5 SEO Mistakes To Be Careful Of

When I first started building websites of my own many moons ago, I read almost everything I could lay my hands on about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I could foresee the importance of search engines then and wanted to be ahead of competition. Soon, I knew by heart the methods needed to improve my websites’ search engine rankings by leaps and bounds, or so I thought.

Unfortunately, not all my websites were able to achieve great SEO as well as I had desired. Some websites were ranked pretty high and were sitting on the first page of search engine results for years; while others did not even make it to page two. Looking back, I saw that I had committed countless mistakes in my quest to SEO my websites. And through the years, I had learned from my mistakes and had managed to put these websites back on track, though it did take some time. Today, I have put together a list of 5 common SEO mistakes to be careful of, that I would be sharing with you, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way like I did.

Mistake #1: Wrong Keywords

Choosing the appropriate keywords is the most important part of the SEO process and yet the most common SEO mistake ever. Most webmasters, regardless of beginners or experts, commit the crime of applying keywords that THEY think best suit the website, instead of what keywords the search engine users pick to look for information offered by these websites. Most of them failed to realize that their keywords are not necessarily the ones that their targeted readers choose to search with. So do ensure that you do keywords research first and one way of doing so is through Google’s free Google Keyword Tool.

A tip here is to concentrate on keywords that have lesser competition and higher monthly searches. This way, you get less competitive sites but comparatively higher traffic, thus elevating your chances of ranking high in the results page.

Mistake #2: Keywords Saturation

I’m sure you have come across some sites which seemed to be saturated with the same keywords. Some webmasters believe that by stuffing the website with the keywords over and over again, the search engines would be able to detect them better. While this may hold some truth few years ago, it is not the case these days. In fact, most popular search engines today would penalize websites that have excessive keywords and poor content.

Regardless of whether it was done intentionally or unintentionally, cramming keywords in the websites or articles should be avoided. Do ensure that you produce quality articles and not quantity keywords only!

Mistake #3: Duplicating Content

Seen an article in another website and think that it’s so well written that you are tempted to just “borrow” it for your website? Don’t even think about it. Not only would search engines drop your site from being indexed but you would also be committing the ultimate crime in writing i.e. plagiarism. It is not worth the trouble.

You may be able to get away with it once or twice but what happens after that? You have to think long term and you definitely have to put in the effort.

It is not easy to come up with quality articles and sometimes you may encountered writer’s block but do persevere through it and your readers will come to appreciate it. So will the search engines.

Mistake #4: Not Doing Any Site-keeping

Like housekeeping, you have to consistently monitor and manage your website’s SEO progress. This is because search engines are changing their algorithms every so often and in order to maintain your high ranking, you would need to constantly put in SEO efforts besides updating your websites.

Mistake #5: Using Black Hat Techniques

Most people are tempted by the less-effort and quick-result offered by black hat SEO techniques like invisible text, doorway pages and overstuffed unrelated keywords. These are short-term and therefore, should be avoided. Bear in mind that search engines are improving their techniques too and will heavily penalize websites found to be using black hat techniques. Do not every use any black hat SEO techniques!

Read more about Magento: www.arrowhitech.com

From: hellboundbloggers.com

Magicento – PhpStorm plugin for Magento development

This post is intended for all Magento developers who use PhpStorm as their IDE. It’s about Magicento – free PhpStorm plugin for Magento developers.

Features in Magicento:

1. Goto

Magicento extends PhpStorm goto functionality in a way that you can now use goto also for factory methods and templates. You can go to destination class from factory method by using middle click (Ctrl+click, Ctrl+B).

Also, at the same way, you can go to any phtml template from layout xml file.

Clicking at any Mage: dispatchEvent call brings you to observer definition for corresponding event.

2. Class recognition for objects 

You can use Alt+M (Option+M) to assign class for certain object that is defined through factory method. That is very useful for code completion.

3. Creating modules

Click Alt+M (Option+M) -> Create Module anywhere in a file to save time while creating Magento modules.

I hope this post will be useful for all Magento developers that use PhpStorm.

http://www.mage-shop.com, http://www.arrowhitech.com/

Magento SEO: How To Optimize A Magento Product Detail Page

Product detail pages are critical for ecommerce sites. They are also the ones Google and other search engines have the most trouble with.

While Magento provides some basic search-engine-optimization capabilities out of the box, search engines still face challenges when crawling the pages of a Magento-powered storefront. This article will focus on the product detail pages. It is the first in a series where I will review the SEO changes you can do to a Magento setup. The idea is to make it easier for the search engines to find, index and rank the pages — without alienating your users. These detailed SEO changes will dramatically improve the search performance of Magento product detail pages, making them much more effective at doing their job. In subsequent articles, I will go over the changes to other important pages like main category pages, sub-categories, internal search pages, etc.

What Should We Optimize?

There are two classes of SEO elements that need to be optimized on any given page: Those that the user can see on the page and those that primarily the search engine bots can see. The first we call “user visible” and the second we call “machine visible.”

User-visible elements. The user-visible elements are everything a person can see both on the product detail page and in the search engine results page. Examples of these are the breadcrumbs, the main navigation, the layered navigation, and the product description.

Machine-visible elements. Machine-visible elements are what the crawlers see behind the scenes in the source code. It’s where we should start our SEO work. Examples of these are rich snippet markup, search friendly video markup, and meta data.

It’s fairly common to see developers who forget about users when making SEO changes to a site. They’ll change the title tag and make it a long string of keywords separated by commas, but forget that’s the “enticing” message they will present to users — in search engine results — to motivate them to click further. To do the job right, you have to make all of the SEO changes while keeping the site intuitive and usable.

What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

The main goal is getting more traffic and sales. But in order to do so, we need to look at the critical intermediate steps.

1. Increase crawling. If Googlebot can’t find a product detail page, it won’t rank. We address this by submitting comprehensive XML sitemaps and by stopping the spiders from entering infinite crawl spaces  such as those caused by layered navigation.

2. Increase indexation. Getting a page crawled doesn’t necessarily mean it will get indexed. We can get more pages into the index when we increase the page’s reputation with more quality inbound links, add more unique content, and eliminate duplicate content issues.

3. Improve ranking. While you can directly affect crawling and indexation, rankings is something we can only affect indirectly. We do this by making sure each page focuses on a small set of keyword opportunities. A page must realistically rank on its relevancy to the search query and its reputation.

4. Improve search results presentation. By tweaking the titles, meta descriptions and adding rich snippet markup, we can make the product detail pages appear more appealing in the search engine result pages. This will increase the click-through rates.

Improving the Product Detail Page

Let’s look at a sample product detail page. I’ve highlighted the most important elements that need to be changed in our template.

How to increase crawling.

First, let’s get the Magento SEO basics out of the way. Then we’ll focus on canonical URLs and eliminating duplicate content. Note that the steps below will vary based on the specific Magento theme.

Step 1: Go to System > Configuration > General > Web > Search Engines Optimization.

Step 2: Go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations.

Step 3: Enable automatic XML sitemap generation. Go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Google Sitemap > Generation Settings.

Step 4: Add robots meta tag with value “noindex/nofollow” to the following pages: “My Account,” “My Wishlist,” “My Cart,” ‘Checkout,” and “Login.” These pages are not useful to search bots. To do this, you need to use layout updates. For example, this is how you add it to “My Wishlist”:

In your Magento installation, open app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/wishlist.xml

Before the closing , add

<reference name="head">

<action method="setRobots"><value>NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW</value></action>

</reference>

Repeat for the rest of the wishlist pages sections in the file.

Step 5: Verify the canonical tags are working properly. For example, different product image views should have the same canonical tag.

How to increase indexation.

Step 1: Avoid using manufacturer provided product descriptions in the details section. Put the extra effort to make them unique and make sure they contain at least 100 words.

Step 2: The related products section is excellent for interlinking similar products and for passing page reputation from the most popular products to the less popular ones. Carefully consider this when adding or updating the related products section.

Step 3: The product reviews contain valuable user generated content. Ideally, they should be on the same page as the product to bolster the amount of written content. Unfortunately, Magento doesn’t provide an easy way to do that. They appear in separate URLs. I’ll address this in detail in a future article.

How to influence rankings.

Step 1: Make sure the product name is part of the title and is the only H1 on the page. For most ecommerce sites, the product name is best keyword the product detail page can rank for.

Step 2: The second best keyword is generally the SKU or any unique product identifier that user might use to search for the product. Surround the unique product identifier with an H2 tag.

Improving search results presentation.

We also want our page to look its best on the Google search engine results page, or SERP. Here is how we do that.

Step 1: Provide enticing titles, and meta descriptions. Consider them “organic ads” users will see in the SERPs. They must motivate searchers to click. You can control them easily via the admin panel.

Step 2: Add Schema.org rich snippet markup and your product pages will stand out in the search results. Explaining this step in detail would take a separate article.

Read more, Magento Extension

Development: Add breadcrumbs on a page via XML layout

The following article may be useful for front-end developers, it describes how to add breadcrumbs on the page (where it is not supposed to be by default) using layout XML and minimal PHP programming. It describes adding of 2-levels breadcrumbs (i.e. “Home / Some page”) which is needed in most cases.

In this article we will add breadcrumbs to Contact us page. There is no breadcrumbs by default.

Step 1

Modify corresponding XML file, in our case it is contacts.xml. You need to add the following code:

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<contacts_index_index translate="label"> ....             <reference name="breadcrumbs">                     <action method="addCrumb">                             <name>home</name>                             <params helper="arrowhitech_mod/getHomeUrl" />                     </action>                     <action method="addCrumb">                             <name>contact</name>                             <params>                                     <label>Contact Us</label>                                     <title>Contact Us</title>                                     <link/>                             </params>                     </action>             </reference> </contacts_index_index>

As you see we operating with breadcrumbs block via XML. We added 2 breadcrumbs:
- One for homepage (with a link to homepage).
- One for the current page.

The interesting point here is the assigning of the link to first breadcrumb:

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<action method="addCrumb">     <name>home</name>     <params helper="arrowhitech_mod/getHomeUrl" /> </action>

As you see, we call method getHomeUrl() from helper arrowhitech_mod which insert the link to homepage into breadcrumb. This is our custom helper, lets create it in “Step 2″.

Step 2

First of all, we need to create our own module (Note: If you don’t know how to create your own module in Magento don’t read further).

In below example the module is located in app/code/community/Arrowhitech/Mod/, but you can use any other location you like.

In the /etc/config.xml file of the module we need to define our helper:

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<?xml version="1.0"?> <config>     <modules>         <Arrowhitech_Mod>             <version>0.0.1</version>         </Arrowhitech_Mod>     </modules>     <global>         <helpers>             <arrowhitech_mod>                 <class>Arrowhitech_Mod_Helper</class>             </arrowhitech_mod>         </helpers>     </global> </config>

Finally, we need to create a helper file app/code/community/Arrowhitech/Mod/Helper/Data.php:

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<?php class Arrowhitech_Mod_Helper_Data extends Mage_Core_Helper_Abstract {     public function getHomeUrl() {         return array(             "label" => $this->__('Home'),             "title" => $this->__('Home Page'),             "link" => Mage::getUrl('')         );     } } ?>

That’s all. If you did everything right you will see the breadcrumbs on the Contact us page.

http://www.arrowhitech.com, http://www.mage-shop.com

When Should You Override Magento Core Files In app/code/local/Mage?

The short answer is: NEVER!

The longer answer is somewhat less absolute and requires some explanation.

Often you will see Magento tutorials or forum posts that implement a feature or functionality change that is different from what the core does which requires changing something in the core of Magento. Someone may then advise that, instead of hacking core files it is better to copy them into theapp/code/local/Mage location and perform the modifications there, so that, upon upgrade, the modifications are not lost. This process is called overriding Magento core functionality and is based on the fact that Magento sets its PHP include paths to first look in app/code/local/ thenapp/code/community/ and finally in app/code/core/. This has the effect that any files of the same name placed under the local or community name space will take precedence in loading, hence, we can override almost any core file in this way. To learn about how exactly Magento sets up its system, read the excellent series on the Magento Configuration by Alan Storm.

This is one, sometimes recommended, way of overriding core functionality without hacking the core but why is it, as you may conclude from my initial statement, so bad?

First, let’s see what scenarios would be compelling us to override core files:

1. We want to change a piece of functionality in a core method so we copy the php file containing the code and modify one or more methods.

2. We want to add a new method to a core block class, so it’s available for use in the phtml template so we copy the relevant core Block php file and add our method to it.

3. We may have several modifications consisting of core functionality changes and additions over several files.

So, what are we actually doing here, when we override core files?

For one thing, we must override the complete core file because we can’t trim out the stuff that we don’t want changed since we would lose all that functionality and most likely break Magento. Once the overridden file is in place, this will be the file and code Magento will be using from now onwards. Given that most core classes contain several and many times a large number of methods it means that we are effectively overriding all those methods in our file.

Now, remember when we were advised to use this override approach so we can make sure that our customizations are going to be preserved after a Magento version upgrade? Well that, indeed, will be true, but, what if the new Magento version has changes in the very files we have previously overridden? What if they have newly implemented methods or bug fixes in existing methods? Since our override will always take precedence, these new features and fixes will never be operational as our override runs all the old code. If you’re lucky, you may get an error report because a new change falls over due to missing methods but what if you don’t get error reports and instead, somehow, some inexplicable and erratic behavior starts expressing itself on your site?

You can see the problem now, right? After each upgrade, you will have to go and check all yourapp/code/local/Mage/ overrides and compare them to the new core files and port any core changes to your local override in order to maintain your site’s integrity. If you have lots of such overrides, this will be tedious. Also, if you are a developer who gets passed on an existing site with these kinds of overrides, you will not be happy. Often you won’t even know what the purpose of the override was and you’d need to laboriously go from diff to diff and decipher the meaning of any changes. It gets worse if the previous developer already performed some Magento upgrades.

By now, I guess, you have a good idea about the dangers of applying this kind of override, so, let’s get back to our original question, when, if at all, should you use this approach?

There are a few cases when this approach may be justified, in my opinion, these are the cases:

If you want to quickly try a core modification to see if it will solve your task as a proof of concept, but don’t want to create an extension just yet. When you are satisfied, you remove your override and implement a proper Magento extension with rewrites.

If you are implementing a temporary override of some core functionality that you will remove after your task is complete. A prime example of this is overriding the Magento dataflow classes for importing, when you want to change the way the importer handles certain things in an initial customer or product import.

The key concept here is: temporarychanges/experiments. You are not planning on leaving your overrides.

Note: There are some other scenarios where local Mage overrides are the only way to customize parts of Magento’s core functionality. I’d like to encourage a discussion in the comments to see what others think about this.

Conclusion

The take-away from this article is, never use the app/code/local/Mage/ approach to permanently override core functionality! If you must, then only use if for temporary changes that you will remove afterwards.

As for the question that now presents itself: how, then, should you implement core overrides? The answer is by creating a custom Magento module and using the available class rewrite mechanisms, or better yet, using event observers if possible.

Well come to visit my website:  http://www.mage-shop.com

Complexity of online trading

Its own online store and maintain, optimize simultaneously advertise and although at least in social networks, via email marketing and SEO. The legal requirements, besides the actual unwinding of transactions, purchase, sale and delivery of goods will be served. Especially for online merchants are the many challenges, all of which have an impact on business success. Very few online retailers, however, have the necessary know-how in all areas simultaneously. The knowledge required to gain is primarily in the legal field and in the areas of marketing such as SEO, is a difficult and time-consuming task. Since one wishes that a button would suffice to ensure, for example, the legal security of the shop.

Every other online retailers were warned 2011

Which formulations are in the Terms and Conditions ? What must always be mentioned in the imprint? Should I use a revocation or rather the return policy at the store? With these and many other questions will have to online retailers deal almost daily. That the dealers lurking in the process many cases, evidenced by the fact that in 2011 an average of every other online retailer was warned at least once.

Many online retailers give the creation of the legal texts now to lawyers who specialize in Internet law. The achieved time savings is by no means to be despised. However, the time is now shifted to the setting of legally secure texts in the online shop. If the dealer is not the lyrics to the correct location, it may be cautioned by the way also.

Carefree with the TNC interface

One step further in terms of legal certainty now is the trader's league. Its application allows TNC interface ensures that the texts are always loaded at the designated place of the shop and the click of a button. So that the texts are not only quite safe but also to keep abreast of the unique pre-established position in the online shop. For many systems, the T-Shop interface is already available. But what happens when changes in the law? Finally, online retailers will no longer deal with the degree of legal certainty of their shops. "The online retailers are under the Terms and update services by informing us about changing the law. The retailer now has to load the revised texts for the shop. This again just press a button and all the texts are already included updated and therefore quite safe". The answer from Andreas Arlt, chairman of the Dealers Association , on demand.

http://www.mage-shop.com, http://www.arrowhitech.com/

Magento SEO -- Things you need to know

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for most of the Magento websites, as search engine brings them a lot of traffic, let’s say, 50%+. However, SEO is still a mystery for many of the Magento store owners, as they don’t know what exactly they need to do when they set up a website. Some of them spend a lot of effort and money on it, but it is not working as they expected. Actually, SEO is not that mysterious. In this article, we’ll brief you the basic concept of SEO and show you how to go with it. It is super helpful for those store owners who don’t know SEO much. For those who had experiences with SEO, this article may still helpful for you.

What is SEO and how search engine works?

SEO is the process of improving the ranking of a website or a web page in search engine results which involves a wide variety of optimization techniques. It doesn’t involve the paid ads from Google Adwords. To know how to do SEO, you should first know how does search engine work.

Mainly, the search engine will do the following jobs:

• crawl & build web pages indexes
• provide answers to a search query based on the indexed

So if you want to have a good ranking from search engine, what will you do?

Firstly, you’ll need to be indexed. Not only to be indexed, but to be indexed well. There’re a lot of techniques that can be discussed here, in following section, we’ll brief you some of them.

Secondly, you’ll need to know what the “flavors” a search engine likes. Basically, the mission of a search engine is to provide the best result to the users when they make a query. So they try to get the most relevant and high quality content to the users. That’s the basic mechanism of a search engine, which means, you’ll need to try to provide the best contents to your visitors.

How to do SEO?

There are two main categories for how to SEO: on-site SEO and off-site SEO.

on-site SEO: refers to everything that you can do with your own website to improve SEO. This involves the strategic placement of keywords in your website content, including page title, meta description, URL structures, headers, etc, building of well organized website structures and internal links, providing high quality content relevant to the topic of the website and so on.

off-site SEO: refers to everything that happens on the internet other than your website and links back to your one. The backlinks can be from either websites or blogs. Each backlinks will contribute for the “impact” of your website on search engine. The strategy here is to get as much relevant back links as possible to your website.

In following content, we’ll focus on specific technical aspects of on-site SEO for your Magento store as this is what we can control directly.

SEO friendly design & development for a Magento website

Search engines are built on top of computer algorithms and therefore, a web page doesn’t always look the same to you and me as to search engines. In this section, we’ll focus on how to design & develop web pages so they’re structured for both human and computer.

Build up indexable content.

Computers don’t read/understand images well at the current stage, so as audios, videos, Flash, Java applets, and other non-text content. In order to be visible to search engines, the easiest way is to make sure all your wordings or phases are written in HTML text on a web page. There’re a lot to discussions for how to organize the content of a web page so as to be better indexed by search engines. The principle is, providing what your audiences really need on the website with well formatted HTML codings. For HTML codings, you can check it out from W3C school.

Be careful for your page title tag

Page title is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content and search engines treat it as a very important part. Therefore, in order to optimize the page title tag for SEO of your Magento site, you can follow the recommendation below which covers the most critical parts.

• Length of the title tag: Search engines normally display only 65-75 characters of the title tag in their searching result so it is recommended the length of the title tag should not exceed this.
• Leverage branding: To create better branding impression for customers, you can end your title tag with you brand name.
• Hierarchy for the title tag: The starting keywords of the title tag count more for search engines, therefore, you should put the important keywords closer to the beginning of the title tag.

Well organize and structure your website content

Search engines start crawling your website from the index page. Imagine that it needs to crawl thousands of thousands of thousands web pages a day, if you hide your web pages deep inside, search engines will simply ignore them. So we recommend that for the main pages, there shouldn’t be more than 3 clicks for a customer to reach them from home page.

Search engine also like highly connected website, which means, there’re a lot of links in all the pages of the website from one page to another. This can be helpful for search engine to index your pages. Also, it is highly recommend to build up a sitemap HTML page to link to all the main pages of your website.

Design targeted keywords for your Contents

Search engines are designed from the science of information retrieval which are based on keywords. Keywords play a fundamental role for Search Engine as they’re the building blocks of the indexing system for search engines. Thus, in order for your web pages to be searched and rank well, you need to design your page keywords before creating content. For example, if you want people to find you by typing “furniture”, you should organized your content according to it and make it part of the indexable content of your page.

However, it doesn’t mean you should put as much keywords as possible on a page. The pages will be punished by search engine if it founds there are keywords abuse on the page.

Below are some tips for best-practice for design targeted keyword and creating content for your web page:

• Put the keywords on Title Tag at least once, and keep the keywords as close to the beginning of the article as possible;
• Design the keywords and organized the content according to the keywords;
• The keywords should appear at least 2~3 times on the body of the text, depending on the length of it;
• The keywords should appear at least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only help your web page to be searched, but also the images in the page;
• Don’t put a specific keyword as the title of all your page.

Control Search Engine Spider By Meta Tags

The meta tags play an important role in SEO as they can be used to control search engine spider at a page level. The two worthy mentioned meta tags are meta robots and meta description.

Meta Robots, an example , the content attributes can be the followings:

• index/noindex: this value tells the search engine whether to crawl the page and keep the index for this page for retrieval or not. The value of it is “index” by default.
• follow/nofollow: this value tells whether the links within the page should be crawled.
• noarchive: it is used to restrict search engines from saving a cache copy of the page.

Meta Description: an example

The meta description will be displayed in the search engine result, see below the image:

The meta description tag is the advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the search results, therefore, it is extremely important part of search marketing. Try to write a readable and compelling description using target keywords to draw higher click through rate of users to your page.

We’ve discussed a lot for on-site SEO in this article. Feel free to let us know if you had any questions. If you have any other SEO experiences, please share them as well.

http://www.mage-shop.com