Before setting off down the road of dishing out any advice on the subject of optimising an osCommerce site for the search engines, I thought it was about time I got back into the real world, i.e. running a store of my own, to check my latest theories out in practice.

Having said that, I have got a number of other people's stores to the top of page results in the major search engines already, but there's nothing like starting from square one as an experiment!

Anyways, so here's the new store: http://www.my-playtime.com (warning adult products....). Lot's more to do one here design-wise yet to make it look tidy, but it's at least passible for now (and better looking than some sites I have seen out there selling similar products).

I haven't done so much work on the copy as yet, but it is a least gratifying to find that the site is already well placed for some keywords in Yahoo. Google of course will take much more work and time to crack. I'm awaiting googlebot to pay a visit first before making any further SEO type changes, so as to get a baseline position from which to measure any improvements. When I start changing things, details will be posted here, along with the results, for your enjoyment and entertainment (no doubt there will be significant hair-pulling to report....)