IA Modules eCommerce Documentation

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SEO Tips - Improve search engine rankings and visibility

Ranking on the first or second page of popular search engines is vital to sales. here are a few tips.

First, lets dispell some myths. Meta tags have been so abused by folks that most search engines clearly tell you they are all but ignored and have been for years. These days, it's all about relevancy. Below are a few questions you should ask yourself to determine your pages relevancy. If you do some searches you will see the best ranking sites follow these rules. If a search engine robot asked these questions to itself when scanning your site, would it rank you as highly relevant for those given key words.

Does your page have content on it with the key words a search engine user searched on?
How many times are these words repeated?
Are they presented in paragraph style text content (not just a list of keywords)?
Do some of those words appear in the title of the page (important)?
Are these words found on the home page of the site or in it's title?
How much emphasis is given to these keywords, ie are they given H1 tag prominence to show them big and loud ? Are those words at the beginning of the page?

That said, if you have 20,000 items, you probably won't rank the best for all 20,000. Try starting by focusing on particular lines of products, items that you have the best margin on or can sell the cheapest, and drive it home to the search engine that you are all about those items. Put many of them on your home page featured products section, new product list, best sellers list, and mention their key words in your home page and category page titles. Let the search engine spiders scaning you site know without a doubt that if someone is searching for X, that is what you are all about!

Use the Meta TagManager in the admin section to give good page titles to your home pages and category pages.

Get your products on more sites that market your items for you like Froogle and Amazon.

Create multiple IAM storefronts with our multi store features. You could focus certain categories on different sites and thus focus their homepages and titles on those product lines. While this comes with an additional monthly fee, it could greatly improve your sales!

Use the froogle export to upload your items to Googles online item shopping site. It's free. you can't lose! Many other item listing aggregator sites will charge you fees to setup, monthly fees, even commissions and few are worth these fees.

Add links in your StoreHome.htm to categories or search results you want to promote. Be sure the link includes words people use when searching and that the resulting linked page also has these words repeated many times with emphasis.

Linking with the URL Rewriter
Use the URL Rewriter capability. Add some links on your home page with the url rewriter. This lets you build page paths and names with key words, making them seem more relevant to spiders.

For QBPOS Clients, the listid is the item number in your QB POS item list so it is pretty easy to find. For QB Financial clients, to find the ListID find the product on your store and note the LISTID= parameter value in the url of your product detail page. The best option is to let your XSL templates do this work for you. They can be tailored to dynamically build the links, selecting the LISTIDs and KeyWords from XML fields whose data comes from QB fields and/or IAM database fields. You could enter this sequence of words or whatever into any IAM or QB field (even a custom data field), and have the XSL templates select and render the links in the format or style of your choice.

example:

You might have a product page link generated by a default XSL layout like this:
http://store.iamodules.com/ProductDetail.jsp?LISTID=1A0000-1150441003
There are no keywords here, just a page name and the LISTID.

However you could tailor the XSL to create a link like this:
http://store.iamodules.com/SPD/Some-Group-Of-KeyWords--1A0000-1150441003.jsp
or you could even have folders with key words appear after SDP/ also
http://store.iamodules.com/SPD/SomeKeyWord/SomeKeyWord/Some-Group-Of-KeyWords--1A0000-1150441003.jsp

Avoid using fields whose data has text that would not make sense for a URL, like commas, periods, or special characters. If you want to select a particular XML field that has data from QB or an IAM database field, be sure those values will be safe for a url or clean them up or choose a different field to use where you put the info you will select and use. One idea might be to use a QB item name or description field, OtherImage Field, or bulletpoint field.

Currently, you must follow these guidelines:

Start with /SPD/
Optionally follow this with any number of fake folder names that are hopefully relevant key words
Put any key words you like to appear to be part of the page name.
Must end with 2 dashes, '--' and then the listid value and then '.jsp'

Avoid making the resulting total link ridiculously long. typically the words at the beginning are given the most weight and at some point, you could make a page link so long that words at the end are ignored. There is no specific number of characters but try to keep the link to 80 characters or less.