Tuesday, 21 February 2017

How to Better Utilize Filters in Magento Sites for SEO Benefit

Magento is a great eCommerce platform, but it has its limitations. Its Layered Navigation feature—which is commonly used by online merchants—can be painful from an SEO perspective. For a serious ecommerce site with thousands of filters and products, Layered Navigation creates loads of terrible URLs with identical page titles, identical descriptions, and near-duplicate (or duplicate) content.

Many of our ecommerce clients use Magento and it’s our job to ensure that their websites remain optimized for search engines despite this fact. So over the years, we have developed Magento SEO techniques that everyone can use—and we are happy to share them with you.

Technical optimization of Magento could become complicated, however it could be done if you have a good understanding of the basics. For this short tutorial, we are going to assume that you have a knowledge of fundamental SEO. Hopefully, these tips help you better utilize filters in Magento sites for improved SEO.

Band-Aid Solution: Block All Layered Navigation Pages from Indexing

If you are completely new to the Magento platform and have no clue how to properly set it up, make sure that all pages created by Layered Navigation are not indexed by Google. This is a quick fix you can do yourself until you are able to learn more, or until you can get an SEO agency to help you. How do you block these pages from indexing? Simply place a noindex tag in the <head> section of all the pages generated through “Filters”.

Use a Layered Navigation Extension

We recommend Improved Layered Navigation by Amnasty, which has helped thousands of online store owners optimize their Magento ecommerce websites’ navigation. This extension lets your customers find exactly the products they need while solving Magento’s common SEO issues.

Do you sell many different brands and want to open all your brands pages for indexing because you think you need them to acquire relevant search traffic? Improved Layered Navigation from Amnasty allows you to build beautiful and easy-to-use brands pages that look just like regular categories. It also lets you to quickly add unique content, META description, CMS blocks, and so on for maximum SEO impact.

Likewise you can allow to open filtered results for indexing, but make them much more search friendly, with optimized URL and unique text.

You can improve the functionality of your filtered pages to apply a combination of several filters for PPC, for long tail keywords, for special deals, etc.

Keep Tweaking
Never lose sight of your main goal for optimizing your Magento site: that is, to give your customers the pages containing the products they came there to see. Regularly review your website especially if you are constantly adding new products.

Are there new search queries you want to rank for? Then keep building pages with filtered products for these queries. The key is to plan way in advance because it takes Google some time to deindex duplicate pages, especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of them. After your website is re-indexed, see how well you are performing in search and fix the remaining duplicate or unwanted pages right away. You might have to change settings, deindex or index pages with filtered results, and do other adjustments based on your SEO data.
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Friday, 17 February 2017

Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing: Battle for Traffic

Getting your SEO strategy right is a task in itself, oftentimes you are presented with a plethora of options to expand your online business and oftentimes you end up with a dilemma about investing when and where. Two of the prominent online marketing techniques are Organic SEO and Social Media Marketing. Today we are presenting some facts that we hope will increase your understanding of both concepts and help you deploy them more effectively to the benefit of your business.

There are two things we want to lay out in front of you before proceeding with our explanations:

1. Social media signals rarely if ever influence your site rankings in SERPs
2. The full potential of SEO is unachievable without harnessing Social Media

Let’s take up social media marketing first. In our research we discovered that social media focused blogs easily outpaced the SEO blogs in terms of sheer numbers since they have a targeted set of social media audience. Their integration with popular social sites means that getting a loyal readership is not too difficult for these websites and blogs. Although, it should be kept in mind that getting social media marketing needs some trickery and savviness. The general tendency of a social media user is to like or share content, to make him/her click on your links you need engaging titles and short descriptions that generate interest and prompt a click (tap).

An interesting fact that we found in our research is the role played by social media marketing focused websites in organic search. The top search results consistently ranked SMM focused content at the top. This in part confirms our assertion at the beginning that SMM plays an important role in realising the potential of SEO.

Secondly, taking a look at the SEO optimised marketing blogs and websites; our research churned out high traffic for SEO marketing content with higher number of backlinks and referring domains. Which is in tune with all the research available about the importance of quality links in your content.

However, one thing that stood out was the number of backlinks being generated for marketing SEO through Social Media Marketing content. It seems that social media marketing content is essential in providing visibility to your content online, which in turn helps SEO marketing blogs increase their following. And when SEO marketing content gains more visitors it ends up being shared more and more thus becoming an extended SMM itself. Thus, although SMM alone is not capable of influencing your search performance, it does provide a useful way to increase your ranking anyway by linking your SEO marketing content with the right audience.

At Xtracare IT Solutions, we are constantly trying to provide the best of social media and SEO marketing services for businesses around the world. If you need any assistance in setting up your online business or running an online marketing campaign, list our website and book a free consultation today.
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Monday, 6 February 2017

Why On Page SEO is must for Search Engine Rankings?

When we talk about ranking and traffic for websites, we usually consider SEO, Social Media and Digital marketing techniques.  In SEO, we have see mostly people ask for OFF PAGE SEO like link building etc, while they forget that ON PAGE SEO has more or equal importance when it comes to ranking in Google and other search engines.

ON Page SEO is basically optimizing your website for On page factors from meta tags to contents and make it search engine friendly.

On page SEO can be done for every CMS from WordPress to Magento and simple static websites, you will be surprised that with On Page SEO, you can see drastic changes in your Search Engine Rankings.

Here at Submitshop, we optimize your website for following on Page SEO factors:

. Domain and Hosting Analysis
. Http Headers (301, 302 , 202, etc)
. Meta Tags (Title, Description, Keywords for each page)
. <H1>, <H2> and <H3> Header Tags
. Robots.txt
. URL Canonicalization
. Breadcrumb Navigation
. Google Website Verification
. Google publisher page verification
. XML Sitemap Creation and Upload in Google
. Fixing for any malware and outdate software’s
. Clean Source Code (Minimum use of inline CSS and JAVA)
. Google Speed for Mobile and Desktop Version
. Clean search Engine friendly URL’s
. 404 Page fixing
. Google Crawl Issue fixing
. Web site Responsiveness Checking
. Alt Image Tags
. Bold, Strong and Italic Tags
. Keyword Research and Placement
. Back Link Profile Checking
. On Page Social Signals and Social Media Accounts
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Saturday, 4 February 2017

Comparisons between Google and Bing

My last post was about the possibility of Bing knocking Google off the top spot for search engine market share. Since that blog, I have discovered a very interesting tool that will allow you to compare the search results for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Twitter. Mixxr displays the search results of each search engine side by side. Mixxr is a great tool for comparing the results of the top search engines enabling you to make an informed decision about which one you prefer or which is more relevant.

Microsoft are clearly aiming to make a big entrance into the search engine market with Bing, with their big launch at the beginning of the month, their enormous marketing budget and their in-depth market research. Microsoft have recognised that search engine users are not always looking for a website, but often looking for the answer to a question and with Bings unique feature allowing you to view part of a websites content without entering the site, information is provided much more quickly.

Illustrating their long term strategy for Bing, Steve Ballmer (Chief Executive of Microsoft), was recently quoted as saying “I don’t want to over-set expectations. We are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time.”

For the search engine optimisers among us, becoming familiar with Bings algorithms may be necessary in the not to distant future. Bing has already taken a noticeable slice of the UK search engine market, overtaking Yahoo and Ask with a 3.15% market share already. We could soon see the use of Google and Bing become fairly evenly split creating the need from an SEO perspective to consider your positions within two search engines with slightly different algorithms.
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Friday, 3 February 2017

Why SEO Campaigns Need To Be Evaluated By Their Conversion Efficiency

Undoubtedly a successful website is one that is able to drive traffic towards itself. However, one does come across numerous instances of sites that attract a lot of traffic but do not have conversions to match. When we say “conversion”, it does not necessarily have to be sales resulting in the generation of revenue but also includes the successful outcome of the intention of the CTA that could range from an email newsletter subscription signup to a request for a demo or just about any other action desired from a visitor to the site.

Visitor Flow Tracking Is Vital

Visitor flow is the way a visitor visits different pages on a website and the sequence they follow. The tracking of this flow is important because it can give you a general view of how the visitor is processing information on the website and where the site provides stopping points. This sort of an insight is crucial because you will be able to discover the points at which there are bottlenecks or halting points and how to connect them so that more conversions take place.

Tools for Tracking Visitor Flow

A simple way of monitoring the flow of visitors is by using Google Analytics. Another effective way of tracking visitor flow is to set goals up in Google’s Admin tab. Either a single page can be set up as a goal or even pages in a funnel, which is defined as the steps leading up to the goal. An example of a typical funnel is product page – shopping cart – checkout. Once the goal is set up, it can be tracked under Conversions – Goals. Once the funnel is established, you can see how the visitor is progressing to the end or leaving at any particular stage.

However, the CEO of the leading provider of bulk email marketing services in Delhi is of the opinion that while such tracking can give you a general idea of visitor flow, you need to appreciate that there are a number of other factors affecting conversions, such as confusion regarding what the next step should be.

The Difference Lies In Gaining Insights into User Behavior

The reasons why your site is not able to get the vital conversions can also be revealed by obtaining visitor feedback as they navigate the site. Gathering insights from users in real time can be really shocking at times butis extremely informative. To understand if there is indeed a pattern that can be established, it is best to have the site navigated by multiple users rather than just one.

This sort of testing can be done through specialist sites like xtracareit.com that take the required user demographics and track the flow of visitors fitting the profile. A useful feature is that you can actually set up goals for your visitors and see how well they fare as they attempt to carry out certain specified transactions like a purchase or an email newsletter signup. You can even request for feedback on specific aspects of your site and use the responses to determine what changes need to be done. By using another test site by the name of xtracareit.com, you can administer a simple test that asks a user to look at a particular design for just five seconds and answer a number of questions. The responses you get will enable you to design a user experience that is better and geared towards promoting conversions once the users land up on your site.

Conclusion

Even the best SEO campaign will only suffice to get the users to visit your site but the traffic does not always correspond to sales conversions. Vital to the purchase decision is the emotion of the user that is very closely linked to the user experience. When users are not clear about what is expected of them or cannot figure out what to do to achieve an outcome, it can lead to frustration and they will leave the website. This underlines the importance of allocating sufficient resources to promoting sales conversions rather than just traffic when strategizing an SEO campaign.
Source By: Xtracare Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
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