Disclaimers:
- Backlinks* are and will be (for the foreseeable future) the trump cards in SEO.
- Volusion has a SEO friendly architecture. Use it wisely and consistently.
- Engaging copy should not be a peripheral thought.
- Each business is different. These are mere guidelines and will get you on the right path. For detailed SEO audits which speak directly to your business or simply as a piece of mind, contact me.
Volusion Categories and Products
Product Name Short: Keep it short and to the point with only the most specific keywords in the URL. If you have multiple variations hard coded in your product table (not in Product Options) like black, large, etc., try abbreviating or concatenating the word. You can take “white” and make it WHT, or black large and make it BLKLG. If you are using product variations the correct way, disregard this segment.
Photo_AltText: It’s simple, don’t try to get too creative and tricky here, just tell your users, Google images and all the other little image crawlers what this is.
Meta Tag Title: Be very specific. There is a time and place for everything. Do not “keyword stuff”! There are plenty of chances for you to optimize all your spaces. Try adding a pipe to make it easier for the user to separate your brand from the product. This does not have a huge impact in SEO but if you can do it, do it.
Example: <title>Volusion SEO | Schawel.com</title>
Meta Tag Description: You should make this all one sentence. I would not simply copy the “client side” description and stick it into the meta description. Remember, Google truncates this information after about 64 characters. Try and get all the important stuff in the first few words and get to the point. Remove all the marketing fluff (language) like hot, most popular, best, etc. When doing massive imports, this may need a customized MS Excel or Numbers rule.
Meta Tag Keywords: Keywords won’t work well if they are not comma separated. The formatting for keywords is simple. You can only have at most 3 words strung together and then you must separate them with a comma. Do not include a bunch of category specific keywords here. There is a time and place for everything and this is the time and place for product specific data. Also, don’t spend a tremendous amount of time here. This area has not been used by Google for a long time now. There are various other engines who still use it, but Google (at the time of writing) has the bulk of the market share online.
Product Description: There is a little something you should know about Volusion. For the product name, Volusion uses FONT tag for all it’s products. It looks like this in the code: <font class="productnamecolorLARGE colors_productname">Your Product</font>. You can’t change that code. All you can do is write .css styles for the tags. This is not forward thinking, semantic SEO code, but that is how Volusion hard coded it (up to V5). Work around it by adding H1 tags in the product description field. Something like. <h1>Your Product Detail right above all the product description copy.
Manufacturer Logo: This is a little sumpin’ sumpin’ if you actively use and show the manufacturer logo on your products. This value will end up being the alt text of the logo.
Guidelines for Volusion Articles
Create a naming convention and sticking with it is crucial. Volusion has some friendly URL rewriting of everything Articles.asp. http://www.yourstore.com/Articles.asp?ID=123. That’s record 123 in the Articles Table in the Volusion DB. There is a much smarter way to write URls:
http://www.yourstore.com/Big-Pun-a/123.htm
This gives you some valuable anchor text for your articles. Make sure to follow the Volusion guidelines for Article rewriting and inject the article title in the URL. You can then tell the SEs not to crawl Articles.asp in the robots.txt. Delicious.
For all the other Meta data, follow the guidelines from above.
Article Body: This an easy one. Write creative, engaging copy (like products and categories) and prefix it with an H1 title. Currently, the Article.asp title encapsulates the title with a <b></b><br> – not a very semantic way to go. Get the H1 or other HTML headers into that space.
Note: If you picked underscore “_” with your SEO node in Volusion, stick with what convention. If you picked dashes “-”, well, go with dashes.
Misc. Guidelines
See the 404 Error, Robots.txt attack file and get friendly with Google Webmaster Tools.
Make sure your web "person" (masters are so passé) edits the CSS to increase the font-size and line-height for humans. Most Volusion stores are 10-12px Helvetica, Arial or Verdana. Ouch. Make some edits, it’s easy.
*There are a plethora of ways to earn backlinks. That’s a whole different post and beyond the scope of this SEO post.
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13 Comments (Leave a Reply)
Thank you, this works perfectly!
Since this is specifically for all the black magic that happens within the Content_Area, put this in the Content_Area.css file.
Thanks for the snippet!
Where exactly do I put this though? I’m not the best with code, but I can get by…
Sure.
#content_area form table tbody tr td font.productnamecolorLARGE {
display:none;
}
Thank you for the helpful insight on product tags! I wrongly assumed Volusion would utilize this in the Product Name…
Now that I’ve started adding the tag in the “Product Description Above Pricing” section, I would like to get rid of the default Product Name displayed on the product page. Having the Product Name repeated in an tag is too much. I noticed you removed the product name on one of the websites you did muratoridesigns.com.
Could you tell me how you accomplished this?
I am using “variations” to mean product options. (size, color, etc.). If the variations are hidden, children products, then disregard. They will never show up in the URL. Only the parent product will.
Onwards…
Basically, some users create these verbose link titles or URLs. Most of the time you won’t SEO for “white” or “large”. They will simply be “somethingcool-wht-lg” in the URL. Keep it simple.
I am loading Volusion data for the first time. I appreciate the help with SEO, but I do not understand this statement below:
If you are using product variations the correct way, disregard this segment.
Their knowledge base does not list “variations”. If you are using that in a generic way, what do you include in that term?
What I am referring to is It looks like this in the code:
Your Product.This is HTML with an inline .css style. If that means nothing to you, then you may want to do a bit of HTML and CSS reading in order to manage your store’s design more effectively.
Basically, what this blurb was about is giving more SEO weight to the product pages. There are HTML tags called
and. Putting product names and other relevant keywords between these tags gives your page more weight. I hope this helps you.Can you explain what you mean by this? what is the benefit? this is totally new to me. Should i learn how to write in this language (i’m assuming this is html)?
sorry if this is an amateur question, but i am one.
Product Description: There is a little something you should know about Volusion. For the product name, Volusion uses HTML tags for all it
Before I could give you any sort of help, it’s best to start with a list of business requirements. What are those? Well, they are simply this…
Make sure that you write down all the functions that are important to your business. Forget about platforms for a second and really concentrate on what you do well and how you can use the software to augment/support/broadcast that. Seriously, write down what you do really well and then start to pick functions that would help you do it better. The functions could be anything from a fancy CMS to a lead/sales system or an up-sell node in your cart to a ultra advanced search application.
Once you have this simple requirement document created, you can then begin to look at other platforms; be that Shopify, Magento, Interspire, etc., etc.
I have been disappointed with Volusion lately and am thinking about switching to Interspire’s Hosted Cart: big Commerce….any thoughts and comparisons?
Tele Technology digs your article. You hit the button on a lot of this. SEO is certainly a lot more simple than it is mystical.
Volusion is great solution for online ecommerce store.. It has many in built features making it to best shopping cart in the market.