http://www.personalizedmementos.com - Want SEO help

[mhalloran]

osirus,

OSCommerce is _very_ malleable. You can do much more than change color - you can have a completely different look & feel & layout... Some of the newer modification out for OSCommerce (which I do not yet have) make very good use of template code allowing even easier and more dramatic modifications.

Cheers,

Mark

[osiris7719]

sounds good. I'm making my own catalogue pages but I'm not sure if they are better to manage than the ready-made ones like yours.

[citadels]

I really like the site. And the logo !! VEry good and clear.

[janeth]

Great looking site. You have done a really good job on it.

[waitman]

The site is very good.

However, it shows

1226 - User 'persona2_catalog' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 50000)

select configuration_key as cfgKey, configuration_value as cfgValue from configuration

[TEP STOP]

Then none of the products pages work anymore.

Basically, the server is overloaded. There are some possibilities.

A). There is way too much traffic on that machine. Don't know what kind of hardware it is, but it *should* service at least 25,000 visitors per day, about 2 million or so hits per day, maybe 500-600 GB of traffic per month - without breaking. Of course, that is on the top end. Database driven dynamic site included. That is with moderate and inexpensive hardware. Like maybe $800 dollars worth of hardware. But you don't want to drive your car with the pedal on the floor everywhere you go, so to speak.

B). Every canned shopping cart software I have seen, and I have looked at the guts of a good many of them, is set up to be full featured and shop-owner friendly, however the code and SQL queries are incredibly inefficient. Like goofy inefficient. Basically the thing does about 10X more work than it is used for 90% of the time, because these guys make them full featured in every possible way, so to speak. I have replaced enough broken and battered canned carts to know this to be true. But- i am NOT cutting on the software. That might not be the problem.

C). The mysql installation (assuming mysql) on the server was just installed or RPM'd etc. and the configuration was left at the default settings. This happens almost all the time. Even large hosting companies with barrels of money to spend on well-paid and well-educated employees don't know that they need to tweak the config to make it perform properly under load. Seriously.

My best wit tells me that B and/or C are most likely causing the problem.

From what I have seen, 85% of the people out there will point to "A" and tell you you need two or three servers to run it. And load balancing, and works. However throwing money at it won't fix it. To fix a problem that involves B and C without changing any application code involves reconfiguring the database server and RAM, RAM, RAM. But RAM is very cheap these days.

Best Regards,

[Ne0]

Hi Mark...

Great site Mark... the page loaded very quickly, the layout/font and text are very easy on the eyes and appealing...

Now I am not an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination...LOL but these things have helped for my site (on Yahoo! and MSN search engines) Google I am completely dumbfounded over ;)

Try this anyways...take the keywords that you want to be well ranked with and use them in your first paragraph of content. Then in your meta tags use those keywords first. This has helped me greatly in yahoo!/MSN... at any given time I have 4-8 of my search terms land on the front page of search results with yahoo/msn...

Hope this helps a lil bit Mark... and thank you for the review of my site;)

Cheers M8,
NeO~1

[mhalloran]

waitman,

During the time of your visit, I had a malicious intruder who was attempting to bring the site down by sending thousands of requests. If it happens again, I'll just have to block him.

Cheers,

Mark

[waitman]

Hello Mark,

"IF AND ONLY IF" you are talking about 68.165.182.36 then the following apply:

a) It wasn't malicious. It was definitely NOT intentionally harmful.

You asked for SEO help and I was attempting to give it. I always spider a site first to determine structure. Looking at key words and phrases on the page is something a lot of other people on here do very well, however I am able to look at a site and predict which pages are more likely (and less likely) to show up in search engine results based on the structure of the site. A spider may index 2500 pages but it definitely doesn't return all 2500 in search results.

It wasn't meant to break anything, and it wasn't clear that "I" was the problem.

b) My spider isn't as friendly as Google's, which is extremely friendly, but it is friendlier than a good many. It has never caused such an error condition.

d) I have no plans to spider that site again. I do appologize for the trouble.

Take care,

[mhalloran]

Waitman,

One and the same IP. Although when I wrote it, I made a conscience decision not to point fingers, I guess I though it was you and might have phrased things _much_ too strongly (I should have just asked instead of pretending to sluff it off and coming off with an un-though-out attitude).

So, everything said and done, I _am_ interested in the results. I do not get that kind of traffic (and it will be a good problem to have), so I cannot judge what other catalogs/ecommerce sites should be / do handle.

Please accept the apology.

Cheers,

Mark

[waitman]

Hey, I am the one that felt like a boob ;-)

Didn't feel like you were pointing fingers, but I thought best to fess up.

Anyhow, I'll set it to sleep 30 seconds per request, less than 2 requests per minute shouldn't cause any problems. I'll keep an eye on it.