IBM Software Group

IBM Software Group
®
ShashAnand(sanand@ca.ibm.com)
Aileen Guan (aguan@ca.ibm.com)
WebSphere® Support Technical Exchange
Search Engine Optimization for a
WebSphere Commerce System
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Agenda
Overview
General SEO
WebSphere Commerce Specific SEO
Demo
WebSphere Commerce URL Mapping and Site Map Exercise
Third Party Search Engine Optimization Tools
Limitations
Summary
Reference
Q&A
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General SEO
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization
•Ensuring your site is search friendly which allows spiders to visit
and index the content on the site
•Ensuring your pages include the keyword phrases actually used by
searchers
•Ensuring the pages of your website are as compliant as possible
with the search engine scoring algorithms
•Ensuring compelling and action oriented descriptions that
encourage visits
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Searchers View of Search Results
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General SEO
Statistics
87% of internet users use search engines
72% of searchers are not happy with results of searches
Most people click in the top 3 links
Sponsored links get < 20% of the clicks
Google will not index a home page > 101 K
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SEO Layers
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Common Problems with Pages
Good Stuff that can hurt you!
Flash
Frames
JavaScripts
Table Structures
Dynamic Content
Redirects
Slow Loading Pages
Graphics vs. text
Image Maps
Spam
Keyword stuffing
Invisible text and tiny text
Page Spoofing
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How does the Algorithm Work
Spam and Inflation Detection
Verifying that no unethical tricks are being used
Verifying that there are not duplicates or redirections
Keyword Phrase Inclusion/Content Relevancy
Does the exact phrase occur on the page
Location and proximity of keyword and/or keyword phrase
What is the relationship of the keyword to the content?
How many other similar or relevant pages on the site are connected to
this page?
Internet Relevancy
How many other sites/pages are linked to this site and page?
How “relevant”are the pages/sites linking to the page?
How are the other links references which point to the page?
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Key Algorithm Attributes –On Page
Keyword Frequency
How many times does the keyword phrase appear on the page (First
250 words most important)
Keyword Density
How many times does the keyword phrase appear as a percent of all
words (No more than 20% density of any particular word)
Keyword Prominence
Importance of the keyword phrase as determined by its position on the
page (Goal is 100% prominence)
Anchor Text
The keyword phrase appearing in the hyperlink to your site
Title Tags are the MOST IMPORTANT attribute
<title> ibm.com Software Group –International Business Machine </title>
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Optimal Keyword Locations
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Commerce Specific SEO
WebSphere Commerce provides functionality to help improve the results of
search engine indexing and ranking with the following features:
URL Mapping
Site Map
Search Ranking
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Commerce Specific SEO –Why use URL Mapping?
Dynamic, database-driven URLs such as those generated by WebSphere Commerce contain
stop characters such as ?, &, and %, which can easily overwhelm search engine crawlers.
http://shashvat.torolab.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?langId=
-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001
Search engines limit the amount of dynamic URLs that they index.
Quote from Google help (http://www.google.ca/webmasters/2.html
)
•“Reasons your site may not be included.
−Your pages are dynamically generated.
−We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because
our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic
content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index.”
Limited parameters in dynamic URLs (restricted to two or less).
Session Management
Session IDs are great for human vistors, but spiders encounter problems if they cache a
dynamic URL with a session ID. If that session ID times out, theindexed page will most
likely point any search engine referrer to an error page and thesearch engine spider will be
unable to return to your page for further spidering. For that reason, most search engine
spiders do not cache dynamic URLs with session IDs.
(http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/dsm.html
)
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Session Management –URL Rewriting with Session ID
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Commerce Specific SEO –URL Mapping
Provides the ability to remove the stop characters by mapping WebSphere
Commerce's dynamic URLs to static ones so that search engines can index
the dynamic pages.
Perl script
Manual steps
For example, it can map the following static URL:
webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10001_10001_10032_-1
to the dynamic WebSphere Commerce URL:
webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001
&productId=10032&langId=-1
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URL Mapping –Dynamic URLs
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URL Mapping –Static URLs
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Commerce Specific SEO –Site Map
Provides an entry point for the search engine crawler to easily follow the links
within your web pages.
A site map is used to address these two challenges:
Changes to the site are not quickly reflected in the search engine
indices.
Most Web pages are designed for human visitors, not crawlers. These
pages usually throw off crawlers due to the excessive number of
graphics and large page size.
A site map helps to optimize the entire structure of the site for a crawler by
providing an alternate set of web pages built specifically so that crawlers can
quickly access and index a large number of embedded pages. Site maps
facilitate deep searches of the site.
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Commerce Specific SEO –Search Ranking
When a search engine analyzes a page, some specific locations are given
more weight than others, and so it is important to put appropriate keywords
in these locations. Some of the locations that are ranked high in search
results are:
Page title
•The page title is the text that appears in a browser’s title bar. The
page title tag is a very important consideration in ranking searches.
Put top searched keywords in the title.
Page heading
•The page heading is also very important for search engines.
First sentence of the body
•In the first sentence, carefully craft words that describe the
purpose of the page, and that attract visitors to click on this entry
in the search results page.
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Search Ranking –Product Management GUI
from WebSphere Commerce Accelerator
Use the appropriate fields to store the words in the different page locations,
as follows:
for the page title, use the Short Descriptionfield
for the heading, use the first Auxiliary Descriptionfield
for the alt tag, use the second Auxiliary Descriptionfield
for the body, use the Long Descriptionfield
for the keywordsin the meta keyword tag, use the Keywordfield
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Product Management GUI from Accelerator
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Product Management GUI from Accelerator
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Product Management GUI from Accelerator
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Commerce Specific SEO –Caching Considerations
Dynamic URLs
Application server level
Remote web server level
Static URLs
Application server level only
No edge caching because Akamaidoes not support static URLs.
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Caching
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Commerce Specific SEO –ibm.com
Sample WebSphere Commerce customer sites that implemented SEO
solutions:
http://www.ibm.com
•2 million pages indexed now
•Up from 10,000 pages in Google 2 years ago
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Commerce Specific SEO –Commerce Sites
not indexed or ranked very well
Main page uses flash.
Not search engine friendly. No ranking.
Redirected index.jsp(301, 302, 303, 410)
http://shashvat.torolab.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ConsumerDirect
/index.jsp
URL Redirects references:
•http://knowledge.storage.ibm.com/manual/mod/mod_alias.html
•http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm
•http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/301-redirect.shtml
Javascript
No ranking
javascriptmenus
http://www.ibm.com
•2 million to 500 pages in 1 week (because of javascript> 101K limit!)
Dynamic URLs only
Product pages (dynamic URLs).
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SEO Exercise
We have provided the functionality to remove the inhibitors so that the
pages can be indexed by search engines, and to facilitate the optimization
of page content. The ranking of your pages in the search results
depends largely on how you optimize your pages.
WebSphere Commerce's search engine optimization feature consistsof the
following functions:
1) URL mapping, which provides the ability to remove the stop characters by
mapping WebSphere Commerce's dynamic URLs to static ones so that
search engines can index the dynamic pages.
2) Site map capability, which provides an entry point for the search engine
crawler to easily follow the links within your web pages.
3) WebSphere Commerce helps to facilitate the optimization of page content so
that the page is ranked high in search engine results. It provides the ability
to easily modify words in the locations that are important for crawlers, by
using the Product Management GUI, or by using the Change Pages GUI in
WebSphere Commerce Accelerator.
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SEO Exercise
1) Change reload interval to 10 sec so it reloads JSPsfaster
Location:
C:\WebSphere\AppServer\config\cells\nodeName\applications\WC_demo.e
ar\deployments\WC_demo\Stores.war\WEB-INF\ibm-web-ext.xmi
2) Enable URLMapperConfig
Location: WC_installdir/instances/instance_name/xml/instance_name.xml
•<component
compClassName="com.ibm.commerce.datatype.UrlMapperConfig"
enable="true"name="UrlMapperConfig"> <property
UrlMapperFile="C:/WebSphere/CommerceServer56/xml/mapping/ne
wUrlmapper.xml" display="false”/> </component>
3) Enable the cache filter (already done in runtime)
Location for development environment:
WCDE_installdir
\workspace\Stores\Web Content\WEB-INF\web.xml
Locate and uncomment the following pair of XML elements:
•<filter id="Filter_1">
•<filter-mapping id="FilterMapping_1">
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SEO Exercise …Site Map
4) Create a Site Map –determine what pages should be indexed
WAS_installdir
/installedApps/cell_name
/WCServer_enterprise_archive
/Stores.war/store_name/SiteMap
copy over the entire directory of ShoppingAreato the SiteMap
directory:
•WAS_InstallDir\installedApps\<nodename>\WC_demo.ear\Stores
.war\ConsumerDirect\ShoppingArea
5) Add URL mappings to the URL mapping file.
Location: WC_installdir
/xml/mapping/newUrlmapper.xml
E.g. –add this line to the top of the page:
<pathInfo_mappingsseparator="_" subDirectory="SiteMap">
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SEO Exercise …Mapping
webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&productId=10032&l
angId=-1
should map to
<mappings>
<pathInfo_mappingsseparator="_" ... >
<pathInfo_mappingname="product" requestName="ProductDisplay">
<parameter name="storeId" />
<parameter name="catalogId" />
<parameter name="productId" />
<parameter name="langId" />
</pathInfo_mapping>...
</pathInfo_mappings>
</mappings>
This will map webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10001_10001_10032_-1to
the above address
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SEO Exercise …Site Map Caching
If you are using a site map, set up separate caching for the site map pages
by adding a component element with the ID of subDirto your site's
cachespec.xmlfile
Create a cache-entry if no caching has been set up yet.
Add the following to the cache entry (if you want both dynamic and static
URL JSPsto be cached and served individually):
<component id="subDir" type="parameter">
<required>false</required>
</component>
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SEO Exercise …Convert JSP pages
Convert JSP pages with dynamic URLs to JSP pages with static URLs:
1) Run the urlmapping.pl
Limitations: The script does not handle JSTL
or Tags generated dynamically by
either Java or other scripts.
For example: out.println("<a href=\"AugInterest?aucItemId=<%=aucId%>\" \\\">.
OR
2) Manually, change the dynamic URLs in JSP pages to static URLs
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SEO Exercise …Convert JSP Page
Comment out the following from your JSP page:
<%--The URL command that will display the sub-category --%>
<%--Added line below comments as a substitute
<c:urlvar="categoryDisplayUrl" value="CategoryDisplay">
<c:paramname="catalogId" value="${WCParam.catalogId}" />
<c:paramname="storeId" value="${WCParam.storeId}" />
<c:paramname="categoryId" value="${subCategory.categoryId}" />
<c:paramname="langId" value="${langId}" />
<c:paramname="parent_category_rn" value="${categoryId}" />
<c:paramname="top_category" value="${categoryId}" />
</c:url>
--%>
Add
<c:set
var="categoryDisplayUrl“value="category2_${WCParam.catalogId}_${W
CParam.storeId}_${subCategory.categoryId}_${langId}_${categoryId}" />
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SEO Exercise …Final steps
If you are using a site map, include a link to the site map starting page from
the header, footer, or sidebar.
If you changed the WebSphere Commerce configuration file (instance.xml
or any xml files and properties files), restart the WebSphere Commerce
Server.
Unix/Linux requires file permission resetting
wcnonroot.sh
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Example
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Third Party SEO Tools
Various SEO Tools
Free Online Tools
IBP
•Top 10 Optimizer
•Search Engine Spider Simulator
•Keyword Generator
•Keyword Density Analyzer
•Search Engine Submitter
•Search Engine Ranking Checker
•Web Site Traffic Analyzer
•Comprehensive Reports
Xenu
•Broken links
•List of redirected URLs
•List of valid URLs you can submit to a search engine
•Site Map of HTML pages with a Title
Web CEO
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Commerce Specific SEO –Summary
URL Mapping, SiteMap, Search Ranking
Out of the box, runtime code only available in WC 5.6.0.2 and higher. (WC 5.4, 5.5 APAR)
Edge caching does not support static URLs.
May need to maintain two sets of JSPs.
Static URLs (/SiteMapdirectory on application server)
Dynamic URLs (Original directory on web server or application server.)
Urlmapping.plperlscript does not support JSTL.
Commerce enabled portal URLs do not support URL Mapping.
Session Management
Jsessionidin URL is not search engine friendly.
Commerce URL Mapping feature does not handle get and post forms.
Even with URL Mapping, Site Map and Search Ranking, we cannot guarantee high ranking.
Many other factors.
Further SEOsare usually done through consulting or services.
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Summary
Inclusion
URL Mapping
Site Map
Ranking
Keywords
Page titles and file names
Meta tags
Inbound links, link popularity
Traffic
Optimal keywords
Brand names
Right keywords in the right element in the right combination!
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Reference
InfoCenter: 5.6.0.2 Search engine optimization
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wc56help/index.jsp?topic=/co
m.ibm.commerce.developer.doc/concepts/csdsearchopt.htm
DeveloperWorksWhitepaper:
http://www-
128.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0509_khu
sial/0509_khusial.html
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Additional WebSphere Product Resources
Discover the latest trends in WebSphere Technology and implementation, participate
in technically-focused briefings, webcastsand podcastsat:
www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/community/
Learn about other upcoming webcasts, conferences and events:
www.ibm.com/software/websphere/events_1.html
Join the Global WebSphere User Group Community: www.websphere.org
Access key product show-me demos and tutorials by visiting IBM Education Assistant:
ibm.com/software/info/education/assistant
Learn about the Electronic Service Request (ESR) tool for submitting problems
electronically:
www.ibm.com/software/support/viewlet/probsub/ESR_Overview_viewlet_swf.html
Sign up to receive weekly technical My support emails:
www.ibm.com/software/support/einfo.html
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Questions and Answers