can be integrated into osCommerce. It's integrated to monitor web traffic and purchase statistics. Purchase statistics integration requires certain modifications in the checkout pages. After Google Analytics is installed, it's possible to get various marketing reports on how the website performs in search engines, how many users and customers are referred by search engines, where the users and customers are coming from, which search engines generate more customers than others, what are the most popular keywords typed by the users to find the online store in search engines, and what are the keywords that convert more users into customers.
Google Webmaster Tools is yet another freely available solution that allows webmasters to access brief but still useful information on how Google indexes the website, how it "sees" its pages, if there are any errors that the webmaster should check and fix, and so on. Using Google Webmaster Tools, a webmaster can also submit a site map to Google, and exclude certain URLs of the website from the Google index.
In order to get access to Google Webmaster Tools one just needs a Google account. Several websites could be associated with one and the same webmaster's account in Google. Each website has to be verified to prove the webmaster really has authorized access to the site. The verification is pretty straightforward and is about either uploading an empty page of a certain name to the website, or adding a certain META tag to the site's pages. If your osCommerce online store uses SEO-friendly URLs of products and categories, it's recommended to use the META tag-based verification method.
Using monitoring and tracking tools should not slow down the site. If the site opens slower than before, the installed monitoring and tracking tools should be turned off one by one until the reason of the poor performance is located and that tool is removed from the website.
By combining solutions like WebRank and Google Analytics, it's possible to monitor how the wesite performs in search engines, track SEO campaign results, and also perform web traffic analysis.
Web traffic generated by search engines or referral websites can be measured. It will include not only clicks performed by real humans, but also clicks and page views performed by the search engine bots. For better and more accurate web traffic analysis such clicks and page views performed by bots should not be considered. Therefore when measuring web traffic the traffic figures per certain period of time with and without search engines bots should be calculated.
Also, taking into account that search engine bots usually follow certain schedule, it is possible to find out when they visit your website in order to prepare and publish updates before the next time your website will be searched, parsed, and indexed.
There exist many solutions for analysis of web traffic. Such as, for example, WebTrends Analytics, Google Analytics, and many others. Some of them are available for free, others would require a payment. A solution like Google Analytics provides online merchants with all essential figures and extensive reports, and costs absolutely nothing to use!
Web traffic analysis can give reports on:
What customers are looking for in search engines that bring them to your online store:
Which of the websites with backward links to your online store provide the largest number of visitors:
Which of the websites with backward links to your online store provide the largest number of customers
Conversion from visitors to customers is better for which search engine, which website, which keyword
How many pages an average customer views on your website, how many pages an average referred customer views on your website and how many pages are usually viewed before the customer is ready to place an order
Search engine optimization is an important process that helps online stores and other websites achieve better positions in search results in search engines. SEO is used to cut down the costs of paid advertising and convert more users into customers as users prefer natural search listings to paid advertising.
There can be ethical and unethical SEO; unethical SEO should be avoided. External SEO is responsible for popularity and ranks in search engines, when internal SEO is responsible for web page optimization, proper content, structure, keyword density.
We have reviewed various methods of both external and internal SEO. They should always be used in combination to achieve maximum results.
We have also reviewed tips and tricks on how to hire an SEO specialist and track SEO campaign results.
In the next chapter, we will concentrate on solutions and practices that help authoring original content, and also allow users and customers of an online shop to post content online. We will review benefits of using dynamic content solutions like CMS, forums, blogs, RSS feeds, and their integration with osCommerce.