Getting Noticed
Search Engine Optimization
Some of What We All Know As Truth Isn’t True
Getting your site seen is essential. The search engines and their proprietary algorithms, their services both for free (such as Google Analytics) and for-fee (Google Adwords, for one) are well-known tools that website owners can use to heighten their sites’ visibility.
There are other things you can do to enhance the chances of a user search bringing up a page on your site. Those “other things” include urls with product-specific words and specific page titles on each page. Neither of these is readily available in a dynamically-generated site like a PDG Commerce site unless you add application-specific tools (see next story).
Meta tags are also much discussed as ways to get information into the databanks of the search engines and therefore improve page rankings. The “description” and “keywords” meta tags are often at the center of commercial SEO efforts. It turns out that some meta tags are more used than others, but in fact neither of these meta tags is used in the page ranking processes at Google. See our recent blog posting on this disclosure by Google. One of their statements is that they don’t use these two meta tags except occasionally the description – and that is for snippet display purposes, not ranking.
There is another meta tag, “canonical”, that can be useful in combatting another side-effect of a dynamically-generated site: the duplication of information due to many highly similar urls that all go to the same “page” of information. If you use the “canonical” meta tag to identify your primary url for a product or topic, Google uses this data for deduplicating the results listings. See the Google discussion here. Why would you care? For one thing, in deduplicating the urls, they also consolidate link popularity. Their article is full of detail and answers to questions.
Is it a good idea to populate the meta tags with reasonable data? Yes. But these tags’ contents will not affect your page ranking – at least not with Google – despite common belief to the contrary.
The best place to put your efforts is in the site content your customer sees. If it contains the keywords and description that a human needs in order to assess your wares, the search engines will also gather those for their needs.
The world of search engines and web services will continue to change. There is a lot at stake and the players do not stand still.
Profits Plus
New Modules and New Unbundled Pricing
One way to make your dynamically-produced PDG Commerce pages more visible and interesting to the search engines is to use Profits Plus. We have just added an SEO Package, as well as the Product Editor (mentioned in previous newsletters) to Profits Plus.
The Profits Plus SEO Package includes url, page title, and meta tag work to make your pages more accessible to the search engines. In all three cases, product specific (or category-specific or sub-category-specific) data is put into the url, page title, and meta tags. What sort of data is inserted depends on the type of page at hand. As you add, delete, or update products, these mechanisms apply the SEO work appropriately and automatically. The package includes consultation and training so that you have control over this aspect of your marketing efforts.
The Profits Plus Sitemaps module automatically produces Google sitemaps and Google Base (now Google Merchant Services) data feeds that put the detail about your products - including type of product, image, price, availability, and link to that page in your site – directly into Google’s hands. This is another hugely useful way to get your products visible to folks who are looking for something you offer.
When we added these two new modules to Profits Plus, we also unbundled the suite of modules so that you can purchase the modules you are interested in without needing to buy the whole package. There is a base module that includes the dynamic menus. This base module is required for many, but not all, of the other modules. Pricing continues to be a one-time license fee, licensed to your domain. Module prices range from $100 to $400. Check our site for module details and pricing.
Buy a Profits Plus module by October 30, 2009 and receive a 10% discount on its price.
Customer Site News
HTN recently launched Gorilla Suits, a PDG Commerce 5 site. It’s hard not to love a site that sells gorilla and chicken suits. So if you have always wanted one, drop by to check them out.
Mountain Tek is using Profits Plus Dynamic Menus styled to match their PDG Commerce store. The number of ways one can pack for rescue efforts boggles my mind. All sorts of outdoor gear is waiting for you here.
New Hosting Pricing
Check out the new hosting pricing for Linux managed private servers. All the numbers and specs are there for your reading pleasure. Note that the Linux MPS Basic at $275 is less expensive than the FreeBSD VPS Pro Plus at $280. This Linux MPS pricing only applies to new server accounts.
Profits Plus: New Modules, Unbundled Pricing
We have added two new modules to the Profits Plus suite: Profits Plus SEO Package and Profits Plus Product Editor. See our site for the details of both pricing and functions for all Profits Plus modules.
Order Profits Plus modules by October 30, 2009 and get a 10% discount on the module price. Use discount code PPOCT.
Be Ready for the Holiday Shopping Season
Just a quick request that you bring any site changes you might want HTN to do before the upcoming holiday shopping season to us as soon as you can.