Search Engine Optimisation
Regardless of the goal of a website a primary requirement for its success will be having lots of visitors. There are two main sources of traffic to any website.
- Direct requests from people who know what the website address is. e.g. existing customers or through leaflets etc.
- Search engines.
In the UK ~75% of search engine traffic is from Google. It is nearer 90% in Ireland. So Google is the primary target. Yahoo and MSN Live search listings are secondary goals.
The search engine's job is to provide the best match in terms of results for any given search phrase. Google often uses the phrase "relevance" to describe the way it orders the results. So, our job is to increase the website's relevance in the eyes of Google.
Google uses three algorithms (procedures) to determine relevance.
- Off page factors.
- Pagerank. This is the links to your page from other sites. This is measured as a pagerank. The higher the pagerank of the linking page the more relevant your site must be. So the more links from good pagerank sites the better.
On page factors. - Hilltop. This is how the content of a page reflects the search phrase. The text content is� a big factor but other elements which can be considered the architecture of the site matter as well. As the name suggests this is about being on the top of the hill not just stuffing a page with keywords. We need to look for the optimum in all things.
- Sandbox. Google figures that content which changes more often is more up to date so more relevant. Just changing text etc. helps here as do things like blogs and forums. This is less important than the other two.
The process of fine tuning a website to meet these criteria is known as "Search Engine Optimisation" or SEO.
A good case study is http://www.luciditservices.co.uk/. They have numerous IT security products which they wanted to come higher on Google for. A link exchange program was established to increase the page rank and individual product pages were constructed to focus on each keyphrase. Within 1-2 months per phrase we achieved page 1/2 listings.
The site www.waterfrontbathrooms.com is also another good example with many first page listings, including broad key phrases such as designer bathrooms and luxury bathrooms.
Our standard SEO package is �200/month for an initial six months but we can be flexible as required.
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| Ok here’s how to make a dynamic jQuery sliding accordian menu in Magento, as seen on http://www.waterfrontbathrooms.com/. Waterfront bathrooms also has a dynamic tree menu system to deal with there being more than 2 levels of categories, but I’ll cover this in a future post. Upload jQuery Upload the latest jQuery version to js/jquery/jquery | If you’re putting a shopping cart area anywhere other than the standard cart side block, then you’ll probably want to show how many items are in the cart at any one time. Here’s how: $cart = Mage::getModel('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getData(); if(isset($cart['items_qty'])){ if($cart['items_qty'] != 1) { echo "You have " . | Here’s a short list of magento codes to do some of the simple stuff. It’s a little empty at the moment but I’ll keep adding to it over time. Check if customer is logged in <?php $_customer = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->isLoggedIn(); if ($_customer) { // do stuff } ?> Get product image <?php echo $this- |
