Static site plus Miva Site Best Way to Merge for SEO - Advice Please

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Hello all,
We have a mydomain.php site which has order buttons on product pages taking customers to our Miva site- store.mydomain.com. Both sites have the same content.
We are in the process of migrating from an MMUI with CSS Miva site to a CSSUI miva site so now would be a good time to make changes and do redirects. The mydomain.php site, which has been up since 2001, has decent link juice. The store.mydomain Miva site has terrible link juice.
I am tired of maintaining 2 sites. My web developer suggests that we take down the original mydomain.php site and rename store.mydomain.com to mydomain.com
and then do htaccess rewrites, and redirects to save the link juice. (My web developer is terrific but is not a Miva developer.)
I would love to not have to maintain 2 sites but I am very nervous about doing this because I am not sure if the coding in Miva hinders spiders searching and indexing. I also have such poor link juice on my Miva site.
I need some advice please. I looked at Phosphor Media's Merchant Optimizer but am not sure if that is the way to go. I am not SEO savvy enough to tell if that is what I need. It would keep me from having to maintain 2 sites, but I can not see a lot of difference when I look at the source code of sites using it.
Regarding SEO, I have been working on SEO researching keywords, updating meta tags,title tags, alt tags, h1 tags, submitting sitemaps, providing better content, etc. I have noticed some results from this.
Thank you for any advice you can provide,
Sincerely, Iris

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Static site plus Miva Site Best Way to Merge for SEO - Advice Please

Iris,

There is nothing in Miva Merchant that would prevent you from maintaining or at least handling a mirror of your existing link structure. However, it could take someone a bit more experienced with the tools available internally and via third party modules to make this happen. Hard to tell exactly which direction to go without a specific set of the types of urls currently being used.

But, you are definitely on the right track with moving everything under one platform. There are enough things to do in ecommerce not to have to maintain two sites.

As far as Optimizer, it might be a useful addition to your site, but would probably not address the main issue of matching up your current site links to Merchant links. Also bear in mind that your store doesn't have any SE ranking because of how you are using it. SE don't generally scan past the "Add to basket" buttons in stores, so they never see the store.

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Re: Static site plus Miva Site Best Way to Merge for SEO - Advice Please

Bruce, Thank you for your help!
My static site URL's are like this

http://mydomain.com/kids-page.php

My Miva shopping cart site is like below

http://mydomain.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=BSAW&Category_Code=K

We are using short links so all except domain name is light grey.

I can do a lot of 301 redirects if that is the only thing that will work when we merge the two sites. There really does not seem to be a way to do it otherwise because the URLs are so different.
My problem is trying to decide what is the best way to proceed and keep my good link juice. Does Merchant Optimizer remove "add to basket" from the site? If so, then how do the customers add something to their basket?
How much "tweaking" has to be done after installing Merchant Optimizer?
I looked at page source for sites using Merchant Optimizer and saw that the navigation was changed to manual navigation, what else generally has to be done after installing Merchant Optimizer?
Thank you!
Sincerely, Iris

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Re: Static site plus Miva Site Best Way to Merge for SEO - Advice Please

Sorry, The full store site like was truncated for some reason. Here it is again

http://store.mydomain.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=BSAW&Category_Code=K

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Static site plus Miva Site Best Way to Merge for SEO - Advice Please

Iris,

Merchant Optimizer doesn't remove anything. If you are using long form urls (like your Merchant store does) it will convert those links to ones that look like standard pages because Optimizer actually creates a static version of your Merchant category and product pages.

That being said, I'd just ignore what Optimizer does for now, cause its not going to address the problem of what to do about current link traffic.

First, if you current traffic is GREAT, then by all means, you should find a way (other than a 301 redirect) to maintain those link structures. Most developers could easily do this (again, they would need specifics...i.e., actual examples.)

However, if they are just 'ok', I'd recommend focusing on making your store links more attractive, for example, by using category and product codes that are meaningful like kids-summer-clothes, and denim-jumper. Then use a permanent redirect to point old links to new ones. After about four weeks, just remove the redirects (they should be no longer needed).

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Re: Static site plus Miva Site Best Way to Merge for SEO - Advice Please

Bruce, Thank you for your advice. You have given me a lot to think about.
Iris