Changing E Commerce platforms

[girlsgonebiker]

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

[RyanKent]

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.

[girlsgonebiker]

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

[girlsgonebiker]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.

[girlsgonebiker]

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.

[blu42media]

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

[RyanKent]

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.