We’ve recently optimised a version of Interspire shopping cart for a client. Going forward the client’s requirements were to manage their SEO in house so we wanted to find a stable shopping cart which is search engine friendly (well… as much as possible) and build on that. We quickly came across Patrick’s review of Interspire so thought we’ll give our first hand review of Interspire shopping cart in terms of its SEO potential divided into available features and those lacking.

Available SEO features

1. Images retain their image name so blue-widget.jpg when uploaded to the product keeps its file name
2. Images are kept by default in a folder level (some shopping carts use a sub-domain which is less effective for SEO)
   
3. Breadcrumb navigation is available by default
4. Basic XML site map is generated by default
5. Under specific server configuration, search engine friendly URLs are available so it will look something like www.sitename.com/products/blue-widgets.html
6. Page titles for products are created based on [product name - store name] and there’s also an option to overwrite the default option and add page title, page description and keyword for each product
7. Site architecture allows the engines to easily crawl the site as it’s based on sitename.com/categories/category-name/ and sitename.com/directory/product-name.html for products
8. Basic Google Analytics integration is present
9. There’s plenty of options to add quality content on a category or product level
10. Featured products rotate increasing the appearance of fresh content
    

Lacking SEO features

1. Product images have no alt text
2. HTML site map is missing
3. There’s no use of H1 across the site which we found very odd, especially for product titles
   
4. While there’s an option to write unique page title and description for products, this option is lacking for HTML static pages as the page title is generated from the file name
5. There’s no option to nofollow pages, unless you’re coding the tag in the template (guess it’s old news now)
6. There’s no real solution for pagination and content duplication issues, such as canonical tag or use of # instead of ? so if you have 2 pages under one category, you’ll face some content duplication issues. We’d expect categories with sitename.com/categories/category-name/?page=<Y> to have a canonical tag back to sitename.com/categories/category-name/
7. There’s no robots.txt file control by default
8. Homepage URL by default is www.sitename.com/index.php which requires 2 minute work in the .htaccess file to redirect to www.sitename.com
9. The ability to redirect the URL of products which have been removed from the site to their main category would have been nice (some default rule instead of using the .htaccess file)

If the people at Interspire manage to add some of the lacking features, it might just be the ultimate shopping cart in terms of SEO.

If you’re hiring an SEO agency, or have the time and knowledge to optimize your site in house, here are some tell tale sighs it’s working. SEO is very much a long term strategy so you’ll expect to see long term results, though there are some short term results which will tell you if you’re likely to prevail.

20 Indications That Your SEO Efforts Are Working Out (or not)

Short Term

1. Links to homepage – As your highest authority page, you’d expect to drive much of the new link building to this page.

2. Links to entire domain – Smart link building will spread over various target pages so you’ll expect to see an overall uplift in the total in bound links pointing to the domain.

3. Number of pages indexed (Google) – Chances are that before the SEO work began, some pages where missing from the index or hidden under the dreaded supplement results.

4. Number of pages indexed (Yahoo) – Same as above, you’d expect to see an uplift in indexed pages.

5. Number of content duplication pages – Once metadata (and maybe some smart 301 / canonical tag work) you’d expect to see less duplicate content issues.

6. Number of pages missing metadata – Each page should have targeted metadata.

7. Number of content pages (ex about us, privacy policy etc) – Intelligent SEO is always about making more great content available on your site, so any decent SEO effort should include the creation of fresh new content which is optimized around your goals.

8. Intervals between Google’s page crawl (in days) – After cleaning some of your HTML code and introducing new content regularly, you’d expect to see an increase in crawl rate which means that your new content will get indexed quicker.

9. Outbound links – Important for SEO, you’ll need to link to added value industry authoritative resources.

Long Term

10. [Keyword 1] rank – You’d expect to see your site ranking higher for these competitive terms.
- [Keyword 2] rank – As above.
- Etc…

11. Traffic from image search (in unique visitors) – After optimizing your images in terms of alt text, image name, size etc you should be getting some image love from the engines. Not great for increasing revenue, but an indication that you’re on the right course.

12. Homepage Page Rank – More authority links, smart use of nofollow, redirect etc and page rank should increase.

13. Number of pages with Page Rank - You’d expect due to the homepage page rank increase to see more pages with page rank.

14. Number of pages getting traffic from the search engines – More of your site pages should be getting traffic from the engines (look for landing pages in Google Analytics).

15. Overall uplift in traffic (in %) - The goal of your search engine optimisation work should include increasing overall traffic.

16. Uplift in traffic from search engines – Mainly due to increase ranking of established pages, you should see an increase of organic traffic.

17. Uplift in traffic from social networking sites – If you’ve created great shareable content and used one of the social bookmarking smartly, you should see an increase in social traffic.

18. Total .edu links to domain – Getting links is very much where they come from so you’d expect some high authority links

19. Total .gov links to domain – As above

20. Uplift in sales (in %) - The holey grail

Try to take a snapshot of each indication at the start, mid way and end of the campaign to compare results and optimize your efforts further.

Looking for an ethical SEO agency? get in touch with us today.

Link building is one the key factors of successful SEO and it takes time and patience. Luckily the search engines offer plenty of search operators which makes this task just a bit easier. Here are my top 10 ways to use search engine operators for SEO:

MSN

1. linkfromdomain operator: Use this operator to see who you’re linking to and to ensure you’re not linking out to a questionable source aka bad neighborhood. For example, you can do a straight forward search by typing [linkfromdomain:examplesite.com] or a more comprehensive questionable source search by typing [linkfromdomain:examplesite.com + spammy term]

Yahoo

2. Links to domain – Use this operator to find the total number of sites linking to the entire domain [linkdomain:examplesite.com -site:examplesite.com], or do a more specific search and find the total number of sites linking to a particular page [link:examplesite.com/page.html -site:examplesite.com]

3. Mentions of site without a link back – Use this operator to find sites mentioning your domain but who haven’t linked to it. In Yahoo type [examplesite -linkdomain:http://www.examplesite.com]. Once found contact the site owners or webmaster and ask for a link back.

4. Mentions of name without a link back to your site – Use this operator to find sites mentioning your name but who haven’t linked to your site. In Yahoo type [First name + Last name -linkdomain:http://www.examplesite.com]. Once found contact the site owners or webmaster and ask for a link back.

5. Site:.edu OR Site:.gov operator – Use this operator to find edu or gov domain links which is particularly useful for competitor analysis. Type [link:http://www.examplesite site:.edu OR site:.gov]. View who links to your competitors, analyze their strategy and try to get a link as well.

6. Region operator – Use this operator to find domain links by region which is an important contributor to where your site is placed in Google various search engine properties i.e. google.co.uk, google.de etc (just one of the considerations together with IP address, domain tld, physical address etc). Type [link:http://www.examplesite.com region:europe] (play between europe, asia, northamerica etc)

Google

7. Site operator – Use site: operator to find how many pages Google has indexed by typing [site:examplesite.com].  The deeper you can go, the better the results will be. For example, [site:examplesite.com/directory/] will provide more accurate results.

8. Related operator – Use this operator to find out in which ‘club’ Google has placed your site by typing [related:examplesite.com]

9. Inurl operator – Use this operator to find relevant keywords together with link opportunities. For example, for quality link opportunities type [Keyword inurl:links|resources]

10. Intitle operator – Use this operator together with Inurl operator to find relevant link opportunities by typing [keyword intitle: "suggest site"|"suggest url"|"submit site"|"Add link"]

Start building your links today.

I recently looked back at some of the SEO reports we’ve done here at Conversion Counts and some SEO mistakes kept surfacing up. While a few mistakes are down to lack of knowledge which is totally acceptable, other mistakes are because there’s been an attempt to save where saving should not have been made, for example on quality hosting, dedicated IP address etc.

30 common SEO mistakes:

1. Not paying enough attention to content duplication issues
2. Having multiple domains all showing the same website version, not knowing that Google is smart and will simply disregard the all but one domain
3. Not paying a bit extra for quality dedicated hosting package
4. Not investing enough resources into creating quality content
5. Targeting too many keywords on page (or even worse, keyword stuffing)
6. Not targeting the right keywords due to lack of strategy
7. Using doorway pages which quickly disappear from the index
8. Creating content for the engines, not for the users
9. Using only images as the site navigation
10. When images are used, there’s little use of alt text or optimized image names
11. Using a non-crawlable JavaScript navigation
12. Not using metadata such as page title and description
13. Missing the connection between great design and SEO
14. Having a flash website intro (splash page)
15. Having a flash site all together
16. Not maintaining the code which results in site errors
17. Submitting the site to 1000 junk directories
18. Counting on link exchange schemes as a link building strategy
19. Using blog comments and news groups to spread spam links
20. Considering (even for a second) answering that email which promised #1 position on Google for £99
21. Opting for a cheap shopping cart software which cannot be customized
22. Blocking important parts of the site using the robots.txt file not as it was meant to be used
23. No following important pages which were passing link juice before
24. Having multiple versions of the homepage
25. Allowing both non www and www versions to resolve without using a 301 redirect
26. Forgetting about site maps (HTML and XML)
27. Missing the connection between site analytics and great SEO
28. Checking search engine ranking every day (or couple of times a day)
29. Optimising the site for PageRank… why?
30. Hosting a blog away from the main site instead of hosting it on the site as a directory

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Other great resources:

SEOMoz Blog – 12 Easy Mistakes That Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field

Search Engine Land – SEO “Don’ts”: 20 Fatal Mistakes You Must Avoid To Succeed

Building links is essential for great search engine optimisation results and while a handful of quality links might work for one site, another site might need hundreds to show any results.

Here are 10 link building tactics I’ve had some great experience with:

1. Turn your stock photography into creative commons – The idea is to take model images and product images you own and might have used in previous years and submit them under creative commons to stock photography sites such as www.sxc.hu. If asked, most users will mention the source in their credits so place a clear call to action asking to mention the source.

2. Offer a set of free web icons – Sites such as IconPot.com list a whole range of icons which are great for web development projects. They we only list icons which you can use for free on personal AND commercial projects AND without having to provide back-links/credit to the author. By offering a set of quality icons for free, you’ll notice that users will be happy to mention the source even though they’re not required too. To make the links as relevant as possible offer industry related icons.

3. Google search operator – You can use Google search operator to find quality directories and sites to submit your links. You’ll need to search a combination of searches for each keyword using keyword “submit url” / keyword “add url” / keyword “suggest url” / keyword “suggest site” / keyword “add site” / keyword “add website” / keyword “submit site” so for blue widgets, you’ll need to search Google for [blue widgets “submit url” / blue widgets “add url” / blue widgets "suggest url" / blue widgets "suggest site" / blue widgets “add site” / blue widgets “add website” / blue widgets "submit site"]

4. Do a guest post – Write a guest post relevant to your industry and normally you’ll get a link back to your site. To find guest post opportunities, search for relevant blogs or use the Google search operator [keyterm intitle:guest+blog+post]

5. How to guide – Write a short 10 step how to guide on a topic relevant to your industry and share your content. Mashable has a great list of How To Guides worth checking.

6. Redirect your 404 pages – Check your Google Webmaster and Google Analytics accounts for error pages and 301 redirect them to a more appropriate page.

7. Search for your domain take 1 – Search for sites, blogs and news stories mentioning your site by name, but haven’t linked to you and ask them to link to your site. To find these mentions, search Yahoo for [examplesite -linkdomain:examplesite.com]

8. Search for your domain take 2 – Search for website who mention your site using the anchor text ‘click here’, ‘find out more’ and ask them to revise the hyper link. You should bear in mind that some ‘click here’ links are needed as you don’t want the anchor text to appear over optimised so choose your battles carefully.

9. Get active! – Start participating and answering on topic questions at Yahoo answers and Google Groups.

10. Add fresh content regularly – Top 10 lists are a great start to generate quality content, for example [intitle:10 site:www.conversioncounts.com]

Start building your links today

A good SEO health check should highlight any areas in need of improvement and recommendations for future optimisation. It should also identify ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings and would normally cost you some hard earn cash. To create a basic SEO health check report, use only your typing skills by following the list below:

1. Type [site:sitename.com] query into Google to find any possible penalties. If you’re coming up first great, otherwise you might be suffering a penalty which will require your immediate attention

2. Open your browser and type sitename.com (no www), if you’re redirected to www.sitename.com great, otherwise you’re running two versions of your website. For example, you’ll notice that conversioncounts.com will redirect to www.conversioncounts.com. To find any non www version of your pages in the index, use [site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www] in Google

3. Check that the server header is returning a 301 redirect response, not a 302 or 200 by testing your sitename.com (no www) version using a server header checker tool

4. If the server header does return either a 200 or 302 for the non www version, and you’re running php use this handy guide by the people at Apache to resolve it using .htacess file

5. Open your browser and type sitename.com/index.php|asp|html|etc, if you’re redirected to www.sitename.com (without /index.php|asp|html|etc) great, otherwise you might have content duplication issues as you haven’t standardized your default pages. The people at atvirante offer an automated tool to check some basic page standardization and content duplication issues which I recommend for basic testing

6. Optimising your images is essential for SEO so you’ll want to ensure all your images have their appropriate alt text, image name etc. Use Juicy Studios’ image analyzer tool to learn more about your image optimisation issue

7. Clean up your links and check that you’re not linking to infected or spammy sites by typing [linkfromdomain:sitename.com + <spammy term>] at www.msn.com.

8. Head deeper and look at one category page and one title page (or product page). If you’re seeing unique page title and description great, otherwise you’ll find it very hard to rank for the long tail

9. Are you using underscore to separate keywords in your URLs, for example, www.sitename.com/blue_widgets/? Change them to hyphens www.sitename.com/blue-widgets/

10. Check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites using an automated tool such as popuri and consider adding social bookmark buttons across the site such as addtoany.com or addthis.com

This check list should take 10 to 15 minutes to complete and will provide you with some useful information about your SEO health.

Search Engine Optimisation is a process which every online retailer needs to apply at some capacity. So it’s no surprise that some projects we manage start with one online service and in many times incorporate SEO work as well. While SEO is very much a learning process based on experience where you never stop learning and picking up great tips (and I guess sometimes not so great tips), I am often quite surprise by some of the myths I hear which I’ve summarized under my top 10 e-commerce SEO Myths and Misconceptions.

Myth 1. If I build it, they will come - Not really. There are some fantastic offers out there and chances are that someone else is offering your products as well. Search engines as good as they are need a gentle nudge in the right direction so built it and they will come won’t work. For example, you’ll find it very hard to rank well if all your product pages have the same or no metadata so by adding unique metadata to each page you’ll be helping the engines make sense of your pages.

Myth 2. I’ll repeat the product title 10 times in the description for better SEO - If it reads bad for users (which it will), it reads bad for the search engine spiders. Keyword stuffing (sorry, keyword density J) will do nothing to increase your ranking so don’t repeat the product name more than three times or so. Place it once or twice in the text, H1 tag, image name and alt text.

Myth 3. I don’t need organic traffic to be successful – In order to keep a sustainable business model and CPAs you can leave with, you’ll need to get some of your traffic from a non paid traffic channel. While it won’t be possible to rank well on the first day, improving your organic ranking must be high on your web KPIs.

Myth 4. Ranking well will happen over night because I’ve hired an SEO guy - If you’ve been promised to rank on Google’s first page within a week by your SEO guy, you might be in for a big disappointment. Search Engine Optimisation takes time, especially if you’ve got a new domain and the bushiness just launched.

Myth 5. Quantity will win over quality so I’ll add the same product under different categories – If you’ve placed similar products under different categories all you’re doing is potentially creating content duplication and spreading your authority to rank well for that product across many page.

Myth 6. I don’t need a customize 404 page – A custom 404 will replace your landing page when users land on a non existent page so invest in a nice design, informative message about the possible cause of the error and fix your 404 pages.

Myth 7. I can do without a copywriter and just copy paste the product description from the manufacturer – Content is king and one of the best ways to improve your SEO is by providing quality content which users (and therefore the search engine) would like. If you’ve got the skills to put together great product descriptions go for it, otherwise consider hiring a copywriter for the purpose of creating great product descriptions.

Myth 8. When a product is discontinued, I’ll just remove it from the site, what’s the harm -  Chances are that the product you’ve just removed has some authority and maybe some links pointing to it. For better SEO and user experience redirect the old URL to the product category or a similar product.

Myth 9. My products are ranking well on MSN / Yahoo so smooth sailing from now on – As most of the organic traffic, at least in the UK is coming from Google’s properties you must invest in your SEO to rank well on Google. In most cases by optimising your site for Google, you’ll also optimise it for other search engines.

Myth 10. To rank well we need to invest in PPC -  There’s absolutely no connection between how much cash you’re spending on ppc advertising to how well you’re ranking. If any, using AdWords you can improve your SEO by testing different text creatives for your metadata page titles using ad variation. We’re big fans of paid search here and even offer a pay per click advertising service, but still surprise that this myth keeps coming up.

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