SEO Guide for VP-ASP

Here are some top tips that can help improve your website's search engine rankings.

VP-ASP Setup & Configuration

Time spent on good configuration and setup will pay dividends.

Optimize at 3 levels, site, catgories and products. Use good quality, well written, content at all levels.

Chunk your content down and interlink it. For example, if your site sells cameras write some content pages about the different types of camera and their features (see how the BYZ VP-ASP content enhancements can help make this easy). Write content on technique which illustrates specific features of your cameras (like face recognition). Link these pages to category pages and specific product pages using the words people may use to search
for specific products (e.g. face recognition). Do the same with category pages. This will help the search engines build up a view of your site and products and it will help with their indexing and ranking of your pages.

Write good quality product descriptions. Include search keywords in headings and descriptions. Consider using the BYZ Keyword tool and Template fields to automatically create keyword links.

Pay special attention to headings and the first few words of product descriptions. Search engines often use these as their search results text.

Ensure that your category & product templates contain valid html (see below). Use heading tags for product names and alt tags on images. Use the BYZ keywords / templates to populate these automatically with your keywords.
Use heading tags and emphasis (e.g. use bold text and / or italics) in your product descriptions to highlight key words / phrases.

In meta tags use only words that appear in your page content. Use the BYZ keyword and template fields add-ons to automatically populate these.

Avoid using the same descriptions as your competitors, especially if you drop-ship or get product information from your suppliers electronically.

Eliminate duplicate content and Make Your Pages Search Engine Friendly

Use the BYZ Content Management Enhancements and BYZ Enhanced Product File Management VPASP Bolt ons to create pages with search engine and human friendly names and to handle duplicate content.

Ensure that you place links from your homepage to your category pages and from category pages to sub categories and products so that search engines can follow them.

Using Pay Per Click (PPC)

Find out what works by using PPC. Some people have great success using PPC (e.g. Adwords) but it needs careful mannagement and a close eye to be kept on results. It can also be a great way to assess which keywords / word combinations / offers work best. Use that information to optimize your site.

Make Good Your html & CSS

Ensure that your html and CSS are reasonably valid. Sites with valid html and CSS are easier for search engines to index properly. You can check for free at http://validator.w3.org. Note that the validation errors reported can be compounded, so the validator results may look much worse than they actually are. Due to the way VPASP needs to work some minor errors are inevitable, so concentrate on the more important tags such as headings. If html isn't your thing then we can help with this - its definitely our thing :)

Linking Strategies

Inbound links are important. Search engines place a lot of emphasis in their rankings about 'what you know' - i.e. your content and 'who you know' - i.e. who links to you.

Get good quality links from relevant sites and ask them to use your important keywords & phrases as anchor text when they link to you. Writing relevant articles and making them available to content aggregation sites as well as offering reciprocal links can work well.

Ensure to interlink your pages. It can help search engines traverse your site and can be helpful to your visitor navigation.

Avoid dubious practices - you will get found out.

Consider setting up an affiliate program using VPASPs affiliate marketing features. As well as the potential to generate affiliate sales the affiliate links will come directly in to your site creating valuable inbound links.

Use Product Feeds

Use product feeds in to search engines. To gain most benefit ensure that the product data you are providing is optimized (GIGO - garbage in = garbage out). Use the additional fields features in the BYZ data feeds to provide additional data, such as sizes, colors and weights.

Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps are useful because they give search engines a list of your site's pages. A plain html sitemap will work fine because search engines follow the links to your pages. The inclusion of an xml sitemap works really well because you can list all your pages in a file stored on your server and include all content, category and product pages. The BYZ Google Sitemap Generator will do this automatically.