Cart Code and Google Ranking

[michellepatterns]

For my products with longer descriptions, the "add to cart" and "view cart" code is at both the top and bottom of the product listings in my store.

But I'm wondering if having it at the top is hurting my google ranking.

As one person trying to do everything for my site, I find it challenging (ok, impossible) to keep up on what google is up to re: rankings. Does anyone have any insight about whether having this code at the top of the product listing might be good/bad/irrelevant as far as SEO?

[E-junkie_Guru]

Our cart button code should be irrelevant to search engine rankings. The main things to focus on for SEO generally would be:

• When visitors are looking for a site or product like yours, what key words and phrases are they most likely to search for?

• Make sure those exact words/phrases are in the actual text content of your page;

• Put the single most important/relevant key word/phrase in the page <title> tag and the top <h1> or <h2> heading (whichever one you use for a top-of-page title header);

• Avoid "SEO tricks" to fool the search-indexing robots that actual human visitors aren't meant to see -- e.g., stuffing the TITLE or H1/H2 or META-description tags with all your keywords, extra H1/H2 headings styled to look like normal text, any text styling that hides a bunch of keywords from human view, etc. -- while these can sometimes work for a short while, the search engines usually catch on eventually and then penalize you for them;

• Try to get other sites to link to yours using your main key words/phrases in the actual text of the link -- e.g., in our case, if we want to be found under "shopping cart" and "download delivery", we'd want links to us from other sites to look something like this:
  Shopping cart with download delivery

• Make sure every page has a description <meta> tag summarizing the page content in 50-300 characters:
  <meta name="description" content="Your page summary goes here">
  Your site-builder software may have a Description field for each page that takes care of this tag automatically. While this doesn't affect search results directly, it will usually be the snippet shown for your page in search results, which can affect your click-through rate from those results, which in turn does affect your rankings for whatever keywords that visitor searched for.

• Consider getting an account on Moz.com, which can scan your site for technical issues that may impact your search results -- e.g., broken links, duplicate pages, missing TITLEs, etc. -- Moz is also a good, reputable site for SEO information generally; see their SEO Guides here.