Ranking with Miva?

How can I get good ranking w/ Miva

[KwikStang]

I have a site that sells performance auto parts. It gets almost no traffic and end result makes no money. I know the products I sell are very popular and prices are very low. What could I be doing wrong? Could this be cause I have Miva for shopping cart and Miva is not good with search engines? I am very open minded, Any help I would be very thanful.
Thank you for reading.

[juniperwasting]

Are you using just the Miva cart? Or are you using the entire platform?

I am not extremely familiar with Miva Merchant, but if you are just using the cart, it would not effect a spiders ability to enter and cache your site.

If you are using the full platform, and it is generating dynamic pages with long session variables, that might be cause for concern.

[KwikStang]

I paid to have most this site done for me. I have done some work to it but most I had no clue on how to work with the miva cart. If you would be so kind as to check out the site if you get a chance and tell me if there is something I might have missed it is <snip>. I have tried so many things and spoke to so many people but still have really bad ranking. I really don't know what else to do I am clean out of money and doing nothing but wasteing money on hosting and c/c processing. I wish I could at least turn a little profit=)

[edited by: Marcia at 4:50 am (utc) on Oct. 24, 2003]
[edit reason] No URLs, please. [/edit]

[juniperwasting]

You need to check out #13 of the Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com].

All I wanted to know is if in each page, the url has or has not a long string of numbers attached.

ex. www.site.com/home.html/10010-2001929292 yadda yadda yadda

[bunltd]

Hi KwikStang! There are several third party modules that can make a Miva Merchant store more search engine friendly. Google for Miva modules [google.com] take a look at the first two sites. We've used various third party modules for client's sites, they can really make a difference.

There are several modules, one that shortens variables in the links, one that creates a html sitemap with friendly links, one that creates a whole mirror of your store in html, and others. Just be sure to get the module version that fits your store version. Once you get them installed, you'll need to make sure the search engines find the new pages, sitemap, etc.

LisaB

[KwikStang]

Oh Sorry,

I don't know much of web sites. That why I thought it would be better if you looked so I would'nt steer in the wrong direction. Trust me I am not trying to promote my site. I am just trying to fix it=)

[juniperwasting]

Just a small point, you have a ton of images, flash, and navigation. I did not see much real content, verbage, text. Search engine spiders don't see images. They read content.

[KwikStang]

Great,
thanks for all your help. I will for sure check out the miva add ons. Anything else I should look into.

[juniperwasting]

Have a good look [webmasterworld.com...] here.
Not Miva specific, but just good solid SEO thought.

[bunltd]

juniperwasting, that's what I noticed too. Something else I noticed: splash page with little on it, except a choice of flash or html to enter the site... Some real content (meaning text) on the main page would go a long way toward making the search engines happy. It'd be a good place to place your store map links after you've created them. :)

Seems like you have to make a lot of clicks to get down to the individual product descriptions... that might hurt, since when you enter the store, you can't really tell what all is available aside from the listing of makes.

LisaB

[ezwebdesign]

What the others have said about your site, I agree with. You probably spent a bunch of money on all the fancy flash. That money would be better spent on SEO. I know those flash experts charge big bucks and I think flash is great, if you already have established traffic or not looking for great traffic.

I am not an expert but I have learned that there are somw simple things you can do to help improve your rankings in places like google. When I used to design sites for small businesses, I had no clue on how to optimize sites for better rankings. But now that I do some ecommerce type stuff, I have learned how to optimize by reading "how to" in forums like this one.

One thing I have found out that "pretty" sites look good but I know a few folks with plain looking sites that are getting great traffic.

I bet if you ask your site designer to "optimize your site" you'd be paying even more out of your pocket. You might be between a rock and a hard place because you mentioned your low on funds.

Just my opinion of course :)