Thread: SEO in ASPDNSF

Just wondering if anyone has any tips for SEO specifically related to ASPDNSF? Is there any specific DO's or DONTs that would help boost rankings?

DON'Ts: use some cheap free open source storefront over ours

DOs:

1) we generate SEO friendly keyword specific urls
2) setup category and topic page keywords individually
3) setup the main AppConfig SE_MetaXXX values apropriately
4) adjust meta description, title, and keywords by EACH category and product, to further refine the defaults we use
5) submit to google webmaster tools
6) create your product feeds for google, etc.

wait for the cash to roll in!

seriously. our SEO is 2nd to none, but the more you do to customize title, meta description, keywords, and all PER page (home, topics, categories, manufacturers, products) will help tune it.

Get with one of our recommended SEO firms also (we use verticalmeasures.com ourselves)...and will continue to. we're on first page of nearly ALL competitive terms we need...with PR 6 (PR sucks actually as Google changes it constantly) but that's not the point.

We'll default MOST SEO info for you. You fine tune it by page. You submit to various indexers. (googleindex.aspx, yahooindex.aspx, etc). Hire a SEO firm to push up natural rankings even further.

You will get success. This is what Jeff at PoolPartsOnline has done. Leveraging mostly (almost only) our SEO capabilities. He manages his business using our platform capabilities for 4 years now, and really leverages what tools we build in for him.

Jeff, you want to chime in here?

Seriously, if you underestimate our SEO capabilities, you will lose to your competitors who do get it. Our SEO is unmatched...executed properly.

We have actually had customers contact us because their "competitors" were jumping ahead of them on SEO and driving sales away from them, and they figured out their competitors were using our platform...

In addition to all of the things you can do with AspDotNetStoreFront itself, which is A LOT (great job on SEO Friendly things, ADNSF Team!), there are a lot of other things you can do to improve your SEO that are not platform dependant.

Take a look at some of the articles in the SEO section of our blog to learn more about keywords, attracting inbound links, alt text, the importance of effective copy, canonical issues, and more.

If you have specific SEO questions, feel free to leave a comment on our blog and our SEO experts would be more than happy to answer.

Wow this is fantastic guys thank you so much for your feedback. I will definately be looking into each and every one of the points made. Sounds very promising really...yet another reason why im glad to be using ASPDNSF

Megan (with Vortx) does SEO consulting yes, so she's got good info. So does Arnie at Vertical Measures as we indicated. So we get you a long ways to SEO maximizing, and then specific SEO specialist firms use other outside (the storefront) techniques to maximize even further.

Well I usually like to lurk but since I was tagged in...
I have been with ASPDNSF since 09/04 - quite a while. I have really watched the storefront evolve and mature. As Rob said, and outlined, the product is fantastic for search engines!
We have google and yahoo accounts and the old overture, but honestly, although they do drive traffic to the site, we were really never able to justify the expense of $1000's per month for utilization.
The reason, almost every term we set up a keyword or phrase for, we were already on page one in the organic search section. So it made no sense.
By looking at the referrer line in the order section, we see where a majority of the referrals are from. From there is how we analyze and optimize our site in-house.
If a specific search rendered us lower than our liking, we dig deeper into it and tweak the page to add more relevant content, change the product or whatever.

The friendly URL's are a huge asset. We can add a product to our site and literally be indexed, high up, in a weeks time. I am not saying that SEO companies are bad or anything like that, just sharing our experience.

We also use Google & Yahoo site feeds and have over 65k products on Google Base - which again gets you up on page one for real specific searches.

Lastly our site is clean, and yes boring, so boring that the boys at ASPDNSF made us give it a face-lift! We feel, and have plenty of feed back, that the site is so easy to navigate without pop-ups,dancing bears or flashing stars that most customers can quickly and easily find what they need and checkout...

My 2 cents...

Great responses all. One of the main things with SEO is to educate yourself. As you become aware of more and more things that Search Engines are/aren't looking for, you can figure out ways to include them in your site (or use previously unused features in ADNSF).

Making sure you have Google Analytics (or something similar) installed to give you verifiable metrics that show what is/isn't working on your site is the first step. Then you have to wait for data to accumulate. That's where reading comes in - learn what you can about search engines, best practices, worst practices and think about how your sites measures up. Check out your competitors, Google search for lots of different keywords, and generally explore.

Learn about all of the SEO features that ADNSF offers and maximize the potential of those.

You can do all of this yourself, definitely. Where a company like Vortx comes in is interpreting the data and making recommendations based on that data. At Vortx, we have excellent knowledge and really great tools that help us to gather very important information about your site - it goes well beyond Google Page Rank and recorded Pageviews.

For example, we have tools that allow us to help you find your best keywords that have the highest search volume with the lowest competition - the best kind to optimize for. Optimizing for the right keywords is much more effective than optimizing for keywords that are 'close' - it can be the difference between a high click through rate on ppc with low conversions and a moderate click through rate with high conversions (much better!). Another example: we can tell you which sites would benefit you most to garner inbound links from, so you can go after getting those links.

SEO is an ongoing process - never set it and forget it - learn as much as you can and plug away at it for best results!

We offer up a lot of free, useful, do it yourself information about SEO, eCommerce, and ADNSF on our LiveWire Blog - check it out.

Thanks for the plug Rob and I agree with both Megan and the "admins" recommendations.

We have helped a few ASPDOTNET clients with their SEO and Google rankings and I would say the technology is well suited for good SEO practices.

If I could narrow it down to just the most important issues I would say they are"
1) unique title tags on every page that match the keywords you are targeting for that page
2) make sure those keyword phrases are used in the content on that page
3) an H1 tag using your most important keyword phrase for that page
4) build links to those pages using that keyword phrase as the anchor text (that's our specialty)

If you get all that right, odds are you will be very happy with your natural search rankings.

All of those "techniques" are supported out of the box. it's just a matter of data entry and proper skin setup usually, and then working with a SEO firm on link building and other specialized techniques on top, both vortx and vertical measures can help with those services also if you're interested, and serious, in SEO.

I have used this platform for many clients, and while we do do a lot of extra work to get good rankings, this cart does have a very good base to get indexed well and get you off on the right track.

One thing I will say however is not to use the default dynamic menu that comes in the default skin. This is not crawlable and search engines will not follow those links.

Hello,

One of the reasons I selected ASPdotnetSF is the fact that it was to be very good for SEO (built in functions to make it better for SEO). I have created customised meta tags,titles and descriptions for every page but have not seen such positve results that are claimed above. My site home page is has a rank of 3 and the site is indexed but not well and is not indexed at all for the key word phrases selected.

The site is listed in DMOZ and has a fairly good number of links (although google isn't crediting us for a lot of them).

Any suggestions?

So the Horizontal nor the vertial menu are not crawlable and search engines will not follow those links? I have added a fly out menu to the left menu. Will that help?

No... Any kind of dynamic menu like that is almost always javascript by the time it is displayed by the browser. Adding a pull-out menu is probably going to have the same issue. Unless your menu is plain text/html or clever CSS, the chances of it being crawlable are slim. That is why we provide two sitemaps plus google and yahoo sitemaps You can submit those using google webmaster tools.

ne of the reasons I selected ASPdotnetSF is the fact that it was to be very good for SEO (built in functions to make it better for SEO).

AspDotNetStorefront has some GREAT features for SEO. The platform is extremely friendly in terms of allowing you to set meta tags, alt tags, descriptions, support for google and yahoo sitemaps, dynamically generated sitemaps (both human- and se-readable), etc. SEO still is a bit of a dark art as opposed to an exact science. There are a lot of unknown factors that can impact your site rankings. At the end of the day, regardless of how friendly the software is, there is no real substitute for tweaking keyword density, getting quality linkbacks, etc.

There are MANY AspDotNetStorefront sites on page 1 of google on very crowded keywords (including our own) using the inherent capabilities of the platform. Provided you haven't removed all of the sitemap links on your site, I might suggest contacting a quality (key word) SEO consultant to lake a look at the site and give some suggestions. If whomever you contact is any good, they will pay for themselves many times over.

After adjusting my meta information, how do I resubmit the reques for Google to relook at the web page? Do I need to resubmit the sitemap? If how often can I do this?

Or do I have to wait for Google to re-crawl my site at the pleasure?
Thanks

Originally Posted by barryd

After adjusting my meta information, how do I resubmit the reques for Google to relook at the web page? Do I need to resubmit the sitemap? If how often can I do this?

Or do I have to wait for Google to re-crawl my site at the pleasure?
Thanks

You do not have to re-submit, in fact you probably should not. If you have a sitemap and it is already submitted to Google via Webmaster Central then are fine. You can go into your account and request it to be crawled otherwise your site will be crawled in due time.

Google is pretty good about picking up these changes, but you may not see the changes in the search results (title & description changes) for a few weeks.

This helps me very much

If I add more categories/products, do I need to resubmit the sitemap or will google rediscover it?

Thanks in advance

Google should eventually find changes made to your site through its normal crawling schedule. You could if needed ask google to recrawl your sitemap through webmaster tools.

Generally no need. Google crawls almost daily (and has for a few years now)...

Originally Posted by Patricia Pinkney

Hello,

One of the reasons I selected ASPdotnetSF is the fact that it was to be very good for SEO (built in functions to make it better for SEO). I have created customised meta tags,titles and descriptions for every page but have not seen such positve results that are claimed above. My site home page is has a rank of 3 and the site is indexed but not well and is not indexed at all for the key word phrases selected.

The site is listed in DMOZ and has a fairly good number of links (although google isn't crediting us for a lot of them).

Any suggestions?

The links that you have in your drop down under Collections, Artists, and Categories are not seo friendly links- its javascript. Since the search engines like static text links, your losing out by not allowing the search engines the ability to crawl the links and pass page rank down to those pages off the home page.

You can check your site in a text-only browser to see the search engine accessibility and how the search engines view your site.

You will need to provide the search engines another way to access those links. Once that is done, more pages will get indexed and receive page rank. Your rankings should then improve.

Hi thanks for this response. I am aware of this issue and am working on getting the code fixed.

Google has my XML sitemap (submitted since Oct last year) and they say they are indexing my page but it's really strange because if I search for specific text like a product name in quotes in the search bar, it returns that it can't find it. But yet that same page is listed among the pages they say they are indexing.

It seems that this issue is only on google. I am ranking for my keywords on yahoo and bing but not at all in google.

Any other ideas why this might be?

Thx in advance for suggestions.

The XML sitemap doesn't really do you any good for ranking for anything competitive. Although Google doesn't technically have supplemental results anymore, the pages only found through an XML sitemap and not actually found on the site being indexed are considered very poor quality and will not rank well. You have to have internal Page Rank being distributed through SEO friendly text based links as Jpickle recommended above. You will need to redo your navigation or provide a workaround SEO friendly nav. Either way, that's the crux of your indexing problem.

You might want to try adding some additional navigation to the site aside from the componentart javascript menu as well. You'll note that many sites use an XML-package based menu, which uses an unordered list and some CSS to generate an HTML menu system. By only using componentart, you are limiting navigation to a javascript menu, which the robots may or may not be able to read properly. It would require a bit of skin redesign, but probably well worth it if you are having severe indexing issues.

Hi Dan,

Thanks for this. I am in the process of trying to fix the navigation and add also links in text rather than just the drop so I hope this will help.

My concern is that I did rank at one point before it completely dropped off (with the same drop down navigation that I currently have). So the concern is that if google was ranking me at one point with this current navigation and no longer is, I am not feeling confident that changing the navigation will resolve my issue.

I still have a feeling there is something set up wrong either with the locales or redirects (unpublished or deleted pages 302 redirecting to home page) or something else.....no one I've talked to so far can seem to put their fingers on it.

What I find odd about the locales is that if the non default locales are in the robots.txt file why is google able to find a page with one of these other locales?

Here's an example:
I search in google for this:
"Eco Recycled Cotton Bag with Shell Button"

This is the search result:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&sa...G=Search&meta=

The first one on the list is my page (see below) - but it's my French page - even though I searced for english content and the french is in the robots.txt files

http://www.pangea-collection.com/set...aspx?returnURL...

Any ideas?

meta tags, titles and descriptions are playing a less important role in SEO these days, and the google ranks are varied in different conntries for the same site. Google is becoming smarter now.

Google will index the site ONLY in the master locale if you have multiple locales configured. This is because robots don't accept cookies, which are required to browse the site in a locale other than the master.

Code:

meta tags, titles and descriptions are playing a less important role in SEO these days, and the google ranks are varied in different conntries for the same site. Google is becoming smarter now.

That is correct. There are many other factors that impact results. Meta tags and titles are important, but you also have to have good, quality content, a strong link-building campaign, etc.

Just wondering if anyone has any tips for SEO specifically related to ASPDNSF? Is there any specific DO's or DONTs that would help boost rankings?

Hi everyone,

I am not a developer. I am a marketing manager who updates content and manages my website. Our developer went and moved on to another company, and we haven't found one to fill his shoes yet.

So my question is one that is very frustrating for me, but I would love some professional input of those who are very familiar with ASPDNSF specifically and DNN in general.

1) I would love to add some social sharing buttons on ASPDNSF, however they won't show up. I originally tried pasting in the code from AddThis or ShareThis, which has worked on every other website I have tried. No luck. I found out you need a module, which unfortunately needs DNN 5.6 or higher, and I am stuck with DNN 5.0. My ASPDNSF is version 7.2, which is frustrating for a number of reasons. (one being that I cannot updated in any recent versions of browsers, I have to keep an old browser on my computer just to update, add and edit content), the other being that it is not supported anymore. Is there any way that I can add social sharing buttons on these pages? Please?

2) If I updated DNN, through my host account, would that affect the structure of my website? My nightmare is that if I did update, my website structure would come crashing down. Since I am only familiar with the CMS part, and am limited to creating landing pages, writing content, editing, etc, I do not know the developer parts like you all do.

It is very stressful as I continue to compete on SEO rankings, it is just lonely old me doing all the work, besides my other tasks as marketing manager. I see my competition creeping up on my search engine rankings and I don't want to lose what I worked so hard for. We have already tripled our web traffic and out of 100 of our keywords, we are on the first page for 75 of them, and about 40 of them in the top 3 positions on Google.

It is also stressful because our IT resources are limited, it is hard to find a DNN developer who will contract until we find someone permanently, and the knowledge in our IT department is limited. Oh, and our "web developers" are part of our IT dept vs. our marketing department, which I don't think should be the case. (my opinion). But it is worthless now because we don't have any developers anymore, when we used to have 3 of them.

About my company: my parent company has 3 wholly owned subsidiaries housed in the same building. We share IT resources and web resources, we all have our own sites that we individually manage (the marketing managers do) and share the web developers (when we had them). We all moved to the DNN platform within the past 4-5 years. My website was launched almost 3 years ago. Don't know what else you need to know to provide helpful input.

Thank you so much. I appreciate any recommendations or suggestions (that don't require a huge overhaul which I won't be able to get approval for).

Have a great day.

Wow... 7.2... that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Where are you trying to add the AddThis code?

In 8.0 I created a string resource. I copied the AddThis code into that string resource. Then I was able to call that in xmlpackages for products and categories.

I'm not sure why 7.2 wouldn't allow you to have the addthis or sharethis code. It's just javascript... but I'm like you and am more on the marketing side of things than the hardcore developer side. I also know nothing about DNN... so I'm probably pretty useless to you. Sorry.

from a great partner Jordan who pointed this out....

in case you aren't aware, there's a sample .net project put out by google for server-side analytics:

https://developers.google.com/analyt...mobileWebsites

Originally Posted by Rob

---
DOs:
1) we generate SEO friendly keyword specific urls
2) setup category and topic page keywords individually
3) setup the main AppConfig SE_MetaXXX values apropriately
4) adjust meta description, title, and keywords by EACH category and product, to further refine the defaults we use
5) submit to google webmaster tools
6) create your product feeds for google, etc.
---

Excuse me Rob. In respond to #1) how would you say ASPDNSF generates a friendly URL when it adds some wire string such as s-3, s-13, m-15, c-19, p-1064, t- in front of every page url ???


Is there a way to remove those useless strings so that the url is more search engine and user friendly?

Thanks


Pheap

Originally Posted by spheapk

Excuse me Rob. In respond to #1) how would you say ASPDNSF generates a friendly URL when it adds some wire string such as s-3, s-13, m-15, c-19, p-1064, t- in front of every page url ???


Is there a way to remove those useless strings so that the url is more search engine and user friendly?

Thanks


Pheap

What how so? How do you plan to identify pages without letter dash number then? If you don't have the letter at the start then it how could the code know what page you are looking for. It could be a category page, a topic , a product or something else. Same thing with the number after the dash except that is the id object. You can rely on the sename being enough in most cases since it is possible to have two objects with the same sename. For example two categories by the same name but have different parents categories is a valid thing and they would have the same sename.

You could modify the URL Rewrites to put the identifiers at end of URL leaving the more important SE Names first...