OPTIMIZING MIVA MERCHANT'S STOREFRONT SCREEN AND WELCOME MESSAGE FOR SEARCH ENGINES

While Google and other search engines are looking for quality content which primarily consists of a relevant text and also a good, descriptive title, many Miva Merchant store owners are not putting their best effort into optimizing their Miva Merchant storefront screen and welcome message. With a little time and effort, this is a chance to bring in hundreds and even thousands more customers from the search engines.  Pay-per-click advertising is effective, but free advertising is even better.

Storefront Screen Title <title>Store Name</title>

By default, the name of your Miva Merchant store becomes the storefront screen title that will appear in the search engines.  Rather than contemplating a good, descriptive title that describes the type of products sold in their store, most Miva Merchant store owners just use their company or site name.  This is a golden opportunity to attract customers from search engines who are looking for a certain group of products.  This not only affects your Miva Merchant storefront screen, but it also affects all your category and product screens as well.  If you have a good title, it may combine with your category or product names as a key phrase.  Sometimes a company's name might have some good keywords in it, but from our experience that is usually not the case.  Even if it does, a title with even more keywords can be more effective.  Put yourself in the fuzzy bunny slippers of your customer and think of a descriptive title that contains a key phrase that they would search for in Google or any other search engine.  Try to be short and sweet.  If your store name is too long, you run the risk of your category or product name not completely showing in your search engine listings.  The new OpenUI look and feel module takes care of this problem (based on our recommendations).  It puts category and product names before the store name for the titles of their screens.  If you must stay with the MMUI look and feel, check into having it customized (see JMH client example).

Storefront Welcome Message

This may be where you are supposed to put your storefront welcome, but we would advise against a simple, "Welcome to our store.  Please look around" or other similar sentiments as your store introduction.  Repeat the title with h1 or h2 formatting on its own line just above your first paragraph. At a minimum, you should devote the first paragraph to describing what your store has to offer, using as many key phrases as possible.  Repeating the title near the beginning of the paragraph is advisable as well.  Once this is done, you can direct customers to different aspects of your store, "welcome" them, etc.  You also might want to consider featuring a few of your top products or categories.  Just make sure you use Google-friendly links. 

Updating Storefront Welcome Message

You should consider updating your storefront welcome message at least once a month.  If Google and other search engines see that your content changes frequently, they might index your store more often.  You can do this manually through the Miva Merchant administration storefront welcome field, or you can purchase a third-party module to help you out. 

Below are some of the modules available with our review: (WE HAVE REVIEWED ALL THE MODULES BUT ONLY HAVE THE FIRST ONE COMPLETED BELOW.  WE ARE WORKING ON THE REST.  THEY WILL BE POSTED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE)

Storefront Template - Viking Coders
*Most links are to screenshots of the module

Like Viking Coder's other template modules (category and product templates, search manager), their storefront template module gives you complete control of the look and feel of the storefront welcome message with many different tokens, etc.  After you install and assign it to your store, you have the option of enabling it right away or configuring it to your liking first.  It also includes a handy preview function.  If you choose to enable it right away, the default display consists of a top row, known as the top zone, with the text "Welcome to %store name%", two rows of random products, known as the middle zone, with three products across each row, and then a bottom row, known as the bottom zone, with an email link to the store owner's email address.  Each zone has many configurable options, and the module even allows you to add or delete zones as needed.  None of the text has any font face or size formatting, so you will probably want to add that.  Obviously, in light of the first part of this article, you will want to change the top zone to include some descriptive text with key phrases.

There is also an images tab configuration screen that allows you to upload current or special images to be used in your welcome message.  You can link these to categories or products as well.  As always, make sure to use Google-friendly links. Once set, you can call each image with a special token, which works well for purposes such as special heading images. 

Next, you will find a lists tab configuration screen that allows you to create lists of products to be displayed in certain zones via tokens.  You could create one list for featured products, one for specials, another for new products - there are many possibilities.

Ranks is another tab configuration screen with two sub-screens; rank by sales and by views. Not only can you view as many products as you want in the administration of these screens, they can also be displayed via tokens as top sellers and most popular product lists in the welcome message.  This is an extremely useful feature.  If you have low-cost items that are not of much concern, they can be deleted from these lists.

The third party tokens tab screen allows you to register other module's tokens to work within the Storefront Template. We have already seen that Weiland's Best Seller Display and Copernicus' Smart Storefront modules work without tokens.  Most, if not all, Viking Coder modules are compatible with this module.  An excellent example is using tokens to display additional product fields with Viking Coder's Additional Fields Manager.

This module uses Google-friendly links for categories and products that are called with tokens.  We have also recommended that configurable alt tags be added to images as well.  You can include as much product information as you desire including price, weight, description or short description, cost, savings, quantity field, add to basket or buy one now buttons, and much more.  The possibilities are endless.  There are too many options to go over in this review.  Please click on the purchase now link below for more information and documentation.

Our current rating of Storefront Template is 5 out of 5 bananas.  We highly recommend it.

PURCHASE NOW! The Storefront Template module works with the OpenUI out-of-the-box and with the MMUI look and feel with minor modifications.  It comes in v3.x, v4.x, and compiled versions for only $35. 

Storefront Featured Products - Sebenza Studios
*Most links are to screenshots of the module

This is a great module for creating grouped product listings that you want to feature or that are new to your store.  You can incude a heading with text optimized for the search engines above these listings as well.  You can still use your Miva Merchant welcome message and place these product listings below it.

When you first assign this module to you store, the main screen is presented where you can create lists of products.  There is also a settings tab configuration screen that allows you to decide whether you want the output above or below the welcome message.  The default is above the welcome message.  We would advise you to change it to appear below your welcome message.

We already know that it is compatible with Weiland's Best Seller Display.  Copernicus' Smart Storefront will work but you have to scroll horizontally to see its layout.  It would probably be best not to use the two together until they play nicer.  Of course, Smart Storefront can be configured to not display on the storefront but still display on categories and product screens.

Remaining Modules to Be Reviewed.....

• Storefront Featured Products - Sebenza Studios
• Category as Storefront - Sebenza Studios
• Smart Storefront - Copernicus
• Random Welcome Messages - Luray
• Storefront Welcome Wizard - Luray
• What's New Interest Generator - Wump

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