20 replies to this topic

[SanDiegoMedia]

Hello,

My name is Jeff, I am part of a team developing a software package mainly for e-commerce clients. MaxEXP is our software, our two biggest clients are SureFire (.com) and Home Controls (.com) (I don't want to inappropriately add links.) I am in charge of making sure this software is as SEO friendly as possible. Currently the only thing I have left to implement (which is in progress,) is to get title and other meta tag info on the pages that display categories and products. The software creates pages that are not template driven and can display title and meta tag info on them.

I was wondering if other SEO's could do a little research on what items should be included in this package. My main goal is to get the signature of approval of the most respected SEO for our software. So what better thing to do then get the most respected SEO's to have an input on its development.

Information from my CEO about MaxEXP can be found here:
sandiegomedia.com/about-maxexp.html

But I think going to surefire.com or homecontrols.com you'll be able to see the software in action.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Matt B]

Jeff,

I appreciate your asking for help. It's good to see that CMS software developers are finally seeing the value of developing search engine friendly software. There are a lot of companies realizing that they have spent thousands of dollars for something that works great, but the world will never find.

In looking at the surefire.com website, I think the software has a long way to go before it is completely open to the search engines. I'm not sure how many pages are actually in the site, but if you run this search query into the Google search bar;

site:www.surefire.com inurl:www.surefire.com

You'll see that Google only has 20 pages indexed and some of those pages look like pages that are no longer on the site. Not only that, but there is no distinguishing information reported for most of the pages. Inktomi only sees 2 pages, and Alltheweb.com, which traditionally does a great job of indexing dynamic content, only sees 7 pages.

I would suspect that part of the problem is the URL, which seems klugy and a bit long for what you are trying to accomplish. Looking at the code linking the pages, there are multiple parameters in the query strings, which may prevent thorough indexing by the search engines. The dynamic URL links are rewritten by the server after being requested, in order to present a search-friendly URL, but the dynamic link may not be spiderable to begin with.

CMS that is search friendly - there aren't too many around, but the ones that I've seen and work with, they all tend to have one thing in common. Very simple, very short query strings.

I hope this helps - Fixing this kind of stuff for companies that buy "search unfriendly" software/websites is what I do for a living.

Good Luck!

Edited by Matt B, 11 September 2003 - 09:01 PM.

[SanDiegoMedia]

Thanks for the input, we only recently started making a solid SEO effort for our software, and the pages are just starting to get indexed. www.homecontrols.com has a bit more indexed (although a lot of them are from the old site, and a custom 404 error page has yet to be created. The main problem we just overcame, was the server admin was using an index file to redirect from index.html to the proper long URL string, that has now been fixed and is using a proper apache redirect. This is one of the main things I think the SureFire site has so few indexed pages (spiders couldnt get to the proper pages.) The SEO efforts are just over a month old, and still being worked on. I've thought the long URL's maybe a problem, but we may not be able to change them.

Anyone else willing to evalutate our software? The sites using it are:
www.surefire.com
www.homecontrols.com

All advice is wanted.

[Scottie]

Hey Jeff-

Welcome to the forum.

What exactly are you looking for? I'm confused by your post. You want people to evaluate your e-commerce software for SEO-friendliness?

Currently the only thing I have left to implement (which is in progress,) is to get title and other meta tag info on the pages that display categories and products. The software creates pages that are not template driven and can display title and meta tag info on them.

So, you haven't implemented titles and meta tags but the software can display titles and meta tags?

Not trying to give you a hard time, but I don't know what you are looking for here...

[SanDiegoMedia]

Some of the pages in the system can create the meta information. Some can't. Most of the pages that display only products and product detail are the ones without meta info yet. All content pages can have meta tag and title information.

Example:
http://www.surefire....igh_performance
This page basically gives information on the type of lights, the system can place meta info on these types of pages.

http://www.surefire....r/228/sesent/00
This page is only for displaying products. That is the only purpose of this page, becuase of how we put it together, the system cannot place meta tag and title info yet (we're going to be fixing that.)

We just want to make sure that we cover all aspects of SEO issues that we can.

Edited by SanDiegoMedia, 12 September 2003 - 10:26 AM.

[daniel]

Hi Jeff,

One thing that you'll definitely need to consider is the download time for the page. Not only will it put off visitors, it can turn search engine spiders off too.

Site Confidence is a good site for checking the download speed for a page.

Unfortunately, it gave the first URL a time of more than 60 seconds to download.

Worth thinking about.

Cheers,

Daniel

[Matt B]

Jeff,

The titles and decriptions may help - but it looks like the search engines aren't able to see much information on the pages. Getting a title and description would be nice, but making the content available to the search engines will help a lot more.

[SanDiegoMedia]

Can you elaborate on that one a bit?

[Matt B]

Sure,

If you search for "surefire" on surefire.com, there is no snippet of information listed with the links of the site. Google tries to return information related to the search query from the text on the page. My guess is that the Google spider is unable to read the content on those pages.

[Matt B]

As an example - contrast the previous results with this site query from imdb.com,

site:www.imdb.com monty python (enter this into the Google search bar)

You'll see the difference in the page information with each page link listed.

[SanDiegoMedia]

Any thoughts as to why? I see what you mean.

I did a "site:www.homecontrols.com home" search on Google, and found that although there a lot of pages from the old site, most of the pages that are in our software do have information showing.

The only difference I know of right now would be the main page the domain is directed too.
http://www.surefire....r/16/sesent/0,0
is the main SureFire URL and:
http://www.homecontr...nbr/2/sesent/00
is the main Home Controls URL, do you think that the "0,0" could be causing problems for the G-bot?


edit: ofcourse moments after I post this message, my programmers tell me they removed the comma on the surefire site.

Edited by SanDiegoMedia, 12 September 2003 - 01:43 PM.

[Matt B]

I'm not sure if it is that simple of a fix - i hope it is.

It looks like the homecontrols site is doing better getting the number of pages indexed, but most of the pages still have no content listed in the snippet.

On a side note, you may want to evaluate your page sizes, your home page is 236K - about 200K larger than an optimal page size. Someone on a 56K dial-up would have to wait at least a minute to see most pages on either site. Google does not spider past the first 100K, (or at least doesn't report anything past 100K), other SE's have similar indexing limits.

[SanDiegoMedia]

Can you please show me where you're getting this file size from please?

[air-dog]

Hello Jeff,

With total respect;

Have you considered hiring the services of one the SEO's from this forum?
I think that your product would defiantly benefit from direct professional consultancy which would give it added value.

[SanDiegoMedia]

I handle the SEO for my company, the size of my pages that I have found is about 60k so I was wondering where he found 200k+ so I could take that to my designers.

Getting the opinons of everyone here would just help me in my process, and cover any bases that I've missed.