Web Design Discussion

Zen Cart has many SEO features already built into it however lots more needs to be done to help your store get good rankings, attract visitors and begin making sales.

A. How to Optimize the Meta tags

Zen cart automatically pulls information from the database and uses that information for the meta tags. One problem with this is that the default setting places too many words in the title tags and doesn’t fill description and keywords meta tags for the home page and product pages.

Optimize your home page title tag

1. Edit the meta_tags.php file by going to:

includes-languages-english-meta_tags.php

2. Edit the line below by placing your most targeted keywords at the beginning of the title.


// page title
define(’TITLE’, ‘Stainless Steel Sinks | Porcelain Sink | Eco Taps - SinkBiz.com’);


3. Edit home page description and keywords meta tags

These tags are also included in meta_tags.php. The description is the small blurb the search engines provide visitors searching for your products. Create an attractive description that gets visitors to take action on your site.

Even though the keywords meta tags does not have much significance these days, include it anyway by adding approximately 10 keywords separated by commas or spaces.

Tip

Don’t place your business name at the beginning of your title tag unless you want visitors to come to your site based on its brand name. Place it at the end of your title tag as I’ve shown above.

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Attract 1000s of NEW visitors to your Zen Cart Web Site by learning
highly effective “Article Marketing Strategies”

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO

For several years I’ve always changed dynamic urls to static urls because search engines did not index those types of pages. This meant less visitors and sales because search engines would only index the home page.

This has all changed now according to Google’s updated WebMaster Guidelines:

Here’s a quote from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

“We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.”

What does this mean for the SEO of your web sites?

1. Don’t rewrite dynamic urls to static urls

If you have an online store or a web site that uses dynamic urls don’t convert then to static urls because your pages will now get crawled. This will save you a lot of time creating a .htaccess file and testing all your pages.

2. Leave your old sites alone

If yoo have an old site with old rewrites in place, leave them as they are because the pages have already been indexed by Google and have gained link popularity (other web sites have linked to those pages). If you want to change them back to dynamic urls, use a 301 redirect This will transfer the old URLS to the new URLS and preserve link popularity and rankings.

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Affordable Web Site Design, Web Hosting and Marketing.

These days people prefer to search for your business online rather than spending time wading through hundreds of yellow page ads. One of the easiest and fastest ways to get your web site listed locally in Google is to create a Google Maps account. This allows people to quickly find services available in their local area.

Google Maps listings now appear above all other listings for organic search results so its imperative to get a listed there if you want to get local traffic to your web site.

Here are the steps for how to set up an account:

1. Sign up for a Google Maps account

Fill in these areas:

Basic information - this refers to the contact information of your business. If you don’t have a current address or don’t want to use your home address, get a P.O. Box address from your local UPS store.

Categories - insert the category of your business and/or create a new one

Hours of Operations - specify the hours you are open. You can also leave this blank.

Payment Options - indicating the type of credit cards you accept allows customers to quickly see what kid of payments you accept.

Photos - this option allows you to browse to a photo of your business on your computer and upload it to your local listing. You are allowed up to 10 photos.

Videos - create a video about your business and upload it to You Tube. You can enter up to 5 URLS of your You Tube videos.

Additional details - you may want to include extra information about your business ie if parking available, or what brands you carry.

2. Submit your listing

After clicking the submit button you will need to verify your listing by providing your telephone number of address. When entering your telephone number you’ll immediately receive an automatic phone call from Google. Enter the pin number provided to you and you will be confirmed right away.

3. Check your listing

Your listing will appear within 24 hours. Check your listing by doing a search on the title of your business.

Getting listed locally with Google Maps is far easier than getting good rankings on a national or world wide scale so take action and sign up for an account right away.

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Get 1000s of NEW visitors to your website without spending
a dime on advertising.

Read my new ebook “Article Marketing Strategies“…
to learn the most effective ways to write and submit articles.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO

There are many dead products being marketed online because they did not do the necessary keyword research. The product was dead before it was promoted. Don’t let yourself fall into the same trap. Many folks get so excited by their new idea they don’t even bother to check if their is a demand for it.

The purpose of doing the keyword research before you build a web site and market it by writing and submitting articles is to see if their is a demand and to determine how competitive your market is.

So how do you determine if there is a demand for your product?

1. Use the free wordtracker tool (Google “free wordtracker tool”)
Enter any of your primary keywords in the search box to find how many searches are being done for that term. The free tool will return 100 phrases you can use. If you wish to dig deeper try the monthly subscription.

2. Copy and paste these phrases into an excel spreadsheet labeled WordTracker at the top of the column.

3. Enter the title Google in the second column. Insert each phrase in the Google search box with quotations around them and press enter. This will give you the number of web sites returned for that term.

4. Enter anchor+keyword in the Google search box. The anchor text is the text used in the link for your phrase. It will return how many web sites are using that keyword in their anchor text.

5. Enter title+keyword in the Google search box. This provides all the web sites that contain your keyword in their title meta tags…a crucial element for optimizing your web site.

6. Enter url+keyword in the the Google search box. This returns web sites that contain your keyword phrase in a URL on their web pages.

7. Research the number of backlinks of top competitors. Take the top 10 web sites that appear in Google for your keyword, then do a backlink check for each of them.

Enter link:www.domain.com in the Yahoo search box then click the web search button. In the inlinks drop down box select “except from this domain” This will show you the number of backlinks this particular site has. If you want to rank higher than this site you will need to get ore backlinks than them.

Ideally you want to target the keywords that have the highest demand and the least number of competitors. For example if the keyword phrase “web site design maryland” produces a large number of searches, has only a small number of sites that contain that phrase in their title, anchor text, url and the top sites contain only a few backlinks, you stand a good chance of achieving top rankings.

If there is no demand for this phrase or it has too many competitors, choose another one. This is why you need to create a large keyword list at the beginning of your research.

Resources

WebCEO
Enables you to do all the above research with one tool

Free WordTracker Tool

*****************************************
Get 1000s of NEW visitors to your website without spending
a dime on advertising.

Read my new ebook “Article Marketing Strategies“…
to learn the most effective ways to write and submit articles.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO

If you want your web content to get found by the search engines and receive high rankings it needs to be unique. If the content is duplicated 100s of times your rankings will suffer and the number of page views will decrease. Even though it takes a little more time to write unique content it benefits you in the long run because it consistently attracts new visitors.

The article below clarifies what duplicate means and how it affects search engine results.

Although there is no such thing as a general duplicate content penalty it is difficult to get high rankings for a web page which contents can also be found on other web pages. If you want to avoid problems with duplicate content, the following tips and illustrations will help you.

What is duplicate content and what do search engines do about it?

Search engines want to return as many different options as possible in their result lists. That’s why they filter all duplicates in the search results and display only one version.

How do search engines determine which web page will be used for the search results?

When search engines find a web page, they compare it to previously found web pages to determine whether it is a duplicate or not:

Web pages that are hosted by known spam sites will be removed from the list:

The remaining web pages will be sorted based on the number and the quality of their inbound links:

The web page with the best inbound links will be chosen for the search results:

How to avoid duplicate content on your on websites

1. Hide duplicate content from search engines

If you offer different versions of your website content (regular view, mobile view, print view, etc.) then search engines might pick the wrong variation for the search results.

Add a noindex meta tag to your duplicate content versions so that search engines don’t index the duplicate content (you can use IBP’s website optimization editor to do it).

2. Require backlinks if you syndicate your web page content

If you syndicate your content to third parties, search engines might favor the version published by one of your partners.

Require a back link from your partners to the original document on your own website so that search engines can find out from which web page the content comes.

Duplicate content can cause problems with your search engine rankings. If you follow the tips above, search engine spiders should index your web pages correctly.

Also make sure that the web page content that search engine spiders index on your website has been optimized so that search engines can give your web pages the best possible rankings in the search results.

Source
http://www.axandra.com/

*****************************************
Get 1000s of NEW visitors to your website without spending
a dime on advertising.

Read my new ebook “Article Marketing Strategies“…
to learn the most effective ways to write and submit articles.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO

The meta robots tag is not one of the common tags to include in your web pages. I decided to mention it here because you see it used on some sites when it has a clear purpose.

All web sites will naturally get indexed by the search engines without using this tag.

The code for the robots meta tag must be included within the header tags of your web pages.

Top 7 Benefits and Uses of the Robots Meta Tag

1. Tell search engines not to index your pages (noindex)


<meta name="robots" content="noindex">


2. Tell search engines to index your site but not to follow links (nofollow)

Use this code for pages which contain useful content but have links which are irrelevant or obsolete.


<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">


3. Tell search engines to not index or follow links on your web page (noindex,nofollow)

If you include this code in the header of every page of your web site, it will not be indexed.


<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">


4. Tell search engines to index your site and follow links (index,follow)


<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">


Because search engines index and follow links naturally, there is no need to add this tag.

5. Tell search engines not to cache your pages (noarchive)


<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">


6. Prevents a description appearing below the page in the search results and prevents page caching (nosnippet)


<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">


7. Prevent search engines from displaying DMOZ data in the search results of your site (noodp)


<meta name="robots" content="noodp">


The above code prevents all search engines from using this information for the page’s description.

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page’s description, use:


<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">


TIPS

A. A word of warning about using content value “NONE”


<meta name="robots" content="none">


Some webmasters use content value “NONE” to indicate no robots restrictions, however they unknowingly block all search engines from indexing the content on their web pages.

B. If you add the robots meta tags to a framed site, make sure you include them on both the FRAMESET and the FRAME pages.

C. Rather than use the meta robots tag to not index a web page use the robots.txt file to block crawler access to pages.
What is robots.txt file?

Conclusion
If you don’t specific the robots meta Tag on a web page, the spiders will index that page and all its links by default. Only use this tag when you don’t want certain parts of your web page indexed.

Resources

Yahoo Provides NOYDIR Opt-Out Of Yahoo Directory Titles & Descriptions
http://searchengineland.com/070228-140603.php

The keywords tags are the least significant of the meta tags. The major search engines don’t crawl them therefore they has almost no affect on your rankings. Many web sites don’t even bother to include them but focus on the title and description meta tags plus weaving their keyword phrases into the web copy.

So should you include the keywords tag?

My recommendation is to include it anyway because some of the smaller search engines still crawl it.

Here are the top 4 strategies to use:

1. Correct coding

Incorrect coding of your meta tags may prevent the search engine spiders fom crawling your web page. HTML errors throughout your web site slows the loading of your web pages. Slow loading causes customers to click off your web site.

HTML


<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">


XHTML


<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"/>


2. Length of tag

The keywords meta tag should be under 800 characters. Use commas of spaces between each keyword.keywords (comma seperated, do not repeat a phrase more than 3 times)

3. Keyword repetition

You may repeat the keywords in your keyword phrases however don’t repeat your keyword phrases more than three times. ie

dog grooming and training,dog caring,dog training

Include the keywords used in your title and description tags and web copy.

I use spaces instead of commas so the search engines can automatically pick up the combinations and I don’t have to repeat keywords as much.

Instead of using commas ie

dog grooming and training,dog caring,dog training

I’ll use spaces instead and have less words ie

dog grooming training caring

4. Word order

Place your most important keywords or keyword phrases at the beginning of your keywords meta tag.

Conclusion

The best investment of your time in optimizing your web site is to do thorough keyword research. Keywords are what people enter into the search engines to find your web site. If you include these keywords within your web copy and in the meta tags you have a much greater chance ranking well for your web site.

Keep in mind there are other major factors you need to consider to rank well such as lots of relevant high quality links pointing to your web site.

Site owners don’t often put much thought into meta descriptions tags. They will write anything that comes into their heads without considering who’s going to read them.

What are meta description tags?

These are the tags you insert after the title tags of your web site. The description displays under the title of your web site in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

7 Top Strategies for Optimizing Description Tags:

1. Include keywords

Don’t duplicate the keywords used in your title tag. Try to vary them a little ie if you used the plural form in the title tag use the singular form in the description tag.

If you used an abbreviated word in the title tag use the full word in the description tag.

2. Write a different description for every web page.

Make sure the description adequately describes what the web page is about so the visitor knows immediately what to expect.

3. Get into the head of your visitor.

You only have a few sentences to make an impression on your visitor. A well-crafted description will help differentiate your site from your competitors. Try to understand what will draw the visitor into your web site. Make sure you write full sentences, not an abbreviated ones.

4. Length of description

The search engines will read anywhere from 150 to 250 characters. Google displays about 150 to 160 characters. If it is over 160 characters it will be truncated. Other search engines allow more characters. A general rule is to write 200 characters (approximately 25-30 words.)

5. Include keyword phrases used in web content

Search engines give more weight to sites which include the same keyword phrases in the web copy and description tags therefore incorporate keyword phrases used in your web page content.

6. Word order

Place your most important keyword phrase at the beginning of your meta description tags. It should also be a phrase that captures your visitor’s attention so they will want to check out your web site.

7. Correct coding

Errors in your code slow the search engine spiders or they may not read your description correctly. Check your code by running it through an online validator at: http://validator.w3.org/

The description tag is coded differently for HTML and XHTML.

In HTML the tag has no end tag. ie


<meta name="description" content="7 Top Strategies for optimizing description tags">

In XHTML the tag must be properly closed.


<meta name="description" content="7 Top Strategies for optimizing description tags" />


Conclusion

Optimizing the description tags is is not as important as optimizing the title tags because the description tags don’t impact your rankings as much. Instead focus on providing a well-written description that will make visitors want to check out your web site.

To read 1-5 please visit Top 10 strategies to optimize your title tag

6. Don’t place your company name at the beginning

When surfing the web you’ll notice many sites place their company name or web site address at the beginning of the title tag. You’ll probably rank No 1 for that term however it does not help your rankings. Place your best keywords or keyword phrases at the beginning followed by your company name. ie

dog grooming and training - Dog Care Inc.

7. Use a divider

Use spaces, dashes (-) or bars (|) to separate your keyword phrase from your company name. This will help you to rank your page for both phrases.

8. Repeat the keywords in your headline and content

The header tag (h1) is often used for the first headline on your web page. Include the same keywords in the headline as your title tag.

Your content should reflect the keywords you chose for your title tag. Be sure to sprinkle them throughout your web copy. This tells the search engines the theme of your site and rank it accordingly.

9. Don’t use the same title tags for all web pages

Create unique title tags for each web page by using different keywords for each title tag. Then use these keywords in the content on your web page.

10. Write for your visitors

Keep your web site visitors in mind when writing. Create attractive and descriptive titles. Your description tag and web copy should expand on the contents of your title tag.

Conclusion

Title tags are crucial in attaining high search engine rankings. Take time to craft a short, concise and attractive description for each of your web pages. Most of your competitors have not read these top 10 strategies so your site has the potential to outrank them.

Title tags are the most important tags of your web site regarding search engine optimization. If you optimize the tag correctly you will be well ahead of your competitors.

Top 10 strategies to optimize your title tags

1. Keyword research

Find the most targeted keywords related to your web site content. I use Search It because it contains all the brainstorming tools you need in one place ie

Wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool
Google adwords keyword tool
Seodigger keyword tool
Yahoo keyword selector tool

2. Length of title tags

Limit the length of the title tag to 70 characters (including spaces). Search engines usually truncate the title after 68-70 characters. This means you can use approximately 6-7 words. This increases your chances of getting all your words to display in all three major search engines.

3. Use keyword phrases

Don’t use single keywords. These are far too competitive to attain high rankings. Instead use 2-4 words that include your targeted keyword phrase.

4. Word order

Place your most targeted keyword at the beginning followed by your second most targeted keyword. This not only helps your ranking in the search engines but it’s what will be displayed at the top of your visitors browser when they visit your web site.

If your keyword phrase is “dog grooming and training”

instead of writing:

the top 7 tips for dog grooming and training

write this for your title tag

dog grooming and training - the top 7 tips

5. Don’t repeat keywords

Don’t use the same keyword more than once. This may be considered spam by the search engines and you may see a drop in your rankings.