Alot of folks here are concerned about Page rank or 'PR' and myths abound. I think it's important to understand just what this means to a site and more particularly to a Cube Cart site as we are trying to make some money with our efforts.

First of all let's look at PR and what it really means:

One way to look at pagerank is that it is not a measure of relevance, and it never has been. Instead, it's a measure of importance, or material content.

A high page rank site may be more important than other sites, based upon the pages that link to it. But, when it comes to a search on a specific subject, that high pagerank site may be considerably less relevant than pages that are more on topic.

So a search for a fairly generic term is going to end up with search results that have higher page ranks. Because the query isn't that specific, relevance is less important. A search query that is much more specific is likely to bring results that have lower pageranks.

To demonstrate, a search for "food" is likely to end up bringing back sites with high page ranks. A search for "Louisiana Deviled Crab Cakes" (with or without the quotes) is going to result in pages that have a lot lower page rank.

As search terms become more generic, relevance is less a factor, and material content is more of a factor. As search terms become more specific, relevancy becomes more important, and material content is less.

What does this mean to Cube Cart. A PR4 page is a PR4 page no matter what keywords you use to find it. Lot's of sites have higher PR than my sites, but they don't show in my keyword serps because they are not relevant. Use one of several online keyword search tools to see just what keywords are being returned from the major search engines for your keyword term and then adjust your keywords to suit.

For instance on my vitamin site I found that the keyword 'vitamins' returned a serp of about 300 searches while 'vitamin' returned over 4000. Guess what? I changed my keyword to reflect the higher search term and then changed my content to reflect the change.

For a great selection of free online SEO tools, try http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

Take this information seriously and adjust your site content for the results. Remember as well that it takes about 6 months for a new site to be ranked and there are no guarantees.

I hope this information is useful and helps you to make alot of money.

If Page Rank is important for you - and if you want to know who holds what page rank in the top ten of any word or group of words or phrase on the three major SEs, see:

Page Rank Search Engine

http://prase.us

A very interesting little tool whose look and feel is inspired by the example of Google. It would not surprise me one bit to see this new tool bought up by Google and added to their tool set the same way they did with Urchin.

I searched this forum for mention of Google and think this is the most relevant place to ask:

How does the (dynamic?) structure of our Cubecart shop pages affect Google Ranking and the chance of specialist products being found by Keyword? I gather than on more complicated carts such as Oscommerce, there are some add-ons/tricks to force static pages or an Index page to be built...

Can anyone elaborate on this area?

Cheers,
Nigel

Joe Fonseca has provided us with an SEO mod that is helpful. In any respect, your site will be indexed over time. This is the order in terms of aggression that I have seen on my vitamin site since 02/28/06 :

MSN Search 489
Ask Jeeves 128
Teoma (Mail Link) 128
GoogleBot 61
Inktomi Slurp 50
Yahoo! Slurp 50
ZyBorg Dead Link Checker 12
findlinks 4
Netcraft Web Server Survey 3
MJ12bot 2
Cerberian Drtrs 2
Alexa Archiver 2
libwww-perl 1
Altavista 1
Java 1
Lycos 1

My site uses Joe's mod plus Google Site Map with session and re-direct filters.

The most important element to achieve Rank (and I don't think it's as important as targeted visitors and conversions) is time. I do SEO and my clients all want PR but when I explain to them that PR has nothing to do with sales, their demeanor changes. What PR can tell you is that you have done all the other SEO work like backlinks, publishing articles relevant to your product and all the other 'organic' SEO necessary to drive targeted visitors to your site. What they do when they get there is another chapter entirely.

Brilliant suggestions Roban and thanx for the quick reply too. I have looked at the Vitamin site & can see a mentioned optimization link at the bottom. Will be trying it.

Next I am wondering it it is viable to have link exchanges on one's Cubecart main page... they are working well on our non-shop homepage.

Outbound links are fine no matter where they are. Just make sure that you are getting back links as well.

Ive spent the last 2 weeks working on promoting my site and finding out how to get page rank happening this is what Ive discoverd.

Links links and more links, basicly to achieve a good page rank you need to get links from other sites to your site this will be the only thing that builds your page rank up. The bots will crawl your site and your information will appear within a search engine search but it may be on page 15 not on the first 3 pages, statistics show that if people dont find what they are looking at within the first 5 pages of a search they will try again, so our main aim is to get your page rank up so your searches move closer to the front page.

Google is very slow to index because of the many billions of links it crawls, I run a program on my site that shows me what search engins and search strings are hitting my site this is extreamly helpfull as I can see whats working for my site and what isnt, here are some stats for the last 2 weeks I have had it running.

33 searches from ninemsn.com.au
10 searches from MSN Search
3 searchs from Yahoo Search
2 searches from msn.co.uk
2 searches from Google Search

Now as you can see google is ranked very low and msn is high and of the products that have been searched on msn my page has been on the 1st page usually at the top of the search so MSN obviosly indexes faster than Google and works rather by keywords and not page rank like goolgle does.

But google is the most used search engine in the world so we want to get ourselves ranked in google and as I said previosly links,liks and links you need to get your url posted as many places as you can. Why when you search for cubecart you get it on the first page at the top of google ? Thats because all the carts on the web have a link on the footer back to cube cart and google loves text links. CC has a page rank of 6 now this alot of links out there to get this type of page rank and will turn out most searches related to CC on the first page, Now that would be nice wouldent it .

Heres some suggestions for you to get your links out there. Do what I have done and attach a links page to your CC site and use the software I have used to create a Receprical links exchange. The url of the links exchange will not beyour main url but when you set up your program you make your Receprical link the link to your cart so that when people exchange links with your site the link that you give them to display on thier site returns to your cart. It dosent matter who if anybody clicks on that link the important thing is that its another link on the net that google will crawl.

Sorry for ranting here but I just wanted to pass on what I have learnt and save you some time and effort in making your site more popular.

I spend at least 2 hours a day tring to get links out there and in the long run this will pay off but it will take months so be patient.

If you would like to join my links page find it Hereand to get the software to this great program you will find it in the footer of the page, Just put a link on your cart to your links page and google will index it. The most important thing is that your reciprical link is back to your cart and not to your links page or your linkspage will end up with a high rank and your cart will stay the same.

I hope this helps some of you out and saves you a bit of time.

Cheers Viss.

I have edited your post to remove the link. Please read the rules especially #12.

Sorry I thought it wasent a promo rather a help tool. Of course I want to promote my site and get links to other sites but if it breaks the rules then it should be removed.

Sorry.

point on link exchange: To get the real benefit the links have to be releavant to your site.

ie no good me selling internet solutions exchanging links with a garage.

it has been said a releavant link is worth 50 normal ones.

It all bils down to are you scared of your competition? If the answer is yes you have a lot of work ahead of you, if you know you offer better service, support etc dont be scared. You may be slightly more expensive but good friendly service goes a long way these days.

Thats not how google see's it they dont care if you have 700 links from 700 porn sites and you sell tea cosies the point is that you have 700 links from other sites that google crawls. Take a look at the stats for CC.com Results 1 - 10 of about 9,720 linking to http://www.cubecart.com.

Cubcart has 9720 links from various different sites from porn to horn to corn do you think google gives a toss no they dont the point is its another text link linking back to CC this is the point, dont matter where your your links are just get them out there its not for customers to click on but only to have google crawl them and increase pagerank.

Sorce: Google search
Type : link:http://www.cubecart.com in the search

Try it for your self and then try microsoft do you think 191,000 links back to microsoft would be relevent to the site ?

Cheers Viss

Hi Roban,

Thanks for taking the time to update the forum about PR. A lot of people misunderstand what it is and its importance (or lack thereof). I have seen PR 0 sites beat PR 6 sites in the SERPS. I think eventually PR will be dropped. PR should be the last thing on any site owner's mind. Qualified traffic and pages that convert are key factors for a successful site.

I also took a look at your keywords and I found the following in G**gle:

Vitamin has ~57,900,000 (depending upon your datacenter) competing web sites and a KEI of 0.003

where

Vitamins has ~51,800,000 competing and KEI of 0.083 with nearly 700% more search volume than vitamin.

Vitamins is the clear winner but since vitamin is a root word of vitamins we may be splitting hairs.

Note: Roban knows this but for the others KEI is the Keyword Effectiveness Index. It is calculated using a formula which considers the search volume (people searching for the specific term) and the number of pages competing for that term. The higher the KEI value the better. A 100 KEI or better is considered a good keyword. Roban has some very competitive keywords considering the search volume. It's definitely a good thing he knows a thing or two about seo!

Best to you all.

-Greg

evilhomer is correct. Regarding G##gle - non-reciprocating, relevant text links from authoritative sites are the most highly valued. A reciprocal link from an unrelated site may count but will not be valued highly. G##gle is currently showing 132,000 backlinks (on my datacenter) to MS but what they don't show is how they value each. If a site has hundreds of thousands of backlinks it is likely that in that group there are countless highly valuable links and much more low quality links.

Regards,

Greg

Doesn't Googlebots prefer htm/html pages rather than .php. Will this affect the maximum page rank available?

Use the SEO mod for search engine friendly URLs.

I have version 4.0.3 so the SEO Mod is built in. As I understand it, and as I read the robots.txt file, the "tellafriend" pages and others should be excluded from search spiders.

However, when I run the Xenu link checker (as recommended by the original v 3.0 SEO Mod Read Me), it seems to crawl these pages. It seems like it may be doing so because of the extra directory levels created by the SEO mod for /category/product-name/prodid.htm.

Is something wrong with the setup? Shouldn't Xenu be excluding these pages just as a search engine spider would?

Thanks for all the useful information.
Sorry to be new to SEO and PR, but I would love some basic advice on "Where" to start.
My store is live for just 1 year now. I sell just a few beauty products that make it challenging to compete with the large warehouse companies.

I was advised to start by changing my "titles" and install the SEO mod which were actually helpful, so thank you!

However I am lost on where and how to get linked to other sites? Is this software, or just put an area on the store page called "link exchange" in which they can sign up? And does it truly matter who I link to/with?

In addition I notice you mention articles, where should the articles be located? Within the cart or another page on the site? I ordered the Latest news blog mod which I LOVE for articles so I am hopeful this is what you all are referring to. I also pay several hundred per month for google ads/yahoo search marketing which I do believe "helps" but the price just keeps increasing as the competition grows.

I would appreciate any and all help and I welcome hiring an SEO company however I am told that I can do this myself and as a young business best to put the time effort and money into learning myself and to spend it on google adwords. Not sure if this is in fact advisable.

THANKS!

Its not the ammount of inbound links, its the quality, one link from a pr 7 site will really boost your page/site, hundreds of pr 3,4 or 5 could have very little effect.

If you get your homepage a good rank, then it should have a rub off effect to your other pages. So if your homepage has pr 5 then the other pages linked from that page should get a 3 or 4.