Monthly Archives: September 2013

09.16.13
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Will Google ask the Syrian government to hide their chemical weapons?

Last week Norway´s largest newspaper Aftenposten published an article with the headline  “Google asks online stores to ‘hide’  weapons” . The article tells the story of how Friluftsmagasinet, the largest hunting and fishing store in Norway , was suspended from advertising on Google. The reason being that they sell hunting and fishing equipment – weapons – that obviously can hurt animals.

This week Google is threatening to shut down Norway´s largest online cosmetics  shop because of UPS Revitalash . Google claims this word/product is an illegal supplement . What are the people in Google´s global policy team thinking?

Global Policy or Local law?

I’m no expert on the law , nor on Google policy. I like Google and I think it is positive that Google prohibits advertisements for alcohol, tobacco and chemical weapons , but where should Google draw the line? Is it possible a large American company to keep track of all local laws and regulations in all countries? Is it really Google’s responsibility to ensure that businesses worldwide have appropriate ethical guidelines? If that is the case :

Google’s core values

In the Aftenposten article, the issue is whether Google should abide by the Google global policy and/or local laws and culture. I admire Google and how they operate in the marketplace, but in this case I think the search engine company have ignored the Google core values . Here are some of Google´s core values: (with my comments below):

Google core value #1: Focus on the user and thus solves the rest by itself

Comment: Focus on the user has been a mantra at Google since its inception. This user centric approach has turned Google into one of the world ‘s strongest brands.  In this case Google is not focusing on the users (local Norwegian businesses and local consumers ). Instead Google employees are acting like bureaucrats referring to the the great “Global Policy”.  Where´s the critical thinking?  Are lawyers and bureaucrats  running Google now?

Google core value #2: It is best to do one thing really well .

Comment: Google is good at search technology . Google should continue focusing on search. It is impossible , even for a large American company (even with some assistance from the NSA ;)) to keep track of all local laws and regulations worldwide. Perhaps Google’s central policy department should hand over responsibility for policy to those of its employees who are really good at NORWAY ?

Google core value #4: Democracy on the web works

Comment:  Why should a central body in Google determine what is legal and what is illegal in democratic countries. Shouldn´t a democracy decide? Why not create a system that gives people the opportunity to decide what should be allowed in each country ? Give users the opportunity to complain about the ads ( Facebook does it already) . If enough people complain, a  local Google representatives in consultation with local authorities and NGOs should decide whether ads should be banned. Look to Wikipedia. Their system seems to work quite well!

“Do no evil” or abide by Googles global policy?

Google´s mantra is “Do no evil”. But what happens if the notion of “evil” is different in countries where Google operates. Who defines evil? If someone within Syria had created an Adwords account with the sole purpose of identifying the location of chemical weapons in Syria, how would Google´s central policy team react? Would they blindly follow the Google policy? Would they apply critical thinking? Would they notify the Syrian Government about a potential national security breach or would they ignore it and let a foreign state bomb the locations? My point is that Google should strive to let their core values determine what they do – not a global policy that is forced upon all the countries in the world. I like Google, but I don´t think Norwegian hunters agree that an American company should that decide what Norwegian companies should be allowed to advertise for!

09.12.13
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The Complete Best Practice Magento SEO Guide

Magento SEO guide

Download Magento SEO Guide (Plus Bonus Tips)

If you have a website, you will want to attract natural and organic traffic.

And as e-commerce platforms go, Magento is one of the best out-of-the-box solutions you will find for how to optimize your website for search engines.

To make the most out of your visibility in search engines, there are a number of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques within the Magento admin you can do to increase the potential of buyers finding your site and making a purchase. During the last five months, I’ve worked with a brand that has five websites in five different languages.

The following Magento SEO guide explains how several improvements lead to an increase in organic traffic from 4,200 visits to 28,800 visits and an increase in organic revenue from $57,000 to $395,000. organic traffic increase

Register your website with Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools provides insight into how Google and Bing see your site and if you have problems with it when they crawl your pages. Register your website in both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools  – Google will provide you with a ‘Google site verification’ tag and Bing will provide a ‘msvalidate’ tag. Copy and paste the HTML tag into the Magento admin. You can find this under System > Configuration > Design > Miscellaneous Scripts. webmaster tools field

Auto redirect base-URL to canonicalize your domain

It’s important that Google only find and index one version of your home page. If both http://www.example.com and http://example.com  can be accessed, your website will be penalized for site-wide duplicate content. You will need to redirect one to the other in Magento. The default setting in Magento is set at a 302 temporary redirect. A 302 temporary redirect will not pass on any link juice so you need to change this to a 301 permanent redirect. You can change this under System > Configuration > General > Web > URL Options and set “Auto-redirect to Base URL” to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”. autobase redirect url

Enable web server rewrites for user-friendly URLs

Having a user-friendly URL structure is important for both search engines and usability.In order to make sure your URL’s are user-friendly, visit System > Configuration > General > Web > Search Engine Optimization and set “Use Web Server Rewrites” to ‘Yes’. web server rewrite The difference in having a user-friendly URL structure compared to session based/ dynamic URLs can be seen below when we turned on the “Use Web Server Rewrites” setting, with the number of impressions in Google increasing immediately. search impressions In 2012, Atoll Paradise updated their URL structure to be more user-friendly and organic traffic increased by 350%. Over the course of twelve months this mean more than 420,000 visitors.

Prevent duplicate content by disabling category URLs

By default, Magento will use the category structure in the product URL. For example, a home furniture store may have a page URL www.mywebsite.com/bedroom/candles. However, you may have products that exist in multiple categories. For example,

The best URL structure here would be www.mywebsite.com/candles.This removes the category in the URL. To change the URL structure visit System > Configuration > General > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization. You can then change the setting “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” to “No”. category path If you haven’t done so already, you can edit two further settings under “Search engine optimization”. Make sure that the following fields are set to “Yes”:

    • Create Permanent Redirect for old URLs if Url key changed
    • Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories
    • Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products

Using the rel=canonical tag will stop your website being penalized for duplicate content. rel-canonical

Create and upload robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a text file that help search engines determine which information on your site to index. As a default, there is no robots.txt file in Magento so you will need to create the robots.txt file yourself. By having a robots.txt file, you can prevent duplicate content issues and hide pages from search engines that you do not want indexed, such as CMS login, reports and files. A robots.txt file is set up for one domain. In order to install it, create a new text file in Notepad and save it as a robots and a “.txt” file. You can then upload the file to the web root of your server (ex, www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt). Here as an example of a standard Magento CMS based robots.txt file: robots txt file Simply copy the above and upload to the web root of your server.

Enable “Index, follow” to get your website found in search engines

It’s common that when you’re testing your website before launching, you hide the site from search engines so you enable “no index, nofollow”. But it’s also common that when you go live with your new website, you can forget to change it to “index, follow” or any other option that prevents your site being found in search. To ensure that your website is being indexed and links are followed, visit System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default robots “Index, follow”. index follow

Create default Meta data to avoid duplicate content

As a default setting, Magento will leave your “default description” field blank, which means that both the default title tag and Meta description is missing. By leaving them blank, you may end up with hundreds or thousands of duplicate content issues on your site and Google will struggle to index certain pages. In order to set a default title tag and Meta description for pages that have yet to be optimized, you can visit System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default description. default meta content

Using Rel=alternate hreflang for International rankings

For International websites, you will most likely have similar versions of your website in multiple languages. Google has provided a way for webmasters to not be penalized for duplicate content by creating the rel=alternate hreflang=X link attribute. By implementing this snippet into the <head> section of your website for each page that exists in a different language/ website, Google will be able to show the correct language and page in the search results. For example, if you have German websites for both www.mywebsite.de and www.mywebsite.at, you would implement the following snippet in the <head> section on both websites.

In order to get the most out of your International website, this should be implemented at page level site wide. For example, your product page would include a similar snippet:

By implementing these snippets, Google will then be able to show the Austrian page to searchers in Austria and the German page for searchers in Germany. To implement the rel=”alternate” hreflang snippet in Mangento, visit System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Miscellaneous Scripts. href lang At nameOn, we saw that the Norwegian website, which had the highest domain authority, was being ranked first in Google for branded searches. nameon SERP 1 Once we were able to implement rel=”alternate” hreflang on both the German and Norwegian websites, the German website was immediately positioned in the first spot, which has helped organic traffic grow in Germany. nameon SERP 2

Implement Google Analytics tracking code

Although not entirely related to SEO, tracking website visitors and site behavior is crucial to your businesses success. You will able to track which marketing activity generates revenue and from which country. Your Google Analytics profile ID will start with “UA” and be followed by several numbers. For example, UA-3465789-9. Paste your Google Analytics profile ID into the field and tracking will begin immediately. It’s easy to get started with Google Analytics and once you have created an account, you can visit System > Configuration > Sales > Google API > Google Analytics. google analyticsgoogle analytics For International websites, it is recommended that you implement cross-domain tracking so that you can avoid having your websites appear as sources under the referral traffic report. cross domain tracking

Default home page title tag

Another default setting in Magento will be the homepage title tag, which is set to “home”. You will need to edit this into a natural title tag that summarizes what your website is/ or does. To edit the home page title tag, visit CMS > Pages and once you find your home page, edit the “Page Title” field. default title tag In addition, you can edit the Meta Data tab (on the left) and update your home page Meta description. default meta description

Create an XML Sitemap and submit it to Webmaster Tools

Creating an XML sitemap allows Google and other search engines to find products, categories and pages on your website. It’s up to Google to determine whether or not your page belongs in the index but an XML sitemap will speed up the process of being indexed/ crawled. To set up an XML sitemap, visit www.xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have your XML sitemap upload it to the root of your website (for example, www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml), and submit the sitemap under “Catalog > Google sitemap” in Magento. xml sitemap You can also submit your XML sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and best practice is to include the XML sitemap in your robots.txt file too. Here is an example of how we included it at nameOn. xml sitemap robots txt When adding the XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, we saw an immediate impact in the number of pages crawled by Google. crawl rate

Conclusion

No CMS is fully optimized for search engines and you will always need to further optimize your site to increase its visibility.

SEO is an ongoing process but the SEO tips used above only need to be addressed one time, which means you can instead focus your efforts on building your social media presence, creating content and optimizing conversion rates.

By following the Magento SEO tips above, more people will find your website in search engines and this will lead to an increase in visits and higher organic sales.

Looking for help with Magento? Visit the Magento blog for eCommerce tips and more.

Bonus section

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