Almost everyone who runs an e-commerce site is concerned about SEO, or search engine optimization, for their store. Typically, the only exceptions are wholesale stores that are only open to distributors. If you’re trying to reach the public directly, you need to optimize your site so that it ranks well within the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Miva Merchant has a bit of a bad reputation as far as SEO goes, but that information is extremely outdated. (Read about more Miva Merchant myths at MerchantTutorials.com.) Miva Merchant 5.5 is search-engine friendly, and you can improve on that even more bad adding in modules for specific things.

Short Links

Miva Merchant 5.5 has built-in support for short links. Short links are links to your category and product pages that don’t have querystrings and parameters in them, and that theoretically are also short in length and contain keywords. Although the built-in support is useful, adding a module offers additional features – such as having short-links without any “indicator” of whether the URL is a product or category, or offering the ability to use something other than the product and category codes as the base of the URL.

Even Google’s Matt Cutts says that keywords in the URL help with SEO efforts. So if your product and category codes aren’t keyword-based, being able to use a custom field (containing your keywords separated by dashes) for the URL can be extremely helpful. For this need, you can use Smart Links for SEO by NetBlazon (us). Another third-party module for short links is Ultimate SEO Links by Sebenza.

Page Titles

One of the most important parts of your site that you should optimize for SEO are your page titles. According to SEOmoz, “Title tags are the second most important on-page factor for SEO (behind content)”. Your title tags should be descriptive, information, and unique – that means a different title for EVERY SINGLE PAGE! Miva Merchant 5.5 allows you to customize the page titles for each page type, and to use variables such as the product name within the title. For even greater control at the individual category/product level, try our Page Title Manager PRO module.

Site Maps

All of the major search engines now support XML-based sitemaps that allow you to tell them the URLs to every page in your site, how often they change, and their importance relative to all other pages in your site. The sitemaps can be submitted to the major search engines either through their webmaster tools (or site explorer for Yahoo!) or they can be updated by pinging certain URLs with the address of your sitemap file.

There’s no support for XML sitemaps in Miva Merchant, but there are several add-on modules that can do this:

Customer Reviews Modules

Reviews modules are wonderful for SEO because they give your site unique, user-generated content (“UGC”) that search engines love. There are some great modules for customer reviews, including Ultimate Product Ratings and Reviews by Sebenza and Rate This by EmporiumPlus. Miva Merchant can also have PowerReviews integrated with it, though this requires some custom coding on your page templates.

So with a little bit of money toward modules, and some quality time working on your site and content, you can have a well-ranked Miva Merchant store across all major search engines.