All posts tagged SEO 101

SEO 101 – 3 Kinds of Ranking Factors

by Eric Winter on October 10, 2011 in SEO with No comments

This post explains three types of “ranking factors” widely believed to be important to Search Ranking at both Google and Bing.   These are:

1)      On-site factors:  What are the words on your page and how do they relate to the keywords in the search.   The search engines look at the code of your webpage.  Can they find keywords in that code.   Are the keywords found in places that the search engine thinks are important?  Is the url of your page one that implies that the page is “on target” for the search?

2)      Off-site factors:  What sites link to your site and to the pages of your site?   What keywords are in the link text that is clickable in those links?   The most talked about example is Google PageRank.  PageRank is a number that Google shows for a given webpage that shows in very rough and generic way how much “link juice” a page is understood by Google to have.   Generally speaking, if a page has more links from many different reputable sites, it will have more PageRank and will have a better chance of ranking for searches.

3)      “Keyword Agnostic Signals”:  This is a relatively new addition to ranking factors and in some ways it overlaps with Off-site factors.  Keyword Agnostic signals are things like the amount of traffic occurring at the website, the success rate of the website for engaging visitors, social mentions for the website , site speed, the age of the domain, the freshness of the content.

Do you have to score well on all three of these to rank?   It depends how competitive the ranking is for the particular term (keyword phrase) you are asking about.  Some phrases are much more competitive than others.

How can you tell which factors are the most important?   Most professional search professionals learn from trying things and from reading what other people are saying.   Matt Cutt’s blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/)  is a very valuable resource since Matt is “on the inside” at Google.   SEOMoz.com has an annual survey of SEO luminaries which is an important reference to the leading thinking in SEO.  Check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.

 

 

SEO 101 – Page Titles, Meta Tags and Search Friendly URLS on CV3

by Eric Winter on October 5, 2011 in SEO with No comments

Welcome to our new series on “SEO Best Practices” in the CV3 environment.   These posts will be tagged as SEO 101, SEO 201, and SEO 301 depending on how advanced they are.  Please let us know what you think.

This post is about how to improve your CV3 site’s “On-site ranking factors” by customizing your page titles, meta descriptions and urls.  These are things you can do on your site to make your pages more search engine friendly.

Title Tags

In my opinion, optimizing your title tags is the single greatest “bang for your buck” in SEO. That does not mean that keywords in your title are sufficient to get you ranking for keyterms, but they are an element that is easy to change and which search engines look at to determine what your page is about.  It is an eCommerce best practice to take the time to come up with keyword rich page titles for the different pages of your website.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are a special set of tags in HTML that are designed to give information about the webpage behind the scenes, i.e. to other programs or to search engines   Early search engines used them more heavily to help determine ranking. Google and Bing don’t seem to infer any particular importance to any of the meta information for ranking, but it is still worth putting in some keywords since they are keywords that can be seen within the code the Search Engine consumes.  Don’t knock yourself out optimizing these keywords in your early SEO efforts.

The meta description field is important right away though. The meta description field is sometimes used on the engines’ search results pages as the descriptor of the page that accompanies the clickable link.   It is worthwhile to write a good meta description for your pages to help your search listings get more clicks. That is an important part of SEO often overlooked as people tend to focus on ranking alone.

Search Friendly URLs

Search friendly urls are urls that have words the search engine can read and understand. These urls can have keywords that tell the search engine that your page is about the keyword topic and therefore can help you rank for a keyword search in a way that a typical “dynamic url” can’t.

Example:
This url is not friendly:

http://www.domain.com/?categoryid=6&productid=567

This url is friendly:

http://www.domain.com/pasta-makers/cuisinart-stainless-pasta-magic/

How to Edit Title Tags and Meta Tags in CommerceV3

Homepage:
In the left navigation go to “Marketing” then click on “Meta Tags”.

Click on Default and you will see the edit Meta Tags interface:

You can fill in the Title Tag, Keyword and  Description fields here.

Considerations for Title Tag
-Put your keywords first and any general info second, e.g. “Civil War Biographies – Rare Historical Books for Collectors”,  “French Revolution Books – Rare Historical Books for Collectors”, etc
-Limit the title to 65 characters. Google will crop your title to the nearest full word.
-All titles should be typed in Title Case (or Proper Case)

Consideration for Meta Tags
Description-  Depending on the page, you can either write 3-4 sentences about what the page is about (remember to use good keywords), or you can write out structured data, i.e. just the facts.   I think this latter technique is especially good for product pages (see below).

Keywords- Pick 10-25 keywords or keyphrases and separate them with commas.

Category Pages and Product Pages:

CV3 does a great job of providing good page titles at the category and product level. By default, the page titles on category pages are simply the category name. In many cases this is a pretty good title. However, category names can be optimized for SEO by adding more keywords either before or after the category name. To do this, navigate to the Edit Category page in your CV3 admin (under Inventory in the left navigation) and then add your preferred page title in the “Meta Title” field in the Information section of the page.


The meta description and meta keywords fields are where you can edit your category page’s meta tags. The general rules for these fields are the same as described in the section above. However, remember to reinforce the category’s keyword themes in the meta fields.

For product pages, CV3 again does a fine job with titles. By default the page title for a product page will be [Category Name] –[Product Title].  That might be very good. However, sometimes you might want to do something different. For example, a bookstore might have the title of the book as the product title. It might be smart to make the page title include the Author’s name as well since people often search by author. To change Titles and Metas for products in CV3 navigate to the Edit Product page and edit the fields under Product Display -> Product Display.

Page Templates

CommerceV3 allows you to specify a unique title, description, and set of keywords for each “top level” template.    This allows you  each static template to be given unique meta information to further increase SEO. Top level templates are those like “viewcart.tpl”. Other templates, like  _top.tpl, which are included within other templates will not have the custom meta information applied to the page.

To edit, navigate to your template list (Design -> Template Library), find and click the template, expand the Edit Meta Information section and Customize.

 

Note: CV3 also provides ways to write title and meta tags automatically according to a formula. This is beyond the scope of this blog post. If you are interested in this topic, let us know and we will write a subsequent post specifically on this.

How to Make Search Friendly URLs in CommerceV3

CommerceV3 makes it easy to make search friendly urls for your categories and products. To make a search friendly category url, navigate to the Edit Category page and, expand the Options section and type the name you want to use for pages in this category.

And it will show up like this:

 

For products, navigate to the Product, Expand Product Display -> Product Display and type the words you want to use in the url for the product.

And it will show up like this:

Note: You should not use spaces in the category or product url fields.   Separate the words with dashes instead.

With a little effort on these three areas – titles, metas, and custom URLs, you will have a solid foundation for optimizing your CommerceV3 website for search.  Look for upcoming posts on more SEO techniques in the coming weeks, including using Google Webmaster Tools, the different types of Ranking Factors that determine your search position and ways to build inbound links.  As always, please let us know if this post has been helpful to you.