SEO...what does this mean for my business

Whatever your position on SEO might be, please note newcomers that posts such as edwardgledson's above are considered spam and quickly deleted. People who post such things are also banned. Please don't do this.

Hi, SEO could help a lot of entrepreneurs these days. It is then a form of marketing tool that will help boost the existence of any products or services that you need to promote:)

Squeezie Teapot:

Hi, SEO could help a lot of entrepreneurs these days. It is then a form of marketing tool that will help boost the existence of any products or services that you need to promote:)

What's the point of your comment?

"SEO" is archaic and redundant. Google has been telling site owners for nearly 10 years BUILD YOUR WEBSITE FOR PEOPLE, and make sure when people get there, they have an enjoyable, productive and worthwhile visit.

The USER EXPERIENCE is now the most critical feature of a website's ranking in search results... so:-

1. Make sure the TECHNICAL ELEMENTS of your site are as perfect as they can be, and the site loads easily and quickly.
2. Make sure your content is engaging, relevant meaningful, helpful, informative and grammatically correct.
3. Embed the coding that facilitated STRUCTURED DATA (see; schema.org) MPROUGH has built a list of code changes on this topic.
4. Test your site using all reliable validators (W3, Google PageSpeed, Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
5. Tell anyone who offers you "SEO" services to get lost - you do not need them.

Becca williams:

you should hire an SEO person it will help you to rank on google.Becca,

Zen Cart currently beats most sites on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO right out of the box. Version 1.5.8 will be even better.
Content is the king in e-commerce and no SEO expert can beat the subject matter expert (owner) already working at or owning the company.:yes:

Using Chrome's Lighthouse, ZC 1.5.8 scores 100 on each of the above four categories out-of-the-box while the site you link to scores 95, 96, 92, and 91. Not too bad I guess BUT, when you look at mobile, the stories change dramatically. For mobile use, your site shows 34, 100, 83, 92.

The point is, yes SEO is in the nineties for both your desktop and mobile but, will the person wait nearly 17 seconds for the site to originally become interactive? All the work done on accessibility and SEO is for naught if the customer leaves before the site loads. Worse yet, they're not going to stick around to report to you that your site is too slow.

Coupled with your CSS errors and HTML errors (one fatal and two confusing XML1), faster sites are going to fend better with the SEs.

Case in point. If you take part of the first sentence on your site> Today everyone wants to manufacture their own T-shirtsand enter it into Google, you come up third even though it is a perfect match. Two non-matching sites rank higher.

Is their SEO better or is their site conforming better? I did not take the time to look at them for full analysis but, since one is Shopify, I assume their compliance is better across the board as Shopify is one that comes the closest to ZC.

IMHO, if a storeowner (the subject matter expert) presents proper content, ZC is going to have them so close to first page that their content will put them "over the top."

Unless a ZC owner can find someone more knowledgeable than themselves, I would put hiring an SEO expert on item 12 of my top ten list.

I would suggest that everyone take a look at https://tinyurl.com/24823nvn and see the things that, when added to ZC will get you better ranked.

Their analytics are great as well. One of our ZC sites that has not spent any money on SEO or ads out performs your Domain Overview scores but, it appears you launched this year so things will probably get better.

Backlinks are supposedly less effective today than, say, a year ago. Yet they do help. Your site shows 273 while our kayak guy shows 676. One of the reasons they show up number one when you Google kayak parts. That and the fact they continually match around 200 of the top three keywords each month.

My whole point is that hired SEO can be fine but, just like any brick andd mortar, if the foundation is not sound, the building won't last long.

In my opinion, there is a significant side of the story being missed that allows the indexing, searchability, and enhancement of ON-SITE SEO, which when referring to SEO in the above comments, is all ON-SITE.

OFF-SITE SEO, is equally important, as each of the search engines uses each other to validate data. Without SERP, Schema, business listings and citations, you are weighting half of the equation of VISIBILITY.

I have seen clients go from being dead last in the search engines with a great SEO website (buried by competitors who took care of OFF-SITE SEO) to the top of the organic rankings and business listing rankings because they equally took care of both.

SEO is far from dead. It's the core to the zen-cart development and it's the core of how a business listing for a business ranks in the listings (which may soon see a drastic change if current legislation is passed that will kill the googles business listing as we currently know it).

If you have a retail location, off site seo is fundamental to being found in the mapping Ai's - Google, Bing, Apple maps, Yelp, Alexa, all major mapping content contributors to the Siri, Hey Google, Bixby, etc ai's.

Just an opinion based in successful observation... take it or leave it at your own peril.

You need an SEO specialist, but it is important to find a professional who will not waste your money.
An experienced specialist works according to the scheme. Schemes may be different, but with experience develops an action plan that adapts to the project. If a specialist cannot explain his plan of action to you, much less justify it, then expect problems.
Before preparing a promotion strategy, the contractor must determine the goals of the work with you.

Examples of incorrect goals:

Increase site traffic;
Increase the number of page views and time on the site;
Reduce bounce rate.

Example of good goals:

Increase project traffic from search engines by February 20 from 200 to at least 600 unique visitors per day;
Increase conversion to orders from 0.78% to 1.8%;
Increase the average check from $1100 to $1700.

schoolboy:

The USER EXPERIENCE is now the most critical feature of a website's ranking in search results... so:-

1. Make sure the TECHNICAL ELEMENTS of your site are as perfect as they can be, and the site loads easily and quickly.
2. Make sure your content is engaging, relevant meaningful, helpful, informative and grammatically correct.
3. Embed the coding that facilitated STRUCTURED DATA (see; schema.org) MPROUGH has built a list of code changes on this topic.
4. Test your site using all reliable validators (W3, Google PageSpeed, Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

The irony is that most of those things don't affect the user experience. But you are right. Those are the things to make both the user and Google happy.

One additional thing I would recommend is to see what Google says about your site at:

https://search.google.com/search-console

Fixing any issues reported can help improve traffic to your site. As you mentioned, good structured data is important. Fixing any usability issues reported is also important.