OpenCart Community

ok thanks labeshops

A really perfect example of how easy SEO is to achieve. Some people make it so much harder than it needs to be. Congrats on getting your sites ranked highly in Google.

Some people don't make it harder than it has to be, some people are also lucky that google hasn't got to their site yet, if you follow google seo forums, you will see how many changes they make as far as their seo, here's just one sample of what google is looking for & much more besides below:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... slash.html

You want to be pro active with google, cause one day when you wake up getting 500 unique hits a day & the days before you were getting 10,000 unique hits a day for your business, it hits home !!

Yes, you do have to keep an eye out on what google has changed and tweak your sites accordingly. I've recently added the schema.org markups, redid my h1 - h6 tags to highlight the most important info on my product pages, and been working more with my g+ pages as well as continuing to do everything I first posted about (and doing a press release about selling shoes and boots to American Idol :-) ).

It's an ongoing process, but then everything about doing a site is lol

i2Paq wrote:

bigchili wrote: The Meta Keyword tag is useless for SEO nowadays.

That is one opinion....

It is, and it's one held by a lot of SEO folks these days, including your compatriot Yoast

WebsiteDoctor wrote:

i2Paq wrote:

bigchili wrote: The Meta Keyword tag is useless for SEO nowadays.

That is one opinion....

It is, and it's one held by a lot of SEO folks these days, including your compatriot Yoast

Keyword tags are obsolete in Google's eyes. Meta descriptions aren't really popular with them either but they do still use them on a lower scale.

DL

Your post prompted me to join this forum. I am starting an ecommerce store and have been using
seo(Yoast) with Wordpress with the eShop plugin. I believe the Opencart platform looks more professional than Wordpress.

Any other seo ecommerce website owners feedback would be most appreciated as I realize that
saving time is the smartest thing I can do by learning from others with experience.
Thanks for your feedback! (I am also in Florida).

Good to know, I just started a daily business shopping site for my local business community only 3 months ago. I am doing everything you are doing except one thing. More than a few businesses are not posting original content. The products and services they are posting descriptions for are regurgitated from there own websites...I am listed very well for many 2nd tier search phrases but a can't get on the first page for the general search phases my customer desire.

It takes time. 3 months is not a lot of it so give it time and keep working away improving little by little.

here is my post about opencart on-site seo checklist:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=107584

learning lots and lots everyday from you labeshops! keep up the good work!

dharrington wrote:learning lots and lots everyday from you labeshops! keep up the good work!

Thanks and no problem We are all still learning - that's the nice thing about active forums and being able to learn from each other.

Lori

In previous days meta keywords are used for ranking factor by the search engines.

but now meta keywords are useless, and other meta fields such as title, description are the important meta fields that are used by search engines to decide page relevancy and other factors.

Google stopped indexing meta keywords in 2009, but some of the smaller search engines do still use them. It takes only a few seconds to fill them in, so why not?

I use the meta keyword field as sort of a note for myself as to the keywords I'm using on that page, so they can have some purpose even if Google and most other engines ignore them.

Since I started this thread, here are a few other things I've been working on lately to improve my rankings:

1. Google+ - Google indexes posts on G+ faster than any other source I've found, so create posts on G+ that are keyword rich with good images and 3-4 paragraphs long. You can do this thru a G+ business page for your store or thru your personal profile. Make them interesting of course, and use the keywords in hashtags as well. Then submit a link to this post to both Facebook and Twitter to increase the link juice a bit more. You could expand this post as an article for your store blog, reddit, and other article sharing sites.

2. Pinterest and other bookmarking sites give link juice as well as send traffic. I have a LABEshops account on pinterest and pin items daily to different boards on it from my stores. I also pin non-store related items, repin pins from others that I follow, etc, so they boards aren't totally sales based - you need to keep them interesting so others will follow you and repin your stuff. You can do a similar strategy with other sites like polyvore, weheartit, shopsimple, etc - you may have to search a bit to find ones that cover your store's niche the best. Pay attention to what gets repinned the most and do more of it. Follow those that repin your items and search for those that have boards matching your niche and follow them. They will often follow you back.

3. Find community pages and groups in facebook and g+ that fit your target audience/product niche and participate in their discussions. Genuinely try to help people - don't just blast out links to your store. I post as the store (for example I post as my gothicplus fan page to gothic/alternative related groups.) This gets your name out in front of people with like interests so they know about you, can follow you and of course, hopefully buy from you. This will also work for forums (which often let you have a signature link of course).

Keep repeating everything and your store will continue to build. And yes, it does take time every day. Hope this helps.

Poline wrote:

The opencart version of this store only went live in April (original store was up since 2004), so getting #1 rankings in only 4 months I'd say is pretty good And can be done by anyone really with time and no money.

Good job! I did a lot to get a good ranking. But what would you do without free time and money? Yes, probably nothing.... To get good rankings you should have money or time.
Thanks for sharing your experience.

Yes, you have to have some time to work on it, but as for having money - I've never spent a dime on marketing my stores. I don't have any marketing/advertising budget at all. So money is definitely NOT required.

I started my stores in 2001 when I had a 9 to 5 job and worked every evening on building my stores for 2-3 hours at a time and most weekends. I didn't quit that other job until 2006 so yeah, it takes time. I work maybe 2-3 hours a day on seo/marketing activities for my stores now and 5-6 hours on processing/shipping orders, adding products, etc. (okay 4-5 hours...I usually take an hour and play World of Warcraft lol).

I am single with no kids so I'm sure someone with kids/spouse/etc would have to sacrifice more to build their business, but it is totally doable. And building your own business is definitely worth it in my opinion. Of course the choice of what you focus on is always yours - you can easily build a store into a part time business to supplement a regular income with a lot less time required or find something else to do if even that is too much for you.

damsanchande wrote:Good day Labelshops!

Thank you very much for the feedbacks. I'm planning to build a kitchenware shopping site myself and your tips gave me some neat ideas. I think meta keywords are for the content maker ( me ) and the customer. They make the website's contents much more organized and viewer friendly. As they say: Content is king anyway

No problem. A kitchenware site would be pretty easy to build content around - there are lots of cooking tips, recipes, etc, you could add to build traffic value. Best of luck with your store and glad I could help

Out of curiosity, what do you write in your Meta Tag Descriptions?

A few years ago I was told to put the product name as the Meta Tag Description, but I am guessing that is the wrong thing to do.

What is your strategy of choosing a Meta Tag Description for each of your products?

I think of meta tag descriptions as a sales pitch - they display on the search engine results page so what will make your potential customer click to see the product/visit your site? They should of course include a few keywords, but they should be a brief sentence that makes sense and would entice a customer to click the link.

Interesting topic indeed. I'm curious about something though which I can't seem to find. That I am about to launch a website which I want to have in Dutch for the Dutch market, and English for the rest of the world. Possibly with adding more languages.

So I have two domains mayann.nl and mayann.eu; Can I link those to the two different languages when I run one store and is this good for seo? Or should I run a multistore website with one in English and one in Dutch?