Changing E Commerce platforms
-
Hey All,
Im Olga and new to search engine optimization and web development.
I recently changed from O S Commerce to Go daddy Quick shopping Cart. Before on my old site I had a lot of images show up on google searches on the first page in the image section that have recently vanished due to the change. I think that is where the majority of my sales were coming from as I did not really rank for any keyword searches.
My old web designer did everything for my old site and told me a year ago he was to busy to help me out anymore and I did not know how to work OS Commerce hence the change to quick shopping cart.
Does anyone know how to get images back into google images, or any other beginner strategies to help me rank in google. I have used all of the tools on this program and pretty much got everything figured out only I think the industry I am in is VERY competitive.
Would love any advice or help.
Thanks,
Olga Girls Gone Biker
-
Olga, here is a link to a ZenCart store which is in development (i.e. not a live site). http://www.durazestcanada.com/store/
Take a look at the images. Right-click on them and depending on your browser plugins you can "Inspect Element" or view the source code. The images have names and ALT tags which relate to the product. I am not aware of any true shopping cart which does not allow this flexibility.
-
Hi John,
Thank you for your response. I do have GA and WMT and I check them often. I did not have them on my OS Commerce site and this was one of the reasons I changed over.
I will take a look at the GTMetrix site and see if that is something that can help. So having dedicated hosting helps rankings more so than a shared hosting situation ? I did not know that I thought it was all about links and domain and page authority.
Thanks for your information.
Olga
-
Hello Ryan,
I spoke with Godaddy today and they said their platform/program is hard coded to give each image a unique name (number).
Also I watched the Danny Dover WBF and he mentions in the video that the file name is algorithmically generated and was "just a bunch of numbers". Is that not what he is talking about ?
Thanks again for all of your information. I think for now I am going to have to make do with what I have, as finding a developer and or learning an entire new shopping cart is going to be expensive and to time consuming.
Olga.
-
If GoDaddy is unable or unwilling to help, you then should consider what John shared above. Packages like GoDaddy offer a quick and easy solution, but not a quality site.
There are many methods for you to provide your site in a quality manner which offers you flexibility to make the changes necessary. A few solutions which I like are:
Joomla + Virtuemart extension for the shopping cart. The software is free but you may have to pay a bit for some extensions, and you should also have a developer involved in the site's creation.
WordPress + a WP extension for the shopping cart. Comments are same as for Joomla.
ZenCart shopping cart. This solution would be more for a stand alone store. If you want a full site where you add articles (blog) about your content and maximize your SEO, the Joomla or WP solutions would be preferable.
There are many other solutions available as well. The best shopping cart software is Magento, but that is for stores with thousands of products. The development time and costs are much higher and the resources required to host the site are higher as well.
-
Hello Ryan,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I have looked over what you have said and changed the ALT tag. But the image name is exactly what you said it should be. I think the QSC assigns the numerical names to the images, which sucks.
I will have to call go daddy and find out if it is something I can actually do.
Thanks again,
Olga.
-
Hey Olga-
If you're in a competitive market then you should consider a more serious platform so you get the most out of your efforts. Wordpress with Cart 66 is good; Magento is good too. GoDaddy is really pretty slow, especially since it's a shared hosting situation.
Many different things may have happened in your switchover - content changes, image path changes, etc. Have you set up Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools to dig in further to see what's going on?
I did try taking a look at your site ... it's loading slowly from here. You could also try setting up a free account at GTMetrix.com and analyze some pages. There are lots of tips on how to speed things up, but again you may only have so much control with your current hosting setup.
I speak from experience that the hosting makes a big difference. I moved a client from Rackspace Cloud to a dedicated a few months ago. After making the switch several of our key terms (moderately difficult) were seeing page 1 and 2 rankings. Just my .02
-John
-
Hi Olga,
The first step would be adjusting your image names and ALT tags. I grabbed a random image from your home page.
Name = 1335830967585-632321001.jpeg
ALT = green paisley print black bandana the pattern of this bandana is made by girls gone biker - bandanas
From a SEO perspective, the name and alt tag are horrible. Your images are ranking just fine for the terms you offered. For example, try a google search for "1335830967585" which is the first part of the name of your image. Google image search shows the image, and regular search shows one result, your website. You are ranking perfectly fine for the image name you chose. A suggested change:
Name = bandana-black-green.jpeg
ALT = "black bandana with green print"
These changes will at least get you into the ball park of where you want to be.
There are other steps you can take such as adding quality content around the images. Danny Dover shared a nice WBF on this topic.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to replace a custom platform's homepage with another homepage from another platform domain?
I have a question regarding 301 permanent redirection. I currently have three websites, each hosted by different platform/CMS: one by Wix, another by WordPress, and a custom built CMS. I want to have all my three websites to be under the the custom build CMS's URL. What I am most concerned about is that I would like to have the home page of my Wix website to become my custom build CMS's new home page and the original content currently under my custom build CMS would be updated under new sub directories (in which I have access to the custom build CMS's source code). I have never done a 301 redirect before and I would like to know if there is any additional thing I need to do to my current custom build CMS besides assigning all my current content under my custom build CMS to new directories before executing 301 redirects?
Technical SEO | | sihanedutech0 -
How does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Pages Indexed Not Changing
I have several sites that I do SEO for that are having a common problem. I have submitted xml sitemaps to Google for each site, and as new pages are added to the site, they are added to the xml sitemap. To make sure new pages are being indexed, I check the number of pages that have been indexed vs. the number of pages submitted by the xml sitemap every week. For weeks now, the number of pages submitted has increased, but the number of pages actually indexed has not changed. I have done searches on Google for the new pages and they are always added to the index, but the number of indexed pages is still not changing. My initial thought was as new pages are added to the index, old ones are being dropped. But I can't find evidence of that, or understand why that would be the case. Any ideas on why this is happening? Or am I worrying about something that I shouldn't even be concerned with since new pages are being indexed?
Technical SEO | | ang1 -
What is the best way to change tons of 302 for 301...
I'm doing an audit for a new client and their website has tons of 302... (more than 1000)... What is the best/fast way to change all the 302 for 301...?
Technical SEO | | Felip30 -
I physically changed my URL and now I have two...How do I get rid of the old one?
Hi, I physically changed my URL as something else and now Google thinks I have two duplicate pages (I know not to do this in the future). e.g. I had www.example.com/i-like-seo.aspx and changed it to: www.example.com/i-love-seo.aspx Google sees this as two pages now and my CMS system is only showing one page (The new page) Also, SEOMOZ is seeing two pages and further more sees them both as having two different amounts of inbound links? When I change content on the new url page, the old url page also updates. I'm really confused as to what has happened here and don't know how to get rid of the old url so that Google doesn't think that I have duplicate content. Any help to what has happened or how to fix it would be so helpful and appreciated. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | CoGri0 -
E-commerce site multi language product urls
Hi, On my E-commerce site I use optimized Url's (product names) with my native language (Hebrew) I am going to translate some of the product pages to English with differnat descriptions, correct layout, etc... But I was wandering about the product Url's. Should I stay with the original product URL and add a language parameter to the url? Should I add a completely new URL using the English product name? Of course what I'm worrying the most of is duplicate content. Thanks, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Lost FaceBook Shares with URL change
I recently changed the URL of a page and used a 301 redirect from old to new. I just realized I lost all my Facebook shares. Now it shows 0 on that page. What can I do to get back my count of shares? I cannot find any information.
Technical SEO | | MiamiWebCompany0 -
Geolocation has changed targeted domains, or has it?
I am monitoring two domains; a .com and a .com.au in quite a competitive sector (men's underwear online sales) last month the .com site completely dropped from rankings sight in Google International SERPs but, the .com.au site is actually ranking (quite respectively too) in the International/US Google SERPs. I have no idea how, when or why but it's now been the case for two months. Help please?
Technical SEO | | Vovia0