I've noticed a lot more chatter on this forum reguarding SEO for Miva Merchant sites. Considering Miva is now offering SEO Products I figured I'd help clarify some things for people that are interested in taking a stab at SEO'ing their own websites.
We'll first discuss Miva's SEO Products. UNDERSTAND, that the seo products that miva offers will 100% not get you ranked in any way shape or form by themselves. That's not to say the seo bundles they offer aren't useful, but they are nothing more than the first step in a process that takes 1000 steps to work. Furthermore, they are to some extent the least important aspects of achieving rankings for your website.
Miva's most popular seo bundle includes 4 services which I will outline below and explain why they truely should be the least of your worries. Once again, the $270 Miva Package is worth buying, but represents less than 10% of the true seo puzzle. It's not worth buying if you're not going to do the things I outline towards the end of this post:
Adding of ALT tags images
(part 1 of miva's package)
This is an seo must, however, you can easily accomplish this on your own by planting the product name token into the alt tag of the product images. So in this case, this will benefit you, but do not assume in any way that this is going to get you traffic because it won't.
SEO Friendly URL setup
Miva's URL's are fully supported and indexable by Google, MSN and Yahoo which are just about the only search engines that matter. There is a video created by Matt Cutts, one of Google's most important and noticable employees that explains that back in 2006 Google improved the way their bots are able to index dynamic URL's. He explains in the video that as long as you don't have more than 3 or 4 different parameters, you don't have to worry. By default, miva category pages only have 2 parameters and the product pages only have 3. This falls well within what google can understand and you better believe that if google fixed this problem back in March of 2006, Yahoo and MSN did also. We operate tons of Miva sites for both our own company and our clients and we have never had a problem with the search engines finding every page within our site. The key is to plan your sites navigation in an intelligent manner and you don't want to change your category codes and product codes either. Keep everything consistent and once a cat or product page gets indexed and starts ranking well, NEVER change that category or product code unless you know how to redirect the old to the new. Otherwise you'll lose your ranking for that page. So you do not need to spend money on an seo friendly links module because Miva's urls are SEO friendly out of the box. Anyone who says they aren't, does not know what they are talking about. Here's a link to Matt Cutts Video about this topic. Remember this is back in July of 2006 so all of the search engines can now fully understand and easily keep track of Miva URL's.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...20126300142609
Meta Tag Setup
Meta Tags are one of the most overrated areas of the seo world. The only meta tag you need to concern yourself with is the <meta description> tag. This tag is what gives the search engine that cool text blurb about your site. The <meta keywords> tag is literally worthless and not even used in any way by Google or Yahoo. There are a few crappy search engines that still use it, so its worth having, but don't include more than 2-4 keyword terms in this tag on each page. Once again, anyone that over emphasises the keywords meta tag is an seo idiot and doesn't know what they're talking about. The meta description tag is the only meta tag you need. Furthermore, the most important tag within your header is the <title> tag. Out of the box, Miva includes either your product or category names within this tag so you really don't need to have anyone help you with this. Just name your products and categories something that best describes them and make sure it's to some extent keyword oriented and you're good to go here.
Submit To Search Engines
Once again, this type of service is not needed. If you need someone to submit your site to search engines, then you're never going to get any traffic anyway unless you pay for it via adwords or yahoo search marketing. If you don't plan on doing all of the other things needed to actually get your site ranked, you might as well have someone submit your site to the se's, but once again, this service will do literally zero in getting you traffic and in getting your website ranked and it will take forever for the site to get added. The best way to help the search engines quickly find your website is issue a bunch of online press releases using outlets like EzineArticles.com, PRweb.com and a bunch of other free services. Furthermore, many idiot SEO'ers try to tell you that you need to submit your website to search engines multiple times. This couldn't be more false. If you are going to go about the manual rout of submitting your site to the se's, only do it once. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have spelled out in their guidlines that you are only supposed to submit your site to their directory 1 TIME. If you submit your site more than that, you risk getting banned or penalized.
SO WHAT REALLY MAKES YOUR WEBSITE RANK IN THE SEARCH ENGINES?
Links, Quality Content & a well organized and structured navigational scheme.
What do I mean by links?
The way the search engines decide how important your website is and how worthy it is of being included in their rankings is mostly determined by how often they see other sites link to your site. The idea is that the more often they see other sites link to your site, the more they believe they can trust your site and its content. Most website owners have heard of link trading. The sole purpose of link trading is to improve your websites "Link Popularity". The better your link popularity is, the better your website rankings will be. Link trading is becoming more and more obsolete on a daily basis because of spammers and those that abuse this technique so the best method of getting links that point to your website is through free online directories.
More about links: Do not use your website URL as the anchor text or title of your link. Use the keyword phrase or phrases that your trying to target the most. I could go on all day about link trading, but just search some seo forums and you'll find more about how to do manage your own link campaign effectively.
Quality Content
The second most important ranking factor is the quality and uniqueness of your content. Make sure that your home page, category pages and product pages include both good text descriptions of your site and that they also include links into other pages of your site. For instance on your home page, you should always have featured products or what not as well as additional category launches that describe each category on your site with a direct link to the category. On your category pages, you should feature between 20-30 products per page (or more) and make sure that each image has an alt tag that reiterates the product name. On your product pages, make sure to use the related items feature within miva to forward users to other products the user may be interested in. The search engines like it when you make them systematically jump from page to page to page to page, in an organized and easy to follow manner.
Well Structured Navigation
Your websites navigation is equally as important. Miva's category tree is only seo friendly if you don't have sub-categories within each main category. If you have sub-categories, they are hidden from the search engine when the bot or spider hits your home page. Nowadays a css navigational menu that includes drop down selections for each main category (see bonitaj.com or pawsforamomentgifts.com) is the best way to make sure every main category and subcategory on your site is visible by the search engines from your home page.
In Closing & PLEASE NOTE:
Please understand (especially the Miva Moderators) that I'm not slamming the packages that Miva offers for seo. If it wasn't for Miva, I wouldn't have a nice house, nice car, clothing or food. 50% of our clients are Miva Merchant store owners and the other 50% are SEO clients. I'm just saying that if you think you're going to pay $270 for an SEO package and that the $270 you invest is going to get you even 100 visitors, you have been horribly mislead. The $270 package that miva offers is nothing more than 1 step in the right direction. You're going to have to take 100 more steps before you ever get a single visitor from the search engines. Without either paying an SEO expert or putting in hour upon hour of hard work in yourself, you're website will never rank well for anything (unless the market you are in is so non-competitve that it isn't funny).
I'm willing to offer up free seo advice to miva store owners (through this thread only) for as long as Miva keeps this thread up. There will be some that will refute what I say and believe me, it will not be difficult to separate the true seo experts from those that really don't know what they are talking about.
The seo industry is one of the most unethical around so its easy to get bad advice. The goal here is to make sure that you miva store owners only get good valid advice. If you implement a "bad" strategy that you picked up from some forum or through word of mouth, you could either waste a lot of time, or even worse get penalized or banned by the search engines.
Let's start a discussion.
We'll first discuss Miva's SEO Products. UNDERSTAND, that the seo products that miva offers will 100% not get you ranked in any way shape or form by themselves. That's not to say the seo bundles they offer aren't useful, but they are nothing more than the first step in a process that takes 1000 steps to work. Furthermore, they are to some extent the least important aspects of achieving rankings for your website.
Miva's most popular seo bundle includes 4 services which I will outline below and explain why they truely should be the least of your worries. Once again, the $270 Miva Package is worth buying, but represents less than 10% of the true seo puzzle. It's not worth buying if you're not going to do the things I outline towards the end of this post:
Adding of ALT tags images
(part 1 of miva's package)
This is an seo must, however, you can easily accomplish this on your own by planting the product name token into the alt tag of the product images. So in this case, this will benefit you, but do not assume in any way that this is going to get you traffic because it won't.
SEO Friendly URL setup
Miva's URL's are fully supported and indexable by Google, MSN and Yahoo which are just about the only search engines that matter. There is a video created by Matt Cutts, one of Google's most important and noticable employees that explains that back in 2006 Google improved the way their bots are able to index dynamic URL's. He explains in the video that as long as you don't have more than 3 or 4 different parameters, you don't have to worry. By default, miva category pages only have 2 parameters and the product pages only have 3. This falls well within what google can understand and you better believe that if google fixed this problem back in March of 2006, Yahoo and MSN did also. We operate tons of Miva sites for both our own company and our clients and we have never had a problem with the search engines finding every page within our site. The key is to plan your sites navigation in an intelligent manner and you don't want to change your category codes and product codes either. Keep everything consistent and once a cat or product page gets indexed and starts ranking well, NEVER change that category or product code unless you know how to redirect the old to the new. Otherwise you'll lose your ranking for that page. So you do not need to spend money on an seo friendly links module because Miva's urls are SEO friendly out of the box. Anyone who says they aren't, does not know what they are talking about. Here's a link to Matt Cutts Video about this topic. Remember this is back in July of 2006 so all of the search engines can now fully understand and easily keep track of Miva URL's.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...20126300142609
Meta Tag Setup
Meta Tags are one of the most overrated areas of the seo world. The only meta tag you need to concern yourself with is the <meta description> tag. This tag is what gives the search engine that cool text blurb about your site. The <meta keywords> tag is literally worthless and not even used in any way by Google or Yahoo. There are a few crappy search engines that still use it, so its worth having, but don't include more than 2-4 keyword terms in this tag on each page. Once again, anyone that over emphasises the keywords meta tag is an seo idiot and doesn't know what they're talking about. The meta description tag is the only meta tag you need. Furthermore, the most important tag within your header is the <title> tag. Out of the box, Miva includes either your product or category names within this tag so you really don't need to have anyone help you with this. Just name your products and categories something that best describes them and make sure it's to some extent keyword oriented and you're good to go here.
Submit To Search Engines
Once again, this type of service is not needed. If you need someone to submit your site to search engines, then you're never going to get any traffic anyway unless you pay for it via adwords or yahoo search marketing. If you don't plan on doing all of the other things needed to actually get your site ranked, you might as well have someone submit your site to the se's, but once again, this service will do literally zero in getting you traffic and in getting your website ranked and it will take forever for the site to get added. The best way to help the search engines quickly find your website is issue a bunch of online press releases using outlets like EzineArticles.com, PRweb.com and a bunch of other free services. Furthermore, many idiot SEO'ers try to tell you that you need to submit your website to search engines multiple times. This couldn't be more false. If you are going to go about the manual rout of submitting your site to the se's, only do it once. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have spelled out in their guidlines that you are only supposed to submit your site to their directory 1 TIME. If you submit your site more than that, you risk getting banned or penalized.
SO WHAT REALLY MAKES YOUR WEBSITE RANK IN THE SEARCH ENGINES?
Links, Quality Content & a well organized and structured navigational scheme.
What do I mean by links?
The way the search engines decide how important your website is and how worthy it is of being included in their rankings is mostly determined by how often they see other sites link to your site. The idea is that the more often they see other sites link to your site, the more they believe they can trust your site and its content. Most website owners have heard of link trading. The sole purpose of link trading is to improve your websites "Link Popularity". The better your link popularity is, the better your website rankings will be. Link trading is becoming more and more obsolete on a daily basis because of spammers and those that abuse this technique so the best method of getting links that point to your website is through free online directories.
More about links: Do not use your website URL as the anchor text or title of your link. Use the keyword phrase or phrases that your trying to target the most. I could go on all day about link trading, but just search some seo forums and you'll find more about how to do manage your own link campaign effectively.
Quality Content
The second most important ranking factor is the quality and uniqueness of your content. Make sure that your home page, category pages and product pages include both good text descriptions of your site and that they also include links into other pages of your site. For instance on your home page, you should always have featured products or what not as well as additional category launches that describe each category on your site with a direct link to the category. On your category pages, you should feature between 20-30 products per page (or more) and make sure that each image has an alt tag that reiterates the product name. On your product pages, make sure to use the related items feature within miva to forward users to other products the user may be interested in. The search engines like it when you make them systematically jump from page to page to page to page, in an organized and easy to follow manner.
Well Structured Navigation
Your websites navigation is equally as important. Miva's category tree is only seo friendly if you don't have sub-categories within each main category. If you have sub-categories, they are hidden from the search engine when the bot or spider hits your home page. Nowadays a css navigational menu that includes drop down selections for each main category (see bonitaj.com or pawsforamomentgifts.com) is the best way to make sure every main category and subcategory on your site is visible by the search engines from your home page.
In Closing & PLEASE NOTE:
Please understand (especially the Miva Moderators) that I'm not slamming the packages that Miva offers for seo. If it wasn't for Miva, I wouldn't have a nice house, nice car, clothing or food. 50% of our clients are Miva Merchant store owners and the other 50% are SEO clients. I'm just saying that if you think you're going to pay $270 for an SEO package and that the $270 you invest is going to get you even 100 visitors, you have been horribly mislead. The $270 package that miva offers is nothing more than 1 step in the right direction. You're going to have to take 100 more steps before you ever get a single visitor from the search engines. Without either paying an SEO expert or putting in hour upon hour of hard work in yourself, you're website will never rank well for anything (unless the market you are in is so non-competitve that it isn't funny).
I'm willing to offer up free seo advice to miva store owners (through this thread only) for as long as Miva keeps this thread up. There will be some that will refute what I say and believe me, it will not be difficult to separate the true seo experts from those that really don't know what they are talking about.
The seo industry is one of the most unethical around so its easy to get bad advice. The goal here is to make sure that you miva store owners only get good valid advice. If you implement a "bad" strategy that you picked up from some forum or through word of mouth, you could either waste a lot of time, or even worse get penalized or banned by the search engines.
Let's start a discussion.
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