Conference Buddies

Search Engine Optimization 201 – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Mark Simon, Miva Merchant

Where on miva to put SEO?

Overview:

• First complete your keyword research
• Identify page for each keyword
• Focus on one keyword phrase per page
• Where to put keyword on your page
• Domain considerations
• Adhering to standards
• Avoiding penalties

Keyword Placement:

• Meta tags – Title, Desc, Keywords
• Header tags – H1 to H6
• URLs & Filenames
• Content – Text on the page (CSS content before image. 400 words min.)
• Links to the page from other pages on your site
• Links to the page from other sites (deep linking)
• Links to other sites
• Alt tags (alt and title tag on images, title tag on links, used for accessibility)

YellowTee.com examples:

1. <title>&mvt:store:name:; &mvt:product:name;</title>
2. <title>&mvt:product:name; - &mvt:store:name;</title>
3. <title>&mvt:product:name; - Custom Catchy Title With Keywords</title>

Have product name first then catchy title with keywords.
Use Miva code to dynamically pull in category and product names for keywords
#3 will render the product name and keywords into the product page title.

Use hyphen, then underscore, bar/pipe, but avoid commas in title tag (harder to read and screws things up)

Similar code for H1 Tags too

Miva:

Product Code & Category Code = If possible (if it doesn’t break any of your business practices) put in keyword (i.e. corporate-golf-tees). 50 character limit.

In Miva Admin Interface:

To create SEO friendly links in Miva Merchant: Global Settings -> Domain Settings -> SEO settings

Domain Considerations:

• WHOIS information: Domain age, expiration (at least 2 to 3 years out), owner, IP
• Sitemap – HTML and XML sitemap
• Custom 404 page – Helps people robots find your site from bad links (link
• Who else is on your IP and IP block

Evaluating Your Site – Standards

• Is your site accessible & crawlable?
• Are you subject to duplicate content?
• Are you a good neighbor?

Avoiding the Penalty Box

• Nobody Likes Spam – Even the Search Engines
• Keyword Stuffing
• Multiple title tags, meta tags, h1 tags (use only 1 h1 tag)
• Hidden content & invisible text (don’t use invisible text)
• Cloaking, Redirection (don’t fool or spoof the user)
• Large spike in links

Resources:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer Tools
• Live Webmaster Tools
• Whois.DomainTools.com
• Sitemappro.com
• Ranksense.com
• SEOMoz.org
• MivaMerchant.com/blog
• W3c.org

301 Redirect long URLs to new URL
Change links in templates

Example:

Polyvore.com customer example site on fashion / user generated content (fashion collage)

<mvt:if expr="1.settings:product:code XYZ">
<title> XYZ </title>
<mvt:elseif >
<title> XYZ </title>
<mvt:else >