I switched to WP Engine this past spring and I have been absolutely thrilled with my Website speed. Pingdom.com said my site is beating 98% of all tested Websites. This is how I compare to other sites on the Web.

• MyWebTronics: 391 ms
• Yoast.com: 545 ms
• Google.com 464 ms
• Google search result for “WordPress Speed”: 478 ms
• TechCrunch: 6.77 seconds

Keep in mind, I am displaying excerpts from 25 posts on my home page. That creates a large while loop during load. But I don’t have to worry about that because WP Engine does such a great job caching my content.

Why WPEngine is so fast

•  All requests are spread across multiple boxes (servers) so WordPress doesn’t have to rely on just one processor
• A custom coded WordPress caching system that delivers pages in 15 milliseconds
• They automatically compress content and images, minify CSS & JS, and rewrite HTML output for speed
• A fully managed content delivery network around the world that delivers static content

I spent almost several days working on a client’s site because it was loading so slow (12+ seconds ). After re-coding some of their site followed Yahoo! and Google’s advice on site speed. When I was done, the site was loading in under 3 seconds.

A nice improvement considering where they started at, but I was still unhappy with their load times. That’s when I stumbled upon WP Engine.

Of course, I would never put one of my clients sites on an untested host. So, I gave MyWebTronics a run on Wp Engine and I was literally blown away by my site’s speed. I am getting ready to move my client’s site and can’t wait to see the results.

WP Engine is completely managed

I almost didn’t pull the trigger on WPEngine because it is completely managed. Most managed hosting solutions really suck. Especially on the speed front. They rarely use GZIP compression or anything else to speed up your site.

I don’t like managing a server, but I did it better than most of the hosts I’ve used. So, in the past I took the reigns from my hosts to make sure that my sites ran very fast.

Unfortunately, the problem with self managed solutions is that you are responsible for all security updates. After I wrote this article, I had to trash my theme because I got hacked. It has been hacked many times since. Turns out, you don’t want to make enemies with Wikipedia radicals

On a side note, the resulting hacks often found vulnerabilities in the advanced themes I was using. Themes that didn’t offer much support. That’s why I have went through so many theme changes.

This brings me to a major WPEngine+++

Top notch WordPress & server security

I always blamed WordPress or my WordPress Themes for my continual site hack vulnerabilities. I did trace some of them to WordPress, but many hacks utilize server vulnerabilities. And you have to stay on top of your server configuration to keep up with security fixes and patches. Something I rarely have time for these days.

Before I started using WPEngine I wanted to make sure that they could handle my consistent hack attacks. I don’t plan on laying off Wikipedia anytime soon Its only been a month, but I am not experiencing the consistent problems I had before I switched hosts.

For those serious geeks out there, here are a few things I’ve learned about the way WP Engine handles security:

• WP Engine conducts internal scans of all infrastructures, servers, databases, and applications for exploits
• This includes internal scanning of disks and db’s for vectors and exploits
• They also do external tests against network connections for common hack attacks
• SecTheory and Sucuri provide penetration testing to make sure no vulnerabilties exist outside of WPEngine’s security scope. They also work as consultants to provide baseline security protocols.com.
• All customer data is separated at root level so if one site gets hacked it doesn’t impact the whole network of sites
• Full backups are stored as tarballs on Amazon S3. Customers do not have access to these backups so no damage can be done to them.
• All customer backups are logically separated for each customer to add a layer of protection to data integrity
• Intrusion detection and prevention systems are used to protect the network in real time
• WPengine maintains detailed audit logs that capture at a minimum a) host name, b) account identifier, c) date and time stamp, d) activity performed, and e) source network address. These logs are available for 7 days and can be shared with you if you have a data breach of some sort

Try It Risk Free Two Months…

WpEngine.com is offering two months hosting risk free. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

WPEngine Review: Lightning Fast WordPress Hosting is by: MyWebTronics

The post WPEngine Review: Lightning Fast WordPress Hosting appeared first on MyWebTronics.

One of the important things for getting a site ranked high in the search engines is to have quality title tags. Although it is not a Meta tag, it is the most important item that is not in the body area. The title tag specifies the name of the web page and hence it should be used to describe the content in a precise way. The information listed between the opening and closing HTML tags is extremely essential for search engine optimization. Mentioned below are basic tips on title tags that would help you drive quality traffic to your site.

The title tags must provide a rough idea on what your site is about as they are the first ones to be indexed by spiders. Basically, you also need to provide suitable keywords so that your page is indexed for those keywords. The header and title tags should be presented in a proper way so that it gives a summary of what is contained in your web page. By providing such relevant information to the search engine spiders, your site would get indexed faster by search engines.

What is the title tag used for?

The title tag is used by web browsers, search engines, and social book marking sites. Browsers need to label the web browsers to as to display the title in the browser window’s title. As title tags would be the headline for Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) listings, it also needs to know the topic of the webpage so that spiders can crawl and analyze the relevant content of the title. Title tags help to social bookmark a site and assign a default value to the bookmarked sites. Title tags also help users to identify the web sites that likely contain the information that they are searching for from a list of websites.

Remember the following (The Do’s)

Your title tag should contain your main keyword as search engines give it more importance than the second or the third. Remember to use key-phrases instead of keywords (such as cheap, best, buy etc.). Use numbers (such as 50 best examples) and also remember to separate your keywords with pipes or hyphens. In addition, each page on your site should have a unique page title and the first word in the home-page should carry the site’s name. Remember to start the title with the keywords that describe the page content.

Remember the following (The Don’ts)

It is to be noted that the title tag should not contain more than 70 characters as most search engines index only up to 70 characters and the rest is truncated in their SERPs. Avoid keyword stuffing as it will make your page look amateurish and will lose its value. Avoid stop words as they are ignored by search engines and most likely users as well. Try and avoid commas as it might also be considered as keyword stuffing. Also, avoid punctuations and special characters, as they don’t add any value to the optimization process. Also, try to avoid synonyms, but instead stick to the most common keyword.

Whatever said, content is king and as algorithms evolve, they would be giving more priority to the content. I am certain that in the future a user would be penalized if their content does not match to the search query.

This article has been brought to you by MyTechHelp – a leader in providing support across various products brands and tech devices for individuals and small businesses in need of instant tech help.go to this link

Generate Quality Traffic With Great Title Tags (Guest Post) is by: MyWebTronics

The post Generate Quality Traffic With Great Title Tags (Guest Post) appeared first on MyWebTronics.

Google has offered an array of free tools to users and Webmasters in order to improve their user’s experience and the relevance of their search results. One such tool is Google Webmaster Tools.  

Most Webmasters never look in their account until they experience a problem. This is a mistake because there is valuable information on your site’s performance that can help you improve your reach.

#1 Find low hanging fruit

Webmaster tools provides a summary of search queries. All though this is a small amount of data, it is possible to find queries for which you have received impressions, but no clicks. And since there are no clicks, it does not show up in Analytics.

Go to “Your site on the web -> Search Queries” to access this information.

You will be given a graph and columns similar to Google Analytics. Look for words that are not on the first page, i.e. position “32″ and start looking at ways to improve their position.

**See Dave’s point in the comment about click through rates.

#2 Monitoring speed

All though I look tools like pingdom to test my site’s speed, Google actually provides a graph so you can check your progress over time. This is unusual for Google since they do not like to reveal to much information about how they grade sites.

Since Google has incorporated speed as a ranking factor, it is important to see how Google thinks your site performs. According to Cutts, they will not penalize a site for being slow, just reward a site for being fast. But, if your site is slow and your competitor is fast it has the same effect.

Go to “Labs -> Site Performance”:

As you can see, one of my sites is performing poorly. No wonder, because it is a Magento site, which I no longer recommend btw.

This graph has prompted me to move the site to a new host that specializes in hosting Magento. Hopefully, we will see an increase in speed on this graph soon.

#3 Identifying Indexation Rates

I don’t mean to keep beating up on Magento, but after a recent buggy release, I noticed two sites that started losing traffic. At first, I attributed the loss of traffic to market shifts. However, both sites were completely unrelated and the traffic drop was to drastic.

After checking out the regular culprits, I discovered that my indexation rate had dropped significantly hurting long tail traffic. This traffic drop turned out to be due to a pagination issue, or more accurately, a lack of pagination on category pages.

These graphs contain dummy info similar to how I track my sites in a spreadsheet (learn how to track your indexed pages):

#4 Detecting Crawl Errors

There is nothing worse than having your hard earned links pointing to pages that are 404′s. Webmaster Tools provides a complete set of pages that are resulting in a 404 error. It is amazing how often this can happen.

When I rolled out my new design for this site, I had about 10 pages that ended up as 404′s. A simple 301 redirect and all is fixed.

This is the download of data Google provides for crawl errors. It also provides the number of times a page has been linked to that is receiving the 404.

#5 Internal link counts

One of the keys to Wikipedia’s SEO success, is the fact that it consistently links to itself from within the main content of a page. As a matter of fact, there is no other obvious navigation to get to pages of interest.

On a side note, conversion experts from grok dot com, recounted how linking to yourself in your own content improves conversion rates in Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer.

There are a few plugins that help with this task, plus WordPress 3.1 will be providing an internal search for post pages so you can easily link to yourself while writing your post.

Make sure you landing pages are receiving the bulk of your internal links. This will ensure Google knows which pages on your site are the most important.

5 Reasons You Should Be Using Google Webmaster Tools More Than You Do is by: MyWebTronics

The post 5 Reasons You Should Be Using Google Webmaster Tools More Than You Do appeared first on MyWebTronics.

Let me preface this with a quote from yours truly…

I Love Magento

Yes, that was me about a year ago. However, I have sadly changed my tune…

How me and Magento got started

I was on the rebound from a very difficult relationship with OSCommerce. Trying to SEO oscommerce had left me empty and wanton for a truly meaningful relationship with an open source ecommerce solution. After a quick fling with Zencart, Magento made its debut and it was love at first sight for me.

It had most of the features that I wanted. Plus, I didn’t mind being seen in public with the packaged UI front end. Heck, I was kinda proud of her. One of the first clients I put on Magento used the then packaged “Blue” theme and did more than $1ook in sales in a year. Not bad for a mom and pop shop that had no experience selling online.

I eagerly anticipated every new release, every new module. I spent countless hours combing over lines and lines of code seeking to know everything about her. I even made myself familiar with her extremely complex database. I overlooked little flaws like, its slow load times and inefficient DB and Caching functions.

Being a little naive, I expected Magento to follow in the footsteps of WordPress. To be the World’s greatest open source ecommerce solution with a thriving open source minded community that always helped each other out. It wasn’t to be…

The commercialization of Magento

I won’t forget how my heart sank when Irubian launched the enterprise edition of Magento that would eventually be used by large companies such as Samsung and Homedics. I had noticed how the best Magento modules started costing money so I should have seen this coming.

After all, this is a great business tactic if you can pull it off. Build a great product and offer it for free. Hold back some of the better capabilities and only offer them in the upgrade. What I didn’t expect was for Magento to limit some of the most basic capabilities. For example:

• Coupons and discounts don’t work in community edition
• User roles. Anyone who has access to the store, has access to all admin privileges.

Costly Magento issues

The truth is that Magento was never designed to be a true tool for those without start up capital or programming knowledge.

• Even if you have very little traffic to your store you will need a strong hosting solution to even run Magento. For the store to run at a basic level you will be paying at least $300 per year in hosting.
• I always schedule several days of time before I upgrade Magento. Themes and modules are usually broken in upgrade and sometimes require advanced programming skills to fix. A good Magento programmer can cost $100 an hour…and that gets expensive quickly.
• Plus, I don’t dare upgrade Magento on a live site. I create a sandbox and test everything there first. This creates hours and hours of work. Magento could seriously use some help in this area (ie WordPress). Heck, upgrading oscommerce was a better experience!
• Designing templates for Magento is timely and costly. It is not as simple as creating a mock up, XHTML page and dropping a few calls (like WordPress), you have to study and understand Magento’s complex xml block system.
• Every update makes Magento more complex and harder to manage.

So why not fork out the money for the enterprise edition? Have you seen the annual price on that thing?

• Community Edition: Free – lacks needed functionality
• Professional Edition (starting at $2,995 yearly – you get coupons
• Enterprise Edition (starting at $12,995 yearly – you get a gift registry

BTW, Enterprise is the only Magento edition that has full page caching options. Apparently, many businesses with the finances have found the above solutions acceptable. I have never used them, so I don’t know how well they work.

I could go on and on about why Magento is not a good choice for start ups with little money. Or why the community edition is not a good choice period. I still use Magento and will continue to program and offer helpful tips whenever possible. Unfortunately, I am now looking for another solution, perhaps a paid one that offers regular support.

Why I No Longer Recommend Magento Community Edition To Small Businesses is by: MyWebTronics

The post Why I No Longer Recommend Magento Community Edition To Small Businesses appeared first on MyWebTronics.

Search engine optimization for an ecommerce store can be a daunting task. Heavy coded back ends make even small changes difficult. Link building can be equally as challenging. Who wants to link to your product page anyway?

The goal of ecommerce is to get customers to purchase your product. Getting product pages ranked well in the SERPS is the key to any ecommerce success. After all, the product page is where all the action takes place.

In the graph below, you will see how SEO is usually approached for most online store owners:

The graphic depicts the normal flow of PageRank in an ecommerce store. The home page is heavily SEO’d. The category pages receive the bulk of the PageRank as it is passed downwards from the home page. The product pages usually end up with the least amount of PageRank passed to them. This is unfortunate, since most product related searches are long tail and low competition, while most category pages are higher competition searches.

Ranking for “Rolex” is much more difficult than ranking for “mens black dial rolex“. Don’t ignore high traffic keywords,  but avoid tunnel vision. By focusing solely on the biggest and baddest keywords, you could miss most of the traffic in your market.

It is typical for most ecommerce stores to link to 10 or 20 products from the home page. Increasing the number of products linked too from the home page will increase the number of products showing up in the SERPS. The top 100 products in your store should probably be on your home page. Here are some suggestions for listing more product links:

• A featured product list
• Top sellers list
• Discount product list
• Items that have been reviewed list

Creating High Value Pages

After leveraging the PageRank of your home page, creating pages of high value, highly linkable content enables further deep linking to product pages. In essence, create linkbait. Creating link bait for an online store can pay huge dividends.

In the watch store example, I want my Rolex watches to rank well for long tail keywords. So I need to pass some strong PageRank to specific watch pages. I create a page as link bait. On this page I create unordered lists with links to the products I want to highlight.

The linkbait would not be too difficult. Perhaps a drawing to give away a Rolex…or better yet, an auction where all of the proceeds would go to charity. I would list the watch with no reserve and host the auction on my site.

Most likely, the charity you have chosen would be happy to link to the auction and help you get the word out. A good piece of linkbait in this situation would result in great PageRank and strong movement for your product pages.

Lets take a look at how PageRank should be passed:

In the mind map above, “Prodcut 1″ represents an entire subset of products (at least it does now) and so you can see that each important subset is being passed PageRank from high value pages.  The red lines represent PageRank passed to the product pages from the high PR pages.

URL Structures

There is direct correlation between the depth of a page in the URL and the authority given to it by Google. So, instead of a URL structure like this:

www.example.com/category1/subcategory/rolexwatch

I use:

www.example.com/rolex-watch

This URL structure signifies that my product page is important to this site. Also, notice that I used “-” in between words in the second example. Google uses the”-” as a word separator in the URL.

Canonical URLs

Of course, the canonical issue of www vs. non www should be resolved for any website.

In light of the URL structure discussion, the canonical URL meta tag may be needed to avoid duplicate content issues. Using the previous example, I discover that I need to use both URL structures for usability issues.

• www.example.com/category1/subcategory/rolex-watch
• www.example.com/rolex-watch

So, on the deep page (www.example.com/category1/subcategory/rolex-watch) I would create a canonical meta tag in the head section that looks like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”www.example.com/rolex-watch” />

This will notify Google which page to use in their index and which page should carry all of the PageRank.

SEO for Ecommerce Images

Its always nice to get traffic from Google Images for a specific product. However, there are other benefits. Using proper SEO for images improves the overall page’s optimization. Here are some best practices:

• Use descriptive names and the “-” for image names…black-dial-rolex-watch.jpg
• Include an Alt tag…alt=”black dial Rolex watch”
• Do not use large pictures and HTML to shrink them down. Ecommerce sites are already slow, having huge picture files when they are not needed will only slow down page load time and possibly hurt search ranking.

Matt Cutts from Google discusses image URLs:

On to a big issue of late…

Duplicate Content

If a site has 1,000,000 products, it is not realistic to think that it will all be unique content. However, some or most of the site should be unique content. Google does gives some duplicate content penalties.

In reality though, it is not a penalty as much as a quality control decision. If 10 competitors have the same content for a certain product, only a few of them are going to show up in the top ten search results. Google does not want its users seeing the same content over and over again.

Instead of rewriting all of the manufacturers content, add a few hundred words to the top of the product description with details that no one else is carrying. Google knows that some content has to be duplicated, like product specifications. However, if you can set yourself apart with 100% unique content, you will have a greater chance of ranking well for long tail keywords.

Its not all or nothing, I typically advise my clients facing this issue to tackle this issue a little at a time. Identify your top 100 sellers and rewrite those descriptions. Twelve product pages with absolute unique content is better than none.

User generated content is always a great plus. Getting customers to review products will assist you in getting great, unique content that both the search engines and potential buyers love.

Sitemaps

I create two sitemaps on any given ecommerce site.

1. XML sitemap: an XML sitemap should be submitted to Google through webmaster tools. It is best if the sitemap updates itself automatically, however you can use a free online service to generate one.  The purpose of this sitemap is to let the SEs know about the entire site’s pages.
2. HTML Sitemap: creating an HTML sitemap with the top 100-200 products will serve to direct your users in the right direction as well as distribute more PageRank to the product pages. Link to the HTML sitemap from the footer of the site.

Keyword Research

When doing keyword research for an ecommerce site, the main objective is to find keywords that will result in a transaction. However, there are many different types of traffic, and it is important to understand the intent of any particular search.

For example, a search for “rolex store” may only have 1/100th the traffic of “rolex”, but may be more valuable based on conversions. Traffic from both keywords is desirable, however a decision must be made about priority.

I divide keyword research into several different categories based upon the intent of the user.

1. Transactional
2. Information
3. Navigational
4. General

Transactional keywords indicate the intent of the user is to buy something. Transactional keywords will often have much  higher conversion rates than other keywords and can be a driving force inside any ecommerce store. Here are some words you can identify as indicating transactional intent:

• buy
• for sale
• cheap
• new
• discount
• warehouse
• store
• online store
• retail
• price

These are obvious giveaways, however through research and understanding the typical customer, other indicators will arise.

For example, a search for a specific product may indicate that the searcher’s intent is to make a purchase. However, in markets where owning a specific product makes the searcher a part of a sub-culture, the product search may not be transactional at all. Many “iphone” searchers behave in this fashion.

Informational keywords signal that the user is looking to answer a question. Such as, “Why are Rolex’s so expensive?”. Chances are the search would look much more different than the question.

For example, the search “rolex cost review” may be asking the above question. There are always common threads of questions related to any product or industry. Even though the searches may look very different. Identifying those questions and answering them on the ecommerce site is a solid strategy for link building and positioning the site as an industry leading expert. Here are some common words that indicate informational searches.

• How
• Where
• Guide
• Tips
• Manual
• Fix
• Why
• What

Informational keywords are often easy to identify and use. Putting up content that answers the user’s questions in your market will make great linkbait.

Navigational keywords usually indicate the searcher is looking for a specific site. A search for “Target” is more than likely a search for www.target.com. There are two ways to use navigational keywords.

1. Determine who in your industry is getting  the most searches. Analyze their internet marketing strategy and brand awareness campaign. You may be able to benefit from their research and emulate their success.
2. Determine which of your products is most sought after by brand. Focus your SEO energies on ranking for those brands in search queries.

General keywords are where the intent of the user cannot be determined simply by their search. A search for “Rolex” can be transactional, informational or navigational. These keywords are also the most heavily searched and therefore the most competitive. The best solution for handling these keywords is giving the user a quick way to find what they are looking for on your site.

That is why web 2.0 designs are so popular and effective. Especially those that provide two or three huge buttons for a user to click on instantly.

Keyword Research Tools

• Keyword Tracker
• Adwords External Keyword Tool
• Spyfu
• SEM Rush

My favorite keyword research tool is Google analytics. I know that it is not a keyword research tool, however it does help identify low hanging fruit.

Low Hanging Fruit

I like to take 1000 or so long tail keywords from Google Analytics and determine their current rank in the search engines. It takes some time, but it is well worth the trouble. If you do not want to go through all the trouble, you can use SEMRush in the same way.

Export the keywords into an excel file. Once all of the rankings are in one place, filter out all results except for those between 11 and 30. Most of these keywords will never have crossed your mind. Prioritize them and start doing SEO for each word. Pushing a large number of results from the second or third page to the first page of Google will result in large traffic increases.

Advanced Keyword Tip

After determining what brands and products are searched for on a regular basis, dig deeper and find out as many combinations as possible for each keyword. For example, the “blue widget model xt330″ may be searched for in all of the following ways.

• blue widget model xt330
• blue widget xt330
• widget xt330
• widget xt 330
• xt 330 blue widget
• etc…

Once the different keyword variations have been selected, order them by the most traffic. Make sure that the most used variation appears in the title tag. Maybe even several of the variations…as long as it does not look spammy. Sprinkle the other keyword variations throughout the product description.

Focus on the pattern and you may not have to do the research on every popular product. Alternating “xt330″ and “xt 330″ throughout the product description may be all that is needed and can be easily turned into a best practice for all other product description copy.

Anchor Text

Do not underestimate the power of anchor text associated with internal linking. It can be difficult to get the anchor text that you want from other sites that you do not control. However, the internal linking structure of your site can be just as effective. Make sure that your anchor texts are descriptive and contain keywords when pointing to a specific page.

Avoid javascript menus and complicated navigational structures. Simple navigation and breadcrumbs can go a long way in passing strong PR to the right pages.

If you have any questions or would like to share some insight, please do.

E-commerce SEO 101 – A Guide To Successful Ecommerce SEO is by: MyWebTronics

The post E-commerce SEO 101 – A Guide To Successful Ecommerce SEO appeared first on MyWebTronics.

I have been working on several small ecommerce sites of late. One of these sites is less than four months old and presents unique SEO issues due to the lack of domain authority.

In my last post on adding products to the home page of Magento, I discussed manually creating your store’s home page to closely match the Amazon.com store. Using this tactic could seriously improve your conversions and SEO.

Increased Conversion Rates

Studies have shown that the less clicks a user has to make in order to make a purchase, the more likely they are to complete their purchase. By linking directly to the most popular products from your home page you give a lazy user (all of us) a reason to click a link on your home page instead of the back button.

Amazon.com uses a cookie system that remembers the previous items you bought or browsed and delivers related items when you return to their page. Of course, that system is very complex and would not be viable for the average store owner. However, you know what products your customers are looking for and what products they buy on a regular basis.

I also link to popular categories. For example, on one of my equipment sites, replacement filters are very popular. So, I link to the filter category and to several of the highest selling filters.

Improved SEO For Product Pages

In today’s Google, it is important to rank for as many “long tail keywords” as possible. When I rank well for one of the main targeted keywords, I find that  only accounts for 20% of the site’s traffic. By focusing on the 80% of long tail traffic, I have also found the real keyword winners easier to score.

With Google’s recent algo shift, many store owners have found it increasingly difficult to rank for the biggest impact keywords. For example, when the algo shift hit my stores, I was immediately contending with Home Depot, Lowes and Amazon.com. None of which were even in the top twenty previously.

I have altered my tactics to focus SEO on the level of the actual purchase, the product page. Most SEO tactics focused on creating domain authority and passing that authority through the category pages to the product pages. In a market where rankings came easier, it would create a theme or silo effect. With enough work, you could even get site links.

Link from the highest authority page

Adding direct links to the top 40 or 50 pages from your home page passes undiluted link authority directly to the product page, bypassing the category pages. Our goal, is to get as much of this authority passed to the lower level product page as possible.

If my product page ranks number one for “blue widgets for sale”, I will convert more of that traffic into sales compared to traffic to the home page where the user has to click through categories to the actual product page.

Secondly, if my home page ranks well for “blue widgets for sale”, I will convert more traffic by providing a one click funnel from the home page to the product page, bypassing the category pages.

Some common ways to pass link juice to the product pages

You can take my approach or you can use some of these ideas.

• A top ten sellers list
• A top ten featured list
• A top ten referral list
• 20 of the best sellers for the last 12 months
• A new product list (will assist in getting new product pages indexed and ranked quickly)
• Featured product reviews with a link

Sub directories

Recent research has shown the further the page is from the base URL, the less authority it is given. For example, www.example.com/page.html will typically rank better than www.example.com/subdirectory/subdirectory/page.html. With mod-rewrite, you can easily make all of your product pages appear in a higher directory.

Magento has a module that allows you to fix this issue. It helps with duplicate content issues as well. Basically, it puts all product pages in the first sub-directory and uses canonical URL for all other product pages found through the category pages.

If you have any tips for boosting sales for small ecommerce stores, let me know

Ecommerce SEO Focus – Long Tail Rules The Day is by: MyWebTronics

The post Ecommerce SEO Focus – Long Tail Rules The Day appeared first on MyWebTronics.

Check out the new Twentyten Ecommerce Theme

SEO Tutorial Overview

1. Some SEO basics.
2. Remove WordPress headline from “products-page”.
3. Add h1 to item/product page.
4. Add h1 element to Category/Group pages.
5. Title tags and meta descriptions

SEO Basics

For those of you just getting your feet wet when it comes to SEO, there are a few basic on-site optimization fundamentals that should never be overlooked, especially if you plan on driving traffic from the search engines in a competitive market. There are three main factors, the title tag, the h1 tag and the inbound anchor text to your page for successful ecommerce seo.


It is important that each page have a unique title tag and h1 tag that closely match (contain the targeted keyword phrase). The h1 tag is often and mistakenly used in the logo and is not unique to each page.  In Google’s algorithm, any content in the h1 element is more important than any other content on the page. For more on the H1 tag you can read Scott Hendison’s explanation or checkout this SEO basics article (third step).

Removing The Products Page Headline Title

WP e-Commerce uses the page template in order to display all products. For example, the products-page will contain a list of products that you choose in the setup. When you click on a category/group, that category or group will be displayed inside of the wordpress products-page. It will send a string to the URL so it may look something like: site.com/products-page/test-category

Since the wordpress products-page is always present, the title (headline) for the page will remain no matter what category or product you are viewing and will say “Products Page”. Lets get rid of the page title for the products page so we can use h1 tags that are related to our products.

The Page/Post title is featured above the content and is displayed in the page.php template with something like this (this is your general wordpress theme, not the WP e-Commerce theme):

Lets tell wordpress to display the page title as long as the page is not the “Products Page”.

Add H1 Element To Items Page

Not to be confused with what WordPress calls the “Products Page”, this is the page where your individual products are for sale. For example the page would be:

site.com/products-page/example-category/another-test-product/

In products_display_functions.php on line 645 you will find the following code.

$output .= "
$special" . stripslashes($product['name'])."
\n\r";

Change the h2 elements to h1 elements.

      $output .= "
$special" . stripslashes($product['name'])."
\n\r";

You will need to play around with the stylesheet to get the look you want, I am not going to go to in depth into the design process here. But, In the iShop.css, look for h2.prodtitles and create another style with h1.prodtitles. If you use the same attributes, will get the same look as the h2 elements.

H1 Element On The Categories/Groups Page

You will need to edit the core WP e-Commerce files in order to get the h1 element included at the top of the categories pages. The category pages are sometimes referred to as group pages. It is important to name them with the proper keyword that you are targeting.

Open products_page.php in your favorite text editor. You will find the following code starting at line 63.

 if($_GET['product_search'] != null) {
					echo "".TXT_WPSC_SEARCH_FOR." : ".stripslashes($_GET['product_search'])."";
				} else {
					$category_image = '';
					if((get_option('show_category_thumbnails') == 1) && ($category_data['image'] != null)) {
						$category_image = "";
					}
					echo "".$category_image."".stripslashes($category_data['name'])."";

On line 64 replace the strong element with the h1 tag. Remember to replace the closing tag with it is well and leave the class=”cattitles” the same. Do the same thing on line 70 since it is an if/else statement.

This is how the code should look after you are done (you could just copy and paste if you like).

if($_GET['product_search'] != null) {
					echo "
".TXT_WPSC_SEARCH_FOR." : ".stripslashes($_GET['product_search'])."
";
				} else {
					$category_image = '';
					if((get_option('show_category_thumbnails') == 1) && ($category_data['image'] != null)) {
						$category_image = "";
					}
					echo "".$category_image."
".stripslashes($category_data['name'])."
";

Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

The title tags and meta description hack was a little bit more involved. Most of it, actually all of it, is done outside of the WP-e-Commerce plugin. First of all, before you can test the description tag, make sure that your categories/groups have a description added to them, since this fix uses that content as the description tag for the category pages.

I built this script based on this one, I modified it to include a title tag for the products page itself. I also added the meta description capabilities.

The category pages function determines that it is indeed a category page, queries the database for the category name and puts it into the title tag. It also takes the first 150 characters of the category description and puts it into the meta description tag

The item (actual product) pages function does the same thing as the category pages function, except that it makes sure you are on the product page. It replaces the title tag with the product name and blog info (you need to edit script to put your blog info in). It also includes the first 150 characters of the first description in the meta description tag.

The title tag and meta description for the main products page(products-page) is added manually when you install the script. Simply, replace, “My Products Page Title” with the appropriate title tag.

I normally use a plugin to add the meta description tag, but that plugin conflicted with WP e-Commerce. So I am using SEO Title Tag and wrote the next part of the script to add the description tag. Basically, it simply adds the description tag to every page that is not on the products page by adding the first 150 characters of the post.

This goes into the main WordPress header template where your normal title tag would go.

".$productname." | site name
";
}
///////// Function to Find Category Name /////////////
function oGetCategoryName( $nicename ){
global $table_prefix;
$query = "SELECT name, description
FROM ".$table_prefix."product_categories
WHERE `nice-name` = '".$nicename."'";
$result = mysql_query( $query );
$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result );
$name = $row['name'];
$description = $row['description'];
//Category Title Tag and Description -- Change the name below to reflect your site
return "".$name." | site name
";
}
//this if state will determine if we are on the products page, the category page or the actual products page (item page) and call the appropriate function
if(get_the_title() == 'Products Page' ){
$pparts = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'/') );
if( $pparts[2] != '' ){
echo oGetProductName( $pparts[2] );
}
else if( $pparts[1] != '' ){
echo oGetCategoryName( $pparts[1] );
}
//if we make it this far in the if statement, than we know that we are on the main products-page listing what you have for sale, manually edit this to reflect what you want the title tag to be and what description you want to use.
else {
?> your title tag for home

<?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();}
?>

Alright, you should be well on the way to a nicely optimized WP e-Commerce site.

WP e-Commerce SEO Tutorial is by: MyWebTronics

The post WP e-Commerce SEO Tutorial appeared first on MyWebTronics.

Header tags are an effective way to communicate to the search engines and readers what a page is about. They convey the importance of the text inside of the header tag. Often times, the header tags are not in the proper order. This is how a header tag would appear in the page.

<h1>Header</h1> — The Theme Of The Page

<h2>Header</h2> — Main Sub Sections Of <h1>

<h3>Header Text</h3> — Sub Sections Of <h2>

The <h1> header tag is the largest font. The <h2> tag is smaller than the <h1> tag but larger than the <h3> tag and so on to <h6>. However, the font size of each header tag can be easily adjusted with css making it possible for all headers to appear the same size:

h1, h2, h3, h4 {font-size:12pt}

The major mistake most webmasters make is creating the header of the website using the <h1> or <h2> tag. When this occurs, the header tags do not change from page to page making it irrelevant. If you want to use text in your header, you can easily format a div or paragraph to look like an <h1> tag with very little difficulty.


The <h1> tag should appear just above the content of the web page. It should closely match the title tag and be relevant to the content of the page. The <h2> and <h3> tags can than follow with relevant keywords related to the <h1> tag. It is also important for all the header tags to be grammatically correct and easily readable. Don’t just keyword stuff! Google can detect keyword stuffing very easily. If they believe that your page is more geared towards them than your audience, they won’t give you an audience. So make sure your header tags make perfect sense to your readers.

You may have heard of “siloing” or “theming” a website, which is a very effective technique for SEO.  I use the same concept for some web pages using header tags as depicted in the graphic below.

Simply by doing a little h1 tag SEO and rearranging content with header tags I have seen web page SERPs jump almost immediately.

SEO Header Tags is by: MyWebTronics

The post SEO Header Tags appeared first on MyWebTronics.

The title tag is the most important on-site attribute that tells the search engines what your web page is about. A well written title tag gives gives a quick summary about the web page while using a key search phrase the page should be found under.

The <title> tag can be found in the <head> section of the website. It is the blue headline that is seen in the search engine results from Google and Yahoo. It is also the verbiage located on your browser at the top of the screen in the blue bar. You can see the title of this page is “SEO Title Tag | MyWebtronics.com”. The Title tag is written in the head section of the website like this:

<title>SEO Title Tag | MyWebtronics.com</title>

Title Tag Format

It is important to get relevant information into the title tag without making it too long. I recommend that the title tag not be any longer than 70 characters. It is best to keep the page title at the beginning of the title tag. I recommend the following format: “Page Title | City, State | Business/Site Name”. The business name does not need to come first because most searchers are probably looking for your service, not your specific business name.

Uniqueness

All Title tags should be unique and relevant to the specific page where it is located. When the SEs rank a page, they rank it based on its perceived authority. If every page on your site has the same title, the SEs have a hard time determining which page is the most relevant. If you use Google webmaster tools (and you should), and your web site pages do not have unique title tags, you will receive an alert from Google. The fact that Google is alerting website owners that duplicate title tags is a problem is enough for me to spend extra time writing unique titles.

For example, lets say that you sell “red widgets”. Your site is filled with information regarding red widgets including reviews, product information and an order form. By specifying what each page is about, Google knows to send visitors to the relevant page. If someone searches for “red widget review” and you have a page titled “red widget review” than Google is going to send them to the correct page. If another searcher enters the phrase “purchase red widget” and you have a page titled, “purchase red widgets”, Google is going to give credence to that page and send the visitor to you. However, if you do not have unique title tags, Google may bypass your site altogether to send their user to a more “relevant” site.

Writing A Title Tag

If you were to purchase ad space in a newspaper, on Google adwords or somewhere else; a great deal of attention would be given to writing the headline. The Title Tag of a website is a “free” headline that Google displays to potential customers. It is important that your title capture the readers attention. Use proper grammar, start the title tag off with a capatilized word and always make sense. Some title tags are simply jammed with keywords, but these titles are not easy to read. When your result appears on a page, you are competing with nine other organic results and 5-10 sponsored results. It is important to make your title stand out so you get the majority of the traffic from the search. Keep in mind that if the title does not match the content of the page, the search engines will consider that spamming and drop the rank of the page.

Just by spending extra time writing your title tags, you can easily impact your search engine result rankings and increase your site traffic from keywords your site is already found under.

SEO Title Tag is by: MyWebTronics

The post SEO Title Tag appeared first on MyWebTronics.