Applying SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices to your Magento Shopping Cart is a great way to take advantage of an already search engine friendly eCommerce system. Although SEO is a continuous process of endless number crunching, keyword analysis, and overall website refinement, ensuring that your title tags are configured properly is a good start.
Default Title Tag Configuration
If your Magento store is still using the default title “Magento Commerce” then this change is for you! To make this change go to Configuration -> Design -> HTML Head. Make sure this title describes your store and is short and precise.
If you want your store name on all product pages add it to the Title Suffix field on the HTML Head admin page. Make sure you choose Title Suffix because the product keyword carries the most weight and you want the search engines read them first.
Magento Page Titles
Category titles should be short and in the same type of language that a customer would use to search for the the types of products in the category. This is where some keyword research will come in handy. Putting your store name in the title is unnecessary if you chose to have it show in the suffix of all titles in the default configuration.
To ensure your product page titles are optimized correctly make sure your product names are short and accurately describe what is being sold. Remember, you don’t need to include your store name if you already added it to the Title Suffix Field.
Although the importance of meta tags and title tags have diminished over the years, they still play a major role in how your Magento store will appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Failing to configure them properly can dramatically effect your website’s traffic and chances of online success. By configuring them properly your Magento store has an edge over the competition and a better chance of being found by customers who are looking for you.
eCommerce is much more than just getting people to your site. While traffic is unarguably an important aspect to internet marketing, getting viewers to purchase from your store is equally important. Here is a list of 10 basic features* your store should encompass to encourage viewers to not only make a purchase but engage in a long-lasting relationship with your store. (*Gartner)
1) Product information should be easy to read, detailed, and promote the best features of the item.
2) Your return policy should be clearly marked, easy to find and interpret.
3) Every page of your website should load quickly. This includes not only the main pages but every page a customer engages through checkout.
4) Product reviews from other customers should be displayed with every item. Product reviews really set eCommerce stores apart from their brick and mortar cousins. Leverage this difference and include product reviews throughout your store to encourage and reassure customers while they shop.
5) Multiple product images or 3d rotators should company every product. Customers like to know what they are buying and clear multiple or 3d images of products do just that.
6) If a picture is worth a thousand words than a video must be priceless.Video of your products included in the description is marketing gold. Viewers feel more connected to video and better informed. Video also offers other marketing venues such as YouTube, video search and more.
7) Online Chat assistance is a great way to bridge the personal connection gap that plague online retailers. Nothing is more reassuring to the customer than knowing that help from a real live person is only a mouse-click away.
8 ) Related products should be displayed with every item. This not only helps you increase sales but helps fill the need for the shopper.
9) Easy and quick checkout is a must. Laborious and slow checkout systems are the culprit for many abandoned shopping carts. Minimize the risk and maximize your customer satisfaction with a one page checkout system or similar system.
10) Many shoppers don’t want to sign up to your eCommerece system. Cater to these customers by allowing them to make purchases a a guest. If you make them happy with the first purchase they might come back, sign up, and become lifelong customers.
Implementing these listed features will put you on the the right track to increase customer retention, loyalty, and overall satisfaction. If your eCommerce shopping cart is falling short of this list please contact us to learn more on how InteractOne can get you back on track.
Imagine for moment that you’ve decided to open a brick and mortar retail shop. Consider the steps that you would take in order to launch the store and drive new sales. Initiating a Magento shopping cart is in many ways the same. You must develop:
A target market
Branding – logo and message
Product mix (inventory)
Pricing
Promotion
Magento is the world’s most powerful eCommerce platform. It is a highly flexible and feature-rich system, helping online retailers specifically tailor their branding, product mix, pricing and promotion to suit their target market.
A problem that many Magento site owners run into is that they don’t fully understand the true potential and complexity of Magento’s selling tools. Magento’s administration interface is versatile and powerful and it maintains a relatively steep learning curve with little in the way of formalized training resources. As a result, Magento site owners don’t take full advantage of the available tools, often to the site’s detriment.
This is why InteractOne offers easy-to-understand product support and training for Magento store owners. Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced Magento administrator, we can help you fully understand and take advantage of Magento’s powerful selling tools. Together with those tools, you can leverage your knowledge into a thriving eCommerce site.
Trust the Magento Shopping Cart Experts
As Magento’s second oldest partner, we have an in-house team of Magento certified developers and front end programmers to bring your website vision to life. We’re so good that we are one of Magento’s four worldwide development trainers. We have PMI-certified Project Professionals on staff to help ensure that your site development runs smoothly. Site support stays on-shore as well. If you need help, your call is handled by a representative in our Ohio office. Do you need marketing assistance promoting your site? We offer a full range of Internet marketing services.
Contact the experts at InteractOne for more information about a Magento shopping cart or Magento training by clicking here or calling 513.437.2983.
Contact Us today receive more information about our Magento Support and Training programs.
Magento Static blocks are a feature that makes adding content to your Magento site easy and convenient. Static blocks allow for your Magento site to be updated via the admin panel making it faster than having to “hard-code” every time you need to make a change to your website. Static blocks can be used anywhere on your Magento site to display text, images, & navigation. Some Magento designs have static blocks already in place for your convenience; however, you might have to install them yourself. Below is a simple tutorial on how to install Magento static blocks in the footer of your Magento site
Step One: Create Static Block in Your Magento Admin
Magento Admin Panel—>Static Blocks—>Add New Block
1) Name your Static Block, in this case Custom footer Links
2) Label the Identifier (This is the link you will use to call the block later) in this case, custom-footer-links
3) Choose what store view you would like it to render in
4) Set Status to Enabled
2) Now for the fun part! Add your navigation links to the block. Make sure to use <style> to make them match your sites color and theme.
Step Two: Inserting Code to Call the Static Block
This part is going to require you to FTP into your Magento site and modify footer.phtml
app—>design—>frontend—->default—>(your template)—>template—>page—>footer.phtml
Find where in the footer you want your navigation links to display and insert:
<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘custom-footer-links’)->toHtml(); ?>
Now most of the time the Static block should display just fine but in some cases you are going to have do some extra steps to have the block display.
1) Instead of inserting:
<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘custom-footer-links’)->toHtml(); ?>
And voila! Your Static Blocks should be displaying and easily accessible through Your Magento Admin panel. Remember Static Blocks can be inserted just about anywhere in your Magento site and are a great feature to use when content needs to be updated frequently. If you have any comments or suggestions on Magento Static Blocks feel free to contact us.
Looking for an eCommerce shopping cart that will meet the needs of your business and stay within your budget can seem overwhelming at first. Shopping around to find the right solution can be a daunting task. Wading through the seemingly endless varieties of shopping cart packages can take many hours and can be very frustrating! Each company boasts that their system is the right one for you so determining which platform to run your eCommerce business requires time and patience. Here are some points to keep in mind when purchasing an eCommerce shopping cart system.
Easy To Use Interface
The interface should be easy to use and understand for both you and the customer. Any eCommerce system worth its salt should be able to import products from an excel sheet, organize them into categories and track inventory. Writing descriptions and modifying products should not be a difficult task.
On the consumer end, your eCommerce shopping cart should be easy to navigate and the checkout process must be simple and secure. Your products should also be categorized and displayed in a logical and intuitive way.
Search Engine Friendly
If people can’t find your eCommerce site then you’re not going to make any sales. Clean code and the ability modify URLs and header tags should be standard. Your website’s loading speed must be fast and without any lag. Lag is any noticeable delay that the user experiences when accessing your website.
Analytics and Reporting
A good eCommerce system will have the ability to track traffic, search queries, shopping cart abandonment, most viewed items and have automated sale reports. Knowing who is coming to your site, what they’re buying, their likes and dislikes, and how they are finding you can go a long way in shaping your marketing strategy.
Marketing Promotions and Tools
Promoting products, offering an email or newsletter sign-up, free shipping options and up-sells are a few features a shopping cart are the features of a superior shopping cart. Getting the customer to the site is only half the battle! Encouraging them to purchase items is a lot easier if your eCommerce system is equipped with the ability to promote your products.
These are just a few pointers and suggestions when looking for an eCommerce system. Here at InteractOne, we offer Magento eCommerce and osCommerce shopping cart solutions. If you are interested in either system for your business please contact us to learn more!
Magento plug-ins are one of the many reasons to consider a Magento shopping cart for your business’ eCommerce platform. These plug-ins or extensions provide a level of usability and functionality not matched by other shopping cart systems. There are plug-ins to make Magento faster, improve SEO, track email campaigns, improve website search and much more. Here are a few that are not only free but effective, a must for any Magento shopping cart.
Fooman Speedster – This extension takes all JS (JavaScript) and CSS (cascading style sheets) and combines, compresses and caches it, significantly speeding up Magento. It is relatively easy to install and, with speed becoming more important for both web users and search engines, this is one Magento extension not to ignore.
Lazzymonks Twitter – Including social media with marketing efforts is a must today. Lazzymonks Twitter extension allows easy integration of Twitter into Magento. It displays Twitter feeds in your menu and allows you to update your Twitter status from the admin panel.
MailChimp ECommerce360 Reporting – Using email as part of your marketing strategy? MailChimp simplifies measurement of ROI. This Magento extension takes away all the compiling and processing of excel spreadsheets and simplifies it into easy-to-read graphs and charts. It measures email clicks and follows them until a purchase is completed!
Canonical URL’s for Magento – This extension protects your content from duplicate content penalties. By inserting the link rel=”canonical” to the head of all your magento pages you can ensure that your site gets credit for the unique content it provides.
There you have it; some free advice about free Magento extensions & plug-ins from InteractOne, a certified Enterprise-level provider of Magento. For a full list, please visit here . If you have any Magento extensions you feel should be listed, or any questions about installation, feel free to share your comments below.
Website loading speed is a major factor when it comes to search engine rankings, retaining viewer interest and turning viewers into customers. Although Magento is a fast loading Ecommerce website out of the box but there are many ways to tweak it for more speed. Increased speed can easily translate into more sales and better rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPS).
One of the easiest ways to improve Magento’s speed is to add the Fooman Speedster extension. This extension is free and can be found here. Load time after this extension is installed is vastly improved and is a must for streamlining your online store.
Another easy way to speed up Magento is to take out this line of code php_value memory_limit 128M which is found in the root .htaccess file. Eliminating this line of code gives magento more memory to work with which will improve page load times greatly.
Enabling Gzip on your server is another great way to speed up your Magento eCommerce site. You can do this by updateing your .htacess file. First find “enable apache served files” in the file. Next change that code to the following:
############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
Hold on to your hats!! Off you go! These modifications and updates are sure to improve the performance of your Magento eCommerce website, convert into better standings in the SERPS, and result in happier customers and more visitors.
Website loading speed is one of the most important features of your website. To much load time and you can lose a potential customer entirely. A study released by Akamai Technologies, Inc. in September showed that “2 seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site.” This threshhold is only going to continue to be pushed as customers speed expectations grow.
Search engines are also adding speed to their page ranking requirements, this is evident with Googles upcoming Caffeine update. In a recent interview Matt Cutts, the man in charge of Google’s Webspam Team, said “speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but that may very well change.”
So how do you speed up your website? The best fastest and easiest way to speed up your websites performance is to look at the websites design. Are there large bulky images, tons of java & flash script? These need to be eliminated and at the very least optimized for performance.
Another variable to look at is your Websites hosting company. Are the severs they provide made for the type of site you have?
Many times the performance issue has to do with age. Code builds up and is outdated, the website platform hasn’t been updated and is vulnerable to bugs and hacks, and like most things the newest version is just plain better. Instead of updating these issues one by one, many times a complete website redesign would be the better and cheaper alternative.
For eCommerce sites a high performance option would be Magento. The Magento platform combines performance, ease of use, and awesome looks into a seamless package. This platform is used by many major retailers for these many reasons and can be parred down or expanded depending on your needs.
For websites that require good looks, speed, and the ability to be updated from any PC WordPress is an excellent platform. With almost endless styleing possibilities, lightweight code, and a host of free plug-ins that can boost performance and functionality this platform has set the standard in Content Management Systems (CMS).
Whether you need to go through your sites code line by line to streamline its performance or your going to opt for a complete redesign one thing is for certain, speed will effect the success of your website and its importance will only continue to grow.
Released to the public March 31, 2008 Magento has revolutionized the way business is conducted online. The front-end (what the customer sees) is user friendly, eye-appealing, fast, & secure. The back-end (the seller admin panel) is easy to use, has built in intuitive functions (taxes, product quantity, shipping, payments, ect), is secure, and is easily upgraded & configured to the needs of the business. See Magento Features.
Today you are more than likely using Mageno if you shop on the internet. Many large retailers and businesses using Magento for their Internet presence such as 3M, The North Face, Stussy, Samsung, & homemedics just to name a few. The reason for this is simple, it is a versatile complete package that is a true asset to any online business. You can see this flexibility when visiting different sites that use the Magento platform. Some don’t look anything alike! The only thing in common are their functionality and ease of use.
Here at InteractOne we realized the magnitude of what such a system could have on the e-commerce world and adopted Magento shortly after its release. We have many custom Magento Designs under our belts and even a few Magento fixes from clients who unfortunately got taken advantage by an adolescent developer.
If you have any experience with Magento based eCommerce sites please feel free to link to them in the comments section and tell us your experience with the system. If you are interested in how Magento can successfully be integrated into your business model please fill out the contact form on the right and a InteractOne representative will contact you shortly.
