X-Cart forums

[Jon]

Keywords are pretty much a non-issue as they aren't often used by search engines any more, but it never hurts to add them.

Lets look at this product:
http://www.cosmickites.com/freestyle-audio-soundwave-waterproof-2gb-mp3_player.html

Keyword Research
First thing to determine, is what keywords people are going to search for to find this product. Possibilities include:
waterproof mp3 player
water proof mp3 player
soundwave mp3 player

You then do some keyword research to find out what people are ACTUALLY searching for and get some other suggestions, so put these keywords in at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Here you can find out how competitive a keyword is, as well as how much it is actually searched for.

waterproof mp3 player is by far the most searched for keyword, but it is also the most competitive, so trying to rank #1 for it will be more difficult. Looking at something like soundwave mp3 player, there's far less searches for it, but its easier to rank #1, so you need to determine if you want to go for it or take advantage of ranking #1 for the lesser searched for term.

Note, regardless of what you choose for your page title and meta tags etc., you should always optimize for several of these keywords in your content body, and perhaps even have multiple pages optimizing titles for the different possibilities.

Note also that if we had optimized for water proof mp3 player instead of waterproof mp3 player we would have been optimizing for a keyword that gets only 3% of the traffic of the word without the space.

Page Title:
Should contain the #1 keyword(s) you want to rank for first:
i.e. Waterproof Mp3 Player by Soundwave

Link Title:
Should contain the #1 keyword(s) you want to rank for.
i.e. Waterproof Mp3 Player

Meta Keywords:
Should list a few of the keywords you want to rank for:
i.e. waterproof mp3 player, water proof mp3 player, soundwave mp3 player

Meta Description:
Should list your keyword first, but also since it appears in search engine results, could be the difference between somebody clicking or not clicking on your link, so some marketing savvy here helps.
i.e. Waterproof mp3 player from Soundwave is a durable, shock-resistant, 2GB MP3 player making it the perfect waterproof mp3 player for listening while playing water sports.

URL:
In general will be similar to your page title:
i.e. waterproof-mp3-player-soundwave

Hope that helps.

[steve.thompson]

Since installing CDSEO, about 25% of my urls contain an occasional underscore character where there was a hyphen character in place of a space character. Now Google is reporting that it can't find these pages. For example, for the product named "1001 Little Parenting Miracles, by Esme Floyd", what was:
stevesbookshop.com.au/1001-little-parenting-miracles-by-esme-floyd.html
is now:
stevesbookshop.com.au/1001-little_parenting-miracles-by-esme-floyd.html

Why the underscore character?
Is this the way it should work or have I done something wrong?

Thanks, Steve.

[Jon]

When auto-populating CDSEO uses _p instead of -p when the letter p is in the start of a word so as not to conflict with its category pagination.

Since you are using the default settings this is a non issue and you can change the _p back to -p by running this SQL patch:

UPDATE wcm_cdseo set cdseoUrl = replace(cdseoUrl,'_p','-p');

[Jon]

Steve: Note that since you dropped the /shop/ from your urls you have many many broken links. You can add this to your .htaccess after 'Rewrite Engine on':

RewriteRule ^shop/(.*)$ http://www.stevesbookshop.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]

[steve.thompson]

Hi Jon.

Thanks for both tips. They fixed both problems.

Thanks, Steve.

[COSMICKITES]

Holly $h!%,
i just paid someone too much money to optimize my site via cdseo and i begged and begged for what you just provided me. We are trully thankful for the service you just provided. Kindness goes a long way, and your kindness and generosity are most appreciated. Between you and Ryan Design Studio, how could someone go wrong.

Thanks again. looking forward to some seo implementation very soon via CDSEO.

[steve.thompson]

When I installed CDSEO, some of my categories, products, etc., in X-Cart had meta descriptions and some not. I then ran "Auto-populate empty CDSEO fields only". Now I'm updating these fields in X-Cart including adding information if the field is empty. Is it appropriate to run CDSEO "Delete and re-populate all CDSEO fields"?

Thanks, Steve.

[retrtrtrytrutru]

Originally Posted by Jon

You could add fields to your access database and customize your import to put the new fields into the wcm_cdseo database table. Alternatively you could also just import and then run the auto-populate feature, or you could customize the ability to run the auto-populate feature from cron.

Thanks Jon, I will talk to our Access developer and let him update the import routine to include the tables for CDSEO.

Originally Posted by Jon

Note CDSEO currently only provides SEO customization in the primary language.

I know but this is not really a problem for us, we advertise on brand names and model names so they're multilingual already and the word "lamp" is too.

Final question before I make the purchase, should I uninstall XC SEO v1.4.0 or just disable it from the backend (Modules Section). Thanks!

[steve.thompson]

Originally Posted by Jon

Steve: Note that since you dropped the /shop/ from your urls you have many many broken links. You can add this to your .htaccess after 'Rewrite Engine on':

RewriteRule ^shop/(.*)$ http://www.stevesbookshop.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]

Hi Jon.

Just had a thought. Does this RewriteRule mean that search engines will think that /shop/ is still valid and continue to list it, or do they take the redirect to mean that /shop/ is no longer available and eventually remove the errors?

Also, Google Webmaster Tools is still showing some /cc/ link errors from when I was running CubeCart about a month ago. Will these eventually disappear?

Thanks, Steve.

[Jon]

Originally Posted by steve.thompson

When I installed CDSEO, some of my categories, products, etc., in X-Cart had meta descriptions and some not. I then ran "Auto-populate empty CDSEO fields only". Now I'm updating these fields in X-Cart including adding information if the field is empty. Is it appropriate to run CDSEO "Delete and re-populate all CDSEO fields"?

Thanks, Steve.

You don't usually ever want to run delete and re-populate. If you just auto-populate empty fields any fields that didn't previously have information will have information added if available. The seo information is often best input directly into CDSEO.