No matter how many features we offer if visitors are not coming then all the functionality and design is pointless.
 
How about a group getting together on how best to optimise our Viart carts. Where to put the text so that the engines find it. Ok Holleyland has some general SEO but how about specific to our carts. Users experiences successes and failures --its all learning. Whatcha all think ? best regards Colin

Alright COlin
 
What do you have in mind ?
 
How should we proceed ?

Perhaps we need a forum board for tips, ideas and sharing?
 
I'm all for learning and sharing - not sure what I have to offer on this thread.
 
I have an html page map that links to category pages - still to be completed but I feel is very helpful - this is in addition to the site map created by VIART. Now my new Viart shop is moving up the rankings often on pages one or two.
 
It's a copy of what I did on my first shop which gets high listings.
 
In Edit Item - Meta Keywords - I have a few key words that I put here every time - these are important words I have least success with and I hope the frequency of use will help??
 
Chris

Would just like to hear of others experiences of how the SE spider through the index page in particular and if anyone knows if the text in custom blocks actually gets looked at.
 
I use the global settings /system - greetings introduction to add in the keywords that I use in my Meta keywords for frequency like you say Christopher. It seems to get looked at.
 
Site Map is important too, and sounds a good idea Christopher using an html map too.
 
Would be good to have some cooperation from us all on how best to optimize our cart to get best results.
 
Colin

In my professional opinion, search engines and moving towards social voting results in one shape or another (people voting on the most appropriate link)
 
"on page SEO" is getting less and less important
 
for SEO, there is only a handful of resources I trust. Overdoing SEO or using OLD tactics can actually hurt your site, if not get it banned by Google.
 
I recommend a membership at http://www.searchenginenews.com/
 
PS: doh, there are 2 people name Colin on this forum

From this months PlanetOcean (aka searchenginenews.com)
 
How Important Are Keywords In The URL For Search Engine Rankings?
  
Answer: Just to clarify, when we speak of placing keywords in your URLs, we're talking about the entire URL string, not just the domain name. So your domain name might be yoursite.com and a webpage's full URL page might be: http://www.yoursite.com/keyword1/keyword2/keyword3.html.
 
Having your keywords in the URL does make a difference and typically leads to noticeable SEO benefits even though it is entirely possible to rank well without having the keyword there. Thus, some will say "it's not a critically important ranking factor" and in general, they are correct.
 
However, we have found that the relevancy boost, albeit ever-so-slight, is worthwhile because every little bit helps. Perhaps even more important, however, is that it increases the odds that someone will click your listing in the search results. This human aspect of URL optimization is very important. A keyword in your URL tends to help potential site visitors predict where your link might lead them and hints in advance of clicking the link as to whether this is a relevant search result.
 
Another important consideration for URL structure is the fact that using multiple parameters and dynamic elements in a URL can confuse both users and search engine spiders. We've covered dynamic URLs extensively in our report Getting Your Dynamic Sites Completely Indexed. Realize that URL structures containing parameters like & and ? can cause problems getting your entire site indexed, especially if you use them excessively.
 
Also bear in mind that searchers have problems remembering longer, dynamic URLS for later use. That's one reason why short, static URLS are more user friendly because they tend to be easier to remember.
 
Overall, keywords in your URLs are good to have, but what's most important is that your URLs are easily crawled and indexed by search engines. Long and confusing URLs can keep your pages from ever showing up in the search results at all.
 
As far as rankings are concerned, your time is much better spent building links and making sure you have keyword rich titles and headers on your pages than it is rewriting your URLs. And we do NOT suggest renaming any web page if it is already indexed and ranking—doing so may very well kill your rankings because the engines are likely to have trouble finding the newly renamed URL.
 
We cover URL optimization in depth on our report How URLs Can Affect Top Search Engine Rankings .

Greetings
 
Shopping cart features are wonderfully things to have. But, to be successful its the content that causes sites to be ranked among the top of search engines.
 
Alkatraz mention many aspects that are very useful regarding SEO ranking in the general sense of the word. What many e-commerce sites including those using Viart great features for the bucks cannot provide content, that you must do yourself or hire someone.
 
What I mean by content is not just product name and description. If you're selling "bamboo wrist bands"
I seriously doubt you'll have any problem ranking high on search engines with just a description of the product.
 
However, clothing, toys, cameras and so forth you'll be at the bottom of the list when it comes to search engines with just a product description.
 
Content means something more. For example lets exam a heavy demanded product “Shopping Cart”and a very small young site under 3 months old “HolleyLand.com” competing among 24,300,000 pages, even ViArt purchases Adword Sponsor Link to appear on the first page. The word is too competitive for our blood for now.
 
We begin by focusing on the product, create an article, added the title {I sometime go so far as to misspell a word for testing} the first effort is to penetrate KEY WORDS / PHRASES MARKET.
 
Try these key phrases on Google;
 
1.Flexible Shopping Cart CMS Combination - 17,100 pages
2.ViArt vs "or try this" vs CubeCart - 941 pages or 32,400 pages
3.ViArt template design - 20,100 pages
 
At this point we are satisfied with the above article and its ranking between 1-10. As Alkatraz stated we make no changes to the titles or article, we don't want to lose our position in the ranking. For other articles that have not done so well, we alter the titles and/or adjust the articles. While at the same time fresh articles are added.
 
Tony
HolleyLand.com

Great points Tony, focusing in on niche "long-tail" keywords, with high demand and low supply, is the easiest way to get results quickly.
 
My favourite tools for keyword research are the google adwords keyword generator (create an adwords account and play around) and www.wordtracker.com (subscription based, but quite good)

I'm in total agreement that adwords keyword generator is a great tool. But, what's need to be point-out is that content must be richer than a product description to be able to float your product/service to page 1 of search engine results.
 
Instead competing against 32,000 pages you're among 860,000 or more with a narrow key word/phrase to grab potential customers. Can you still float to the top? My experience tells me, yes you can under the most adverse condition of "short-tail" keywords with high demand and high supply.
 
To illustrate the point, 1st. Uffizi Gallery largest museum in Florence and the 2nd. Vatican museum largest museum in Rome.
 
I sell museums tickets to tourist, so my key phrases that I must have A. Uffizi Gallery booking and B. Vatican Museum Tour. Furthermore, I want to appear not only in Google but Yahoo as well to generate a cross blend of traffic.
 
Uffizi Gallery booking - Yahoo - rank 8-9 first page
position among 879,000 pages
Vatican Museum Tour - Goolge - rank 2 first page
position among 869,000 pages
 
1. If you check, you'll notice that the url does not contain key word phrase.
2. Open adword account or wordtracker.
3. I recommend content done in regular html.
 
Just so pointers
 
Tony
HolleyLand

Its good to share :) I enjoyed reading all ideas and guidance.
 
Lots of good ideas for us Viart cart hopefuls to use.
 
To be honest I have been spending lose your shirt bucks on adwords. And want to achieve higher ranking on certain phrases.
 
Didn't help that my sitemap was not up and working in google tools. (now fixed) And that it was quite a challenge to get the cart to write to the sitemap.xml to the root directory. Anyhow hopefully keyword content rich information with good titles and a sitemap that googlebots can spider will help.
 
 
Such great info Tony and Alkatraz.
 
Tony I noticed by checking your site http://www.holleyland.com/viart/index.php
 
That you have no keywords or meta tags at all. And still impressive ranking.
 
How about links .. non reciprocal links seem best so I am told. Do any of you add yourself from directories?
 
Colin

you can use 301 redirect in the .htaccess file so you will not loose any ranking in google. Google will just update the new URL for you. I tested this and it works. XML Sitemap is another best thing viart has. I manually update sitemap after adding products, and google just downloads my sitemap every other day through google webmaster. I really like ViArt with friendly dynamic URLs, XML Sitemap option. You should also update your index page often (even a very small change, like positions of 2 products etc) so that SE's will send you more visitors, believing that they will see different content. Of course there are too many thinks like the age of domain, trustrank, strong links etc...If you have any specific questions I would do my best.
 
ps.
 
google.com.tr
Keyword: 1) Nike 2) Converse
I am right after Nike Inc. (belindasport.com) so I believe I am doing good. %97 percent of my traffic comes from Google. Around 90000 visitors each month.

Greetings
 
Hi eyestrain
 
Usually I begin by adding content "title header" then incorporate the key word/phrase in first paragraph. At this point I don't worry about adding keywords or meta tags.
 
After doing this for several years, I notice that Google and Yahoo grab the title {H2-H3} then analyzes first section of the page.
 
It does NOT appear that the search engines focus on keywords or meta tags in determining ranking. But do take into account "FIRST" site name "SECOND" Page Title follow by "THIRD" brief Content.
 
To illustrate my point, try this on Google, search for:
1.Introducting ViArt Solutions - number 1
2.ViArt Solutions - number 2 Take a look at number 1 position "www.viartsolutions.com" SITE NAME no content whatsoever. But Google gave the page top raking because the name addresses what the user ask for.
 
By the way, "Introducting" is intentionally misspelled. Helps me determine if the search engines have index the page and the time lapse.
 
Tony
HolleyLand.com

Again that's great information Tony.
 
Wanted to ask you a couple of questions if you will be so kind.
 
1) I notice the following line in your meta tag info
 
MSSmartTagsPreventParsing TRUE
 
went off and researched it - http://archives.hwg.org/hwg-techniques/000001c1e70f$d4da8160$9a10b0d1@laptop1800t1
 
You obviously recommend doing this as a safeguard.
 
2) Also I signed up to google's web tools thingy and got a varify code to add to my site you dont have this, you have a line about robots revisit every 5 days. How did you do this?
 
Also specifically to my site I get an error on webmaster tools webcrawl of a lot of unfound pages : http://www.yoiscissors.com/http://www....ssors.com/product_print.php?item_id=178
being one but cant see why this double up on domain name is happening, any ideas?
 
best regards Colin

eyestrain there are two ways to verify your site through google. One is meta tag, other is ıpluading HMTL file on your server. Tony probably did that. I also wonder what MSSmartTags..... is all about.

I went off and added this into my site-
 
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="5 days">
 
I added it into the - Administration > Global Settings greetings and introductions bit.
 
Seems to work and shows on meta tag analysis.. big question hmmm does it mean more visits by bots?
 
anyhow ... cheers Colin

Hi Re verifying on Google I used the google analytics option in Administration > Global Settings and also used the google webmaster tools to verify meta tag. Mystifying stuff

I believe instead of using _ for blank characters in Friendly URLs, ViArt should use - (dashes). I experienced that dashes are stronger especially for Google results. Does anyone agree with me?

I'm in the process of moving my site to viart cart. One thing I worried about is the current rankings of my web pages with search engines. Will I be able to use the friendly url feature on products to generate the same url as currently have (i.e. abc.htm)? If I keep the original web pages at the root, wonder how it will work with viart?

Yes, You can set the friendly URLs manually.
 
I've moved to viart last december (2007) and our visitors from SEs constatnly increased.
 
The SEO possibilities is very good in viart.

What about filtering engines using robot.txt and using do not follow coding in the htaccess file. Also that a basic viart home page splits the search into up to 4 - ie www.yoursite.com - www.yousite.com/index.php - http://yoursite.com etc
 
Also a basic structure of a viart cart in tables is very code heavy in relation to text on page. How many edit their menus using css?
 
Colin

I've been working with a client who uses Viart over the last few months to improve their search engine ranking for a few key phrases.
 
So far, we've managed to push them from a position in the high tens to the first page of google.co.uk for their primary phrase.
 
The greatest factor in all of this is - as a couple of people have pointed out - is establishing good quality in-bound links.
 
Of course on-page SEO is still important -not only from the SE's point of view, but also the browser. It's well worth bearing in mind that a well-crafted meta description can encourage more click-throughs from the SERPs.
 
We did have some issues with duplicate meta-data and with friendly & dirty URLs. In the case of the former we had issues with the 'Tell a Friend' and 'Print this Page' functionality. In short, every product has an identical Tell a Friend page and a Printer-Friendly page so we suddenly had hundreds of ostensibly identical pages.
 
In the case of the latter, we unfortunately found ourselves with a mix of the two types of URL in Google's index. We're gradually scrubbing them out through the use of robots.txt and Webmaster URL removal requests. That takes time, however, and is prone to rejection by Google.
 
To share our experiences I wrote a short article on the SEO potential of Viart on our blog.
 
One of the owners of Viart actually commented on the article, and we subsequently had a very positive discussion. He even put forward a couple of my issues to the development team for resolution.
 
I have to say I was amazed by the response - if my experience is anything to go by this is an issue they're taking seriously and, even better, they're actively engaging in discussion with their customers.
 
I'd appreciate any further input on my article - comments (moderated) are open: http://www.mackerelmedia.co.uk/blog/viart-e-commerce-and-seo-review/

good call on the 'Tell a Friend' and 'Print this Page' tip, thank you!
 
I'm going to add the 'nofollow' attribute on those links, within the template, to prevent that.