Big Cartel Store Description

This is a no-brainer. When you setup your shop right from the start make sure to add a descriptive, compelling description, under 128 characters, of your shop. This description, using the default theme or Sunday theme, is used on your site pages. This is the description that would be used first on search result pages. If you haven’t done it yet make sure to update this relatively new field.

From the Big Cartel announcement…

Big Cartel now automatically generates unique meta descriptions for each page in your store. For your home page, we use a brand new Description field we’ve added to the Store > Settings section of your admin area, so head over there and enter a good short description of your store. Go ahead, we’ll wait. [source]

Big Cartel Store Directory Image

It takes just a few seconds. Edit your logo or create a attention grabbing image that is 125×125 pixels and upload it now. Take advantage of being listed in this searchable directory that many people use to find interesting stores. Not like Etsy but it is pretty cool. Read more about the store directory

Use a Custom Domain on Big Cartel

If you have a domain name you purchased, make sure to use it with your shop. It is as simple as following some instructions to make sure you have a unique store url that doesn’t include bigcartel.com.

Using the Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Big Cartel provides statistics on product views and some other stats but you can go even further using the google analytics and webmaster tools. I would suggest setting up a google webmaster account and editing the LAYOUT page to include the meta verification tag.  You can even now point the webmaster tool to the new sitemap.xml file BC is providing.  From the Big Cartel Blog…

Your store now has an automatically generated XML sitemap located at http://example.bigcartel.com/sitemap.xml (replace “example” with your store’s subdomain). This is used to tell search engines about all of your store’s pages, and we now point to this sitemap from your robots.txt file. Don’t worry, if this sounds confusing just know it’s helpful and already working for your store. [source]

Build Inbound Links to Your Online Shop

This is likely the most important of all these items. Inbound links from other sites will always be better than anything you can do to your site markup. The more inbound links the better, as long as you are getting them from reputable sources. Consider linking from twitter, facebook and other social sites. Share your store url from popular forums you frequent and even getting friends in the same niche to write a blog post about your site with links in.

Conclusion

Building traffic is not easy. It takes time and effort. Make a decision to work on building links or improving your text one or two days a week for a month. I would say it takes a minimum of 30 days for most honest strategies to work. Don’t be fooled this can be done in a weeks time.

If you need help with your Big Cartel site I am available for hire,  hello@tonkapark.com

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If you don’t already have your own website domain and your storenvy.com is your only site out there, besides perhaps your Myspace, Facebook and Twitter pages, you might want to consider a few simple tips and changes to the templates to improve on the search engine optimization (SEO) of your store pages.

Since Storenvy gives you complete control over the design and content of your site you can improve on small things if you choose. Here are just 6 suggestions to improve your storenvy shop. There are others but I will save those for another day.

Product Descriptions

Write detailed product descriptions. Content is important to search engines. Add as much descriptive content in the product description provided when creating a product. Make sure to use phrases that someone might use to find your products not just keywords. Most likely you won’t rank #1 for t-shirt so use something like Christian T-shirt.  This applies to all shopping carts.

Product Tags

Add informative tags to your products. These tags show-up on the storenvy product profile pages and are used when searching from storenvy.com. Add as many as you need to. Think of what people will search for. Tags can be helpful on storenvy to add terms if you cannot find a way to get the words in your product description.

Product Type

Pick the appropriate product type. When creating a new product make sure to pick the right categorization of  your product. When a shopper is on storenvy.com there is a drop down on every page at the top that allows a drilled down search for a specific type of product. Pick wisely.

Store Description

Include a good description about your store in the store profile section. Now find the meta description tag in the Layout file and edit as shown below. This will use your store profile description as the description on all your site pages. Not ideal but better than just your store name.

<meta name="description" content="{% if store.description != blank %}{{ store.description }}"{% else %}{{ store.name }} Online Store Powered by Storenvy{% endif %}/>

Page Title

There is no reason every page should have your store name first. Really just the front page should. An idea could be to edit the Layout Template file. Go to the Design tab at your admin page ([storenamehere].storenvy.com/admin).  Select Edit Pages, then click on the Layout page.

Find this line:
<title>{{ store.name }} | {{ page.name }} | Online Store Powered by Storenvy</title>

Change to:
<title>{% if page.permalink != "home" %}{{ page.name }} | {% endif %}{{ store.name }} | Online Store Powered by Storenvy</title>

Use Tags wisely

For each product make sure to add good tags. These tags may not help with search engines like google but it will help with storenvy’s internal search engine that helps shoppers find your products before those in another store. This may not be necessary but to have these tags on your site, where at least yahoo reads them, find the meta keywords tag in the Layout file and edit as shown below.

<meta name="keywords" content="{{store.name}}, merch, merchandise, tshirts, shirt" />

Share your thoughts?

What helps your store show up better on storenvy searches and google searches? If you make any of these changes feel free to share a link to your storenvy store in the comments.

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1. Free Storenvy Theme Download
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Meta Tag Keywords should be more targeted

We probably didn’t focus enough on these the first time out. So we have refined the meta keywords for the site to be more targeted to local searches and make sure we avoid being lost competing for generic search terms such as vacation.

Before:

the lake of the ozarks, lake of ozarks, ozarks, osage beach, sunrise beach, camdenton, laurie, lake ozark, linn creek, missouri, vacation, rentals, boat rentals, marina, vacation planning

After:

the lake of the ozarks, lake of ozarks, lake of ozarks news, ozarks, osage beach, sunrise beach, camdenton, laurie, lake ozark, linn creek, ozarks missouri, lake of the ozarks vacation, lake of the ozarks rentals, lake of the ozarks boat rentals, lake of the ozarks marina, lake of the ozarks dining, lake of the ozarks restaurants, lake of the ozarks music, lake of the ozarks bars, lake of the ozarks nightlife

Reduce redundant links to add value

We removed the categories from the wordpress widget on the right sidebar from each page to highlight the important of the category links in the main header. This was in response to the comments…

the less links you have the more value/weight each one has to a search engine.  I would look to remove “categories” first since it’s just a rehash of the navigation – Al Maguire

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

We already had these in place. We are still so new that we aren’t getting great information from these tools just yet. As we advertise and get better known in the area and improve serp rank these should help us tweak additional keywords and links. We are being found in some searches now but we hope to utilize both analytics and webmaster tools further in the coming weeks and months.

Navigation should mimic page flow

On thelakeoftheozarks.net we have categories for the posts. The categories are listed in the navigation bar across the top. Additionally on the front page the categories are displayed with recent posts for each category. We have tweaked the category order for the navigation bar and the category recent posts to match. We ended up having to use a wordpress plugin to get the categories ordered dynamically. Check out the Category Order plugin for more information.

Include a sitemap.xml file

We actually already have a plugin to automatically generate the sitemap.xml file and submits it to the major search engines. Unfortunately, we are using Capistrano-Wordpress deployment strategy I wrote about, to deploy the Ozarks website. This means that some files get deleted if they aren’t saved in the shared folder.  At this time the sitemap.xml is not linked to the shared folder so it is lost when we deploy a site update.  The easy fix is to force a regeneration of the sitemap so it exists when the search engine crawlers come. Additionally, I could simply edit the recipe in the deploy.rb file to include the sitemap file in the linked shared folder.

Embrace SEO cheesiness

This is a great tip for SEO. Basically find the keywords to target and get them into the links and navigation throughout the site. We already do this some but we don’t take it to the cheesy level that I think is being suggested. So we took a first step to change the category slugs. In doing this we also made sure to utilize the WordPress Redirection plugin to avoid any 404 errors since some of our pages had been indexed already. The new slugs add the term lake or ozarks to give some more cheesiness. It isn’t over the top but it is a little something we hope helps moving forward.

Place meta tags just below title tag

The tip, “move the meta tags (that SEO pack from Semper Fi) to below the title tag“. Unfortunately, since we are taking advantage of a wordpress plugin to simplify the SEO tags for all pages and posts in our wordpress site we are stuck with the current state. The plugin hooks into the wordpress wp_head(); function and is typically placed just before the closing head tag. So for now we cannot change this without additional effort on our part. Not sure how much this makes a difference but we wanted to put into place as much of the advice as we could from an experienced SEO who has worked on large scale websites using these techniques.

Summary of SEO tips

Basically some of these tips are technical or questionable in helping your SERP Rankings but what can be said is that it is critical to understand your targeted keywords and make sure your content is high quality and full of your keyword phrases. At the very least great content with targeted keywords will being to help with your organic search results.

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2. Lake of the Ozarks web services blog
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