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How to add Google Plus One to Magento in 5 Easy Steps

Google plus1 and Magento

Google +1 and Magento

At present it is not clear what effect Google’s Plus 1 will have on search engine positions for your Magento store. As Google move towards more on-site content driven SERP’s, I believe it will become more important in the future so we may as well start now.

      1. add google plus1Log in to Google webmaster tools and get the +1 code (its where you would manage your sitemaps) as pictured.
      2. Design your +1 button then grab the java-script code that generates the button.
      3. Paste the code into your Magento store: System> Configuration> Design> HTML Head> Miscellaneous Scripts
      4. Insert the snippet where you want the button to display in your store. I position it in an unused space on the menu bar, or you could move it up into the header.
        If you wish to do the same the file to edit is: app/design/frontend/default/YOURtempleNAME/template/page/html/header.phtml
        The code I use is:
        <span id=”plusone”> optional text <g:plusone annotation=”none”></g:plusone></span>
      5. I give it an ID so i can use CSS to position the button. In my stylesheet i have:

        #plusone { float:right; position: relative; top:-25px;}

 Magento Extension

There is a free magento extension which you can get through magento connect but in my opinon it is poorly designed. While it does work, the +1 button is placed right next to the shopping cart. This may confuse people who do not know about +1 and think that +1 will add one item to the shopping cart. Anything that distracts the customer and complicates checkout should be avoided.

It is not difficult to do yourself, please ensure it is placed in a distinctive area of your store so it is clear that it is an optional extra rather than part of the magento checkout process.

Multiple Pages and Website Optimiser In ZenCart Part2

Google Optimiser gives  a piece of code to insert at the beginning and end of the original ez-page and another piece of code at the end of the 2nd alternative ez-page. This can be easily copy and pasted using the ZenCart admin.

Now for the tricky part.

Having selected the add to shopping cart stage as the ‘measurement of success’ page i placed the tracking code in /includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/template/tpl_shopping_cart_default.php. This file will need to be copied from the template default and uploaded to the server in YOUR TEMPLATE folder.

This file has 2 functions: display the cart when an item is added and display the cart when it is empty. So, to measure page success when something is added to the cart, the Google code needs to go in the middle of the file before the ‘cart is empty’ function.

I inserted the code around line 174  in tpl_shopping_cart_default.php just after the shipping estimator section as shown below.

Once edited upload the file to your server and save an additional temporary copy to your desktop.

Validating the file.

Google will not be able to validate the performance success page so this needs to be done manually with the saved copy of tpl_shopping_cart_default.php as illustrated below.

Verify all the information in the optimiser and let your experiment begin.

It may need some tweaking but now the pages are in place I can edit the ez-page easily through ZenCart admin section as long as I don’t disturb the Google script allowing experimentation with the page content.

Multiple Pages and Website Optimiser in ZenCart Part1

Having braved google analytics, the bounce rate of an ez-page is high and I want to change it. But what to?

Well, by looking at how and why people visit a page and, from the overlay, where they click I can make assumptions at why there are there and now i want to meet their expectations.

But hold on. How will I know my new content will be an improvement? Why not offer multiple variations of the same ZenCart page and see which one is more successful?

Once you have a Google analytics account you can go directly to Google Website Optimiser and set up testing. I am using a simple A/B page to begin with.

One page is made in EZ pages and consists of the normal, but revamped, page. The other is again an ez-page but one that google will redirect to rather than publicly linked and clickable.

Having created two pages and selected a ‘results’ page (i used adding an item to the shopping cart as a result to measure page performance http://allgiftsdirect.co.uk/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart) it is time to add the tracking code. That stage is a little more tricky so I’ll cover it in part 2.

Get Serious About SEO: 3 Meta Descriptions in ZenCart

Previously I briefly covered the basics of meta descriptions. Here I focus specifically on Zen Cart and how it can help you.

I haven’t manually assigned meta descriptions and keywords for each product, that is too time consuming, but I have for product categories. Google picked up those changes very quickly so it it absolutely worth doing.

In your categories menu you will see, on the right hand side, something like this:

The orange symbol shows the tag has been manually configured, the black shows it is on automatic. Doing it manually is so much better and from the example above there is one category to configure so lets do that now.

There are 3 boxes to complete: the first is a customised title for the page which should reflect its content. The second is for keywords which should reflect the products within that category (or subcategories if you use them). The third box is for the meta description.

This is what could be displayed when people search for a particular key word. If your keywords and content match up to a users search term then the meta description may be shown in the search engine results, otherwise only the page title will show.

Maximum characters displayed (by Google) in a meta description is 150 so don’t go over this.

My previous post offers ideas on what makes a good meta description.

It is too important to leave to Zencart to auto display. Ensure for each category and sub category you manually configure your (meta) title, keywords and description. It is so worthwhile.

Update: Don’t forget /includes/languages/english/YOUR TEMPLATE/meta_tags.php

and then add a line for each of your EZ-pages

  • define(‘META_TAG_DESCRIPTION_EZPAGE_2′,’your description here’);
  • define(‘META_TAG_DESCRIPTION_EZPAGE_3′,’your description here’);

and so forth for the title, description and keywords for each EZ-page you are using. Google loves it.

NB: When editing meta titles, descriptions and keywords for your categories or pages all 3 fields must be filled in otherwise the meta fields are not complete and will be ignored.

How to fix ebay shops and google base feeds.

I wrote earlier about using eBay RSS feeds to automatically update google shopping products. This no longer works due to an error with eBay’s coding.  Google now require the condition to be specified (new/used/refurbished) but eBay does not send this in the correct format so updating automatically from feeds no longer works.  Ebay are using the <condition> tag which applies to text files rather than the <g:condition> tag which applies to feeds.

You now need to upload to google base manually.  Go to the webage where your feed is located (as detailed in the previous article), for example mine is:

http://esssl.ebay.co.uk/GetListings/allgiftsdirect?fmt=g

Save the page from your browser and then open it for editing, wordpad will do fine. Simply find and replace all instances of <condition> with <g:condition> and all instances of </condition> with </g:condition>.

Save the file and upload it to google base.

Alternatively there are websites where you enter your feed web address, they alter the code for you and then allow you to save the file to upload to base:

UK site builder is one example I have tried and it works.

Perhaps one day eBay will fix their code so we can all go back to doing it automatically. Is this not what we pay our fees for?

The Simple and Best SEO Tip in the World

You need to be top of the search engine result and you understand about on-page optimization and have done the basics.

Now what? How do you take your site from the middle of the pile and push and pull it slowly to the promised land of the top 5 positions?

And slowly here is the key. I’m talking about long term investment into the future of your website and business.

I’m also not talking about ranking number 1 in Google for your business name or a 10 word phrase that absolutely no-one else would want to rank for. If you haven’t done that yet, you need get some very basic SEO grounding.

What I want to discuss is out-performing your competitors on the absolutely top-notch make-you-a-fortune keywords that bring laser-targeted traffic. In other words, the ones you’re only dreaming about ranking for!

How do we do it?

Simple, really – we stand on the shoulders of giants. In other words, we look at what successful websites do and have done – and we use that information. No, we’re not going to re-invent the wheel and copy others’ business models, we’re going to take the cream from their hard work and pour it onto our sites!

Ranking in Google is about two things – it’s about relevance and it’s about popularity. We’ll assume that our sites are relevant to the traffic we’re seeking – no point attracting shoe shoppers if we’re selling ice cream! So it’s about popularity. And in Google’s case, that means backlinks. Put simply, the better the links to your site, the more they’ll see you as being popular, and the more they’ll pull your site to the top of the results.

Notice I said ‘better’, not ‘more’. In this case, quality is far more important than quantity. I can give you examples of sites with 300,000 inbound links that are far outranked by sites with 2000.

SEO experts talk about ranking number 1 in Google rather than Yahoo or MSN simply because Google is the search engine that most searchers use. Ironically, though, we need to use Yahoo to get to number one in Google. This is because Google is really bad at showing inbound links.

Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer dot search dot yahoo dot com) is far better at this. YSE will show you which sites link to your competitors. And better still, they’ll rank them in terms of importance, so all the hard work’s done for you!

You just need to type in the URL of the site into the SEARCH box at the top of the screen, click on ‘Explore URL’, then click on ‘Inlinks’ and select ‘Except from this domain’ in the drop-down box. Lo-and-behold – a list of your competitor’s most important links. Not bad, eh?

So here’s your strategy:

  • draw up your list of must-have, top-drawer keywords and keyword phrases.
  • search Google for them and take a note of the top 10 websites for each.
  • examine each of the top 10 in YSE and see where the important links are coming from.
  • filter these links into three categories: 1, the sites you won’t get links from; 2, the sites you’ll get links from with some hard work; 3, the sites you can get links from straight away (these can include blogs that allow comments, directories, article sites etc.
  • get to work on acquiring links from the third category, then move on to the second.

This takes time, obviously, but not as much time as randomly searching for links that you’ll ultimately discover have no importance whatsoever.

If you follow this procedure diligently and methodically, you’ll soon begin to see your sites slowly but surely marching up to the top of the rankings. I’m going to start straight away.