Through much effort we have been able to get our current Monster site ranked in the top 3 organically for our most important keywords. One of the things that made a huge difference was including key word descriptions for all alt tags on our photos (we have LOTS of photos). With 3d we do not have that option, so I have a couple of questions:
1) Do the search engines look at the caption for each photo as they would the alt tags?
2) Have any of you who have made the switch found their ranking better/worse/the same as they had with Monster?
We're getting ready to go live with the new 3d store and I'm terrified of losing our organic ranking. Thanks!
Yes- we switched from Monstercommerce.....and held back quite awhile due to this fear. The answer: with little or no "extra" SEO efforts, our ranking is BETTER than it was.
I don't really have an answer for you for your first question.
But as far as your second...We made the switch from Monster to 3dCart back in October and I noticed that our traffic quadrupled. A lot of that may be because of the Christmas shopping season and also because our site is still new to the search engines. But I found that while with Monster, MSN brought us the most traffic. Google now accounts for around 55-65% of our traffic on a given day and MSN accounts for less than 10%. Although we have a long way to "grow", our rankings have definitely improved since switching.
We switched from Monster to 3d on Jan 1 and it sure seems like SEO is much better. We had the 3d site up, in development, since October and it seemed like things on that site were getting better/same rankings as the same item on Monster that had been up for 18 months.
I am very happy with 3d so far. I highly recommend them to someone needing a good cart that offers flexibility.