Open Social Collaboration: The Missing Piece of Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

Through working for a startup, I know these strategies can take a significant amount of time and effort to plan and execute. So, I set out to find a better way to manage our SEO and CE planning process and provide better content (i.e. becoming authoritative by sharing what we're getting done) while optimizing the potential search and social reach for our content..

I’m going to share a few of my secrets on how integrating open social collaboration helps you produce better work and, improve your organic search results.

Open collaboration

It’s important that we first make a distinction between the two ways to use open social collaboration; that’s the “open” component. Let’s look at open social collaboration in two parts: the front end and the back end.

+ Back end: includes everything that happens before you hit “publish.”

+ Front end: includes everything that happens after you hit “publish.”

Open only comes into play when it’s time and/or necessary. There’s an entire “private” social collaboration component that’s meant for you or you and your team. You can use open social collaboration to plan your SEO and CE efforts, and then extend your reach privately. Before doing so, it's important to find a collaboration platform that can handle both private and public sharing to truly optimize your SEO and CE strategies.

But back to our content engagement workflow. The back end process includes things like:

+ Editorial planning for your website, blog, and social networks

+ Keyword list creation

+ Content creation for your website, blog, and social networks

+ Editing and review of content

+ Delegation of tasks to socially promote each piece of content

Let’s break these steps down even further. As you plan the promotion for the content you create, think strategically about the social networks you use and how they complement your SEO efforts.

The retweet opportunity and the Rule of 60

You may know that getting retweets is the best way to amplify your Twitter reach. But, did you know that many miss out on the complete retweet opportunity? Here’s our tried and true magic mix:

When you search for something on Google, the result titles only display about 70-80 characters (or less). That means the first 60 to 70 characters in your tweet, title tag, and other indexed social postings are the most important. If you include your keywords after that point, it doesn’t do much to help your SEO. I like to call this the Rule of 60.

The Rule of 60 is also important for your title tag. As Ruth Burr wrote in a recent case study, “When your title tag is too long, instead of simply truncating it and adding an ellipsis to the end the way they used to, Google is trying to algorithmically determine a better title for the post.”

A few great tactics for planning out Twitter content (and a variation of this for other social networks) includes:

+ Creating great content you think will resonate with your customers

+ Creating SEO-friendly headlines with 70 characters or less title tags

+ Keywords included in first 60 words of your tweets

+ Include the link to the post after the keywords (they have the highest likelihood of being retweeted)

+ Post tweets during times your community are most likely to engage.

Although this may seem like a lengthy process, over time it becomes second nature - a habit is formed. I keep the checklist around for sustainability (i.e. if someone new had to jump in and do it) reasons. The final tweet recommendation goes to the entire team to share, if they feel so inclined.  Publishing versions of posts to Twitter and Facebook (or with Buffer) is a great next step, which adds more SEO value since it’s spiderable and makes social sharing even easier (this is part of the “front end” strategy). When your team is in the loop and your content is shared across multiple platforms, everyone wins!

Our product here: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

Top 9 Keyword Placement

“Keyword Placement Is an SEO Essential” will trump “SEO Essentials: Keyword and key phrase Placement” for a look for on “keyword placement”, with the exception of that all other factors are organised continuous.

1. Each web page (article, publish etc) of material should be between 500-1000 terms long

Creating a web page that only has 100 terms on it, is fairly much a spend of your energy and energy. Unless you are offering great material you are not going to get all of the advantages of referring to the subject and could possibly keep your visitors asking concerns that your web page does not response.

2. Use your primary keyword and key phrase at least once in each 80-100 terms and each additional keyword and key phrase at least once in each 400-500 words

Each web page of your web page should be planned out with one primary keyword and key phrase (the primary concentrate of the page) and 3-4 additional search phrases. When you create (or edit) the material of your web page you need to consist of these terms to create the material appropriate. Your primary keyword and key phrase should be recurring a few times throughout and your additional every so often, maybe once or twice in the site based on its duration.

3. Use your primary keyword and key phrase in the headline of the site, content or post

Each of your webpages should have a headline that is designed using the <h1> going tag. When you create this headline it should consist of your primary keyword and key phrase as this is given more concentrate than your web page material.

4. Use the primary keyword and key phrase in the first and last phrase of your web page, content or post

This is one that you should be trying to do anyway, consist of your primary keyword and key phrase at the starting and the end to present people to the subject and tell them why they just study your page: awesome simple phrase structure we should have all discovered in university.

5. Include at least 2 sub-titles with the primary keyword and key phrase of the site, content or publish.

A large content should always be designed out with sub headings to demonstrate the different segments of the site, these subheadings should consist of your primary keyword and key phrase. If your keyword and key phrase is Bundaberg Housing your sub headings could be Bundaberg Housing Features and Things to do near your Bundaberg Housing.

6. Add primary keyword and key phrase in the first aspect of your meta information (and keep in mind it needs to be exclusive for every web page on your site).

Getting back to the Meta Description we described previously, you need to make sure your primary keyword and key phrase is involved towards the starting. This is a primary SEO concept that provides concentrate to google and also reveals visitors that your web page material is appropriate to what they are looking for.

7. Include at least one picture in each publish optimized for the primary keyword and key phrase such as the picture name and alt tag.

No one wants to look at a lengthy web page with no pictures, when you create your web page material create sure you consist of appropriate pictures that are known as properly with the keyword and key phrase and have an alt tag also such as that keyword and key phrase, keep in mind, google cannot see pictures, they depend on the picture name and alt tag to find out what the picture is ‘about’.

8. Include one primary keyword and key phrase in strong and one italicised.

Throughout your written text, where most appropriate you should structure your primary keyword and key phrase so it is bolded and italicised once each. In our case we have involved seo guidelines and seo guidelines throughout our material.

9. Use your keyword and key phrase as aspect of your web page permalink.

When you create your web page you should be able to figure out the URL that will display for that web page, you should always work to consist of the keyword and key phrase as aspect of it and when in two areas individual the phrase with a hyphen.

Read more: mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

7 Tips for On-page SEO Success

When searching for an SEO strategic consultant, your best option is to go with someone who not only has years of SEO training and experience but someone that has in-depth experience in website coding, programming, designing and developing. As a SEO strategist who began her professional career as not only a software application programmer but also a website designer and developer, I always take into consideration the front end and back end of a company’s success online. In order to help your online success, I’m going to give you 7 tactics to successful on-page SEO problems that happen quite frequently but can be fixed quickly.

1. Create Unique TITLE Tags

One of the most powerful ranking factors is the TITLE tag on your website. The TITLE tag is the text that appears at the top of your browser bar that will usually state your business name and specialty. These tags should always be unique, keyword rich and descriptive. Each page should have it’s own unique TITLE tag to illustrate to the search engine spiders that each page contains unique and relevant content. If you have a huge site that is running on a specific platform (WordPress, Joomla, .NET, etc) there are ways to code appropriately to automate this field to pull a specific area of content from the page.

2. Create Unique META DESCRIPTION Tags

Although the DESCRIPTION tag does not directly impact your search engine rankings (SER), it does indirectly impact your website in:

+ It most often determines the snippet of content that is displayed in your listing on the search engine results page (SERP).

+ Creates a value added that attracts your visitors to click on your link in the search engines to visit your website.

As with the TITLE tag, the DESCRIPTION tag should be unique to differentiate it from other areas of your website and attract more relevant traffic.

3. Keep Your TITLE Tags Short

SEO is an art and a science but still has certain rules it must follow. One of these rules is the limit of character displayed in the TITLE tag on your website and the fact that the more words in this tag, the more diluted your optimization efforts. Keep your TITLE tags relevant but do not make your other pages compete with each other. Keep the TITLE tags short and relevant to the content on the page.

Along with this, the TITLE tag has a limited character threshold on the search engine results page (SERP). Don’t make your TITLE tag contain “…” after it. When it does, the search engines and potential visitors are missing out on quality keyword content.

4. The Importance of Canonicalizing Internal Duplicates

There is a lot of duplicate content available on the Internet and Google has been implementing new algorithms to ward off websites that scrap and steal quality content. In order to help increase your website’s search engine ranking you need to be aware of three common kinds of internal duplicates:

+ Those caused by alternate URL paths to the same page

+ Those caused by tracking parameters and session variables

+ Those caused by search filters and sorts

In these cases, it is important to canonicalize these pages by either using a canonical tag or 301-permanent redirect. This will inform the search engine spiders which page is the original content and help prevent duplicate content indexing.

5. Create Direct Product Links

If you’re website is e-commerce based or has thousands of pages, then having a simple website architecture platform is not a viable option. Normally, you never want to make your website visitor click more than 3 levels deep to find the page or product they are looking for on your website. In this case, it is best to add direct product links, from your best sellers, on your homepage. For bestsellers or featured products, keep the direct links to a minimum but by implementing this strategy, both your visitors and search engines can more easily get to deeper levels of your website.

6. Get Rid of Low Quality Links

The more links you have on your website, the more diluted the weight of each link becomes. Websites with limited links (internal and external) demonstrate to the search engines that each link is of high value and therefore should be treated as such. Keep the linking limited to a few high quality pages and websites in order to increase the weight of each of those links.

7. Modify Internal Anchor Text

Don’t over-think the keywords you use to link to other pages in your website. Keywords should always reflect your keyword strategy and remain simple but relevant to both your visitors and search engines. Use common words that your customers or visitors would use to find your products or services. For example, if you are a B2C company, don’t use language or jargon that only the internal employees would know for your consumer website. Simple and relevant anchor text should remain a priority.

Although there are many parts to a complete SEO strategic plan, website owners and companies should not ignore the important of on-site tactics. Link building and off-site tactics may bring some traffic and search engine spiders to a website but it is what happens on the website that determines the overall success of a SEO strategy. Without a solid on-site SEO strategic plan, search engine spiders may not only have difficulty indexing and ranking your website correctly but customers may become frustrated – which highly decreases the chance of conversion.

I welcome you to implement these solid SEO strategic tactics on your own website and when you are ready to take your website/online brand management success to the next level, don’t hesitate to contact us.

mage-shop.com, arrowhitech.com

5 Awesome Simple Steps To Find Your SEO RankScore

The aim of this post is to give you a gauge of the most important SEO metric for your website – your search engine rankings. Often, we find ourselves searching for our keywords on Google to see where we rank. That gives us a binary result – a ‘yes/no answer’ i.e. you’re either ranking well or not. But while performing this periodic ritual, we miss recording something more valuable. And what’s that?

Imagine you’re playing a game – and all your rankings in that game are put up on a scoreboard, next to your competition. The score-keeper runs some calculations on the rankings, and comes up with a total score for each contender. Those scores are then put up on a totem pole (a pole where ranks are put in order from top to bottom), so you know exactly who’s winning & who’s losing. You then track this score over-time to witness your improvement (or decline); and make changes to your SEO strategy when necessary. Such a score would arm you with precise knowledge of your competitive rankings & tell you where you stand on Google in one go, wouldn’t you agree?

That’s the concept behind RankScore, and that’s why I feel it is important to share it with you. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to determine your own RankScore (with the help of a simple Excel sheet), and know the RankScore of your competitors too. You ready? Let’s jump right into it then.

Step 1: List your Keywords

In the first step, simply list down all your keywords together (preferably in an excel sheet). In the next column, write down your website name/URL, and highlight the whole column.

Tip: the more keywords you enter, the more awesome analysis you’ll get

Step 2: Know your Competition

This is important! You need to know who you’re competing against. If you already know your top 3 competitors (atleast), skip this step. If you don’t, perform a search on Google for your main keyword, and note down the top 3 competitors. Now, enter them next to your website like this:

Step 3: Find thy Standing

Where do you rank on Google? More importantly, where does your competition rank? Let’s get searching! To do this, you can either use free tools available online that allow you to check your rank on Google, or do it manually yourself. What we’re trying to do here is fill in that sheet with actual data that can be used for our analysis in the next step. The final version may look something like this:

Step 4: Analyze

Done checking your rankings for all keywords? Great! It’s time for your hard-work to pay off! The first thing you should do is find out your average rankings. This will tell you the exact number of #1’s, Top 10s, Top 30s & Top 100s you have. The formula I use to calculate this is:

=COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10″)

The above formula will tell you the number of Top 10s that are present within a keyword cell range. To put this in your sheet, simply change the B3:B6 to your keyword cell range, and “<=10″ to whatever criteria you want to apply (for eg: “=1″ for to find the number of Position 1s).

Next, let’s run a formula to get the actual rankScore. For the sake of simplicity, here’s a formula you can use right away:

=(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “=1″)*5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=3″)*4)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=10″)*3.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=30″)*2.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=50″)*1.5)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=70″)*1)+(COUNTIF(B3:B6, “<=100″)*0.5)

Put this formula below all your rankings and replace the “B3:B6” with the range of your keyword cells. This formula basically counts all your rankings, gives a specific score to each position range (for eg: 5 points if you are #1 for a keyword), and then sums it up for all keywords. There it is, your RankScore! This is how it all looks at my end:

Step 5: Take Action!

Yep, about time! Now that you know where you stand, it’s time to think about your future steps & the action you’re going to take on them. If you have a lower score vis-à-vis your competition, change your SEO strategy. For more insight, compare your averages too (your number of #1s, Top 10s etc.). If you fare great on both these aspects, great job – be proud of yourself!

Read more: arrowhitech.com, mage-shop.com

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

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

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

Magento SEO

It’s now almost a year after the world saw the first stable release of Magento, and there was still no “definitive guide” to Magento SEO. A lot has been written on the subject, in the Magento forum and some blog posts, but nothing that gives a complete overview of this subject. It’s time to let all this knowledge and experience fall into one big piece; the definitive guide to Magento SEO.

As search, SEO, and last but not least the Magento platform evolve, we will keep this Magento SEO article up to date with tips, tricks & best practices. Because Magento, though pretty stable, hasn’t matured yet, the best practice is to stay updated with the latest release, at moment of writing 1.4.

Need your website reviewed?

If you need an outside look at your Magento install, you might consider our Website Review. The results of this review contain a full report of improvements for your site, encompassing my findings for improvements in different key areas such as SEO to Usability to Site Speed & more. For the cost of €595 (which is less than $800), you’ll receive a report that represents a much larger value in turn-over and profit!

Table of contents

1. 1 Basic technical optimization
   1. 1.1 General Configuration
   2. 1.2 Header Settings
   3. 1.3 CMS Pages
   4. 1.4 Category optimization
   5. 1.5 Products optimization
2. 2 Magento Template Optimization
   1. 2.1 Optimized Blank Template
   2. 2.2 Headings
   3. 2.3 Clean up your code
   4. 2.4 Aim for speed
3. 3 Advanced Magento SEO and Duplicate Content
   1. 3.1 Nofollowing unnecessary links
   2. 3.2 Canonical URLs
   3. 3.3 XML Sitemaps

1 Basic technical optimization

1.1 General Configuration

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms straight out of the box, but there are several known issues that can be taken care of to optimize your Magento SEO. The first step is to get the most recent release, 1.2.1 Then, to get started, enable Server URL rewrites. You will find this setting under System => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization. Another good thing to configure now you are on this screen is “Add store Code to Urls” under “Url Options”. In most cases it is better to set this functionality to “No”.

WWW vs non-WWW

Under “Unsecure” and “Secure” you can find the Base URL, where you can set the preferred domain. You can choose between the www and the non-www version of the URL. With changing the setting you don’t create a redirect from www to non-www or non-www to www but set only the preferred one. Therefore it is a good idea to create a 301 redirect through .htaccess with mod_rewrite. Besides solving the WWW vs non-WWW problem this redirect prevents Magento from adding the SID query to your URLs, like ?SID=b9c95150f7f70d6e77ad070259afa15d. Make sure the Base URL is the same as redirect. When editing the .htaccess file you can add the following code to redirectindex.php to root.

Around line 119:

1	RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/

2	RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L]

Or, when your Magento install is not in the root but in the sub-directoryhttp://www.mydomain.com/magento/:

1	RewriteBase /magento/ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /magento/index.php HTTP/

2	RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ [R=301,L]

1.2 Header Settings

By default your Magento install has the title “Magento Commerce”. For your Magento shop to get the traffic it deserves you should keep at your mind:

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

First of all you should get rid off the default title “Magento Commerce”. Go to Configuration => Design => HTML Head. Choose a good and descriptive title for your website. This title will be used for several non-content pages without custom title, e.g. “Contact Us” and the “Popular Search Terms”.

To add your store name to all page titles, including categories and products, put your store name in “Title Suffix”. It is a better idea to keep the Prefix empty, for the reasons mentioned above. Also keep “Default Description” and “Default Keywords” empty. For a non-production environment, to prevent indexing of the site, it may be useful to set “Default Robots” to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” but for all other applications make sure it is set to “INDEX, FOLLOW”.

Now we are optimizing the <head> of your web-store pages it is a good idea to add the new canonical tag. You can install the Canonical URL’s for Magento Module to add them to your head and improve your Magento SEO.

For some reason Magento turns non-set meta robots into a meta tag in this style:

<meta name="robots" content="*" />

This can result in some very strange behavior in the search engines, so we’ll remove it. 

1.3 CMS Pages

At first sight Magento may lack some descent CMS functionality, but for most uses it will be flexible and powerful enough. One of the benefits of this simple CMS is that you can control each aspect of the pages. Once you’ve given each CMS page some decent content, pick a SEF URL Identifier and page title, (while keeping in mind the points under 1.2), and go to the Meta Data tab to write a description for each CMS page that you actually want to rank with.

You can keep the “Keywords” empty. The description has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet…

If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

1.4 Category optimization

Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL’s. Because Magento doesn’t support this functionality very well – it creates duplicate content issues – it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set “Use categories path for product URL’s to “no”.

Now it’s time to set the details for each category. Go to Catalog => Manage Categories. The most important fields are:

• Meta Description: put an attractive description here; Keep in mind that people will see the description in the result listings of search engines.
• Page Title: keep this empty to use the category name including parents categories. When you customize it, the title will be exactly like your input, without the parent category.
• URL Key: try to keep a short but keyword rich URL. Removing stop words like “the”, “and”, “for” etc. is usually a good idea. Also note that you can set this only for all store views, for a multi-language store you should keep it language independent.

For each store view you can specify the Name, Description, Page Title and Meta data. For multi-language stores this is really a great feature.

1.5 Products optimization

Optimization of the Products pages is similar to Categories. You can set the Meta Information for the “Default Values” and for each “Store View”. Note that for the “Meta Title”, this will overwrite the complete page title, including categories but except title prefix/suffix, and not just the product name.

An often-overlooked aspect of Magento SEO is how you handle your images. By for instance writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the image files, you can get a nice bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you’re helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them.

By default the images will be renamed to the product title, the same for titles and alt tags. With some extra effort you can set the titles and alt tags for each product image. Under the tab “Images” of the Product Information you can set the label for each product image, this value will be used for the alt and title tag. Of course you can do this for each specified Store View as well.

2 Magento Template Optimization

2.1 Optimized Blank Template

The default Magento skins like “Default Theme”, “Blue Skin” and “Modern Theme” don’t do a very good job in the use of headings, so from an SEO perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement there. To make it easy on you, we have developed a MS cosmetics theme and Ms fashion2 theme, Ms premium theme which incorporates all the things we’ve outlined below. 

2.2 Headings

By default the logo is an <h1>, which is should only be on the front page, and on all other pages it should be no more than an <h3>. The most important thing is to get the title of the content in an <h1> tag, e.g. for a category page should it be the category name and for a product the product name.

The next step is to clean up the over usage of headings. It’s a good idea to get rid off the header usage in the side columns, or make the text relevant to the shop (ie. include keywords). There is no reason to add “static” and keyword less titles with an <h4>. It is, for instance, better to change all the <h4> tags in <div class="head"> to <strong>tags. Now it is time to optimize your content, at the category pages put the product names in a <h3> and the category name in a <h1>. On product pages, you should put the product name in an <h1>.

2.3 Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they’re not doing your Magento SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don’t have to download them most of the time.

2.4 Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your shop each day, is how speedy your shop loads.

You can do two things to increase the speed of your Magento install:

1. Enable caching. Go to System => Cache Management and enable all caching features, like this.
2. The importance of a good host and server config. With MySQL and PHP opcode cache you can improve the speed of Magento dramatically.

NOTE: there is a rumor that with the 1.3 release of Magento new functionality will be added with huge performance improvements.

Another thing to look for is the number of external files. For each file you make people download, their browser has to create another connection to the webserver. So it is a very good idea to reduce the number of external files and combine several external files in to one. By default Magento already combines (almost) all javascript files into one file.

It doesn’t do this for stylesheets though: the default template has 6 different stylesheet files. You can combine the content of these stylesheets into one new one, except for the print.css file, or you can use the Fooman Speedster module. Besides combining files, this module also compresses and caches your javascript and stylesheet files. (Please note the requirements for Speedster: mod_rewrite has to be enabled & and your server needs to have .htaccess support. If you use Canonical URLs for Magento and Fooman Speedster together, you need to overwrite the Canonical module.

3 Advanced Magento SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you have done all the basic stuff you will find the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. For products you have, at least, the following URLs with exact the same content:

• domain.com/product.html
• domain.com/category1/product.html
• domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/
• domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1/

Besides that you have pages like the product review pages with almost the same content. Another problem are categories, you get a load of duplicate content with layered navigation and the sorting options. In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a product is available on 4 pages at least next to the page where it should be available.

We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered but not indexed and fixing the sorting options and layered navigation for categories.

3.1 Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your Magento SEO is to stop linking to your login, checkout, wishlist, and all other non-content pages. The same goes for your RSS feeds, layered navigation, add to wishlist, add to compare etc. Still there is no plugin for Magento to work this around. You had probably have to go into your template files to add nofollow to those links by hand.

3.2 Canonical URLs

To help search engines to understand the duplicate content of your pages you can suggest the preferred version of the URL for each page, using the new canonical URL tag, so you should install the Canonical URL’s for Magento module.

3.3 XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are an easy way of letting search engines know where your content is, it won’t help you rank, but it might help you get indexed faster. You can create an XML sitemap manually by going to Catalog => Google Sitemap => Add Sitemap, choosing a filename, path and store view, and then pressing “Save & Generate”.

You can then simply put the following code in your robots.txt file to point the search engines to your sitemap.xml file:

Sitemap: http://domain.com/sitemap.xml

As your inventory changes, you’ll have to re-generate XML sitemaps. To make sure they’re up to date, the best way is to set up a cron job.

Conclusion: Magento SEO development

This article has covered all the aspects of Magento SEO, if you have any feedback, or additions, let us know, so we can keep improving on this article. We’re working closely with the Magento core development team to improve the SEO aspects of Magento, so we’re actively trying to get some of the ideas in this article into Magento core.

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