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
-
SEO implications when changing the business function however using the same domain name
Hi Everyone, Request some advice on the following situation please: If a client wishes to start a new business (advertising agency) using a domain name that they previously used for a completely different business function (selling hats & t-shirts) Is there anything you can do to "clean" the domain so that the previous indexing of the domain does not effect the new business and give the client a fresh start. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Regards and thanks.
Technical SEO | | Republica0 -
Why is Google's cache preview showing different version of webpage (i.e. not displaying content)
My URL is: http://www.fslocal.comRecently, we discovered Google's cached snapshots of our business listings look different from what's displayed to users. The main issue? Our content isn't displayed in cached results (although while the content isn't visible on the front-end of cached pages, the text can be found when you view the page source of that cached result).These listings are structured so everything is coded and contained within 1 page (e.g. http://www.fslocal.com/toronto/auto-vault-canada/). But even though the URL stays the same, we've created separate "pages" of content (e.g. "About," "Additional Info," "Contact," etc.) for each listing, and only 1 "page" of content will ever be displayed to the user at a time. This is controlled by JavaScript and using display:none in CSS. Why do our cached results look different? Why would our content not show up in Google's cache preview, even though the text can be found in the page source? Does it have to do with the way we're using display:none? Are there negative SEO effects with regards to how we're using it (i.e. we're employing it strictly for aesthetics, but is it possible Google thinks we're trying to hide text)? Google's Technical Guidelines recommends against using "fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash." If we were to separate those business listing "pages" into actual separate URLs (e.g. http://www.fslocal.com/toronto/auto-vault-canada/contact/ would be the "Contact" page), and employ static HTML code instead of complicated JavaScript, would that solve the problem? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.Thanks!
Technical SEO | | fslocal0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Google is changing the title
Hi! Lately i have seen that Google changed the page titles for some clients, not all... its about 30% of them. For example, the title looks likes this after the Google change: Company name: SEO and Pay per click management But in on that page it looks like this: SEO and Pay per click management - Company name Does anyone know why?
Technical SEO | | DanielNordahl1 -
My company is changing ecommerce platforms. What are image URL considerations?
My company is switching from osCommerce to Magento. What should I do about my image URL's? Should I try to recreate the filenames and directory paths from the old site on the new one? How bad is it for our SEO if I can't do that?
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M0 -
Help changing category and page titles on established Magento site.
Hi All, This is my first post, I've been a Pro member for a while now, read many posts but have never asked a question here. I have an established Magento site that I need to do a lot of SEO work on. I am a newbie at SEO, so I wanted to ask for advice here. I just changed one of the category names, the url, meta title, and meta description. When making the change I selected the checkbox in the Magento backend that says "Create Permanent Redirect for Old URL" Example:
Technical SEO | | TrulyLuna
Old Category: http://www.domain.com/old-category-name.html
New Category: http://www.domain.com/new-category-name.html Everything worked fine with the exception of one alarming thing... I lost all of the page authority for the category itself and all of the sub categories and pages below it. Now the category and all pages below it show (on the moz toolbar) a PA of 1 and 0 links and 0 domains. I updated the sitemap. I did not do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess, I only chose the option to redirect on the Magento backend when changing the name and url of the category. I need to change a lot of other category and page names and urls but now I'm a bit gun shy, as I do not want to do something that will damage what little page rank I have at the moment. I'm looking for some advice from one of you guys who might be able to help me do this the correct way. I did some research on Google, but I'm still not sure of the correct method to accomplish this. Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer.0 -
Creating new website with possible Url change (301 involved?)
Hi, I am currently getting a web designer to upgrade my website. I have built lost of links to my internal pages, should I get him to 301 redirect example.com/about.html (old) to example.com/about (new) OR Is there any need for this once the page doesn't change to example.com/about-us? Thank you in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
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