V6 to V7 Catalog comments

[Steven Barkess]

Hi

I have been using V6 for the last year and have been pleased with the level of customisation that I have been able to acheive with it.

However, one functional thing that I want is to display a product in multiple sections. A competitor of mine shows say product X in a product table, but the product has its own seperate page too. That seperate page is always the page that is displayed when you search on Google rather than the page with the product in the table. This is the main functional difference for me in V7. But, 2 questions

1. Am i write in assuming that search engines will prefer product X in its own page (assuming the page name includes the product name), does this aid listings (I often note that in the competior example, they may be highly listed but still have a low page rank)

2. Whats the feeling for the upgrade from V6 to V7. A lot of sites I have seen look a lot more professional and harder to spot that they are Actinic builds which is a good thing. Have peopled been delighted / dissapointed with the upgrade.

Actually, a 3rd question re V7. It doesnt accomodate html emails yet? Not worried about creating customised ones, but mainly order received / shipped.

Steven

[BPJSURF]

Is it worth the upgrade from version 6 to version 7? The fact that page titles are easily defined in version 7 justifies the upgrade cost IMHO. Being able to better define the page titles can make a huge impact on your search engine results.

Building a more professional looking site that has better merchandising of your catalogs products can also increase your page rank as well as search engine results.

1. Somewhere in this forum I posted about cataloging a single product per page. If you build your page html (section, product and primary templates) correctly and set up a single product per page you will often find your products listed very high in google if a product name is used in a search.

Page rank is a measurement used by google. Page rank has more to do with text content, link content and link popularity. Often an index page may have a higher page rank then other pages in a catalog or informational page. A search engine may give a page number one spot with a page rank of 2 and number two spot to a page that has a page rank of 6 if the "page 1" has more relevant content consistant with the search request by the browser. (god thats confusing)

2. Sites are improving with the versions because people are putting more effort into building better professional looking sites with the Actinic product. The core design framework has not changed much between version 6 and version 7 (this is good for a simple upgrade path)

3. no html emails however there is additional flexibility in that you can customize more email templates in version 7.

I am baised and I openly admit that i am baised. However if your looking to become more competitive with search engines and internet marketing the the move to actinic version seven will payfor itself just in the new "page titles" feature added to the software.

Brian