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. (more…)
You can add a search box to virtually any page in Miva Merchant and it is very easy to do. You will have to have a little knowledge of Miva
page templates and a teensy bit of html.
Here are the instructions:
Figure out where you want to add the search box
Log into your Miva Admin
Find and edit the appropriate page or section of Miva that you want to add the search feature
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>
You can customize the button value and the search field value to your personal preferences
Now is the time to move your store to a different Miva Merchant web host!
Start off the New Year by saving your company some serious money!
We are offering Miva Merchant store owners 3 months of Miva Merchant hosting at $12.95 each if they allow us to move their store to Morditech. After that the price will be 10% less than our standard rates. You get everything you have now except more of it. Our hosting packages offer more disk space and bandwidth usage than your current web host.
This promotion is valid on new stores and multiple store transfers as well.
There are no setup fees or any other hidden charges. We bill quarterly or annually based on your personal preferences. When you pay annually you get an additional 10% off and we include a private business SSL certificate.
To summarize you only pay $12.95 a month for the first three months. Then you get 10% off of the standard price for the rest of the time you are with Morditech plus we will include and install a private SSL certificate.
Our transfers are hassle free and seamless. We move your store, files, email, databases etc. for you so you do not have to worry about anything and the transfer is seamless. Your customers will not even know anything changed. There are no hidden fees, extra charges.
To find out more information or to sign up for the transfer please click the following link, email us or give us a call.
Great content and keywords alone will not get you top search engine rankings. Your Miva Merchant store must be customized to cater to search engines to get optimal rankings. All the time, effort and money you spent on keyword research to maximize your organic search engine listing may be futile if the search engines cannot decipher your main keywords from your supporting content. If the search engines do not know what the image on your product page is then it will not show up in search engine listings.
The fact is that straight out of the box Miva Merchant is not completely optimized for search engines. For optimal search engine listing results then this service is an absolute must.
We do not use any tricks or information that is not readily available to you. We simply apply SEO basics and fundamentals to your store.
If you have good content but your web pages are still not ranking as well as you believe they should then the problem is most likely the structure of your Miva Merchant store pages. The Miva SEO tune up will make sure your category, product and storefront pages are dynamically generated and displayed with the best possible SEO fundamentals in place. If you already rank well the tune up should help you rank even further.
There are several SEO fundamentals that every web page must have in order to be ranked by top search engines appropriately. The most fundamental and important rule of SEO according to any expert is good, accurate, and unique content. Most of the other SEO fundamentals support the content of the page and is contained within the source code of the page which is why many times it is so hard to pin point why your competitor’s pages come up higher than yours in search engines.
Though we do not guarantee that your search engine results will get better it is very likely
The following is a summary of everything included with the Miva SEO Tune Up
If you would like to learn more about SEO with Miva Merchant please read this article written by Eric Mandell
Short Links - We will replace the long Miva Merchant product and category links with short links throughout your entire store. We will also make any and all necessary 301 permanent redirects so any and all pages that are indexed by search engines will not be missed or affected negatively.
Page Title Tags – We will Format and clean up the page Title Tags to display the category and/or product names or the contents of a custom field.
H1 Tags – We will make sure your category names and product names on your category and product pages have the appropriate h1 tags at least once on each page
Alt Tags – We will make sure your product images have the appropriate alt tags on the category and product pages
www 301 redirect – If your hosting server allows it we will set your store to redirect all traffic from ‘yourdomain.com’ to ‘www.yourdomain.com’ to make sure search engines are not splitting your rank between the two.
Canonical Links – We will create canonical links on your product and category pages to make sure search engines recognize your original content pages.
Google Sitemap – We will setup and install the template data feed module so you can create Google sitemaps and submit them to Google. We will show you how to do this as well. We will do the first one for you.
Google Product Feed – Using the Template Data Feed module we will create a google base product feed and and submit it to google. Although this is not part of SEO it will dramaticall increase your product views and sales.
This service requires the Emporium Plus template data feed module. If you do not already have that module we can purchase and install it for you for $39.50.
If your store is NOT CSSUI then this service will also require the Emporium Plus Tool Kit. If you do not have this module we can purchase it and install it for you for $46.95.
I found a great new plugin for WordPress that allows you to display your latest tweets in your sidebar, post tweets from your sidebar or within the WordPress admin and also automatically tweets your new WordPress posts. It seems to have everything you need for your Twitter and WordPress integration all built in.
The name of the plugin is “Twitter Tools” and you can check it out here: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
In addition you can add a twitter “Follow Us” type badge to your blog like the one you see here on the right of the page. I used WP-TwitterBadge but there are several out there that all seem to do the same thing.
WordPress 2.8 + allows you to automatically run updates from the WordPress admin. As long as you know your FTP username and Password you can run it automatically and it takes care of all the extra steps which save you time and unfortunate mistakes.
To run the auto update you just log into your WordPress admin and if there is an available update there will be a message at the top of the page when you log in that says something like this:
WordPress 2.8.4 is available! Please update now.
You simply need to click on the ‘Please update now.’ link and choose ‘Upgrade Automatically’. Fill in your ‘Hostname’ field with your domain name (example: morditech.com) then in the ‘username’ and ‘password’ field type in your FTP username and password (This may not be the same as your WordPress username and password). The connection type should be set as ‘FTP’. Click the ‘Proceed’ button and let it run. This process may take several minutes because it is doing a number of things including backing up, downloading the new version, and the actual upgrade with a few post upgrade procedures.
Be patient and let it run. If you run into any problems contact your web host and let them know. Usually if there is a problem it is just file permissions that can be easily updated by your WordPress web host.
You can change the number of items that are listed on pages within the Miva Admin. For instance if your store has hundreds or thousands of products you may want to see more than just 10 products listed when you click your ‘products’ link. I suggest changing the your ‘items per page’ to ‘100’. Doing this makes it easier to see more data on one page rather than having to click the next button 9 additional times to view the first one hundred items. Keep in mind that the more items you have listed on each page the longer it will take that page to load.
Changing the ‘items per page’ will affect several pages within the Miva Admin. Any page that dynamically lists items on a page for example: products, categories, pages, countries, orders, etc.
Here are the directions on changing your default ‘items per page’. This setting is per Miva Merchant Admin user.
You can change the number of items that are listed on pages within the Miva Admin. For instance if your store has hundreds or thousands of products you may want to see more than just 10 products listed when you click your ‘products’ link. I suggest changing the your ‘items per page’ to ‘100’. Doing this makes it easier to see more data on one page rather than having to click the next button 9 additional times to view the first one hundred items. Keep in mind that the more items you have listed on each page the longer it will take that page to load.
Changing the ‘items per page’ will affect several pages within the Miva Admin. Any page that dynamically lists items on a page for example: products, categories, pages, countries, orders, etc.
Here are the directions on changing your default ‘items per page’. This setting is per Miva Merchant Admin user.
Log in to Miva Merchant
Expand ‘Global Settings’ and click ‘users’
Click ‘EDIT’ next to the user you would like to change the items per page setting
This article shows you a little trick on how to export ONLY the products that you wish to update.
By default in Miva Merchant you cannot export only the products of your choosing to a flat file. you have the option of exporting entire categories or the entire product database. (more…)
There is a now a great FTP program that is available for free. The program is FileZilla and it can be downloaded here: http://filezilla-project.org/(more…)
This article shows how to create a Miva Merchant conditional that will check to see if there is any data in specific custom product field. If there is data in the custom product field then the product title will display the data in that custom field. If there is not input in the custom product field then the default product name will be used for the product title. (more…)
