keywords for our site's 3rd party order online provider

question about what keywords to provide 3rd party

[learning]

Our corporate site just started using a 3rd party for 1)ordering our products online and 2) creating a product catalog that integrates to the purchasing funtion. These elements hot link from our corp. site to the 3rd party's domain/our corp id. Question: I have eliminated existing most corp. site product pages because info now included in catalog -- even though there's enough html text and meta keywords to get search hits. But...the 3rd party text is trapped as graphic, not html text. Plus, they have no meta keywords attached to our files in their domain. They have agreed to insert meta keywords provided by me. My point: is there a downside to search engines picking up meta keywords, when the 3rd party catalog page text is not in html format?

[WebGuerrilla]

Hi Learning,

Welcome to WmW.

My first comment would be is that you shouldn't eliminate the product info from your corporate site. If your original pages are text based and they have the potential to rank well, you would be better off reformating them so someone landing on them could simply click through to the third party provider to make a purchase.

If, for some reason that's not an option, then you will probably need to do more than just send them some meta tags. (You can find several other threads in this forum that discuss the limited value of meta tags).

Along with having to deal with the copy being presented in graphic format, you might also have problems with the outsourced catalog being dynamic, which will prevent most spiders from crawling it.

Another downside to removing the content from your site is the fact that you loose the potential popularity benefit of inbound links and directory listings. If your company sells "blue fuzzy widgets" and you are listed in ODP, Looksmart, and Yahoo in categories related to blue fuzzy widgets, your product pages will rank better from your own domain.

All in all, you'd probably be better off if you focus on converting your product pages into content rich information pages and use them as the cornerstone of your SEO strategy.

[learning]

Thanks so much. Our organization is just starting to branch out into e-commerce, and your insights are very enlightening. Looks like I have some work to do. Thanks again.