Optimising an Established Site

[CuddlyKingdom]

Hi,

 

I'd like to start by praising Oscommerce and the community around it.

 

I’m a partner in a Cuddly Toy Shop who is nearing its first year anniversary, which has show steady growth. Being from a graphic design background and working only part-time on the site the past year has been very much about learning as about making some extra money.

 

As the New Year looms my self and the Cuddly Kingdom team have sat down and addressed some issues, which we have yet to address properly. The main one of these is search engine optimization. At the moment we rely heavily on Google adwords to bring in shoppers. In the past few weeks it has became apparent that outside sponsored links we are no where to be seen, other than an external link from another of my sites.

 

I’ve read plenty of posts in the forum and began working my way through the advice given. I installed header tags last night and we’re in the process of populating our category and product pages as we speak. Next on the agenda will be Ultimate SEO URLs contribution.

 

My query revolves around what are the reasons that Google has not picked the site up yet? Even though Google Bots frequently visit our shop and the Index page have had a description Meta tag setup for several months.

 

Thank you very much in advance

 

Richard

[jpweber]

Richard, Google can take 3-12 months to start listing your site in the natural listings -- even after the googlebot spidered your site -- so be patient. There's really nobody out there who knows for sure how the alogrithm works, or how the googlebot precisely works, although many will claim to have your site listed in 2 days, guaranteed, yada yada ... nobody can guarantee anything. We can just have a lot of highly educated guesses. Keep the header tags -- titles are presumably important, perhaps consider SEO URL's, get your site backlinked with as many quality websites pertinent to your industry as you can, and of course, work on that content -- always a key!

 

Good luck.

[tobad78]

What is your site and I'll take a look?

 

PM me if you don't want to post it.

 

 

 

Brian

*** Link to personal site against forum rules ***

[CuddlyKingdom]

So we're actually getting some where, Cuddly Kingdom moved to a new server in janauary allowing us to install SEO URLs without any .htaccess issues. I've installed froogle site map, which gets sent automatically to google every night via cron and even gave the yahoo version a shot too. Google has started to list us with 20 pages being added over the past 2 days. The next step with this as adviced is to get more external links, which might be a bit tricky so any advice would be great.

 

Next i'd love to sort some way of saving peoples searches so we can get an idea of what people are looking for. Alternatively I was thinking of perhaps adding some sort of form on the search results page for people to say what they were looking for or suggest what they would like to see.

 

Thanks again for the help

 

Richard