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Making Your Amazon AStore Search Engine Friendly

by 38 Comments

Amazon AStoreAmazon just recently released a new beta tool for their associates (affiliates). It’s called Amazon AStore.

It allows you to build your own customizable store. This is what a store looks like: http://astore.amazon.com/bristolwebdes-20

The things I like about it are:

  • It’s simple and easy to set up. Mine took less than 5 minutes.
  • It allows you to feature products on the homepage and add your own descriptions to them.
  • You can add your own logo and customize the color scheme.

Unfortunately, one of the first things you’ll notice is where the store is located. It is hosted on Amazon’s servers. To use or promote the store you are stuck with three options.

These descriptions are taken directly from Amazon’s page:

Link to your aStore as a stand-alone site
Make your aStore a stand-alone section of your Web site by adding a “Store” link to your main site navigation bar that links directly to your new store. This is the easiest way to integrate your aStore; however, it will appear to your users as if they are leaving your website when visiting your store. 		Link to the Store
Embed your aStore using an inline frame
An inline frame is a great way to embed your aStore into any existing or new page on your Web site. This method of embedding your aStore will appear to your visitors as if the aStore is part of your site and enable them to shop without leaving your site. 		iFrame
Integrate your aStore using a frameset
Frame your aStore into your Web site using a frameset by placing your aStore in one frame and your Web site’s navigation in another frame. This method of embeding your store will also be appear to your visitors as if the store is part of your Web site and enable them to shop without leaving your site.		 Frameset

You’ll notice that none of the options are search engine friendly. Search engines treat frames and iframes as links, simply following them rather than thinking of it as part of your site. If it were possible to make it part of your site, it would allow you to rank your Amazon category and product detail pages in the search engines separately.

I’ve recently come up with a solution whereby you can have your AStore hosted on your own domain and fully indexable by the search engines. Here is my first store:

http://www.gift-unique.com

Would you be interested in this solution?

How important is it to be able to customize the headers and footers (outside of the customization allowed by Amazon)?

If enough people are interested, I’ll make it available for download.

Comments

  2. Thanks for the interest in the script. I haven’t documented it yet, but if you’d like I can email you it.

    Keep in mind, your server will need to be able to run ASP scripts and you must be able to have custom error pages.

  3. Thank you very much for your reply. I would love it if you would e-mail it to me.

    Best,

    Matt Sager

    (email removed so it doesn\’t get spammed)

  6. Really like your website. Most of the astores I have seen people did not fit the store into the page correctly so people can not click on the right hand links. The stores don’t look professional because of the incorrect fit. Glad to see your site. I am a newbie so was beginning to think the astore was at fault.
    I am working on getting a good domain name and also finding out how to promote the website so it is good to see you have a script that will make it easier to promote. Could you please send me the script too? Any other suggestions of how to do this type of thing would be appreciated. I see you used WordPress. Thought that was just for blogs (?).

    Thank you for your time

  8. I also love the look of A-Store but would like to make it SEO friendly for my guitar blog/site. Please send solution if you can. Thanx bunches, dma

  9. Hi there. This is exactly what I was searching for! Please email the solution. I will be very greatful!

    Thank you so much!!!

  10. Hi,

    Please e-mail me your download for the aStore. I’ve recently seen the following aStore : http://www.shoppingmall.org.uk and would love to have a top navigator bar like his integrated into my site.

    I guess it’s not just a case of copying and pasting his source code onto my host server/domain?

    Kind regards,
    Simon

  11. Hi Guys,

    Sorry I haven’t replied sooner. The reason is that the solution I wrote seems to have little bugs in it that I haven’t had the time to address just yet.

    Simon, as for the ShoppingMall.org.uk site, they are just using iframes (one of amazon’s recommended method). And it is simply a matter of duplicating their code and modifying it to suit your needs.

    Best,

    Tom

  12. Hi,
    I found your blog via google by accident and have to admit that youve a really interesting blog 🙂
    Just saved your feed in my reader, have a nice day 🙂

  14. Hi,

    Please e-mail me your download for the aStore.
    This is exactly what I was searching for! Please email the solution. I will be very greatful!

    Thank you so much!!!

  16. Hi

    This is just the solution I have been searching for too. Please mail the details to me. Pretty sure I have ASP on my server.

    Cheers,

    Jon.

  17. Hi Tom,

    It’s me again – now that I know that your system has bugs (you’ll recall I thought it was the ISP’s fault), please let me know as soon as the solution is ready for prime-time, I would love to work with you again to get some aStores published and searchable.

    Thanks!

    Matt

  19. Tom,

    I like your WordPress Permalink workaround for IIS. I am using it on my site, but it seems to cause problems with the character set when it returns the response page. For example, if I use Chinese/Japanese characters in a post, it renders those as question marks even though the HTML charset is UTF-8. Is there a way to set the character set/encoding on the response in the ASP file?

    Thanks.

  20. Hi again. FYI, I resaved the errorpage.asp file with a UTF-8 encoding signature and that seemed to fix the problem. Now Unicode characters work okay.

  22. I believe the script has some errors or doesn’t work totally correctly, so I’m not emailing it out until I have the time to fix it. My sample site is disabled for the moment as well.

    Best,
    Tom

  23. Hi,

    Do you still have the code for the Astore?

    Would appreciate a copy of it

    Thanks,

    Bob Firmin

  26. I would also love to have the script if you get it running straight. Perhaps you could offer this to Amazon as a fourth method to embed!
    If you do get it running, please let me know!

  27. Please send me the script to make astores search engine friendly.

    Thanks.

  29. Thanks for everyone’s interest in the script. It needs some updates before I can release it, but I’ll see if I can get those done soon.

  30. Hi Tom,

    please send me your script too, even if you couldn’t update it yet. I’m interested in how your approach works.

    Thanks!

  32. Hello,

    How are the updates coming along? Would you be able to send me whatever you have of the script working or not and ill try to get something out of it?

    Thank You

  33. I have been looking for a complete example, care to just spell it out in this post Tom? People have been waiting since September 6, 2006, ha!!! 🙂

  34. Could you please send me your script how to make the astores SEO-friendly?

    Thank you so much!!

    Greetings from Düsseldorf, Germany,

    Benita

  35. I have solution for the problem too: free public on-line service StoreBrander I created recently. The service allows not only give own domain name to Amazon aStore (including all links) but benefit from various Google services like Webmaster Tools, Analytics, AdSense, etc.

  36. Yes, yes, I’d love to learn how to incorporate a search feature into my Amazon astore.

    Many thanks,

    Ellen

  38. hi,

    i’d be interested in seeing this script, if you don’t mind forwarding it to me, i would be so very grateful.

    merry christmas,

    James

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