AboutEzra Silverton Expertise Have questions about search engine optimization and submission, web design / development or Internet marketing? I can be of valuable assistance. I want your business to be successful and will do what I can to accomplish this goal. Let me save you time.
Experience With an honours major in Marketing Administration, my experience and passion have been in this field. Since 1995 I have been working / learning Internet marketing tactics and would like to share with you what I have learned. I'm currently the marketing director for the web design company 9th sphere.
My shopping cart software generates HTML pages. I am concerned about the ALT TAGS and URL's.
Right now, my shopping cart does not generate ALT tags for the images. Though this is simple to implement, I have recently heard that search engines now frown upon ALT TAGS - is this true? I don't want to modify my templates so that ALT TAGS are generated only to find out they now hurt your page rank.
Also, the HTML URL's are a couple folders deep.
Example: www.domainname.com/store/html/productpage.html. I have heard that search engines give priority to files that are closer to the root directory such as www.domainname.com/productpage.html. Is this really a big deal? In reality, I have seen URL's go on and on and have ranked better than the shorter more direct URL's.
Any help would be appreciated. I am trying to make my shopping cart software automatically do a great deal of the SEO so anything else you think a page absolutely needs please advise.
Thank you so much!
Answer Hi Brian,
As long as you don't abuse the alt tag by stuffing keywords in them, you have nothing to worry about by either adding them or not.
In regards to the sub folders, in my opinion, I would ideally keep them in your root, but it's not crucial. I have optimized and had very high rankings with many site pages which are very deep.
All the best,
Ezra Silverton
Marketing Director
www.9thsphere.com
