| |||||||||||||
Latest Miva Search Engine Tips and NewsHere are the latest tips and news on Miva Merchant and Search Engines.
Miva Merchant Users ConferenceJMH is putting together a users conference in the Dallas area around the third week in May. We will be presenting a session on search engine optimization and marketing for Miva Merchant. Although it is in Texas, users and developers from around the world are invited. There is already interest from Georgia, Kansas, and Illinois. If you are interested in attending, please fill out our interest form. Additional Information: Hiring or Listening to A Search Engine Optimization / Marketing "Specialist"JMH has been disturbed in recent months, as more and more Miva Merchant store owners come to us after bad experiences with seo firms who have little or know experience with Miva Merchant. Sometimes their store is never touched, and a few static pages stuffed with a ton of key phrases have been added. We were just hired to do an analysis of a client's previous developer's seo work, and the work performed was severely lacking. For many, results have been minimal but the cost has been high. There are currently two Search Engine Strategies conference sponsors who subscribe to this newsletter. We received a referral from one of them just this last week for a store owner with no static pages. We can only assume that they thought that this company would be best served by someone who specializes in seo and Miva Merchant. Another problem has been Miva Merchant developers pretending to be search engine optimization specialists on and off the Miva Merchant users list. We have had several instances where developers have personally emailed JMH with remedial seo questions and than turned around and offered optimization services. You need to be careful when listening to developers who all of a sudden are offering advice on search engines. Anyone can put into place a few suggestions from this newsletter and obtain some results for clients who are currently not doing anything to improve their placement in search engines. While this is better than nothing, the unsuspecting client could have easily done it themselves. If they had a more competent developer, they would be head and shoulders above where they currently are. There are other companies that can provide adequate search engine optimization for miva merchant sites, as JMH has pointed out numerous times on the merchant users list. Here are some tips to decide if a company who claims that they can work with Miva Merchant should take your money. Don't bother if they make broad generalizations similar to the following:
Definitely don't bother if they don't mention Miva Merchant at all. This most likely means that it is not a major part of their business or focus. We have seen that even seo companies that specialize in dynamic pages can be extremely poor choices for Miva Merchant optimization. If you are going to choose a company to optimize your Miva Merchant store, choose wisely. Back to TopCategory Paging LinksFor quite some time, JMH has recommended search friendly links from Copernicus for making Miva Merchant category and product links appear static. This allows pages to be indexed by as many search engines possible. However, Miva Merchant store owners faced a problem when splitting up categories with large amounts of products into multiple pages. No solution was available to make these special urls compatible with search friendly links and thus appear static. We had been requesting for almost a year that the developer of Category Page Templates from Viking Coders make their category paging feature compatible with search friendly links. Viking Coders has been great at implementing our suggestions in the past and just did not have the time to take on what sounded like an enormous task. However, our latest reminder must have done the trick, because this feature was included in their latest version update. Within one week of implementing the update, one of our clients had category paging (paginated) links appearing static and within Google search results . We are currently waiting for these urls to show up in other engines. Look forward to a full review of this module in another issue along with their companion module, Product Page Templates. Additional Information:
Site Map Generator for Miva Merchant Gets FriendlyGoogle has a file size limit of 100k. Swap Link from Emporium Plus ( William Weiland ) is a site map generator for Miva Merchant that takes care of this problem by splitting up a store's site map into multiple pages with links to each successive page included. This is a phenomenal feature in and of itself, but JMH approached the developer about making it compatible with search friendly links from Copernicus as well. Not only was this feature added, but you can also include an affiliate code from Viking Coders' Affiliate Manager module. Look forward to a full review of this module in the future. Additional Information: Back to TopYahoo Drops GoogleYahoo finally dropped Google as their main provider of search results to go with their own crawler, Slurp. Our initial tests have seen very positive, if sometimes mixed, results. Search results have appeared more relevant than Google's for the most part. Both dynamic urls and directory-style links are being indexed. This is good news because we feared Yahoo would not like Miva Merchant's dynamic urls just like Inktomi. Most likely Yahoo has made sure their crawler is able to index dynamic urls better than Inktomi. Good for them. The bad news is that Yahoo will be doing away with Inktomi, AltaVista, and Fast/All the Web's old paid inclusion programs that reindexed urls every 48 hours in exchange for a program called Overture Site Match Service, which is similar to pay per click. The good news is that they have a free add url program unlike Inktomi. However, your pages "should" get indexed fine if they are in Google and other engines. *Update (03/18/04) - It seems other people are not seeing most of their dynamic pages from Miva in Yahoo's index yet. Although many of our client's dynamic pages are showing up, we did discover that the largest one with search friendly links had every single product and category listed that used the directory style links from this Miva Merchant module. Definitely try search friendly links from Copernicus. Additional Information:
Search Engine Optimization / Marketing ResourcesJMH receives many inquiries as to what we think are the top resources a Miva Merchant store owner can have to help with search engine optimization and marketing. Here are three resources that we have used and can highly recommend.
|
|||||||||||||
Don't Miss the Latest News and Tips on SEO / Marketing for Miva Merchant. Subscribe Now!Attend the Official Miva Conference in San Diego and hear Jason live! |
|||||||||||||
Miva, Miva Engine, Miva Empressa, Miva Mia, Miva Merchant, and the Miva Corp. Blade Logo are trademarks of Miva Corporation. | |||||||||||||
