Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Thankyou for saying this Dean!  Keyword meta tags are all but useless.  Stick in a few misspellings and be done with it.

For SEO purposes, write unique, keyword rich <title> tags for each page of the site.  For better clickthroughs in the SERPs, write unique, compelling meta descriptions for each page of the site.

Simple.

As for dynamically generated pages?  The search engines generally index them just fine and you should be able to optimize them like any other static page.  The problem comes in when there are too many parameters in the query string (which I think has been mentioned here already). 

There are usually workarounds for this although I can`t speak directly to the CMS you are using. 

Many many sites are dynamically created now and search engines recognize this.  They just ask that the URLs be as "search engine friendly" as possible. 

A nice ditty on the subject:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/10/update-to -our-webmaster-guidelines.html

Happy SEOing!

Karri

Hey Karri. Long time no see. Nice to bump into you here. I knew I had recognized that beautiful Canadian  face. lol.

You get brownie points for agreeing with me again.

eGuru, if you log into your Zen Cart Administration, you will see that each product has it`s own metatags that you can set.

I use Zen Cart on my self publishing website, and it has been a huge success for me. Many people have hit directly on my bookstore (the Zen Cart portion) from search engines, according to my site statistics, which tells me that Zen Cart works great for SEO.

One thing to consider that may be a help if you are still concerned. Zen Cart is highly efficient way to store all of those products, but if you still want some static web pages, you could add some front pages in HTML, with a link to the store portion of your website. Because I have articles and free resources on my site, as well as the bookstore, this is what I have done. I have found though that people hit on both parts of my site equally from Google and Yahoo.

You may also want to go to Google, and go to webmaster tools, and set up a Google Site map and also let Google know about your site, so that it would be indexed faster.

Hope this has been a help to you,

Kimberly Eddy

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http://www.kimberlyeddydesign.net custom designs, animations, and more

Friends,

Many thanks to all.  Once again the community has come through....Nuevolution thanks a ton for the great in depth feedback and more importantly for reviving this discussion.  I believe there are many of us that can benefit from this thread, as has already been witnessed in this very own chain thus far.  Hdean, Karri, Gdernie, Tom Sawyer and Kimbery Eddy, thank you all so much for the valuable input.

What I have found so far to be the best solution is to go into the the individual items for sale and manually enter tags/keywords for each item (just as Kimberly said).  The problem I am running into with this is that although I am able to make adds/edits to the meta tags and keywords, the description does not seem to be working.  Is there a trick to make the description part work?  Has anyone run into this same issue? Though it will take time for the thousands of items I have, I am confident that this will boost visibility even further.

The other issue with the infrastructure of the site is that it becomes hard to track the pages visitor are entering from.  As such it is hard to track where people are spending their most time and what is (what page in particular) causing them to leave.  This is difficult because the tracking script apparently recognizes only 3 pages all together, the main one being the index.php page.  I want to be able to track the traffic and through google analytics (or any other tracking device) be able to tell the behavior of my visitors.  Any solutions to this ?

Once again, thank you all so much and let`s keep the ball rolling

Zen Cart has great tech support. i have not personally run into that problem with your description meta tag, but if someone else has you would find great info at the Zen Cart Tech forum.

Blessings,

Kimberly Eddy

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http://www.kimberlyeddydesign.net custom designs, animations, and more

eguru,

Now that is a good question, making Google analytics read every page. Here is the problem, since you would have to add the Script to the header, there wouldn`t be a way for it to track which page you are in. What I would suggest is adding it to the products.php page. but being that it`s dynamic, it would be hard to track each page individually.  You would only see points of entrance and how long they are staying on the web site, Here is what I would do, I would add the script to every page on your catalog, excluding the admin portion of it.

Here is why, even though all pages are contingent to the header.php, they are only calling it as a run once file. I think that by you adding your google script to all pages such as newitems.php, categories.php, and every page in catalog.

You can actually track which pages they are landing on the most. What type of Campaigns are you using on Google? Text, Image, Banners, or??
let me know. Lets try to see how far we can go with this...

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

While the original question has pretty much been answered, there is one additional item that should be of interest--Zen Cart has many add-ons, one of which is "Ultimate SEO URLs". This should take care of the main problem for more search-engine friendly URLs.

While the meta tags are considered to be pretty much moot these days, they do help increase keyword density on a page and thus do play a small part in the SEO of a page. Far more important, however is the text that`s actually visible on the page and the page title--the altter because it`;s so close to the top of the page (codewise) and thus has a big influence. Also important is how many clicks it takes to get to a secondary page. Many search engines will not go more than a click or two deep, so make sure, as someone already said, that your top products have a direct link from the home page. And make sure product descriptions contain some keyphrases you`ve researched.

PHP Oscomerce and SEO is my area of expertise.

You could do with some contributions being installed to the shop, Ultimate Seo Urls, Dynamic Header Tags and Google Sitemap Generator. These are free from the oscommerce contributions page but you will need some expert help to get them working with any existing modifications the developers made to your shop. (Can`t they install the Mods for you?)

I have done this to many stores and found it works really well, listing every page under google

NOTE: Dont over optimise you site as google doesnt appreciate it, name products correctly and dont over do the keywords, google use special algorithims to read your pages and they dont like over seo.

Name the products exactly as what they are called by the manufacturers, so if your selling a sony viao fs315s then name it that, this may sound obvious but so many people name the products wrongly and believe me if i was looking for a sony viao fs315s then thats exactly what i will type into the search engine, so ensure your products are gonna be found by the search bots,  if someone types for example sony viao fs315s into google, its because there looking to buy one!

You can email me directly at ecdinfo@aol.com if you need a good seo Oscommerce Developer.

Lee

I have been doing SEO for many years and specialize in ecommerce solutions. Unfortunatley with Zen Cart your possibilities are limited with getting actual results in google. A short answere for why is due to the programming. If I were you, I would use a different solution that is much more search engine friendly.

Zen Cart also has issues with conversions and ease of use for the admin area.

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Matthew Burlile 951.303.8697 www.imarketingexpert.com

Explain what you mean ease of use for the admin area?
Are you trying to say that its hackable?
Also, I don`t know how much you know about ZenCart or OsCommerce, but they are search engine friendly "Giving that you do have to put in some extra work to some of the files.
I don`t think eguru has any problems indexing his pages as far as I know he indexed about 1495 pages. What he needs to work on is Ranking and fixing a few things on his web site.


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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net