SEO: H1 Tag, Alt Tag, Title Tag

[ajasko]

Do your product and category pages use H1 heading tags and Alt tags for the images? These are absolutely CRUCIAL for search engine rankings, and it seems to me after examining 7.0 that it does not use or have these options at all. Also, it does not put the Manufacturer name in the Title tag or heading tag for the product: the manufacturer name only seems to appear in a manufacturer link on the side. For example, for the sample product "Flat Panel Plasma TV" the manufacturer name "Samsung" only appears in a link on the side of the page. If it were to appear on the <title> tag of the page and the <h1> tag, so the full product name would be "Samsung Panel Plasma TV," this would make a huge difference for search engine optimization. These features of control over the title, h1, and image alt tags are very important, and I think would also increase sales, for many people looking for carts are very concerned about SEO. If you want to market AbleCommerce 7.0 for ecommerce and SEO, these features may be very important. At least, I know I always look for them when browsing shopping cart SEO feature descriptions. Is it possible to control these at all now, or will these features be added?

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello,

The title, H1 and alt text are all in the product page.

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<h1>Ecco Track Lite Boots - Waterproof Gore-Tex (For Women)</h1></div>

[Logan Rhodehamel]

We certainly take SEO very seriously. Part of our development cycle is to research and test various techniques to ensure that out of the box, AbleCommerce sites will do well in search engine rankings.

About two weeks ago, a demo site we had set up accidentally got crawled by Google. We ended up with two orders and a phone call asking about a shirt. To me, this is evidence that we are on the right track.

As to your questions, yes the default display pages for categories and products make use of both H1 tags and alt text on product images.

For example, this is from the source of the view product page on an example product:

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<div><h1>Le Chameau Neoprene Lined Camo Rubber Boots - Waterproof (For Men)</h1></div>

Alt text on product images by default will be the product name, but through the advanced images menu you can specify the text to be something else if you wish.

For manufacturer, it is true that we do not place that field into the H1 or the title. This can be addressed in one of two ways, either by adding the manufacturer as part of the product name or by modifying the product display code.

Also know that for SEO, we have gone beyond H1 and title tags. We have other features, such as URL rewriting. The rewriting feature allows search engine spiders to traverse the whole site as if it were static HTML rather than a dynamic ASP.NET based site. It also makes the URL address have the same name as the product, giving you an added boost with some ranking systems.