Search Engine Optimization with Database-Driven Shopping carts
How to have the best of both worlds - Indexing AND Management!

John Carter, eCommerce Entrepreneur

The more products you have, the more you need a database-driven shopping cart . . . but search engines fear the dynamic links needed to pull your products from your database. Ah, but we have the solution for you:
 John Carter at BarParts.com has contributed this article to put "the proof in the pudding"!

The SF Search Engine Optimizer by SitesbySean has proven to be the most efficient and unbelievable tool to rank me high in the search engines that I have ever found! 

In October I wrote an article about Zeus, and how the reciprocal links were driving visitors to my site at www.BarParts.com.  Zeus helped me to build traffic and rankings. I was thrilled by the results because I had never ranked well at all in the search engines for my core site, www.BarParts.com,  though I have had excellent placements for satellite sites, such as www.1stDecanters.com (another subject I have written above in this newsletter - click here for this newsletter).

However, I didn't quite realize what a disadvantage I was at due to my product pages being database driven.

What I'd like to teach anyone using a database-driven shopping cart is that search engines fear search results pages (pages with query strings attached to them - for instance detail.asp?Product_ID=007) and won't search the database to pull out your products. To make static HTML pages for hundreds or thousands of items would take a tremendous amount of time, not to mention a fair amount of disk space on the server - and hence, cost more money. . . . but it would increase your exposure in the search engines. This is a fundamental dilemma for all merchant with lots of products, and a database-driven shopping cart.

I learned this from Sean at SitesbySean.com, who told me he had an idea for a new product he called the SF Search Engine Optimizer. He said he thought he could make the dynamic pages appear as HTML pages that would allow the items to be indexed as HTML links by the search engines when they visited the site -- thereby offering the best of both a database-driven administration AND a fully indexable site that would likely yield excellent rankings too. No more dilemma.

I told him, sometime around the first of November, to give it a try. Suddenly, I noticed that business was shooting up. This past December was up 73% over last year! Just a month or so after Sean implemented the SEOptimizer!

As you may know, Yahoo now uses Google for search phrase results. Google has become an awesome search engine that many try to emulate. If you can place well in Google, that is about all you need to achieve. Honestly, as Google commands more than 70-80% of all search results on the Internet, it is easy to see that if you need to learn to perfect ONE strategy, it would be to optimize for the Google-bots.

The following are some of the results I have obtained from using SitesbySean's SEOptimizer. And remember, this has only happened since November, 2002:

First of all, I have too many single products that rank #1 on Yahoo/Google to mention them all! So I will just take the categories which appear on each page of my site and show you how they rank.

If you take the generic term Bar Accessories, BarParts.com ranks #1 out of 1,240,000 sites and under Wine Accessories, it ranks #6 out of 1,110,000 sites. Not bad considering it wasn't even ranked anywhere appreciable in October!

From nothing to the apex in less than 2 months! 

I believe that reciprocal links give a merchant credibility with the search engines, and once you have the credibility, the SEOptimizer by SitesbySean gets you traction in the search engines - that is, the more products you have, the more bite it can achieve; yet the richer your reciprocal links, the better your ranking by the Google algorithm. What a combo!

Not only are my search rankings completely through the roof suddenly, but so is my bandwidth - the total demand of information from my site. I just got a bill from my hosting company, because for the past two months my bandwidth has exceeded 2.3 gigabytes! I had been hoping to someday top 1 gigabyte (my host's limit for my particular account).

I have gone from an average of 4000 visitors per month to over 20,000 per month since I have implemented the SEOptimizer from SitesbySean. I have also seen the traffic coming back through the links it creates, so I know that this tool is what brought a flood of traffic to my site.

Paying for search engine optimization and promotion always seems to be a risky ROI . . . but I have to say that I have NEVER had a better ROI than what I have achieved through this solution!

If you're looking for a cost-effective formula, I believe it is this:

Reciprocal links 
(you can get the discount on Zeus Pro at http://cyber-robotics.com/BarpartsDiscount.htm)  

. . . and the Search Engine Optimizer from SitesbySean!

Thank you Sean for an unbelievable product!

John Carter
www.barparts.com

Backup Your Site:

Please make sure that you have a local backup of your website, and that you have a regular routine for backing up your site's database. 

If you need help with a backup strategy, please email support@sitesbysean.com, and we will walk you through what you need to do.

If you'd prefer to just have us back up your site for you and send you duplicate versions on CD, we have organized a service to provide this for you:

• We'll provide two CDs for you to archive.
• We'll also walk your through how to make regular backups of your database

Cost: $50 for the first 50 MB + $0.75/MB thereafter.

Please contact support@sitesbysean.com if you are interested in this support option.

Your success is our success!
If you don't succeed, we don't have a business!