CartGenie v5.0+: Search Engine Friendly Features & Suggestions

CartGenie v5.0+: Search Engine Friendly Features & Suggestions

Applies To:
CartGenie v5.0+ Standard, Professional & Enterprise Editions

Summary:

CartGenie Storefront pages are in fact search engine friendly. In fact, we have had a number of customers write to us just to tell us how well they were doing in the search engines because they were utilizing the search engine friendly features.

Here are the 5 most important features that are required to be considered search engine friendly.

1.      URL - The URL, http://www.SomeURL.com/CartGenie/prod-329.htm, is a search engine friendly url because it reflects a static page location (i.e. prod-329.htm).

2.      Title Tag – The page must include an html Title Tag to be considered search engine friendly. The Title Tag is included in the CartGenie Storefront. The content of the tag must be “unique” for every page of your Web site. You can define the content of the Title Tag for every page in the CartGenie storefront. The most important Title Tags in the storefront are the home page (Controlled in the Profile Manager) and the Title Tags for each of your product pages (Controlled in the Product Manager).

3.      META Description – The page must include an html META Description tag. The Meta Description tag is included in the CartGenie Storefront. The content of the tag should be “unique” for every page of your Web site. You can define the content of the META Description for every page in the CartGenie storefront. The most important META Description tags in the storefront are the home page (Controlled in the Profile Manager) and the Meta Descriptions for each of your product pages (Controlled in the Product Manager).

4.      META Keywords – The Meta Keywords tag is NOT required to be considered search engine friendly. The Meta Keywords tag is included in the CartGenie Storefront. From a best practices point of view, which is one that we adhere to, you should still utilize the META Keywords tag. This is primarily considered a best practice “carry over” from the past when search engines involved a human being that actually review the content of the keywords. That is no longer the case. In fact, none of the major search engines, utilize the Keywords tag in their algorithms and haven’t for many years.

5.      Javascript(.js) – All Javascript must be stored in an external .js file to be considered search engine friendly. All of the Javascript in the storefront pages is stored in external .js files. This ensures that the content that you create is nested at the top of the page instead of being pushed down below all of the Javascript.   The search engines consider content at the top of a page as more important than content at the bottom so if you have Javascript crowding out the content then you will not get the most important content indexed by the search engine.

NOTE: There is a term called “stuffing” in SEO which is a reference to putting too much info in the title tag, meta description, and meta keywords. Google has guidelines available in their Webmaster area on this topic. They give less weight to sites that stuff those tags so you will want to avoid this tactic.

One of the ways to improve your “rankings” (i.e. where you come up for a given search phrase) is to utilize the features we mentioned above. The friendliness of the url (#1 above) is already taken care of for you and so is the Javascript (#5 above) so you don’t have to worry about that. Where you can improve is by updating your Title and Meta Description info so that it is unique to each page and reflects what customers search for. Between the Title Tag and the Meta Description the Title is by far much more important. For example, if you feel that customers often search for a manufacturer part number then you should include that part number in your Title Tag because the search engines apply a huge amount of weight to the content in that tag. To learn more please take a look at our CartGenie Tip of the Week article http://blog.jstreettech.com/?p=70 in our Blog.
~ By design in CartGenie if there is only 1 sub-category associated with a category, then the link go directly to the prodlist page. If there is only one product in a category then the link will go directly to the product’s page. In a browser search if a category only has one sub-category then the search engine will index the prodlist page.

~ You can discover how many pages are indexed by typing 'Site:MyURL.com' in to a Google's search field. If you would like to explore ways to increase your popularity, we highly recommend the pay-for-performance service offered by Rank Pay.

~ Another heavily weighted factor is the title tag of each individual page. Product pages that have a generic title tag such as “cars, trucks, etc…” instead of something more specific like “2010 Honda Civic” will not necessarily show up in a search (or may rank very low in relevance). The more exact your title tag matches what a potential customer would type in to a search engine, the more likely your site will appear in the first few search results.

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