OK – Another week gone by.  So what have we done for our LiveSEO experiment?

Lot’s.

This post is longer than I like,  so feel free to skim, but there are a lot of good details.

You may have noticed that we changed the  front page title from “Lovely Lingerie” to “Summer Swimwear” to match the trends as displayed on Google Trends for the summer.  If you do a search for swimwear and for lingerie in Google Trends, you’ll see that we’re heading into a high volume search period for swimwear, and a lull for lingerie for a bit.

In the same homepage box, we changed half of the links in the same box to be swimwear links, so we get half lingerie links and half swimwear links in that main box.

I think we should change out the image on the homepage to a women in a bikini.  What do you guys think?

And it looks like even an SEO expert can make mistakes…

I had to start redoing the page titles, and meta tags for all the category pages…. why?

Because the previous theme we were using had them all set, and the new theme changed it, and I didn’t even notice… If I was working this site on a full-time basis, I’d have noticed it much sooner (in a matter of days).

It was checked off my list as done for stage one, so I didn’t even check that part out. I found it while doing research for another site I was analyzing, and realized that my own site was not where I thought it was.

BTW – checking Google’s Webmaster tools on a regular basis will help you identify these things, if you look closely.  I had switched my link structure, and had thousands of errors for a few weeks, and didn’t see the other problems that were in their.

We added an SEO plugin for ZenCart called Simple SEO that makes the ugly links pretty – look at some of the links on the lingerie site, and take a look at the links of some of the products.  The links have the title in them if they are a product, or just made really simple for things like the features page or specials page.  This are easier on the eyes, and Google is able to weigh them better in your favor, since there are words to analyze in the url.

Now that the dust is settling of a bunch of broken links (since the old links no longer work) , it’s easier to identify problems in my webmaster tools account.  We’ll address Googles webmaster tools later.  Just know that every SEO webmaster has this bookmarked.

I’ve just completed the page titles, meta keywords and meta keywords for all the category pages.

Looks like the product pages themselves have OK title tags, since I’d created them to be a combination of the category name and the title of the product.  The meta tags will need to be done by hand though for each product – this is part of the time consuming aspect of running your own cart – and this should normally be a part of the process of uploading new products.

So how do you know what information to use for page titles, and meta tags?  look at what the top 10 competitors for each keyword are using… if they make it to the top 10, then they’re doing something right – and so should you!!

I’d done the keyword research on this project a while ago, but couldn’t find the sheet that I’d created (normally it’s in my SEO binder… hmmm).  So without it, I had to improvise.

For each category, I Googled the category name, and took the keywords and descriptions (modified to taste of course), and inserted those into my category meta tags.  I’ll have a posting on the FireFox extensions that I used to quickly get the meta tags, but for now, just do a “view source” and look at the meta keywords & descriptions near the top of the page.

This isn’t optimized, nor ideal, but they are top 10 listings for the keyword, so they are doing something right, and will work to at least get Google to get us closer than the default “ZenCart!” meta tags.

We’ll optimize all the category pages at a later date.

Also – for all of you “View Source” junkies out their (like me) – I just found out this week (by accident) that if you refresh the “view source” page after making html changes, you don’t need to close it down and open an new one.  You can hit F5 to refresh, just like you would any other web page….

This is in FireFox by the way.  I’ve not tested this in IE, but I suspect you’d get the same results.  Leave us some feedback if you test this in IE.

We also added model# and Mfr columns to product listings. I’m not a designer, but I think I did a pretty good job of it.  We also made the model number a link to the product as well, which it doesn’t do by default with our ZenCart software.

If you saw the category pages previously, there was a drop down menu just below the category description.  It looked bad, and didn’t serve a purpose for our site.  So we removed the alphabetical filter dropdown menu.

I’ve also ordered up some product descriptions for some of the swimwear products – at only $1 per 100 words,  I’d prefer to pay $1 for a few product descriptions to have more meat to them.

I don’t have the time to write up 100 word descriptions for each product, so I hire someone that is much better than I am at it.  You should do the same if you can’t write it up in 2 minutes.

I won’t have all 800 products done this way right away, but all my specials and features will get this special treatment in the future, since they are pages that get a fair bit of traffic and visibility.

I don’t know that the product descriptions will be done by this weekend, but we can hope!  Chances are that I’ll still need to re-structure the descriptions that he gives back for SEO, but that will only take a minute or two, and is something I expect and accept.

I’ve also got some article writers to write up some articles that I can submit to ezinearticles.com to start our article marketing campaign.

We’ll need to order up some more product reviews for our lingerie/swimwear review blog, which is starting to get traffic of it’s own. We may need to go clean that site up soon too.

The next thing that we’re working on are the category descriptions for each of the product categories.  We’ll be switching out our specials soon, and we need to start updating the meta tags for each of the products, and review if the titles are what we really want.