Though Google is not transparent about how it ranks sites, what is known is that a large part of Google’s ranking algorithm is based on the popularity of a Website.  They’ve been doing this based at least in part on links.  Now the truth about links is that they are very, very susceptible to manipulation.  Google has decided to fight people buying links, reciprocal linking and directory links, but in spite of this there remain dozens of ways to get links that have nothing to do with what another Website owner things of the site it is linking to.

At some point if their idea for personalized search takes off and they get a lot of people voting one site up over another it is going to become far to tempting for them not to add or even make this a primary factor in their ranking.  Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily, but many people believe it is an elite group of users who are most likely to use this feature, so an elite group may be determining what all are seeing.

The prudent thing seo is to start using this tool.  Vote your own site up and have your network vote your site up too.  As always be smart about this and how you do it.

SearchWiki for Increasing Visitors

One of the features of the SearchWiki is the ability to make comments about a site.  Those comments are available to anyone else looking at the results for that site.  Thus what you say and how you say it can play a role in getting other to move your site, or a site you comment on, up in their search results.  Obviously, you should comment well on Websites you want to make popular.  Another thing to keep in mind is that people like sites that other people like so more positive comments on your site can only help you in the long run.

Is Personal Search Good for Personal Use

Given the advice above about having your networks vote you up you might think that I am going to say yes, but in reality I don’t think this is the case at all. When you use personal search and the SearchWiki to move a site up or out of the list you move it permenantly for your results.  Do new better sites ever come along?  Yes, everyday and any user using personal search limits what they see. Sure you can log out of your account to see what the world is seeig, or if you’re like me with two screens and three or four browsers on your computer you can easily jump between the results.  The reality for most users is they don’t have two screens and several browsers and signing in and out of accounts is just too much of a bother.

Now that you’ve got my opinions here’s what Google has to say about their new SearchWiki

This post was originally written in March of 2008.  A lot has changed with WP e-Commerce in that time.  We’ve been keeping up with the changes and recently rewrote our WP e-Commerce SEO manual.

The post below may still have useful information, but certain portions like the title tag recommended below are no longer compatible, the manual is the most up to date information available.  In it you’ll learn the secrets to speeding up your cart, how to set your title tags, how to make those invaluable xml sitemaps work and much more.

If you want the items in your WP e-Commerce site to show up in the search engines, you are going to need to do a little work. This post should help to improve your Web site’s store rankings; however, read the disclaimer at the end of this post prior to implementing any of these solutions.


Title Tag

The title that WP e-Commerce displays is probably responsible for 85% of WP e-Commerce’s search engine optimization deficiency. If you fix nothing else you should fix this issue. My solution is to work with the title tag which actually resides not in the WP e-Commerce plugin files but instead is located in your theme’s header.php file. To find it you’ll need to have access to your WordPress files on your hosts server. The path will look like wp_content/themes/yourtheme/header.php (where your theme is the actual name like “Classic”).

Make sure you save a copy of your header.php file, before you modify it, to your computer. This way if anything goes wrong you’ll be able to simply upload the original file and revert back to status quo.

Open the header.php file and find the title tag which will look something like this: <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
Copy and paste the code on the following page in its entirety directly over your original tag from <title> to </title>.
<title><?php
function oGetProductName( $meta ){
global $table_prefix;
$query = “SELECT product_id
FROM “.$table_prefix.”wpsc_productmeta
WHERE meta_value = ‘”.$meta.”‘”;
$result = mysql_query( $query );
$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );
$productid = $row[0];

$query = “SELECT name
FROM “.$table_prefix.”product_list
WHERE id = “.$productid;
$result = mysql_query( $query );
$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );
$productname = $row[0];
return $productname;

}

function oGetCategoryName( $nicename ){
global $table_prefix;
$query = “SELECT name
FROM “.$table_prefix.”product_categories
WHERE `nice-name` = ‘”.$nicename.”‘”;
$result = mysql_query( $query );
$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );
$categoryname = $row[0];

return $categoryname;
}

if( is_page() && trim(wp_title (”,false )) == ‘Products Page’ ){
$pparts = explode(’/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],’/') );
if( $pparts[2] != ” ){
echo oGetProductName( $pparts[2] );
}
else if( $pparts[1] != ” ){
echo oGetCategoryName( $pparts[1] );
}
else{
wp_title (”); echo ‘ at Your Site Name’;
}
}
else{ if ( is_single() ){ wp_title(”); }elseif (is_404()){ echo ‘Your Site Name – 404 Error’;
}elseif (is_category()) { echo single_cat_title(); echo ‘ at Your Site Name’; }elseif (is_page()) {
wp_title (”); echo ‘ at Your Site Name’; }else{ echo ‘Your Site Name’; }
}
?></title>

That’s it. Save the file and you’ve improved the seo on your shopping cart by a good eighty-five percent. *Note the above was worked out on the 3.6 Beta 12 release and may or may not work in other versions. The script has been worked out on WP 2.5.  You can see it on one of my most recent projects www.alpenglownaturalfoods.com



Search Engine Friendly URL’s / Permalinks

Earlier versions of WP e-Commerce didn’t support keyword rich URLs. It is unknown what if any effect this plays in getting your site ranked higher in the search engines. However, your URL is known to be an important factor in people clicking through to your site from the search engines. Also the solution is very simple so you might as well implement it.

Within your WordPress admin area you will want to navigate to “Options” if you are using a pre 2.5 version of WordPress and “Settings” if you are using WordPress 2.5+. From either of these you will want to navigate to “Permalinks.” Scroll down the page and click the “Custom Structure” radio button and enter the following:

/%category%/%postname%/

I recommend you do this prior to setting up any category or product in your shopping cart as more than one WP e-Commerce user has found that they had to go back and do a fresh install of WP and / or WP e-Commerce when they didn’t do this option first. In fact you may want to do it prior to activating the plugin. WARNING – if you already had content on your blog or site but haven’t been using this option you will want to carefully consider how to move forward as changing now will change the URLs, cause you to have 404 errors, and lots of other problems. You do have other options. You can have more than one install of WordPress on a site, you can do 301 redirects, etc, but any of these may be a bigger headache than they are worth depending on your knowledge and comfort with any of them.

Modifying Category Pages

One of the annoying and seo unfriendly things that happens on the category pages of WP-eCommerce is that it shows all the categories. This means if you are clothing store you could get, blouses, trousers, shoes and more all showing up on the category page in anchor link text. This can confuse the search engine about what the page topic actually is and lead to lower rankings.

To get rid of the word “Category” and the list of categories that appears on individual Category pages remove this code:

//include(”show_cats_brands.php”);
if (get_option(’cat_brand_loc’) == 0) {
show_cats_brands();
}

from the products_page.php. The full path of which is wp-contetnt/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/products_page.php.

The default menu set up for WP e-Commerce shows in your “Pages” menu, and looks like:

• Catalog
  • Verify your Order
  • Transaction Results
  • Your Account

From an SEO perspective this is very weak. Here there is already a solution provided by WP e-Commerce. Navigate to your “Widgets” within WordPress. This will be found under “Presentation” in pre WP 2.5 versions and under “Design” in 2.5 and above. There is a Categories and Brands widget and you can either drag this into your sidebar in the pre 2.5 WP or click Add in the post 2.5 versions.


Menu Header Title

This next piece may be a small SEO matter, but it is also a personal preference on presentation. The menu item using the above widget will read “Categories and Brands” in the header. You may want to rename it. I would. To do so navigate to the “languages” folder in wp-shopping-cart. wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/languages. Now find the file En_en.php open it and go down to the line that reads define(’TXT_WPSC_CATSANDBRAND’, ‘Categories & Brands’); You can edit the word “Categories” “Brands” to read whatever you like. Just make sure that if you are trying to use the ampersand “&” that you leave the “&” and that you leave in place the single quotation marks.

Update:

Here’s a revision to the title tag script that includes your category name before the product name on individual product pages. It was made at John’s request (see comments below) and I hope it helps others as well.

<title><?php

############################################################

## Custom Hack for wp-shopping-cart3.6Beta12 ##

## Just Copy this Section in between the <title> tag ##

## of your selected theme. Replace whatever code ##

## is in there. themes located ##

## at <wordpressroot>/wp-content/themes/<yourtemplate>/ ##

## Find the file header.php Mar.24,2008 ##

############################################################

function oGetProductName( $meta ){

global $table_prefix;

$query = “SELECT product_id

FROM “.$table_prefix.”wpsc_productmeta

WHERE meta_value = ‘”.$meta.”‘”;

$result = mysql_query( $query );

$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );

$productid = $row[0];

$query = “SELECT name

FROM “.$table_prefix.”product_list

WHERE id = “.$productid;

$result = mysql_query( $query );

$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );

$productname = $row[0];

return $productname;

}

function oGetCategoryName( $nicename ){

global $table_prefix;

$query = “SELECT name

FROM “.$table_prefix.”product_categories

WHERE `nice-name` = ‘”.$nicename.”‘”;

$result = mysql_query( $query );

$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );

$categoryname = $row[0];

return $categoryname;

}

if( is_page() && trim(wp_title (”,false )) == ‘Products Page’ ){

$pparts = explode(’/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],’/') );

if( $pparts[2] != ” ){

echo oGetCategoryName( $pparts[1] ).’ ‘.oGetProductName( $pparts[2] );

}

else if( $pparts[1] != ” ){

echo oGetCategoryName( $pparts[1] );

}

else{

wp_title (”); echo ‘ at Daisy Marketing’;

}

}

else{

if ( is_single() ){

wp_title(”);

}elseif (is_404()){

echo ‘Daisy Marketing – 404 Error’;

}elseif (is_category()) {

echo single_cat_title(); echo ‘ at Daisy Marketing’;

}elseif (is_page()) {

wp_title (”); echo ‘ at Daisy Marketing’;

}else{

echo ‘Daisy Marketing’;

}

}

############################################################

## Custom Hack for wp-shopping-cart3.6Beta12 ##

############################################################

?></title>


Disclaimer:
I hope the above is useful for you. Just understand that you use it at your own risk. I am not making any claims that it will improve and not hurt your rankings or break your WP template.

One of the improvements will better title tags.  In case you’re unfamiliar with title tags they are what show up as the first  line of text in the search results pages of any search engine page.  One of the factors for many search engines is in terms of how they rank your site is known to be how and where the keywords in title tags are placed.  Up until version 2.5 of word press if you did a standard install and either didn’t use a plugin that changed these for you, or didn’t manipulate the code (this is what I do) your blog/site name would always appear first followed by the title of your page /post.  Now that will be reversed.

This will be a good thing and it will help WordPress be better optimized right from the get go assuming you are smart about the names you give your titles.  I personally will continue to change the code for my WordPress installs because there is more that one can do with the title to improve search engine optimization, but if you don’t have the know how and can’t afford to pay someone to do it for you – what WordPress is offering is much better than what they’ve had before.

This isn’t the post I set out to write this morning, but while researching a title, yes I research titles, in fact you could call this behavior keyword search optimization I ran across an interesting little example of why some folks should slow down the trigger finger on buying pay per clicks.

Take a look at the image below:

In case the highlighted yellow is too small to read I’ll type it out here: keyword search optimization. Now notice that almost completely green bar on the left, that bar represents advertiser competition and with so many people competing for it you can guess the clicks are probably pretty spendy if you want to be at the top of the list.

The thing is that when you do an exact phrase match search for this term there are only 9,22o results. Only the first one is even halfway optimized. By this I mean it is the only one that uses keyword search optimization in the title, and it only does this after a couple of other words. Of course I say this assuming that you haven’t come to this page via search, when and if it works it’s way to the top, and I have ever reason to suspect that it will. Why I am so confident? Take a look at the Title in the browser bar, and at the url structure and at the title on the page and at the keyword density. Sure someone at Google could push it down, but barring that, this page with this low of competition almost can’t help but rise to the top.

So if I were adwords.google.com or allbusiness.com or any of the other advertisers that I see are paying for clicks for this term, I would really have had to give a second thought to optimizing a page for the term keyword search optimization. After all wouldn’t doing so generate a lot more credibility?

When I did an exact match search for “website” and the Starbucks site came up I was curious enough to view the link in Google’s Cache mode which among other things makes scanning for words on a page handy because it highlights them. This is what I saw:

What you may have noticed, and what caught my eye right away was that the part that says “These terms appear only in links pointing to this page: website

Want a gauge of just how important the text of links pointing back to your page are? This is it. In fact get ready for this, eight of the top ten results in Google for the term website don’t have the term website anywhere in the text of the landing page.

The other day I watched a little video where Matt Cutts, the SEO spokesperson for Google, suggested to Starbucks that from an SEO perspective “Starbucks Homepage” might not be the greatest title. At the time I thought it was funny that he was busting their chops and wondered what else he thought they needed in their title. I now have some suggestions. Here is my open letter to the Internet marketing team at Starbucks.

Dear Starbucks Internet Marketers,

Perhaps you have already heard from Matt Cutts that you have some search engine optimization issues. I am sorry to say, at least when it comes to optimizing for Google, this is quite true. It appears that you don’t rank in Google’s top ten results for the terms espresso, cappuccino or french roast. I haven’t had time to verify more terms, but based on this sampling I suspect that you also don’t rank in the top ten for numerous other caffeinated beverages for which you are so famous, though rest assured that you do have a top ten placement for both the terms coffee and website.Â

What can you do about this, well Matt seems to think that you have squandered an opportunity with the title tag on your homepage. You really might consider replacing the word Homepage in that title tag with one or more of the terms you aren’t ranking for. You could take the keyword stuffing route as some do and try Starbucks | Espresso | cappuccino | latte, but this could be considered ethicly questionable by some.   If you prefer the somewhat more subtle route and are really attached to the homepage thing, you could save a bit of it with a title tag like <title> Starbucks the world’s home for Espresso, cappuccino, lattes, and coffee</title>. Either of these might give you a boost and help those who don’t know that you exist on every corner to at least find your website.

That said, if you really want to work some magic (and if you’re tired of not showing up for logical keyword terms while showing up for irrelevant ones), you might have Jim or Howard ring up Sergey or Larry and ask them to fix their search engine algorithm which is turned up too high for anchor text links and not high enough for other factors like website theme, on page text etc.

Finally, if Jim and Howard are just too busy to sit down for a cup of coffee with Larry and Sergey, or vice versa, you could always consider asking some of the owners of the 163,000 links to change their anchor text. Clearly many of these sites are pointing back to your site with something like “Starbucks Website” in their anchor text. I bet for a 50 cent cup of coffee many of them would be willing to change the text in the link. I am pretty sure that Google wouldn’t consider this link buying, though you might want to check with Matt on this one. I am just throwing out this caveat because you would clearly be trying to manipulate their search engine, but really only in a way that would help Google and the website owners who actually want to rank for the term website, and of course you might also benefit in some small way.

Sincerely,

David Westbrook
Dew Point Productions

cc: Owners of the Other Top Ranking Sites for “Website”
President of the United States
Hillary Clinton
Choice Hotels
Subway
McDonald’s
Super 8 Motels