OpenCart Community

i2Paq wrote:That is one opinion....

One of many, including Google

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your SEO experience with us, it will be really helpful.

I like your stores "Set Filters" part too. Is this a module or you did this with some tricks.

OpenCart do not have filter option by default like Magento, if you share how you did this it will be helpful.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks. It's the simon filter extension. There are a few filtering extensions in the extensions store.

have multiple sites with and without keywords and I must say that they are still important for search engines logically they must be related to the real content

Fantastic work my friend...the whole things you've done seems very logic..I need to copy...he he he..good luck with the business

cheer,

nyomanmusdina wrote:Fantastic work my friend...the whole things you've done seems very logic..I need to copy...he he he..good luck with the business

cheer,

lol thank you. I borrow ideas all the time from other sites and pretty sure we all do It's called "research"

This forum is for opencart and not really how to do seo on a site. There are a lot of forums for seo so I really suggest you frequent them.

Quick update - the store I started this thread about, gothicplus.com, is currently my highest traffic store with about 12k visitors a month and it's sales are about 80% of what they were before though I still have probably less than 1/2 of the products in it now that I used to.

My other stores are also climbing in both rankings and traffic with several ranking #1 or within the top 10 for their specific keywords. My total sales are about 70% of what they were pre-opencart and I'm expecting to be at 100% by the end of the year and continue to climb from there. Overall, I only have about 1/4 of my products up - tons more to go!

Since that first post, I have added a blog extension though haven't added a lot of posts yet. And I did add one of the caching extensions to speed up my page loads and hopefully reduce server loads as I have had occasional resource issues with my shared hosting account (I will probably move to vps in the future). I also added Google Checkout and Western Union payment extensions (as an alternative to money orders for countries that don't have money orders) though haven't had anyone use them yet (credit cards are most of my payments with Paypal #2). Otherwise I'm continuing to do everything I first posted about daily as well as continued tweaking of all my stores and adding 200-500+ products a week.

Definitely loving Opencart!

I'm going to add a blog/cms as well.

I just started a small shop for my wife, 4 products, but due to that blog/cms it is ranked on page one withing 4 weeks!

For the first time I have configured SEO-urls and I see that this worked as biggest part of this ranking.

Can't wait to upgrade my own store to 1.5.4.1 end of this year

i2Paq wrote:I'm going to add a blog/cms as well.

I just started a small shop for my wife, 4 products, but due to that blog/cms it is ranked on page one withing 4 weeks!

For the first time I have configured SEO-urls and I see that this worked as biggest part of this ranking.

Can't wait to upgrade my own store to 1.5.4.1 end of this year

That's awesome i2paq!! Congrats!

labeshops wrote: ... Otherwise I'm continuing to do everything I first posted about daily as well as continued tweaking of all my stores and adding 200-500+ products a week.

How are you able to write that many product titles/descriptions that fast?
I have about 800 products and currently using the text from my product feed, which I know is bad so all my products need to be re-written as far as title, description and meta-description. Plus, since im using SEO url's, when i change my product name, the URL will change so i need to figure out a massive 301 redirect scenario too.
I just cringe thinking about how long it'll take me or how much it would cost me to have all that done. You have a dirt cheap writer to outsource to??

moneycarlo wrote:

labeshops wrote: ... Otherwise I'm continuing to do everything I first posted about daily as well as continued tweaking of all my stores and adding 200-500+ products a week.

How are you able to write that many product titles/descriptions that fast?
I have about 800 products and currently using the text from my product feed, which I know is bad so all my products need to be re-written as far as title, description and meta-description. Plus, since im using SEO url's, when i change my product name, the URL will change so i need to figure out a massive 301 redirect scenario too.
I just cringe thinking about how long it'll take me or how much it would cost me to have all that done. You have a dirt cheap writer to outsource to??

No, I do everything myself. I'm not writing complete descriptions for everything right now - I'll go back and expand on a lot of them later as I'm focusing on getting as many of my products up as I can to get my sales back to my pre-switch level. I periodically browse my stores and tweak descriptions and information. I work with about 80 different manufacturers so have about 100,000 total products from home decor to clothing and shoes to jewelry. Most I've worked with for 10 years so I know their products very well so its very easy for me to write about them and this is about the 3rd time I've redone everything from scratch over the years I copied some things from my old stores too. I also always add to the description when I get a product in hand for the first time to really be able to examine it.

I'm also a fast typist which helps - 4 years of secretarial training comes in handy Only worked as a secretary for 6 months before I became art director for an ad agency, but the skills have helped! So has 13 years working for an ad agency as I learned a lot about copy writing. And my stores are my full time career and other than occasional World of Warcraft breaks, I have no life lol so am at my desk everyday from about 7 am til 10 pm.

My stores are all based around my interests as well so I use my knowledge of the subjects (such as my Wicca, science fiction and Egyptian stores) to add information a lot of my competitors don't (or don't know).

Not following why changing your product name would affect you seo url requiring 301 redirects - I use keywords in my seo keyword with the sku at the end so I'm sure they are unique. The product name doesn't have to be the same as the url. Some of mine are since I also use keyword rich product titles, but not necessarily. I did 301s for my most popular products when I switched to opencart - and really focused on all the products that had been pinned on pinterest or linked to from other sites, but otherwise, haven't had to worry about them.

Not following why changing your product name would affect you seo url requiring 301 redirects

Because Im using SEO URL's so the product page URL is based on the product name. If I change the name, then any links would be pointing to the old product name/url.
With SEO URL's the url's use the format: domain.com/productName
So if you change the product name, the URL will be changed as well.

moneycarlo wrote:

Not following why changing your product name would affect you seo url requiring 301 redirects

Because Im using SEO URL's so the product page URL is based on the product name. If I change the name, then any links would be pointing to the old product name/url.
With SEO URL's the url's use the format: domain.com/productName
So if you change the product name, the URL will be changed as well.

You know you can change the product name and leave the seo url whatever it was before you changed the name? That way, no 301 redirects required.

If you have a mod that auto generates the seo url from the product name, it shouldn't change when you edit the product - only when you first add the product. So if you don't manually change the seo keyword, no 301s needed.

doh! you're right!! I got them confused as I had set the product name the same as seo keyword by default during my import.
Now, i just need to get to an easy way to rewrite my descriptions! haha
thanks for setting me straight!

This is inspirational. Thank you!

Your a star labeshops! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions!

Thank you namn8r and allaroundfem. And no problem.

Great post. Very inspirational.

I have a question about SEO - is it bad or good if I include the same url words in category and than products, ex. domain.com/superfood/spirulina-chlorella/spirulina

so its not the same name, the category has just the same word included as the product...what do you guys think?


and another thing I would like to ask, if I may - do page titles have to be unique or i can include the same word in all of the product title pages, for example spirulina-superfood, goji-berries-superfood, chia-seeds-superfood... ? is bad or good for seo spiders to see the same word included in so much page titles?

Thanks for your time..

Great sharing. For product descriptions, is it necessary to create unique descriptions for all of them? would recycling the writeups bring ill effects on seo? for now, i am only including dimensions in my product pages.