7 replies to this topic

[seoisgod]

Hi everyone,

just a quick question.

The site that i run which is an online store selling fires is almost a year old (in April) and it has done well so far for our main generic keywords. For example the keyword "woodburner" now brings us out top and many other highly search keywords has gone onto page 1 and a few top of page 2 but climbing.

What I want to do next is optimise for an individual product so when some one searches for "morso squirrel multi fuel stove" etc we rank high on them.

My only problem being that on the none product pages i have access to the Meta tag section so i can add title tags, keywords, description etc etc, however when i add a product via the control panel there is no meta section integrated into the system.

What this means is when im viewing a "morso squirrel multi fuel stove" the title tag will only show the title tag of the highest level of that category, so the header title will just say "morso multi fuel stoves | morso woodburning stoves | Morso woodburners etc etc

Ive contacted the company that developed the software and they never reply to emails.

so what would be the best course of action bearing in mind i cant optimise the meta tags at all.

what i have done so far

1) on the product page i have added the title of the product and added them in H1 tags.
2) in the highest category title tag (the one that generically shows on all product pages i have added the model names into the header for example like this:
| morso multi fuel stoves | squirrel, owl, badger | im hoping that as the models are in there it may help the results?
3) on another page called "manufacturer Information" i have added a sort of page that tells you all about each manufacturer and has every single stove model in that range listed which links to each product page. The title of each stove that links to the product page is made in anchor text. under the clickable title there is a brief description of the stove. Im hopeing that because this page can have meta info that if i can optimise this page well it may help the others or at least they will find that page and click to what they are looking for.

is there anything else you can reccomend that may help me out a little bit? sorry for the long winded post. This problem with added meta tags etc is the only thing really holding us back from ranking well on all keywords.

I hope someone can help

all the best

[mickmel]

Meta tags don't help your ranking at all, at least in Google and Yahoo.

H1 tags, title tags, anchor text, etc all are what count. If you control those, you should be in fine shape.

[Randy]

It sounds like you're running into an issue where the cart simply isn't giving you enough control over your <title> tag. A question for you...

1) on the product page i have added the title of the product and added them in H1 tags.

Are you having to hand type this into each page? Or are you able to pull the product title into the page via a variable that's stored in your database somewhere?

If it's the latter you should be able to tweak your product pages to get that info into the <title> tag. Simply echo or print it there when people are actually on a product page.

That's going to be the only best solution. If you can't change the title you're going to be left doing what you're currently doing and trying to make sure you link to those product pages using the full product title. Or switching to a cart that gives you more control over your titles.

[Nueromancer]

When you say you have no access to the back office:

Or do you mean you have only the back office access or do you have full ftp access to the site?

If you have full ftp access you can extend the CMS functionality basically it goes like this

1 add a new table to the database call its say tbl_SEO_Meta (have it store id, productid (this is a foreign key into the main product table) ,title and metadescription) then
2 build a back end system to populate the new table.
3 edit the code that displays the page to look up the product key in you new table if it exists use that to derive the if not use the existing code to display title meta etcetera.

This took me around a day to do on one simple site I work on.

In step 1 of course you could just add fields to the existing tables but I feel that creating a separate table is safer than modifying some cms of unknown quality.Or you could just bite the bullet and rewrite the cms

Some times you have to do this as one site I’me working with the developer of the CMS had a bad stroke just before Christmass

[seoisgod]

here are some photo shots of the control panel and what i can/ cant do:

Please note I have blanked out any names that blatantly advertise who we are so that its not seen as a plug for the site

Home page control panel section:


Meta tag section:


Product page - no meta option


Product page:


Manuafctuer info page- H1 title on page with keywords in there, also full title tags etc on this page and anchor text linking to product page for each product by that manufacturer:


Hope this helps

Edited by woodburner_warehouse, 29 January 2008 - 09:11 AM.

[Jill]

Offtopic

The site that i run which is an online store selling fires is almost a year old

You sell fires? Who's the target, pyros?

[seoisgod]

hi everyone sorry to come back to this but its doing my head in now and is really holding me back.

The actual product pages are ranking a little better but are still page 3 and beyond.

The tech guy who runs the software hasnt got back to me after nearly 2 months so not happy.

Is there any html code or something that can be placed on the page? like hidden code that will overwrite the title tag, description, keywords etc.

Im grabbing at straws a bit her but need to get this sorted

[Randy]

Without seeing how the backend code is contructed it's impossible to answer your question. Assuming the <title> and such are being inserted dynamically, you'd have to make your changes in the backend file that builds your html page.