OSC Website and SEO Changes Help

[Allthingsgifts]

Hi

My website is www.allthingsgifts.co.uk and it's been going for 2 years and i'm currently looking into working on SEO on the site to improve keyword rankings on google which will hopefully lead to more traffic and sales. I currenlt use adwords and am ranked high for brand names but for the general gifts for him, birthday gifts etc i'm on page 5 or lower so want to improve on these. These are my ideas and suggestions from Seo companies and people off the UK business forum:-

 

1. Add a blog (i've installed this already, it's a wordpress one) but haven't put any info on it yet.

 

2. I forgot to mention a further solution to any problems you might have

had with search engines seeing two websites in other words

http://www.allthingsgifts.co.uk and http://allthingsgifts.co.uk. You

should be able to ask your hosting company to use mod-rewrite for a

permanent 301 re-direct to which ever domain you want the search engines

to see.

 

3. CSS/JavaScript

I think I have already mentioned that removing the CSS and JavaScript from within the HEAD tag will benefit

your website, as the SE bots will be able to go straight from your HEAD area to the BODY area.

Obviously these should not be removed completely, just placed in an external .CSS and .JS file.

 

4. Logo

To help with an earlier mention of a keyword, I would suggest converting part of your logo into text. Both

graphical text elements of your logo could be changed to pure text, but I would suggest just changing the

tag line 'Gift Ideas For All Occasions'.

So even though you loose your ALT tags on the logo, you gain keywords for the SE bots to see at the

earliest opportunity,

 

5. H1/H2/H3 Tags

There appears to no use of these tags within your homepage, to use them is a good idea, as SE bots will

rank the wording with greater importance than the other wording around it.

An example could be the 'tag line' converted to text as I mentioned above, you could use the H1 tag and the

use CSS to bring it back to the font and size you require.

Using these tags is not fundamental but as with other elements a good idea to have a couple within your

code.

 

6. Add some text links for keywords in the footer and link this to relevant parts of the site.

 

7. make site W3C complaint

 

8. re-write urls so that product no. etc aren't on the end of the URL's just words

 

9. fix meta tag header for info pages like contact us etc as these are showing just 'All Things Gifts' at the moment.

 

Has anyone made any of these changed to their OSC site for SEO purposes and seen any improvement on rankings? or would you recommend doing any of these?

 

Regards

Lianne

[Guest]

1. A blog will help with your SEO if you post regularly as it will add fresh new content.

 

2. Changing that may help, this can be done with your htaccess file.

 

3. The content within the CSS/Javascript files are going to be too large to be placed into the header and are better in an external file as they are.

 

4. Won't really make much difference to be honest.

 

5. That is right, I suppose you could use all your heading titles for example your category names, page names etc as H1/H2 tags.

 

6. Not too bad of an idea, don't over do it due to keyword spamming.

 

7. Good luck! With the mess the coding is I would think this would be very hard to do.

 

8. You won't get any better then you currently have I wouldn't think.

 

9. People say that having unique meta tags per page will rank better but I have noticed it depends on the site as to weather or not it works better.

[Allthingsgifts]

5. That is right, I suppose you could use all your heading titles for example your category names, page names etc as H1/H2 tags.

 

Hi Richard

Thanks for replying, what exactly is the H1, H2, H3 tags, where do they appear?

Regards

Lianne

[Jack_mcs]

1. Add a blog (i've installed this already, it's a wordpress one) but haven't put any info on it yet.

 

2. I forgot to mention a further solution to any problems you might have

had with search engines seeing two websites in other words

http://www.allthingsgifts.co.uk and http://allthingsgifts.co.uk. You

should be able to ask your hosting company to use mod-rewrite for a

permanent 301 re-direct to which ever domain you want the search engines

to see.

 

4. Logo

To help with an earlier mention of a keyword, I would suggest converting part of your logo into text. Both

graphical text elements of your logo could be changed to pure text, but I would suggest just changing the

tag line 'Gift Ideas For All Occasions'.

So even though you loose your ALT tags on the logo, you gain keywords for the SE bots to see at the

earliest opportunity,

 

5. H1/H2/H3 Tags

 

7. make site W3C complaint

 

8. re-write urls so that product no. etc aren't on the end of the URL's just words

 

9. fix meta tag header for info pages like contact us etc as these are showing just 'All Things Gifts' at the moment.

These items, and many more, have been mentioned here in the forums many times. You might want to search google using "site:http://www.oscommerce.com/forums seo" for more ideas.

 

1 - Requires a lot of work to have any affect and the blog should be on an external server. It is rarely worth the effort unless one has the time to devote to it.

 

2 - See this thread.

 

4 - Not necessary since the alt and title attributes will serve about the same purpose, not to mention the loss of appearance that would occur. Header Tags SEO allows you to control the alt and title attributes for every page so you can specialize the text there to fit the page.

 

5 - Handled in Header Tags SEO.

 

7 - Won't make any difference at all for SEO purposes, unless there is a fatal error on the page.

 

8 - See the Ultimate SEO contribution.

 

9 - Handled in Header Tags SEO.

 

Jack

[Allthingsgifts]

Hi Jack

Thanks for replying, from looking at my site would you say I already have header tags seo and ultimate seo installed on the site as i know I have something but not sure if it's enough?

Regards

Lianne

[Jack_mcs]

There is a url rewriter but there isn't a way to tell which one from here. You have the Header Tags Controller installed, according to the source. That lacks many of the features of Header Tags SEO.

 

Jack