Miva

Miva Merchant SEO

The Key to A Profitable Miva Store

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Where Miva Online Selling Meets SEO

With tens of thousands of firms offering SEO (search engine optimization) services, you might think you have just as many options for improving the SEO ranking of your Miva store. However, because Miva runs on a proprietary script, only Miva developers can optimize Miva stores for search engines. Good Miva SEO integrates both skill sets—rock-solid Miva development and deep knowledge of SEO best practices. At 216digital, we combine 15 years of Miva experience with 10 years of SEO experience. This puts us in prime position to give you stellar SEO results with Miva.

Miva is an incredibly flexible ecommerce platform. Given Miva’s extensibility and ease of customization, a cookie-cutter approach to SEO for Miva simply won’t work. Since every Miva store is different, a good Miva SEO project starts with a comprehensive onsite audit. At 216digital, our SEO audit gathers data on everything that Google uses when ranking a site. Some of the most critical aspects we analyze include:


Old-school Miva Store

If you created your Miva store many years ago and haven’t updated your URL structure, you’ve got a real SEO problem. Google doesn’t like links that aren’t human-readable. Older Miva Merchant URLs look like this one: http://www.mivacommerce.com/Merchant5/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=mc&Screen=PROD&Product_Code=Test. That URL doesn’t tell a human user anything about the product being displayed. Worse, it probably doesn’t contain any of the keywords that a user would enter to search for the product. That means Google can’t tell what the page is about. Looks like an SEO strikeout.

Changing a URL isn’t difficult, and yes, we do that for our clients; but there’s more to it than that. When URLs change, redirects are critical to maintaining whatever SEO standing you previously had. Without redirects, Google will see that the previously-indexed URLs don’t exist anymore. That means an SEO nosedive for your site.

Luckily, implementing a redirect to the new URL maintains your legacy SEO standing for that page. This is a critical part of any URL update project, and we perform comprehensive, page-by-page redirects as part of every URL update project we take on.

Updating an older Miva store doesn’t have to be a stress bomb. At 216digital, your Miva update project is in good hands. With 15 years of Miva experience, we’ve stayed abreast of all the changes in Miva and SEO best practices.

Growing Store, Growing SEO Headache?

Every business owner wants business to grow. When a great product line gets out to more people, everyone wins. But like anything else in business, a change in scale creates new stresses for owners and managers. If manual search engine optimization was the only option in Miva, you’d have to perform new onsite SEO every time you added a product—meaning more cost to you. However, with tokenization, your Miva installation can configure new metadata dynamically, based on parameters that have been optimized for your business.

Tokenization generally takes care of metadata for new products. Occasionally, however, tokenization doesn’t create the ideal title tag and meta description for a given product. In that case, Miva allows you to fill out the metadata yourself. You can write your own title tag, H1 tag, and meta description, overriding the tokenized version for that page. If you’re not sure how to write metadata, we can do that for you. Many of our clients have us write custom metadata to optimize SEO for the pages that need the customization. Think of it like doing the manual work where it really counts and leaving tokenization in place where it’s already working. This gives you more bang for your SEO buck.