Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

[aarcmedia]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

IBP is ok as long as all you plan on using it for is checking your rankings. I believe that piece of software also has a "submit your site" tool that shoulnd NEVER be used. Many people think that it's necessary to submit their sites to google, yahoo and msn every month (or they've been told this anyway) and that couldn't be more wrong. Once a search engine finds your page, never submit another page from your site again. The se's have very strict guidlines about this.

However, that's off topic. So here's what I like about this software and what I don't (and this isn't an endorsement because I don't use it myself).

1. Keyword Analysis Research
It does a good job of helping you create a huge keyword list. And then once you create that list it will track your rankings in all of the search engines for those terms.

2. Top 10 Ranking Optimization
This tool is ok, but unless you know what you're looking at some of the stuff will be missed and may look greek.

3. Inbound Link Optimizer
I think this tool helps you find inbound links that competing sites have. Not a bad tool, but since link trading is becoming less important and relevant as a method of building links everyday, I would stick to finding the one-way directories your competitors are getting links from which this should also find.

4. Link Popularity Builder
There's only one true way to build your link popularity and that's to go out there and get links. No software can help you with that. Manual link building is the ONLY way to go. Don't buy into softwares that do it for you because all seo industry experts agree that doing it by hand is always the best method.

5. Submit Your Site
DON'T DO THIS. Unless your site is brand new and it's not in the search engines yet, NEVER SUBMIT YOUR SITE to a search engine. The best way and the quickest way to get your website found by the search engines is to submit your website to the "one-way" directories that we've been talking about in this thread. Better yet, do press releases with PRweb.com, ArticleSender.com and a few others and your website will get picked up more quickly than if you submit it manually. If you submit your website through google's submit url page, it will take at least 6 weeks to get added. If you issue 1 PRweb.com press release announcing the opening of your website, your site will get indexed within a day or two. So you should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, submit your website to the search engines manually as a rule.

6. Professional SEO Reports
This is where the IBP software tears it up. They do a great job of providing you with both rankings reports and then to make it better, you can compare a report from July to your August rankings report side by side and easily track improvements or ranking drops.

So in all it's a decent piece of software, but I would only use the trial as it's probably not worth buying. I see people all the time ask about it in seo forums and most of the time the experts or moderators discount it and tell people that it is a good start, but not truely worth its pricetag.

[Biffy]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Okay, let me clarify my outlink question.

Site A has already linked to me. Should I outlink to Site A? How do I decide?

In many cases the outlink will damage my PageRank score, but there are circumstances where an outlink will improve my PR via the feedback effect. Do you know how to predict which ones are good?

[gibby]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

thanks for the reply.

another question I have & I apologise if its a daft one but Im just learning about SEO.............

Ive submitted a sitemap, do I have to update the sitemap monthly or am I right in thinking this is automatically done by the search engines??

thanks

G

[aarcmedia]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

It depends on how you submit it. If you're submitting it via Google's Webmaster Tools, then you can update it as needed whenever you make updates. But you should only update it when you make changes. What method do you use to submit the sitemap?

[aarcmedia]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Okay, let me clarify my outlink question.

Site A has already linked to me. Should I outlink to Site A? How do I decide?

In many cases the outlink will damage my PageRank score, but there are circumstances where an outlink will improve my PR via the feedback effect. Do you know how to predict which ones are good?

Once again, it depends on what you mean by PR. If you're talking about your Google PR (0-10 rating google gives you), then linking from your resource page, to someone else has no effect on PR. The only pages that effect your PR through where you link are on pages that have links pointing to them.

For instance, you should never include a link away from your site to someone else's on your home page. Besides the obvious reason which is why would you want someone to leave your page, your home page also has the most links pointing to it from other sites. So if you link to another site from your homepage, that does waste PR, but it won't make your PR go down. It just takes away from how the PR spreads to other pages within your website.

As I've mentioned also, if you are going to trade links, only trade links with highly relevant websites and better yet, only trade links with your direct competitors. The less relevant a site you link to is from yours, the less a benefit you'll get from the trade. Never trade links with someone who puts the link to you on a page within their site that isn't indexed. This is the biggest reason link trading has become a dead art. Most people that don't know what their doing still trade links with people who have link or resource pages that aren't even viewed by the search engines anymore. Thats why I say it's a waste of time for someone that doesn't know 100% what they're doing.

[Csinatra]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Hi,

Love your information regarding SEO. Here is my question for your.

I have a relatively small site +/- 50 products. I'm looking to move to MM5 from MM4 and have been running Merchant Optimzer for a couple of years and have had great results. Thinking about running SEO Optimizer from Sebenza so that I can keep some dynamic functionality but I don't want to lose any PR.

What are your thoughts? Can I safely move to MM4 from MM5 and switch to the Ultimate SEO Mod without losing pr? Or a better question is, how to move from MM4 to MM5 without losing PR

Let me know and thanks,

Chris

[aarcmedia]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

You'll want to be very careful when making the switch. We always suggest keeping all category and product codes the same and when you switch from 4 to 5, have your host change your /mm5/ directory for the new store, to match whatever it was for your old store. That way Category and Product URL's don't change.

That's really the biggest key. If all of your product and category URL's change when making the upgrade, your rankings will go with them and won't resettle back to normal for up to 6 months to a year.

Problem being, I'm not sure you can 301 redirect dynamic URL's to new url's. If you don't know what a 301 redirect is, then you may want to hire someone to oversee your switch because you may bury your rankings without realizing what you even did.

Lastly, any time you make a big update to your website, your rankings will fluctuate. Whether the change is visual in nature (like a re-design) or maybe you add a bunch of content all at once, all of these things can cause your rankings to fluctuate both up and down.

I hope this is what you were asking.

[JoeVodkaSauce]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Before I ask my couple of questions I want to say that this is probably one of the most informative threads I've read so far. Great work and thanks! Now onto my questions:

I read that you suggest CSS menu's rather than JS menus. Do JS menus not get "read" properly by search engine indexes? I ask because we built our menu in CSS at first and then ran into various issues with browser compatibility and I ultimately decided to go to JS. On that same note - my category navigation menu is in "Italian" with a text swap to English on a mouse over. I know this may seem silly but it's part of a design/branding we're trying to move with. Do you have suggestions to make sure our "English" categories" get indexed from the home page?

Second quick question - someone asked about moving form Miva 4 to Miva 5 and you stated the importance of trying to keep the indexed URL's the same. Would this be truly "harmful" to our rankings if this couldn't be done? Our Miva 4 store had a poorly planned category and naming convention. Fortunately Google has "been kind to us" for several years and we see out category and full dynamic URLs' indexed everywhere when we search for keywords. My concern is the new Miva 5 site will have an intelligent category layout but there will be new category codes and names. Is this going to kill us?

Finally - One more silly question if I may - I think I saw a Miva article about using the .htaccess file for url re-directs/clean-up (or something like that). Would be this be advised for better ranking/indexing or is it more for an end user-eye appealing look to the url?

Sorry if I've asked too many questions in this one topic but you folks seem to be the exerts on this topic. Thanks in advance!

[gibby]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Ive also been advised to use CSS rather than the html nav bar I have put together, for seo reasons
I have no experiece with CSS and wondering if any of you good guys know of a simple guide to putting em together & using em

thanks


G

[rolygate]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

@gibby: always use a basic HTML navigation menu if that does the job. You can use simple horizontal or vertical nav menus if there are not too many links, and if they will do the job. They can be made to look nice with a little CSS. These are the best for search results - all search engines read them, prefer them, and know they are accessible by all users - which is becoming increasingly important.

If you don't have enough space, or you have too many links to go into the menus (which is the same thing I guess), then use the Suckerfish CSS method. This creates slide-out, aka cascading, menus via pure HTML and CSS. Google it to find resources - though you will need a coder to build them exactly to suit your site appearance and functionality. This route is 100% better than JavaScript or Flash menus.

Never use JavaScript or Flash menus if you want the best search results, even though they look fabulous. In theory many search engines can follow them now, but in practice they are a big minus point against you on the accessibility issue. If you look at the page source code and you can't see the linked pages in plain text there - i.e. as an HTML/CSS link - it's no good. It depends what you want: a fabulous-looking site or the top search results - you choose. In fact an expert coder can do marvels with a Suckerfish menu, so if you want the best look then you can get it.

There are some kludge fixes if you insist on JS menus, such as putting the plain text links at the foot of the page and so on - but if you go the right way with HTML/CSS/Suckerfish it will pay in the end. And after all, we're in it for the money, not the artistic result. Unless I've got it all wrong.

@JoeVodkaSauce: there are numerous browser problems with any coding, but a skilled coder who works with CSS menus can resolve them. JS and Flash are the wrong way to go if you want the search traffic - simple as that. I start with my client's sites by stripping all that stuff out. It's no great secret after all. In 9 month's time when their revenue has doubled, do you think they are moaning about their lost Flash menus? Do me a favour!

[JoeVodkaSauce]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Thanks for the info rolygate - I'm going to be re-writing our menu in HTML/CSS now - and can I get you to commit to "double-sales" growth if we do it? ;)

I would love to get a skilled programmer to check out and see why the CSS swaps don't work for some browsers (unfortunately that's the look we want to go with) but we're a bit lacking on the $$$ resource at the moment which is why I'm painfully learning all of this stuff. I've read a lot and have used the forums at webmasterworld.com a bit so I'll just go post some more out there for CSS help. Thanks again for the feedback though!

[dud11332]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Hello:

In your step one:
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.

How can I do that in product display template?

Bayho use ADS meta master module, but it has the meta title tag. Can it replace the title tag in SEO?

Dennis

[Biffy]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

I get traffic from image searches using ALT tag product name tokens. They're logged right there in my Analytics source reports. Not a lot, but it's increasing as time goes on and image searches get more popular.

[dud11332]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Hello:

this is the product name token we used in title:
<title>&mvt:product:name;</title>

how to change it to ALT name tag?

Dennis

[agarvey]

Re: Search Engine Optimization w/ Miva

Hello!
We are working on a new site and are concerned about SEO. I am happy to make sure all H1 tags and alt tags give valuable information, but I am more concerned with our product names.

To simplify things for our order manager, we have named our Category_Codes easy things such as B or MAT. This is not descriptive and therefore our long URLs are not very descriptive.

Here is an example: http://www.nationalincontinence.com/...egory_Code=BPA

We would like this to look like: http://www.nationalincontinence.com/...ttresspad.html. Is this possible without renaming BPA to be BeautyRestWaterProofMattressPad? Sebenza's module seems to update the url based on the info in Miva. Does using htaccesss help in anyway? Have others had such problems? And finally (most importantly), Will this even matter to the search engine?

Thanks