Are my templates affecting search results?

[Luddite]

Hi - My template layout looks pretty, but I think its negatively affecting my search results. The main reason for this is that most of the product details can only be accessed if the customer clicks 'details', and gets a pop-up. Would I be better off changing my template to accomodate more info so that the SE's can pick this info up too?

Also, the feedback i'm getting from many of my customers is that they aren't realising they can get more info by clicking 'details'. So , i'm hoping that by tweaking the templates, I can kill 2 birds with one stone i.e. make the site more user & search engine friendly.

I'd really appreciate your thoughts.

Nick
www.theperfectpad.co.uk

[Kermy]

Adding the product info into the page rather than a pop-up will benefit your search ranking, so long as you make use of your keywords properly. If your product info is full of description and few relevant keywords, it may have an adverse effect. You should try to pepper your descriptions so that keywords take up 3-9% of the page content ( go to http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com where there are lots of SEO tools you can use to help your keyword density and general page ranking).

[pinbrook]

You can also benefit by staying with popups.

2 things to do

1 Go to 'Design | Text' and click 'Go to'. Go to 'Phase: -1' and 'ID: 2175'. The prompt there reads: javascript:ShowPopUp('%s',%s,%s);

change it to
%s" onclick="ShowPopUp(this.href,%s,%s);return false;

this makes your popup spiderable by SEs

2 within the popup template add this line

<TITLE>NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTNAME</TITLE>

[george]

Good tip Jo. You could still do much more with yer page titles my son.

[Kermy]

this makes your popup spiderable by SEs

Nice idea, hadn't thought of that. But...surely you would want search results to take the user to the actual page with Add To Cart options rather than a plain info box..?

[pinbrook]

We use this with surf-wax, but within the ext-infobox we also put a couple of link backs

one to the index page and one back to the product to buy.

I think there are threads describing how to put the add to cart on the ext info box

[Luddite]

Thanks to all for your help:

Kermy - thanks for your suggestion - I'll check out the website you suggested

Jo - As always - big thanks. I've implemented the changes you suggested. When I added '<TITLE>NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTNAME</TITLE>, i'm assuming I should have seen a difference on the pop up (which I didn't). The file I changed was site1/Act_InfoPopup. I like the idea of 'add to cart' within the pop-up, and links back. I found the thread that dealt with this but the link (to Normans site) seems to be broken now. Perhaps if Norman/anyone can point me in the right direction?

George - you're not wrong. I made a few changes last time this subject cropped up but presumably ran out of time/will to live/that sort of thing. What do you suggest - more product specific?

I think i'm going to implement all 3 suggestions. I need to make my site more visible, and ultimately start making a living from all this!

Nick

[AJReading]

As mentioned above, if you change your popup code like soo....

Go to 'Design | Text' and click 'Go to'. Go to 'Phase: -1' and 'ID: 2175'. The prompt there reads: javascript:ShowPopUp('%s',%s,%s);

change it to
%s" onclick="ShowPopUp(this.href,%s,%s);return false;

Then search engines will be able to access them.

Make sure that you use the robots meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

This will ensure that your pages are indexed and all links on the page will be followed. So even your popups will reach the search engines

[Luddite]

As mentioned above, if you change your popup code like soo....

Go to 'Design | Text' and click 'Go to'. Go to 'Phase: -1' and 'ID: 2175'. The prompt there reads: javascript:ShowPopUp('%s',%s,%s);

change it to
%s" onclick="ShowPopUp(this.href,%s,%s);return false;

Then search engines will be able to access them.

Thanks - done this already

Make sure that you use the robots meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Where do I put that?

[pinbrook]

Make sure that you use the robots meta tag:

you don't need this tag as follow and index are the default behaviour

[AJReading]

If you load your "Act_Primary.html" file you should see at the top somthing like this.
Simply slot it in next to the other meta tags as ive shown (in red)

Any Meta tag must be placed between the <head> and </head> tags to work correctly, anywhere there is fine...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
<!-- Primary HTML begin -->
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
NETQUOTEVAR:PAGETITLE
</TITLE>
<Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="NETQUOTEVAR:BASEHREF"/>
<META NAME="ACTINICTITLE" CONTENT="NETQUOTEVAR:PAGEHEADER">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<!--@act NETQUOTEVAR:HEADERMETA -->
<!--@act NETQUOTEVAR:LOADFUNCTION -->
<!--@act NETQUOTEVAR:SUBMITFUNCTION -->
<!--@act NETQUOTEVAR:P3PFULLPOLICYLINK -->
<LINK REL=STYLESHEET HREF="actinic.css">
-----------------------------------------------------------------------