OpenCart Community

Hey all, newbie question. I recently put OC in place and I love it! Problem is, I'm not getting any traffic..? I have what I think is a good looking page, my products are very popular on ebay but I can't seem to get them to show up in search engines. Other than the obvious (fill in the SEO fields) are there other cheap ways of getting traffic to my site? I've been told not to pay for adwords, etc because I can drive traffic in other ways- problem is I can't find those ways in OC. Any opinions or suggestions appreciated. Thanks!

-Jeff
http://www.desertdogdecals.com

Traffic has nothing to do with the store script you use. SEO only helps in making things human-readable these days. But you need to have unique products, search engine inclusion, and high rankings

Search google for one of your products. Set the results to 100 per page and see how many pages deep your item is found. Click on it when found but don't spam it. Do it a few times per day from different computers... wifi at coffee shops, whereever.. it will help.

be sure to use googlebase and any other feeds. I have an RSS module that supports google base feeds as well.

Thanks Qphoria, now those are things I can do. I need to know more about googlebase. I set up google analytics in my pages (don't know much about the content yet). Any help on googlebase?

-Jeff
www.desertdogdecals.com

lol.. well best place would be to start at google and search "googlebase"

I guess I asked for that one.. duh. Thanks! Researching now!

-Jeff
www.desertdogdecals.com

Qphoria wrote:Traffic has nothing to do with the store script you use. SEO only helps in making things human-readable these days. But you need to have unique products, search engine inclusion, and high rankings

Search google for one of your products. Set the results to 100 per page and see how many pages deep your item is found. Click on it when found but don't spam it. Do it a few times per day from different computers... wifi at coffee shops, whereever.. it will help.

be sure to use googlebase and any other feeds. I have an RSS module that supports google base feeds as well.

LOL. Click on search results? sorry, that is some of the worst "SEO" advice I've seen. I am not denying that Google is totally moving in that direction, I am totally question the benefits in such an approach as SEO advice right now in 2009.

Clicking on your entry in search results will have next to zero effect on your website's rank in any search engine index. Behavioral ranking is not (yet) a reality.

OP - you need LINKS, not anything else.

Links can mean spreading your content via RSS and google base, as Qphoria mentions. It can mean community building via social media. It can mean networking with our webmasters in your niche and establishing mutually beneficial promotions. And more.

How competitive is your niche? Does your domain name align with keywords or is it a brand? Have you thought of ways to develop a community around your e-commerce site? Have you got a content development plan for your own site and for publishing content on other sites that links back to you? These are the questions you should begin with if you want to SEO your stuff.

Howdy Jeff,

First off, your site is indexed in Google:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=site: ... ecals.com/

And Bing:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=site:http: ... t=all&qs=n

And... Yahoo!
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk ... =seo-rd-se

Some very easy to implement alterations in no particular order:

# Look at the search results above, the titles of the pages are not descriptive enough. Give each SKU at least 4 words, preferably six relavant words.

# The same content is over and over, compare:
http://www.desertdogdecals.com/CHEVY%20 ... x4%20DECAL
to
http://www.desertdogdecals.com/Jeep%20m ... al%20vinyl

Looks to same does it not, well it looks the same to google too! Beef those descriptions up baby!

# Submit a google base feed

# Submit a google sitemap

# Stick some google analytics tracking code on your site to find out where the traffic is coming from

Now this is important, give the search engine a REASON to come back, that is give it some new content to lap up.

My two suggestions on this are:

# Add products daily and get the RSS addon module

# Add more content to the site, you should be seen as the leader in your area, prove it to your buyers and google that you are by giving it some well though out news posts. There is a CMS (content Management System) that can be added to OpenCart, add it and start writing.

See these two links http://www.unbannable.com/ocstore/rss_gbase and http://www.unbannable.com/ocstore/openc ... odules/cms

Post decent content (100 to 500 words) on your site five times a week for the next three months (did you really expect for changes to happen over night with no effort???) and I guarantee you google will be eating you site at least once per day, thus more viewers and if the product is right, thus more sales.

Oh and DO pay for search advertising all the above is only one part of a multi layered approach to website promotion.

Matt

Oh and while you're at it, remove spaces in the SEO names on your products and replace them with hyphens

So ugly ones like

.....com/Jeep%20beer%204x4%20decal%20off-road

Become

....com/Jeep-beer-4x4-decal-off-road

Or even better

....com/Jeep-beer-4x4-decal-off-road-decals

And then because your inventory base is limited, add more categories and have individual items per colour, that will deepen you inventory base 7 fold (but make sure you categorise well)

I'll stop looking now Xd

Matt

towerofbabel wrote:
LOL. Click on search results? sorry, that is some of the worst "SEO" advice I've seen. I am not denying that Google is totally moving in that direction, I am totally question the benefits in such an approach as SEO advice right now in 2009.

Clicking on your entry in search results will have next to zero effect on your website's rank in any search engine index. Behavioral ranking is not (yet) a reality.

Well I don't claim to be a pro.. and I know its oft regarded as a pipe dream to click on your links. But I'll be damned if my largest online store wasn't due in part to that. I had an automated script that I ran on 5 PCs at work... all searching for my product list and clicking the link when it found.
Clicking increases traffic stats for the link, which I think eventually relates to ranking.

Wanted to tell you guys- thanks so much for the info!! I've learned so much from what you have told me. I really appreciate the time you all took to put this stuff into understandable language. Thanks again!

-Jeff
www.desertdogdecals.com