The short version fo search engine optimization is this:

 

  • You want the seach engien spider to find your pages as fast as possible
  • You want to have as much text on the page that so the search engine can tell exactly what your page is about
The art and science of search engine optimization goes much farther then that, but those two principles are the core of getting your site into the search engines.
Prophet 21 web hosting has several tools that are designed to help you with search engine optimization and there are a few things yous can do yourself as well.
Sitemap.xml
First off, the more items you have on your website the better. This one is pretty simple, the bigger your site, the more authority the search engines will give you on your products.
Prophet 21 has a sitemap.xml file that is automatically generate that includes all of the items on your entire site. The URL of this sitemap.xml file is http://www.yourwebsitename.com/SiteMap.aspx. As of the time of the writing of this article (2009-10-08) this sitemap.xml file does not follow the complete sitemap protocol. It does not properly escape certain characters, especially if you have space in your Item Ids. You can create your own sitemap files, although it is unclear how to accomplish this within the Prophet 21 web hosting system, even though I have seen some documentation that says it is possible. Also, if you ahve more than 50,000 items the sitemap protocol states that you need to break your sitemap into multiple files, which it doe snot look like the Prophet 21 web hosting has the ability to do.
The Web Module of P21 Manger will eventually create separate sitemap.xml files for each vendor and an index file that you can place on a different web host. Then you will need to inform Prophet 21 web hosting that you need to have a link to your sitemap files put into the shared robots.txt file. This proves that your other hosted site has the right to host the sitemap files for your main website. The Web module will also compress the sitemaps into a gzip format which will limit the amount fo bandwidth needed to transmit the fies to the search engines.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and moreover.com all use this sitemap format and may find your sitemaps simply by reading the location i y9our robots.txt file. You can also use a ping tool from all of these search engine to let them know when you sitemap have been updated. Both Google and Yahoo have a larger set of tools that allows you to see the status of your sitemap and how many pages they have indexed.
Meta Tags
Prophet 21 hosting allows you to create a file for each item in a format they call the MTAG format. Basically this is a properly named file that has the meta tags and title you want to show up on each item detail page, as well as category pages. This can get tedious if you have a lot of items in your P21 database as you need a separate file for each item.
The web module in P21 Manger help with this by retrieving the information out of your P21 database directly and creating the files for you. It will let you adjust the title to include the Item Id of the item and some text you choose and then use the Extended description of the item as the description meta tag and the keywords in the database as the keywords meta tag.
After these files are created all you will need to do to finish up is upload the MTAG files into the metatag folder on your Prophet 21 hosted website.