Can anyone do the SEO for our Opencart site?

We are looking for a SEO expert to optismise our Opencart site to improve search rankings. As well on-site optimisation, we do require link building, artical submission etc.

Can anyone offer thier services, or recommend anyone to use? The site is
http://www.mytwinkletoeshoes.co.uk/

Although the URL and site design will be changing before the SEO work is to begin.

Please let us know what you can do, and the costs involved.

Thanks

Matthew

IMHO SEO is a myth... just fill out the SEO fields in your store, that should be enough... link building is only useful if it is Quality links that are being built, and those are hard to do... so unless you're willing to spend a lot of money on it, I wouldn't bother to do it...
I have a site running with OC that comes up high on page 1 for all products in the store, just by filling out all fields in the admin.

Have you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization headings 'Increasing prominence' and 'White hat versus black hat' ?

Am i familiar with many of the principles of SEO, including link building, multi-way linking, etc etc. However, I am not familiar with HTML, and therefore site optimisation, metatagging, image linking etc. Our site needs to be optimised for terms such as childrens shoes, leather shoes, etc rather than specific products. Any thoughts?

magicmat wrote:Am i familiar with many of the principles of SEO, including link building, multi-way linking, etc etc. However, I am not familiar with HTML, and therefore site optimisation, metatagging, image linking etc. Our site needs to be optimised for terms such as childrens shoes, leather shoes, etc rather than specific products. Any thoughts?

OpenCart has fields defined for that in the backend. META, SEO, Description. If you fill those out you're set as best you can for the search engine bots

It's also important you have pieces of TEXT on your site that describe what you do, and describe it in context... the search engine bots read this and rate your site accordingly

The way some vendors who specialise talk about SEO you'd think it was some kind of magical silver bullet!

It's not entirely a myth however, but all it requires is a little common sense. Google is doing their absolute best that their results returned provide the most relevant information to the query given. SEO's that engage in 'black hat' practices with site layovers and massive link farms seek to undermine Google's algorithm, just as a warning not, if you have any SEO vendor looking to employ these tactics you might like to point out that BMW Germany famously had themselves removed from the Google index for a while for such things.

My advice is to use the field entry's provided in OpenCart to put in meaningful information related to the terms you want to try and place highly in the index for. As burrito also mentioned, having good relevant content targetting the keywords your after also helps.

PageRank, this is the secret sauce in Googles search algorithm, and a good way to get highly placed in an index is to achieve a higher pagerank than someone else who is targetting the same keywords. This is generally achieved by managing to have quality sites reference information or articles on your particular site, while minimising the number of outgoing links you provide. (In a way you can cheat by putting 'rel="nofollow"' attributes on outgoing links where you do not want to bestow pagerank - however if you do this you may find that people will return the same favour to you). Good site layout also plays a part, but since you are using OpenCart which already has a decent and well structured way to produce HTML you do not need to worry overly much about document format.

At the end of the day, if you keep your content focussed and targetted on keywords you want to show up for in the index, Google will recognise and generally accomodate this approach. If you resort to odd strategies and try to find ways around or to manipulate the index, you could find yourself removed entirely.

Just stick to the honest approach of good content, and information related to terms you want to be high for in the index. Don't do anything tricky, and don't get sucked into paying "SEO Experts" that could potentially bring more harm then good (however it can be a good approach to hire SEO Experts that provide good copywrite and editing services - they will know how to legitimately target keywords).

pstreet wrote:The way some vendors who specialise talk about SEO you'd think it was some kind of magical silver bullet!

It's not entirely a myth however, but all it requires is a little common sense. Google is doing their absolute best that their results returned provide the most relevant information to the query given. SEO's that engage in 'black hat' practices with site layovers and massive link farms seek to undermine Google's algorithm, just as a warning not, if you have any SEO vendor looking to employ these tactics you might like to point out that BMW Germany famously had themselves removed from the Google index for a while for such things.

My advice is to use the field entry's provided in OpenCart to put in meaningful information related to the terms you want to try and place highly in the index for. As burrito also mentioned, having good relevant content targetting the keywords your after also helps.

PageRank, this is the secret sauce in Googles search algorithm, and a good way to get highly placed in an index is to achieve a higher pagerank than someone else who is targetting the same keywords. This is generally achieved by managing to have quality sites reference information or articles on your particular site, while minimising the number of outgoing links you provide. (In a way you can cheat by putting 'rel="nofollow"' attributes on outgoing links where you do not want to bestow pagerank - however if you do this you may find that people will return the same favour to you). Good site layout also plays a part, but since you are using OpenCart which already has a decent and well structured way to produce HTML you do not need to worry overly much about document format.

At the end of the day, if you keep your content focussed and targetted on keywords you want to show up for in the index, Google will recognise and generally accomodate this approach. If you resort to odd strategies and try to find ways around or to manipulate the index, you could find yourself removed entirely.

Just stick to the honest approach of good content, and information related to terms you want to be high for in the index. Don't do anything tricky, and don't get sucked into paying "SEO Experts" that could potentially bring more harm then good (however it can be a good approach to hire SEO Experts that provide good copywrite and editing services - they will know how to legitimately target keywords).

what he said!

Don't pay for SEO, OpenCart has already done most of the work for you.

huhitschris wrote:Don't pay for SEO, OpenCart has already done most of the work for you.

Yea. I am fully agreed with 'huhitschris' .
SEO is very expensive and opencart doesn't need it.

All valid points in these replys, however you are not making best use of the built in SEO functions of OpenCart

SEO friendly URLs should be enables - then configured for each page

Page titles need to be set differently for each page/product - it looks like all pages use a generic title of "Shop Stylish and Affordable Baby Boys and Girls Soft Leather Shoes and Leather Boots", not good Google does not like this - make sure each page title unique and has the most important keywords included, but keep the title short.

Make sure you add a description meta field for each page - your pages don't seem to have this set at the moment so Google will take the first few words from each page for the description and often that doesn't make sence when you read it. Have a look at site:www.mytwinkletoeshoes.co.uk and you'll see what I mean.

Make these few changes and you'll be doing well. Also remember content is king - fill your pages with rich content and try using H2 H3 for sub titles and some bold for keywords.

Good luck and nice video.