Matt Cutts explains that Google does not treat DMOZ the same way it used to and there are only certain circumstances that DMOZ is even utilized anymore.

Watch this short Video for a more in depth explanation of the relationship between Google and Dmoz.org

Matt Cutts from Google answers this question in the following video.

This is how we did it in Plesk. In order for you to do this you will need the ability to create a sub domain, and use a .htaccess file.

1. Create a sub domain. Any name that makes sense will do. We chose ‘twitter’. You may want to choose ‘follow’ or ‘facebook’ or whatever makes sense to you.
2. Create a file named .htaccess with the following directives and then upload it to the web root of your subdomain. BE CAREFUL TO MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT OVERWRITE AN EXISTING .htaccess FILE IF IT IS ALREADY THERE. If there is already a .htaccess file in the web root of your sub domain then you will want to append the following directies to it.
   • RewriteEngine on
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^twitter.morditech\.com$ [NC]
     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://twitter.com/morditech$1 [R=301,L]
3. You will have to replace the appropriate information above with your information
4. Upload the file to your sub domain web root and test it. Make sure to test that your main domain name was not affected by this change and be careful that you uploaded the new .htaccess file to your sub domain web root and not your main domain’s web root.

Good luck, have fun.

We are now offering the ‘Ask a Qualified Miva Merchant Expert’ service which will save you hours of trial and error when you are integrating or customizing your Miva Merchant ecommerce store.  This service starts at $20 per answer that solves your problem. If your question is not so simple and requires custom documentation or extensive explanation then there may be additional cost but we will always let you know up front. Our expert advice can be given to you via telephone, live support, or email.

Why use the AQME service

The AQME service goes beyond the realm of typical Miva Merchant support. It is very different than the Miva Merchant Service Club and not like the Miva Merchant Tutorials at all. AQME offers answers to specific questions relating to Miva Merchant design, implementation, and customization and beyond. Although the Miva Merchant forum is great for finding answers to general scenarios it is public and viewable by anyone. That means it is impossible to ask questions privately or discreetly. All information exchanged with Morditech is confidential and kept private between the listed contact and our experts.

We have made thousands of Miva Merchant customizations over the course of 10 years and we have done countless full we design integrations into Miva Merchant. We know there are many ‘do-it-yourselfers’ that make beautiful designs but do not understand how to fully integrate the design into Miva Merchant or customize Miva Merchant to work for your specific scenario.

If you would like to hire us to do it for you the standard rate is $69 an hour.
If you have a question and you would like to get started click here.

Giving you answers to:

• Miva Merchant Customization
• Miva Merchant Conditionals
• Miva Syntax
• Best Practices
• Miva Merchant Installation
• Miva Merchant related problems, errors, or questions

This letter is to tell you that we recently settled Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations that certain of our privacy and security seals were deceptive. Among other things, the FTC, the nation’s consumer protection agency, alleged that our Privacy Protected, Privacy Reviewed, Business Background Reviewed, and Registered Member seals falsely claimed to consumers that we had verified the privacy and security of the websites displaying them, when, in many instances, we had not.

We already have discontinued these seals, so you should not be displaying them. If you are still displaying any of these seals on your website, you must remove them immediately.

You may continue to display the Verified Secure seal.

If you have questions about this matter, please contact Joan Herbig at 800-825-3301 ext

Screen Shot of letter sent to Control Scan customers from support@controlscan.com

Finally, there is a list of SEO recommendations to implement on your Miva Merchant store to make it more appealing to search engines when they crawl your site. Miva Merchant is not completely search engine ready straight out of the box. The Miva Merchant SEO recommendations made here are my opinions based on 10 years of experience working with hundreds of Miva Merchant stores. There is no guarantee that implementing these changes on your site will get you top search engine listings because that is mostly dependant on you and  your content and of course your competitors but I will guarantee that using these techniques will get you better search engine rankings than you have now.

Many of the recommendations that I suggest implementing are beyond the standard level Miva Merchant administrator’s level of expertise. If you would like to hire Morditech to make these changes for you we offer two services a ‘Miva Merchant SEO tune-up’ and a ‘Miva Merchant SEO Overhaul’. Contact us at eric@morditech.com or call 508-743-7758 for more information.

• Clean Design Code – The code search engines have to sift through to get to read your content the better. The Ideal way have less source code is by using CSS whenever possible. Using tables and standard html in your code is ok but you have to make sure it is formatted properly and all of your syntax is correct. There is software that crawl your pages and validate your code.
• Title Tags – Generally the first content on a page that search engines read is your title tag. It is important that your title tag is relevant to the particular page that the search engine is crawling. Make sure your title tag is what people will type to find this page when they do a search but do not overdo it because this is also the heading searchers will see when the result is displayed in a search engine. Just put in one or two keywords or just one key phrase and make it attractive to the searchers so they will click on it. If you stuff it with keywords then it will probably just look like spam to an Internet searcher. It may be a good idea to have your company name in your homepage title but it is not necessary to have your company name on every page of your Miva Merchant store. My recommendation is to remove the store name from your category and product pages leaving just the name of your product or category assuming that your product or category name is your optimal keyword. If you do not want to use your product or category names for the title then I suggest creating a custom category or product field and using that for the title. You could use conditionals that dynamically determine if the title tag should use the product name or your custom field. If you have additional information pages in Miva Merchant then I suggest changing your titles to reflect the best keywords for that page as well.
• Description Meta Tag – The description Meta tag is primarily displayed in search engine result listings below the title. The description has little to no affect on the actual search rankings but it plays one of the most important roles in getting click throughs to your site from search engines. Think of it as your sales pitch to get people in the front door. It should summarize the page and be grammatically correct and attractive. You have to make sure your Meta description supports your title tag and is relevant to the specific page that it is on. Your description should make searchers want to click on your link because it is exactly what the searcher is looking for. Even of your pages show up number one in search engines it is useless if no one clicks through to your site. Think about the search engine results you click on. Whatever it is that makes them attractive to you probably makes them attractive to other searchers as well. Use common sense.
• Keyword Meta Tag – Meta Keywords are important because they give the search engine an idea of what the content of your page is about and again make sure your keywords include what you think users will type in search engines to find this page. Miva Merchant lets you specify your Meta keywords per individual product and category. Optionally you can dynamically place your product and/or category name in the keyword list. I do recommend making sure whatever you use in your title tag is included in your keyword list. If you feel like you have to stuff your keywords someplace then this is probably the place to do it but I would not overdo it because search engines may not find the keywords specific enough.
• H1 Tags – You must put H1 tags around the category name on the category list page and around the product name on the product detail page. No exceptions. This one change alone should improve your search engine rankings. You should always have an H1 tag on every page. I highly recommend matching your H1 tag with your title tag and include it in your meta tag keyword list. If you use your product and category names for your title tags and you display the category and product pages within H1 tags then you will be in very good shape.
• Product and Category Names – Make sure to give your products and categories names that your potential customers will be interested in. And make sure the product or category name includes the main keyword or key phrase that you expect people will type in search engines to find it. Again, you should use common sense when naming your products and categories. The names should be short and sweet but you should also try to be unique. You may have to embellish the product name or category to make it stand out from other ecommerce websites that carry this same product.
• Product Descriptions – Your product description is going to be where most of your product page content is located. The absolute most important thing when optimizing your Miva Merchant store for search engines is original content and lots of it. This is another place where you really need to use common sense. The reason people use search engines is to find the specific information they are looking for so the more information you have on the page that is relevant the better. You should not stuff the content with keywords however because search engines will recognize that and penalize you for it, however you should you’re your keywords or key phrases in it. I recommend putting your keywords or key phrases in approximately once or twice per paragraph. Your descriptions should be informative about the product and it should be as specific as possible with as much detail as possible. The more specific and unique the content the more likely search engines will be to display your page results. If you sell products that come with stock descriptions that everyone else uses on their websites then I recommend changing, rearranging and embellishing the descriptions. Make the descriptions better and add value. Use your own words.
• Product Images – Make sure your product images have alt tags on them. Since search engines cannot recognize what is in an image alt tags help search engines understand what is in the image. I recommend using the product or category name as the alt tag for an image. You can do that dynamically within the pages templates. You should put in a title tag for that image as well. This may not have much of an effect on search engine ranking but it does help anyone using a screen know what the image is. Something else should do If possible is make the actual image names descriptive. Always use dashes when separating words in a file name, never use spaces, underscores, or any other characters. Aside from search engine rankings you should always have nice clear images of your products and categories whenever possible. There are studies that show customers are more likely to buy when a product image is attractive.
• Product and Category Headers – The category header area is a great place to put the description of your categories since there is no actual ‘category description’ field in Miva Merchant. Remember, the more information that is relevant and unique on a page the more likely it is that it will show up in search results. If you have an image for the category then you should put that in the ‘category title’ area of the category page template. It is not absolutely necessary to put in product headers because there is already a specific area to put your product description in. If you have notes or additional information about the product then you may want to put that in the product header.
• Short links – I strongly recommend updating your category and product links within the entire store to utilize short links with keyword pointers. This will put your keywords in the URL for each product and category as well as make the links to the categories and products easier to remember and navigate for the user. Some search engines have trouble reading long URL’s with characters in them like the standard Miva Merchant category and product links.
• WWW – redirect domain.com to www.domain.com or vice versa.

The point of doing this is so that search engines only crawl your site with www or only without. Search engines will see your domain with and without the W’s as two different domain names. You can accomplish this with an .htaccess file.

• Canonical links – Canonical links are a great way to avoid duplicate content complications within your site. There are sometimes several different ways of getting to the same link within a Miva Merchant store especially if you have implemented short links and/or other rewrite rules for the site. Canonical links allow you to specify which links should be recognized by Google and other search engines as the master content page so all ‘Google Juice’ is given to the appropriate page instead of splitting the credit for the content between multiple pages within the same site. There is a way to setup canonical links dynamically on your product and category pages.
• Google Sitemap – Google really likes it when you give them a sitemap of your entire domain. Even brand new sites are usually crawled within a couple of days after submitting a Google sitemap.  You should create a Google webmaster account, create a site and add a sitemap to it. It is extra easy and it is free. There are tons of other great tools within the Google webmaster area that can help you as well. Explore it.
• Google Base – Google Base is the product search for Google. This is a free product listing directory that Google offers to ecommerce stores. This gives you free direct traffic to specific products directly from a Google product search. There are Miva Merchant modules that will export the products for you in a format suitable to feed into Google Base. Generally the more time and effort you put into creating your export feeds the better the results you will get from Google Base. This is a spectacular offering by Google that most merchants do not know about or just do not use. The search results for Base are independent and complete based on the product information you provide to Google. Everyone is on a level playing ground in Base. Make your feeds as detailed and specific as possible and you will see results almost immediately.
• Start a blog – Google admits that blogs are crawled more frequently and quicker than standard commercial websites. As a matter of fact the same day that I wrote my first article for this blog I submitted the URL to Google and it was crawled by Google and was result number one for the search ‘miva merchant best practices’ amongst other searches. If you do not already have a blog start one. I recommend using WordPress because it is very SEO friendly straight out of the box, it is free, and it has more third party plug-ins than I could possible list. WordPress is easy to install and I know most hosting control panels allow you to install it instantly. Put in articles relating to your products like tips and tricks or frequently asked questions then put links to your products from the articles. That has a way of working out nicely with search engines.
• Google Domain Submission – If you just registered a domain name and it has not been crawled by Google then you should register your domain name with Google at this link http://www.google.com/addurl.html

The Miva Merchant SEO tune-up® is a service that we offer to store owners that will make your Miva Merchant store more desirable to search engines. We customize your Miva Merchant page templates using Miva’s Store Morph Technology. This one time service insures that your storefront, products, and categories are SEO ready by addressing and applying the following.

1. Figure out where you want to add the search box
2. Log into your Miva Admin
3. Find and edit the appropriate page or section of Miva that you want to add the search feature
4. Add the following code but make sure you do not add this code within a different form:
   <form method=”post” action=”&mvt:global:sessionurl;”>
   <input type=”hidden” name=”Store_Code”     value=”&mvte:store:code;”>
   <input type=”hidden” name=”Screen”         value=”SRCH”>
   <input type=”text” name=”Search” size=”40″ value=”Search Our Products”>
   <input name=”" type=”button” value=”Search” />
   </form>
5. You can customize the button value and the search field value to your personal preferences

Enter to win a Free Year of all inclusive Miva Merchant Web hosting with morditech here

There is no purchase necessary to apply and no fees or any other charges.

Here are the rules:

1. You must presently have a Miva Merchant Store and be willing to transfer it to Morditech if you win and are not already hosted with us.
2. You must use your real name and email address and have the authority to transfer this domain if you win.
3. 1 entry per store. A merchant with multiple stores can enter multiple times.
4. The store that wins is the store that must be used for the free account. You cannot substitute a store with a different domain.
5. The winner must transfer the store within 1 month of winning the contest. Don’t worry; we will transfer the store for you so you do not have to worry about the technical stuff.
6. The winner will be picked electronically at random. We will post the winning store on our contest page and contact them on or after February 1^st, 2010.
7. We reserve the right to change the rules at anytime. We will only change the rules if it is absolutely necessary and to make sure the contest is fair for all applicants.
8. Every live Miva Merchant store on any web host including Morditech is eligible to enter this contest.

CLICK HERE TO ENTER CONTEST

Fill this form out to enter the contest. Good Luck!