search engine traffic

[bristweb]

i just wanted to post a testimonial to 3dcart optimization: with some solid effort can produce very good results.

we just turned on the website to the public to allow search engines to index. this is a brand new site with zero search engine history or credibility. search engines are already sending dozens of visitors per day for very competitive keywords.

this was much more than expected, most of the website isn't even indexed yet and has no pagerank! certainly a few dozen visitors a day is nothing amazing, but at this stage of the game for a brand new website, this is very reassuring. also, traffic is almost all google. most other SE have not picked up the site yet.

thank you 3dcart!

[ScribeTime]

Before switching our site back in October, most of our visitors came from MSN - Google didn't pay us much attention. After we switched to 3Dcart - Google quickly became our number one traffic source - providing approximately 55-70% of our traffic. I attribute much of this also to the search engine friendly nature of 3dcart and allowing so many opportunities to optimize our sites - especially seeing how quickly we were able to notice the jump.

I second the thanks!! We have a lot of work left to do - but it helps having a great infrastructure.

[ontiltcasinogear]

thats great for you guys!

what do you think, especially scribetime is the main difference?

[ScribeTime]

I think the main differences between 3Dcart and our previous cart for our site have been 1) the Search Engine Friendly HTML URLs with 3Dcart and 2)the ability to customize the meta tags for individual products.

Regrettably, we haven't done a great job of maintaining our linking program (i.e. adding new relevant links or actively seeking links from other sites) since switching last October. I know it doesn't mean that sites haven't added our link to their sites (that would be great), but since we haven't worked much on this since switching, I can't really attribute linking to the jump in traffic.

We still have such a long way to go and so much work to do. Traffic is no where near where we want it to be, but the improved indexing and traffic from Google was great to see.

Like I said, just glad to have a good shopping cart infrastructure in place that is search engine friendly like 3Dcart.

[wackyjazz]

Hey Scribe..

Your other cart now has friendly URLs...

I will say my 3D carts started off good, but traffic has really been down this past month. Since this is a new site, new domain, I am not waving any flags just yet. I now have an affiliate program set up for my 3D site so we will see how it works. Just FYI...all four of my sites Go*gle is the primary source of traffic. Since MSN/Live did whatever they did..my traffic has all but dissapeared.

Like some of the other statements, i like the SEO this cart can do.

I think the main differences between 3Dcart and our previous cart for our site have been 1) the Search Engine Friendly HTML URLs with 3Dcart and 2)the ability to customize the meta tags for individual products.

Regrettably, we haven't done a great job of maintaining our linking program (i.e. adding new relevant links or actively seeking links from other sites) since switching last October. I know it doesn't mean that sites haven't added our link to their sites (that would be great), but since we haven't worked much on this since switching, I can't really attribute linking to the jump in traffic.

We still have such a long way to go and so much work to do. Traffic is no where near where we want it to be, but the improved indexing and traffic from Google was great to see.

Like I said, just glad to have a good shopping cart infrastructure in place that is search engine friendly like 3Dcart.

[bristweb]

thats great for you guys!

what do you think, especially scribetime is the main difference?

i have also worked with

• mivamerchant
• monstercommerce
• oscommerce / creloaded
• virtuemart
• maybe another i'm forgettin?

the difference?

miva - very old, very costly to buy addons to do anything, VERY cumbersome
mc - from a design and seo standpoint, i couldn't do one tenth of what i can do with 3dcart. i HATED their customer service
osc - very old, very cumbersome. but it is free and has unlimited flexibility, but very difficult to achieve anything...which essentially means you stick with the defaults unless you have a gigantic development budget
virtuemart - great free software, but not near the capabilities...and by the time you add in the cost to customize it, not even close worth it

[ScribeTime]

Hey Wackyjazz,

Great hearing from you. That's also good to hear that MC now has SEO friendly URLS. Regarding traffic (and sales), things really slipped for us this week. I've been wondering if Google did something different. But I'm hoping it's one of those "blips" and things pick up.

We're in the process of working on a new 3Dcart store (that was supposed to be open by now). We've neglected our existing store a little bit and have just done the bare minimum of filling orders and customer service activities. We haven't made any changes or done much with links. But hopefully we'll get it together soon and give both sites the attention they need...

[JLynn]

These are all such positive things to hear - especially since I'm getting closer each day to going live....

Quick plea for help...
If any of you can pass along web-reads/tips for learning about the search engines, keywords, advertising, etc. - kind of a like a condensed web101 for optimizing your site - that would be great as I'd like to do things right the first time and don't mind spend a little extra time reading online.
Thanks,
J-Lynn

[ScribeTime]

I subscribe to a daily e-newsletter called SiteProNews that I've found to be helpful, which can be found at SiteProNews.com

A couple of forums/sites that I've ran across are: SearchEngineWatch.com and HighRankings.com.

[bristweb]

i always recommend people that are serious about their business to attend a search engine conference. there are two good ones:

http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/

http://searchmarketingexpo.com/

sending two people would probably cost around $3k-$5k, but considering that monthly advertising budgets are often much higher, it is a great value.

[bristweb]

Update:

MSN just found us and ranked us #4 for a top keyword sending a hundred visitors per day.

[brian]

3Dcart stores do seem to rank well out of the box. I've A-B tested 3DC against other solutions and it does the best.

But remember, you need to keep up the SEO effort at all times. Website SEO is like tending to a garden. You have to add new plants, prune and water daily!

[MissHTML]

I've been doing seo for 7 years now. I started off when I was running my own graphic firm with webmasterworld.com and then along came seochat.com shortly after. I also subscribed to seochat's webdev newsletter which is very helpful. All of the sites I work with (currently it's down to around 7) are all on the first page for the most competitive keywords in their industry (including my own sites). It's actually not very hard as long as you keep up with reading and learning about seo, you can achieve great rankings. When we finally switched our trailerandtruckparts.com site to 3dcart, I was really worried that since there would be such a dramatic change (adding around 1200 more pages and changed page names, different layout etc. I thought the big G might throw us in the sandbox. Well, it's only been almost 2 months, and it hasn't happened yet, but I'm not holding my breath. :) If anyone has any questions or would like any help in this area, let me know, and I'll do my best to assist to a point. :)

[Razzaq]

Hi everyone,

Nice to fine the interesting place...

Thanks to everyone for posting useful information and links related to search engine traffic...


Take care

:)

[cekman]

MissHTML - I would love some advice from you on what to do for my pages. Since I changed to 3DCart my orders have dropped by nearly 40% - I don't think 3DCart has anything to do with this - the problem is that I have dropped of all of the organic search pages.

I used to be on the first page for MANY of my main keywords - now I often don't show up in the first 10.

I will check the sites you mention in your post.

I seem to to a little better on Yahoo searches - but terrible with Google. It is frustrating after I had worked my way up so well before.

Any basic advice would be appreciated - or if you have a link to an ariticle that you think is especially helpful then that would be great.

Thank you
CEKMAN