DOes google not like cs-cart or something

I am finding that if I create a similar page/post on a product with perhaps even less text than that on my cs-cart product page, WP always outranks cs-cart



Also, I noticed that people selling the same product using different shopping carts always rank higher than me



The only way I can rank higher for a product is by adding backlinks but why is it that any other platform can outrank my pages without any additional backlinks as in the case of my WP posts?



Any ideas on how to improve things?



Thanks



B

I think CSS validation is the problem. I could be wrong though.

I feel pretty much same way…




[quote name=‘badmaash’]I am finding that if I create a similar page/post on a product with perhaps even less text than that on my cs-cart product page, WP always outranks cs-cart



Also, I noticed that people selling the same product using different shopping carts always rank higher than me



The only way I can rank higher for a product is by adding backlinks but why is it that any other platform can outrank my pages without any additional backlinks as in the case of my WP posts?



Any ideas on how to improve things?



Thanks



B[/QUOTE]

[quote name=‘badmaash’]I am finding that if I create a similar page/post on a product with perhaps even less text than that on my cs-cart product page, WP always outranks cs-cart



Also, I noticed that people selling the same product using different shopping carts always rank higher than me



The only way I can rank higher for a product is by adding backlinks but why is it that any other platform can outrank my pages without any additional backlinks as in the case of my WP posts?



Any ideas on how to improve things?



Thanks



B[/quote]

WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.



WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging.

[quote name=‘indy0077’]WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.



WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging.[/QUOTE]



Yes I know all this, but my point is what can we do as cs-cart owners?



At the moment cs-cart=more work



WP=less work

The quickest way to combat this is to use a landing page other then the cart index.



Use html to introduce your site and it’s advantages including as many key words and phases in H1 tags. Make it simple to navigate and stick all your external links to places like shopping directories on there (but at the bottom so your people visitors don’t stray away from your site to early). Don’t put any advertising on other these those small buttons at the bottom.



Make this conform to standards http://validator.w3.org



It’s easy to achive at least a google rank 3 and this will pull your whole site up the index. It’ll do that if your title, description and keyword match those in your shopping cart.



If you want to raise some products profile put section of text about those products on your landing page.



I’ve not yet looked at any specific area for the cart but general rules like pushing text up the top and adverts to the bottom will help. Also choosing the correct words for both categories and products will help along with not having too many subcategories. Remember google will only follow 100 links on a page at any one visit. If your best content is the 101st on your home page google might not ever even assess it.

Hello,



What do you mean by “landing page” and “cart index” ?



I’m not a pro web guy so don’t understand these terms. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hi, just registered last night, this is my first post at cs-cart forums. Current zencart user; circumstances may force us into something else. Been comparing cs-cart, prestashop, opencart for nearly two weeks. Here are the cart comparisons (homepage test) of the carts, with my zencart far right:



[url]http://gtmetrix.com/compare/FM9O25q6/ZiDqa8BJ/UxSNmRiI/5ZBI7Jed[/url]



Don’t know how long above link/page will last. But last night I tweaked cs-cart using prestashop as a guide and increased it’s “score”. Note that in my testing, although cs-cart still has a lower SCORE than prestashop, it’s ACTUAL SPEED has been faster than prestashop. Perceived speed also seems faster. But neither are as fast as opencart or my zencart. (Up to a second faster; like 10 cars lengths in a drag race.)



Anyway, SEO. Yes, one of my main concerns with any cart.



I would not use any cart that required some off-cart seo landing page for good seo results. I hope this is not the case with cs-cart, as I thought it probably the most overall beautiful cart.



We have several carts (all zencarts same general business). Our heavily paid-for-seo site destroyed the competition, right up until some google thing a few months back. We have a non-optimized zencart that is floating by itself, now usually beating our optimized cart.



My prommart.com site - using out of the box dynamic urls - can often rank first page google on a product page, sometimes at or near top. Slipping somewhat now, end of season. All but maybe 50 pages indexed. Perhaps if I actually did some on-site seo it would do better.



Validation is crucial, imo. My prommart should show green html/css validation. I’m always still surprised to see so many carts of all kinds - with beautiful professional templates - doing horribly on validation testing. I wonder what kind of ranking they have. Validation is one of the first things I check on a cart - and any proposed template.



So, my main question: How does the typical cs-cart rank with google? Can anyone post live google search results for some term?



Here is one of mine, should be near top (3d place my screen):

[url]Flaunt 8824 - Google Suche

I have always found cs-cart to be the best for seo. I have used other carts and ranked worse than with cs-cart. One of my main decisions to use cs-cart is based on the fast indexing. Almost all of my sites are ranked niche page 1, listing1 or 2 for my main keywords. However, I am in a small niche as well.

Load up with relevent keywords, I use "for sale, Buy in my title tags + keywords, make sure you have relevant text on your pages, homepage.



Patrick

I found that even a simplest and not very SEO optimized yahoo store (page displaying bunch of products) would rank higher than my c-cart SEO optimized landing page (with products). Must be something off with cs-cart.

Since “content is king” (followed by links-in), I wouldn't blame the cart for rankings…

I have to agree with the majority here. CS Cart does seem to hinder SEO.

I agree as well. Nice application, but SEO is very important. I rather have a cart with a bad ui design that helps rank my site to #1 in google, then a cart with a good ui design that doesn't. One of the main reasons I bought cs-cart was because of their cache optimization update. (Focusing on speed) It was good already that it had a nice ui, but their focus on optimizing cs-cart functionality was a + .



Note: Please vote for this add-on:

Header Tags SEO (CS-Cart Edition) - Add-on - Hints & Modifications - CS-Cart Community Forums



Will definitely help!

If CS-Cart hindered SEO, I wouldn't have a job.

It's high time that people investigated why and detailed how to improve it.

@jesse trouble is that most people haven't a clue as to “why”. They just look at their rankings. The webmaster tools tell some of the story but many people can't interpret what the real problem is.



Others want the cart to “think for them” which it obviously can't do. I think the cart does a pretty good job of trying to fill in the holes when info (like meta data) is missing. But from my experience, content is king, closely followed by number of links in. So someone with poor content, bad links, poor page speed, etc. will all cause rankings to fall.



I do not claim to be an SEO wizard. I just know there are basic things that don't change over time that people can do that will help them. But the easiest way is to buy a good book and read it on your next Dr. Appointment.

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1313864593' post='119965']

@jesse trouble is that most people haven't a clue as to “why”. They just look at their rankings. The webmaster tools tell some of the story but many people can't interpret what the real problem is.

[/quote]



(This is not directed at you Tony)



How a selected group of people can draw conclusions that CS-Cart's SEO sucks, merely due to their lack of knowledge is beyond me. I don't appreciate people making literal statements the CS-Cart is NOT good for SEO.



If the same group of people could educate themselves for a few hours a week, to review HOW SEO works (FFS - Use Google's own guides?), we wouldn't have to worry about people making grossly inaccurate statements, impeding CS-Carts growth, especially for those with perpetual licenses.



I've added two FREE PDF documents to this post, straight from the horses-mouth (Google that is) that will provide enough knowledge to get anyone off the ground. There are more factors than these, but for the love of god - READ THEM PEOPLE before you complain.



J.

search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

google-seo-report-card.pdf

Nah, that would actually require an investment in my business of personal knowledge and education. I’d much rather just assume the cart’s the problem than anything I might have done (or not done)! :-)

Most of business lately has been coming from Google searches. My products spider very quickly and on my more popular products, I'm #1 on the 1st page.

Here are a few things to improve SEO:-


  1. When using blocks with wrapper such as mainbox wrapper.

    Example: Featured Products, if you check source code you will notice this uses html H1 heading tag - this tells google and other search engines what the page is about. So to improve search results you should only have one H1 heading on a page. On your home page include H1 heading which tells humans and search engines about your page. Product page titles are already H1 tags. But if you include other blocks (Featured Products, Other Customers Bought etc.) then these should not have H1 heading.



    To get overcome this problem in customer/blocks/wrappers simple create a new template file called mainbox_simple_h3.tpl, and copy code from mainbox_simple.tpl to this file. In this file (mainbox_simple_h3.tpl) change the

    and

    to

    and save file. Then in for example Feature Products block select wrapper mainbox_simple_h3.



    This will ensure you only have one H1 header tag on a page, which will improve search engine results.


  2. Make sure you have good product description with keywords mentioned, but do not repeat keyword too many times.


  3. Make sure you have a meta description (not exceeding 140 characters), and Page Title


  4. For images make sure you include Alt text


  5. Using image for Add to Cart button may also improve results, for a category page keyword Cart can appear many times confusing search engines. How to change Add To Cart to an image has been on the forum in the past.


  6. Page Speed, faster loading pages are good for search angines as well as visitors. Make sure you have GZip or Deflate enabled for html, js, css files. Compress jpeg images to a level so you have no noticable perceived degradation in image quality.





    Using these techniques it is possible to get your CS-Cart products well positioned in search engine results.



    If you have Google Chrome installed you could try this tool: SEO Site Tools extension - browsing your site using this tool can give you useful tips ranking, links, Meta description, social media, tiltes, keywords and suggestions.



    Use the Google Webmaster tools, check your keywords significance.





    www.ecopolar.com

@ Adrian8… thanks for constructive reply.





John