Positionine Oscommerce on Search Engines

[metalkakkarot]

hmm, no matter what i write in google my site just wont come up :confused:
could you please tell me steps i need to take to properly position my site and products on my site on google ..yahoo...ask jeeves..e.t.c
ive heard of the term spiders..but i have no idea what it is..means..impacts..where to place...i have no clue whatsoever of what it is and how to set it up. So if you could please point me in the right direction
thankyou

[YvetteKuhns]

Can you post your website URL? We can probably give better advice if we can see your website.

[metalkakkarot]

antechnology.co.uk

[YvetteKuhns]

Have you submitted your URL to Google (http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl) and/or other search engines (yet)? Your domain name cannot be found on Google (yet).

Your web page URLs are not very search engine friendly. For example, http://www.antechnology.co.uk/index.php?cPath=21_34 is just the index.php followed by a query. Often, search engines will simply list the index.php page and not the other versions of the same page. Also, http://www.antechnology.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=21_34&products_id=98 is one of many product pages. Search engines will see variations of product_info.php and ignore what follows the question mark.

You can rename your URLs to be more search engine friendly. This is extremely helpful for e-commerce websites. I have created a website that has URLs like http://www.healthyweightlossplans.com/viewcategory.php/u/shapeworks that replaces the question mark and the equals sign with the slash. This can be done in different ways. I think we used php in this case, but sometimes .htaccess files can be used to do this. Do not use the .htaccess method unless you feel confident using it.

Be sure to add very good descriptions of each product. Search engines can find keyword phrases in your web page text. Also customize your titles for each page.

<title>osCommerce</title>

Change this to whatever product or information is on the page or good keyword phrases. Do not use all uppercase letters. Do not use more than 80 characters.

Add a meta description and meta keywords. While Google may not use them, meta searches do. Do not repeat keywords more than three times. Use a few sentences with your best keywords in your description.

Copyright © 2005 Company Name (found at the bottom of the web page) should be updated to the current year and contain your company name.

Coming soon pages are not recommended. Include them when you have products. Please provide your company info (I didn't even see a link for this.), privacy, payment, refund and shipping policies and other info. The contact page has a form to request info but it does not offer any. I wouldn't buy from this site as it is now.

Create a page to include links to sites that link to yours. Exchange links with sites that have a similar target audience. Get incoming links from search engines, directories, forums, press releases, articles, blogs and news websites. Even You Tube could be helpful if you post a cool video that you made and included a link to your website.

Your website name is an image. Search engines read text and not images or media. You can include an ALT attribute for your IMG tag that says your website name. You would have better luck with search engines if the name appeared in bold text or between H1, H2 or H3 tags.

DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE until you have included your contents and made the necessary changes to your source code!

I said enough for now. You have a lot of work to do.

[metalkakkarot]

Thankyou very much for your detailed analysis of the site and ways to improve them. I will be sure to follow through all the steps. Just to let you know we havent actually added our products yet..want to make the settings right first :)

If i come across any problems ill post them on this topic

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do you know in which file i can change the hyperlink for the images on the right Toshiba image..refresh your desktop pimage and win it now image?

[YvetteKuhns]

Did you use the Instant Installer in OPS to install OScommerce? Or did you manually install it? You may want to back up your website before making changes. Please visit OScommerce knowledge base (http://www.oscommerce.info/) for information before making changes. You can also find answers to questions on their forum if you can't find them here. And you can find other things you may want to do.

The word currensies should be spelled currencies.

do you know in which file i can change the hyperlink for the images on the right Toshiba image..refresh your desktop pimage and win it now image?

See this (http://www.oscommerce.info/kb/osCommerce/General_Information/Tips_and_Tricks/252)