Achieving osCommerce organic SEO can take time, but it also takes targeting the right elements of your osCommerce store. You can spend a lot of time tweaking aspects of your store, only to find that it still ranks below the third page of search results. If your attention is focused on the right elements, however, you’ll find that organic SEO can be a fairly effective method of achieving a higher search engine ranking.
Make no mistake, however; organic SEO alone is not as effective as organic SEO combined with some form of pay-per-click or keyword advertising program. Though organic SEO is good, adding the extra, more costly programs can be what you need to push your site right to the top of the SERPs.
A good first step in search engine optimization is to ensure that the organic elements of your site are as optimized as possible. Here is a look at some of the basics.
Site content
Site content is one of the most highly debated elements in search engine optimization, mostly because many rather unethical SEO users have turned to black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword tuffing to try to artificially improve search engine ranking. Despite these less-than-honest approaches to search engine optimization, however, your site content is still an important part of any web-site optimization strategy.
The content on your osCommerce store is the main draw for visitors. Whether your site sells products or other items, what brings visitors to your site is the words on the page. Product descriptions, articles, blog entries, and even advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as they work to index the Web.
One strategy of these crawlers and spiders is to examine just how the content of your page works with all of the other elements (like links and meta tags) that are examined. To rank high in a selection of search results, your content must be relevant to those other elements.
Some search engines will de-list your page or lower your page rank if the content of your osCommerce Template site is not unique. Search engines now are examining how frequently the content on pages is updated and looking for content that appears only on your site. This doesn’t mean you can’t have static content on your page. For your osCommerce sites, the product descriptions may rarely change.
But including other elements on the page, like reviews or product updates, will satisfy a crawler’s requirement that content change regularly. Content is an important part of your site and the ranking of your site in search engine results. To achieve osCommerce organic SEO, take the time to develop a content plan that not only outlines what should be included on each product page of your site, but also how often that content will be updated, and who will do the updates.
One other element you might want to consider when looking at your page content as part of SEO is the keywords that you plan to use. Ideally, your chosen words should appear on the page several times. But again, this is a balancing act that might take some time to accomplish.
Keywords are part of your site content, and as such require special attention. In fact, the selection of the right keywords is a bit of an art form that takes some time to master. For example, if your web site is dedicated to selling products for show dogs, you might assume that “show dogs” would be a perfect keyword. You might be wrong. Selecting the right keywords requires a good understanding of your audience and what they might be looking for when they want to find your web site. People looking for products for show dogs could search for “grooming products,” “pedigree training,” or just “dog supplies.” It could even be something entirely different, like the name of a product that was featured at the most recent dog show.
Learning which keyword will be most effective for your site will require that you study your audience, but it also requires some trial and error. Try using different keywords each quarter to learn which ones work the best.
It’s also advised that you use a tracking program such as Google Analytics to monitor your osCommerce store traffic and to track the keywords that most often lead users to your site.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web site statistics application that you can use to track your web site traffic. You can access Google Analytics by going to http://www.google.com/analytics. You are required to have a Google user name to access the program.
If you do not have a Google user name, you can create one when you sign up for the application. It’s simple. Provide your e-mail address and a password, type the verification word from the graphic provided, and then read the Terms of Service and click “I accept. Create my account.” Once you’ve created your user name and password, accessing the tracking capabilities of Google is no problem. You’ll need to copy a snippet of text that Google provides into the coding of your web site. Once you’ve added the code to your site it will take a few days for Google to gather enough information to provide reports about your site, and as much as two months to gather enough data to give you real insight into your site. But once there is enough data, you’ll have access to the keywords that most often lead visitors to your site.
Google Analytics can also be combined with Google’s AdWords program to provide paid keyword tracking and information. To learn more about Google Analytics, check out the book Google Analytics 2.0 by Mary Tyler and Jerri Ledford (Wiley, Aug 2007, ISBN: 978-0470175019). It should be noted that Google Analytics doesn’t track spiders and crawlers at this time, however, so there may be some limitations to its SEO functionality. Still, if you need a (free) tool to help you examine some of the metrics surrounding your SEO efforts, Google Analytics is a good starting point.
