Although there are ways to improve
your Miva Merchant store
for search engines, it still can't beat a nicely optimized static page
in our opinion. Some people would fall over themselves if they knew
they could get over 800
Miva Merchant category and product pages
listed in the king of all search engines, Google.
Yes, if you have over 800 categories and products in your Miva Merchant
store, you could possibly have every single one listed in Google because
of Search Engine Killer.
Search Engine Killer, also known as SEK2, is an add-on module
that creates a static mirror of your Miva Merchant store with your welcome
screen message and all your categories and products. Some search
engines do not like the dynamic urls or pages from Miva Merchant, and
this is discussed in our article on Google
and Miva Merchant. SEK2 allows for the insertion of a custom logo,
header, copyright message, keywords, and description. It will also use
your images, category and product headers, and category tree to create
these static versions. In addition, you can specify a name for the
directory on your site where your mirror will be created. It will
use your custom input, welcome screen message, and category tree to create
the static index page. You have the option to leave off the sub-categories
from the category tree. The index page and category pages will be
created in the sub-directory that you specified in the administrative
interface. Your product pages will be placed in another sub-directory
under the one called prods. (i.e. www.yourdomain.com/sekdirectory/prods/)
Here are some screen shots of Search Engine Killer's administrative interface
and details concerning their function and use.
INITIAL ADMINSTATION SCREEN
This is the initial screen you will see when accessing Search
Engine Killer's administrative interface. As you can see, you can
check for updates, create or re-create your static mirror, enter or change
basic and advanced configuration options, and even tell SEK2 to not touch
certain categories and products.
BASIC CONFIGURATION
The first input field is where you tell Search Engine Killer
to place your static directory in relation to your root directory. (i.e.
www.yourdomain.com/) It comes with the default
of /thestore which would make it www.yourdomain.com/thestore.
Some people leave it alone while others choose names like store, shop,
shopping, and similar things. We recommend choosing a directory
name that has one of your target keywords or keyphrases. We will
discuss this more later in the article. The client using the above
configuration wanted their static index page to be the website index page.
(i.e. www.yourdomain.com/index.html) That is a
good idea if you do not want to have to edit any html.
This field is where you enter your target keywords and keyphrases
that best represent what your store is about. Be careful with this
field because SEK2 will not only be using it as your mirror's index page
meta keywords (i.e. <meta name="keywords" content="your
keywords"> ), but it will also be using it in the title
tag. (i.e. <title>Your Title</title>)
Try and keep it down to a total of 8-9 words and don't separate words
with commas. If the words can flow together, avoid using words that
search engines will ignore anyways like and, the, with, and other 3-4
letter words. In the above example, there are 8 words with only
one word that will be ignored. The keyword metatag is not that
important anymore, so you should be viewing this as primarily what will
be the index page title. Even if it was just for the meta keywords
tag, we would still advise against the use of commas (why this is advised
will be discussed in another issue.)
The description field is very important. Not only
will it be your meta description (i.e. <meta name="description"
content="Your Description"> ) for the mirror index
page, but it will be included in the body of your pages as well.
Try and shoot for 2-3 brief but keyphrase-rich sentences that are extremely
descriptive of your company. Think like a consumer would when searching
from a search engine.
The copyright message field is where you can place your
company's copyright, contact information, and even a global footer.
However, you must enter everything on one continuous line to use html
code, or you will get some strange
output. We believe that the copyright field was initially intended
for some brief text and that is it. It does not handle html code
very well unless it is in a certain format. The basics are that
instead of having your html like this:
If you want to make sure you have everything on one line,
turn off word wrap in notepad or whatever text or html editor you have
and double check it. It should all appear on one line. If
you enter code correctly, there is not a limit to what you can place in
the copyright field. You can include javascript as well. This
is also the place to enter links to special categories that you have kept
off the category tree. If you have questions about anything regarding
the copyright field, feel free to drop by our Miva
Discussion Forum.
This option allows you to have a complete list of products
and links to their respective static pages right below the welcome message
of your static index page. This does not present the best look and
can make the page file size quite large, depending on how many products
you have. You can try it for yourself and turn it off if you don't
like it.
You have the option to hide your subcategories from the
static index page. If you leave this unchecked, all your categories
and subcategories will be shown in the category tree. It does not
work like the regular Miva Merchant category tree. Do not worry
about not having your subcategories included in the static mirror if you
hide the subcategories. Links to the subcategories will be placed
on the individual category page if that particular category contains subcategories.
You should take notice that the category tree is not included on any static
mirror page other than the index page unless you have it customized.
This option is available because you could potentially have
multiple broken links and images in your static mirror. This is
because many people have text links and images in their welcome message,
category and product headers, and various other places in relation to
where their store is located (i.e. www.yourdomain.com/Merchant2).
When you create your static mirror, the links and images will be looking
for your Merchant2 or similar store directory and will not find it (i.e.
img src="graphics/0000000/image.gif and href="file.html").
A normal SEK2 setup would have the static index page and all categories
in one sub-directory below the root (i.e. www.yourdomain.com/sek)
and all the static product pages in a sub-directory below that called
prods (i.e. www.yourdomain.com/sek/prods). When
we do customizations, the prods directory is changed to a targeted keyword
or phrase. (i.e. Boxed
Greens has their static index and categories created in the root directory,
so their customized sub-directory is www.boxedgreens.com/organicproduce
rather than www.boxedgreens.com/organicproduce/prods)
If you tell SEK2 to not use these links and images, you might feel that
your static mirror is naked. You should take note that this doesn't
apply to product images. SEK2 will reference those correctly for
you. Here are some tips on how to make sure all your links and images
work.
Change all text and image links in your store welcome message, category
headers and footers, and product headers and footers to absolute rather
than relative. (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/Merchant2/graphics/0000000/image.gif
is an absolute reference and graphics/0000000/image.gif
is relative)
The easier way is the just reference all images and links with /Merchant2/
(i.e. img src="/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/image.gif
or href="/Merchant2/privacy.html").
This relative method will work in any directory on your site.
If you have questions or problems with any of the above, you can either
stick with the absolute reference or post your question to the Miva
Discussion Forums.
