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Hi Alana,
Your web designer can only set you up with a framework that may compliment your SEO activities, he/she can’t implement SEO. If they don’t understand the impact of site structure and design in SEO, you are already beyond help with these elements.
Byron gave you a really good reference.
If you read it, you will find it says almost nothing about meta tags and other on-page code elements.
The reason is that these can do almost nothing to help a shopping cart rank well in any moderately competitive shopping market and you are in a “biggie”.
SEO starts with research – to see what level of competition you are up against.
SEO then has to develop a plan to attract SE referrals. Try a few searches for phrases like “girls bikinis” and “womens swimwear”. A new site with little content has absolutely no chance of knocking any of the current top 10 pages out of the page #1 list. So, what are you going to do to side-step the 450kg gorillas that currently rank top for these phrases?
After strategy and planning comes SEO implementation. The single most important SE ranking attribute is content. SEs are trying to deliver the most relevant search results and the primary determinant since Google hit the scene, has been content or the words on a website.
On an e-commerce site, you need to consider the content of the different types of pages published. At the most simplistic level you have:
- Home page
- Product category pages
- Product pages
How many Home pages and product pages did you see ranking top 10 to the search phrases, “girls bikinis” and “womens swimwear”? That should tell you something about SEO tactics.
All titles, URLs, metatags, etc. do is help you point out to Google what words are important on a specific page. If you don’t have enough info on a page to start with, your page will be dead in the SE water.
If you have been told that SEO is about sticking keywords in these code areas, you have been given advice by someone who knows nothing about SEO.
Good luck and Regs,
JohnW
