It’s been several days now since the new osCommerce store was launched and I’m beginning to get into some serious SEO work for the site. Whilst Pay Per Click campaigning brought serious amounts of traffic to the site initially, I’ve now knocked this on the head for the time being because of relatively low conversion rates, whilst I seek out keywords that are likely to be less well covered by the competition.

Spiders from Google, MSN and Yahoo, amongst others, are now visiting the site regularly, so it’s all about trying to get the best out of those visits at the moment. It was a bit of a surprise then, when I stumbled upon a major issue over the weekend.

When checking the cached pages in each of these engines, by simply searching for it by domain name, I found that each of them had experienced a fatal error whilst trying to spider site. Because the error occurred in the categories box – the second box in the left hand column – they had gotten little page content indexed other than “… Fatal Error: cannot instantiate non-existent class in ….blah, blah… /boxes/categories.php on line 146”. Doing a google search for this exact error, I find a number of CRE Loaded sites that have the same problem.

Of course, the site works fine in a browser, so it seems that it is only search engines that experience this error. The causes is going to be down to something concerning session cookies (search engines don’t send these) or the fact that I have caching enabled, but I didn’t have time to troubleshoot that – I just wanted to fix the problem quickly.

In CRE Loaded you have the choice of a number of different styles of categories box, so I just had to switch the existing one off and switch on another one that didn’t suffer the same problem. In order to assess this, I needed something that would show the site from a search engine spider’s perspective – in my case, I headed over to Poodle.com, which does just this.

Problem now solved as a result, so now I just have to wait for the spiders to come back again and index the site successfully (as it turned out Googlebot showed up this morning, so hopefully my cached pages will update in due course). Whether or not this is due to my subscribing to their sitemap beta project I don’t know. This is an interesting idea which they have launched recently which is touted as a way for webmasters to provide clearer instructions to Googlebot about how their site is organised. Great idea I thought, because sometimes it only finds its way to a handful of product pages – with this tool, you can tell it up front where all the interesting stuff is. Early days yet, but I will be very interested to see if this makes a difference to the depth of crawls that I see from Googlebot. If you are interested in trying it for your osCommerce store, head on over to the contributions area at the osCommerce site and search for Google – you will find a ready-made contribution there which creates the necessary XML feeds and is dead easy to install.

I have also been spending this weekend seeking out quality links to point to the new site – some paid for, some free. The aim of course being to bring up that all important pagerank. With that in mind, here are my top tips for incoming link hunting:

1. Get the Google toolbar installed on your browser. You can get a quick visual indication of the pagerank of potential sites linking in – if the pagerank on which your link would be placed is low or non-existent, you might want to think again, especially if money is involved.

2. Try and get yourself listed in dmoz.org if you can. Actually achieving this is something akin to torture and can take years, but is worth putting in place on the off-chance that your category is actually well staffed by editors. Sites listed in dmoz always seem to do well in search engine results because of the huge number of sites running their feeds.

3. Do a search for your keywords / keyphrases on a search engine. Make a note of the sites placed in the top few positions and then head over to alexa.com. Enter the urls for those well-placed sites and you can get information on sites linking in to it. If it is appropriate to do so, you can get your link put in these places too! If you come across paid inclusion directory pages appearing in the top 10 results here, you should seriously consider adding your site to them (see 5).

4. If a site requires a reciprocal link, try and collect these all together on dedicated page(s) on your site. Outgoing links count against the pagerank of page on which they appear and can lead to pagerank “leakage”, so putting them on all pages, or your frontpage can cause you pagerank problems.

5. Get yourself into at least one of the paid inclusion directories, preferably one that is specific to your country and that has decent pagerank. Not only should you get targeted visitors, but also your pagerank will be boosted. One of my favourites is allovertheuk.co.uk – they only charge £15 a year and I know of sites that had made hundreds of sales through directly referred visitors.