So, now you have a beautiful new shopping cart from Kryptronic, you have your products in the system, your categories are smokin’ and your site just shines. Now you want the world to see it! Are you using the promotional tools you have to their fullest? This is how to be king of the mountain (or how to own Google) in five easy steps…
STEP 1: The Blatantly Obvious
ClickCartPro and EuropaCart come with great SEO functionality out of the box. Not only does our software auto-recognize search engines, spiders, crawlers and bots and serve appropriate content to them, it goes well beyond typical best practices to ensure you’re working with the most complete SEO solution available. With full control over Advanced SEO URLs, meta information on various levels, and the printing of optimized XHTML Strict 1.0 and CSS compliant output, we’ve got you covered. Whether you’re looking for control over URLs or optimized OpenGraph tags, it’s all in there – you just need to turn it on. Here’s a great article on configuring SEO in our version 8 software:
Turning on and Configuring SEO
STEP 2: What’s in a Name?
Every product, category and html page in our software has a spot where you can enter advanced, or search engine friendly, URLs. For example, a normal software-generated product URL will look like this when SEO is turned off (see step 1 to turn SEO on):
http://www.billygoats.com/index.php?app=ecom&ns=prodshow&ref=gt-flav-gm
If you have SEO turned on, the URL starts to look better, using the product id in this case in a more friendly URL, but it still could be better…
http://www.billygoats.com/Item/gt-flav-gm
Using an Advanced SEO URL, that same URL can be juiced up and look like this:
http://www.billygoats.com/Item/Billy-Goat-Flavored-Gum
You’ve now given the search engines some useful meat to chew on. Imagine the additional positive content you can add to your site merely by flipping a switch and adding these URLs to categories, products and HTML pages. Don’t worry about redirects – the software will automatically handle all redirects for you, generating proper 301 response codes for all URLs (even URLs from past upgrades).
STEP 3: Cross the T’s and Dot the I’s
With SEO configured, and your Advanced SEO URLs set up, you’ve got your categories, products and HTML pages almost where they need to be. Each of these items has input fields for a Meta Description, Meta Keywords, and a Meta Title. Good content and good meta information (especially descriptions and titles) go a long way to give you better search engine rankings.
By default our software will use the name and entered description (or short description in some cases) to populate meta information when you haven’t entered anything specific. This will result in using, for example a product name like ‘Goat Gum’ for the meta title instead of a more proper title like ‘Flavored Gums – The Best Billy Goat Gum’.
Entering meta information is easy, and it’s definitely worth it. Just summarize what’s on your page in your description, and use a meaningful title. Using keywords which people search for using search engines in your title and descrition is the best way to go.
Our software also has global meta information input fields which further augments the meta information used on your category, product and HTML pages. Make sure you visit the System > Component > Settings > Frontend Meta Information function in your management interface to adjust global meta information.
STEP 4: Go Tell It On The Mountain
Sign Up and use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Google provides a very nice and detailed lineup of monitors for your site so that you can measure the quality and quantity of the users who visit your site each and every day. What is your most popular product and your most popular page? How long does your average customer stay on your site? Is that video you added being viewed?
Sign up for Google Analytics. Google will give you an account number which you can input directly into your software using the System > Component > Settings > Search Engine Optimization Settings function in your management interface.
Also, configure your software to produce an XML SiteMap by using the System > Component > Settings > SiteMap function in your management interface. Your SiteMap will be published and uploaded to the major search engines daily, if you activate it.
Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools Account. If you sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account, you will be able to input the location of your SiteMap and instruct Google to download it regularly. This will give you SiteMap statistics and allow you to view search term statistics for your site.
Also consider some of the extension modules (XMODs) Kryptronic has available for ClickCartPro and EuropaCart which will help boost your search engine rankings. We have a GoogleBase module available which allows you to post an XML feed to Google Shopping on a regular basis. Also available are modules which produce Rich Snippets (aka Structured Snippets) on your product pages, and a Trusted Stores integration which provides delivery and reliability information on your store to consumers direct from Google.
Check Out Kryptronic’s Extension Modules (XMODs)
STEP 5: Lack of Speed Kills
Server speed, that is. This isn’t going to be a shameless pitch for Kryptronic Managed Hosting, but it will sound like it. Over the past three years we’ve documented subsequent page click through rates, and online store conversions, are directly related to site speed – among many other things like good content, proper security, and economic factors being in check like price/demand/etc. Time after time we’ve seen properly built and marketed sites move from a substandard server to Kryptronic Managed Hosting (where the only change was the server itself). Those sites have increased conversion rates significantly – in some cases by as much as 50%.
Making customers wait is a bad idea. In 1940 people may have been willing to wait. Not today. In this world where everything needs to be instant, your site needs to respond instantly. If it doesn’t, you may be leaving money on the table.
Click Here to Make Your Site Fly with Kryptronic Managed Hosting
Going Further
There are instances where we simply are too close to our own web site to really see it. Let’s face it, we work on these sites day in and day out for years. We know what we carry, we know what services we provide and frankly, we start to just assume that everyone gets it. When you hit that point in the life of your web site, it might just be a good idea to have someone else look at your site with Fresh Eyes.
It is for that reason we launched our Fresh Eyes Website Analysis Program in July 2014. This program is designed to offer you affordable web site analysis that can help you capture an outsider’s perspective on your website, products and services. At Kryptronic, we use the steps in this article as a baseline for our Fresh Eyes Website Analysis program. Beyond these steps, using our Fresh Eyes Website Analysis Program, Kryptronic can help you further by getting real, valuable information back to you on how to better sell your products and promote your site.
