This list describes what we considered to be the top 10 SEO modifications you can make on your Miva Merchant 5.5 shopping cart software

1. Title tags - should be relevant and unique. By default the titles are usually the product or category name.
2. Description Meta Tags – These tags are what potential customers see in your search engine results. Consider the description tag your sales pitch for that particular item or category.
3. Keyword Meta Tag – Only use relevant and unique keywords here. Search engines know when you are stuffing them.
4. H1 Tags – Place H1 tags around your product and category names headers on your PROD and CTGY pages. By default they have bold tags. This is an absolute MUST.
5. Product & Category Names – Make your product and category names relevant and unique when at all possible. Embellish your product and category names to differentiate your products from the thousands of other stores online selling the same thing.
6. Category Header Descriptions – Make a brief, relevant, and unique a category description and includes images if possible and place it in the header of each category.
7. Product Descriptions –Make sure you describe your product well and allow the description to support the product name. Integrate other search terms into your description that you believe customers may be searching for.
8. Alt Image Tags – Make sure to put alt tags within your images so search engines know what the image is. Describe the image in a relative way. Usually people use the product name as alt tag or use something like ‘image of product name’. Adding a title element to your image tag will create a cool helpful tool tip pop-up.
9. Use Short Links – You should convert the long default Miva Merchant links to short descriptive links. This ability is now built into Miva Merchant as of MM 5.5.
10. Google Sitemap –Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Submitting a sitemap to Google tends to get your pages crawled pretty quickly.

BONUS TIP:

Create a blog to compliment your store (I recommend WordPress). Write relative content that focuses on your products or industry. Perhaps you could select a product and describe its different uses or tell stories about it. Google and other search engines have a tendency to crawl search engines more often than standard web pages. Make sure you have links from your blog to related items in your store.