SEO and Opencart

I know several people have been worried about getting good SEO rankings using opencart and multistore, so thought I'd give all doubters some hope.

One of my stores, www.Gothicplus.com is in the top 8 results on google for 10 keywords- for 5 of them, I'm #1 My other stores are also ranking well, but since I just checked this one last night, it's my example.

I only use Opencart's 1.5.2 built in seo tools, no seo addons.

So how did I do it?

I took some time to develop a list of keywords I wanted to rank for (using google's keyword tool to see what was being searched for in my niche) and use them throughout the store - in product names, descriptions, meta data, category names, tags, etc. Most products have descriptions I wrote and probably 70% of the products on this store I also list on 1-3 other stores - the others are unique to it. I've been working on backlinks from dofollow and nofollow sources like forums, blog comments, etc, for about a month now. I have product feeds with google and thefind. I did htaccess 301 redirects for my most popular products and those that were posted on pinterest, etc. I have facebook page, G+ page and twitter accounts for it. I submitted my site maps via google and bing webmaster tools (using UKSB's feed extension). Not sure what helped the most, but I would highly recommend doing all of the above.

I've never done PPC or any other paid marketing or linking schemes and I try to find blogs and forums to comment in that fit my stores niche. I do not have a blog or youtube channel for this store, though do post products to pinterest and bookmarking/product discussion sites. I haven't created any static pages for the store either - it uses all opencart dynamic pages. Haven't done any article submissions for it either.

The opencart version of this store only went live in April (original store was up since 2004), so getting #1 rankings in only 4 months I'd say is pretty good And can be done by anyone really with time and no money.

Bravo

Now you are up there. The hard part is staying up there and as you well know, you cant afford to sit back and must persist in all avenues you are currently using.

A great success story for SEO with OpenCart, especially for clothing related stores as there many out there competing with you.

Keep up the good work and reap in the benefits :-)

p.s. your background on the above site would look better set to fixed rather than scroll on the body background image ;-)

Is opencart 1.5 more friendly to SEO than opencart 1.4? What's the difference between these versions?

A really perfect example of how easy SEO is to achieve. Some people make it so much harder than it needs to be. Congrats on getting your sites ranked highly in Google.

There's so much SEO quackery out there. It's refreshing to see common sense SEO practices being put to use successfully.

Thanks guys. That's why I wanted to post what I did and didn't do so people here realize you don't have to buy into one of those SEO schemes (a lot of which do black hat stuff that ultimately penalizes you) or spend a lot of money to do it - just takes some work and research.

And thanks UK - I did have my background image set to fixed...though it would have worked better without a typo putting fiixed instead lol.

Sorry genegrin but I've never used version 1.4 so no clue on how it differs.

labeshops, do you have the same issue like i do with the version 1.4.9.3?
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•Your site likely has canonical URL problems. For instance, you may have the same content on http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. That separation can cause lost link value and hurt rankings for your page. If you find external links pointing to both the non-www and the www version, use a 301 re-write rule so that all pages point to the same URL.
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Thank you.

No. I have a rewrite rule to make mysite.com http://www.mysite.com

labeshops wrote:No. I have a rewrite rule to make mysite.com http://www.mysite.com

Code: Select all

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks. I'll try to find somebody who can help me with this stuff. I'm not a webmaster.

Oh, i forgot to ask you. Did you solve an issuel with the title and description tagles too? Or every page has the same ones like the main page?

genegrin wrote:Oh, i forgot to ask you. Did you solve an issuel with the title and description tagles too? Or every page has the same ones like the main page?

Every page doesn't have the same title and description - or shouldn't. By default the title is your products title + site title and the description is whatever you type into the meta description box for that item, so not sure what you mean. I added extra key words in the header file after <?php echo $title> - Keywords you want (may not be the exact code - going from memory on this one).

Hi,

We have studied SEO and opencart user and developed SEO module.

We have covered all necessary requirement for SEO.

We have covered -

-Automatically Generate SEO word for products, categories , information page , images , manufactures .

- Convert all your links for SEO friendly like : yourstore.com/index.php?route=common/home to yourstore.com/home

-Multi-Language SEO URLs:

- Multi-language SEO Keyword generator
- Multi-language SEO editor

-Custom Titles , Meta Tag Keywords , Meta Tag Description

- Generate Titles , Meta Tag Keywords , Meta Tag Description for all your opencart pages including homepage,product pages etc

-Advanced SEO Editor

have a look our 'All in one SEO module'

Regarding 'boosting' the SEO, would you recommend on posting category descriptions for all my categories, or would you say this is not necessary?

Any text you can give search engines to find on category pages, etc, is a good thing to me. Ecommerce stores as a rule are image heavy so adding text is a very good thing.

labeshops wrote:Any text you can give search engines to find on category pages, etc, is a good thing to me. Ecommerce stores as a rule are image heavy so adding text is a very good thing.

Ok thanks for the input, thats what I figured would be the case.

I guess getting some keywords related to some of the main items in that category to appear also in text.

Best get my planning head on for the right content to add :-)

Andy

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk 2

Im assuming that it does not really matter if my SEO keywords for products etc have capitals or not?

eg gift-vouchers

or

Gift-Vouchers


??

probably not but I have no idea. I always use all lower case for things.

labeshops wrote:probably not but I have no idea. I always use all lower case for things.

As always, thanks for your help/advice again!

No doubt ill have another question or issue in the future to challenge the helpful people of the forum

Andy

great, so now i gotta start spamming another forum(s)

seriously though, thanks for the tips. def gonna get on these since my last facebook ads got me nothing.

anyone know if the meta fields are really even used much by the engines anymore? I thought last I heard they were pretty much useless from the olden days when people would just fill them various keywords.

moneycarlo wrote:anyone know if the meta fields are really even used much by the engines anymore?

The Meta Keyword tag is useless for SEO nowadays.

bigchili wrote:

moneycarlo wrote:anyone know if the meta fields are really even used much by the engines anymore?

The Meta Keyword tag is useless for SEO nowadays.

That is one opinion....