SEO Training

Eternity Jewellery Online Shop using OScommerce

I have been working on a site for a jewellers for the last while.  I decided to go with OScommerce as the ecommerce engine.  The reason for that was that it was recommended to me by several people. I decided to check it out.  I was delighted when I saw that it was w3c standards compliant, so I dived right in.

About OScommerce Version 2.3.1

OScommerce V2.3.1 is an open source online shopping solution.  Open source software is developed by a network of developers in an open community.  Therefore it is free.  That means I can charge less to my clients than if I buy a shopping cart solution or have to develop it from scratch myself.

OScommerce runs on PHP and mysql – which themselves have tons of online support available.

OScommerce comes with an impressive feature set which you can look through here.  It seems like they have everything covered. I particularly liked things like unlimited products and multi-currency support (although I since found out that exchange rates are only automatic if the US dollar is your primary currency).

Working with OScommerce 2.3.1 (let the review begin)

Installation

Installation was straightforward and there is plenty of online help if you get stuck.  It’s not as easy as wordpress, but it is not as hard as a multisite wordpress install.

Modification

This is where things get a little less rosy.  Unless you want to use OScommerce as it is then you are going to have to make some modifications.  It will work perfectly well as it is and you can upload your store logo etc, it’s just that I have yet to meet anybody that wants their shop to look like anybody elses.

OScommerce is not a theme based platform.  There are people out there selling “themes” but these all go further than just some changes to the CSS.

Any modifications will affect future updates! This is because just about every mod requires changes to more than one file.

There are thousands of modifications available though.  Be warned.  A lot of modifications require you to upload files, overwriting the ones that were there before.  If you have made modifications already you may well find yourself overwriting some of those.  The upshot of that would be at best stopping your original modifications from working, and at worst breaking your whole site.  Backup, backup, backup!

File Structure

It’s a nightmare.  To do something simple like adding a page requires changes to 3 pages (or maybe 4 I forget).  Once you get used to the file structure it’s not as bad, but you can forget about putting in a page called something.php and just linking to it.  It will not work.  The side menus are module based.  This is great in that you can position and reposition individual modules like the shopping cart and product categories easily from the admin.  It is not so great when it comes to adding to a module (extra pages for example) or creating a new module (box).

OScommerce SEO

SEO is a foreign concept to OScommerce.  I made the stupid assumption that because they had gone to the effort of making the site standards compliant (markup, but not CSS) that they had also put some effort into SEO.  This is absolutely not the case.  Problems with the SEO include:

1. Multiple pages with the same meta title (the store name).  Products and categories have separate page titles but all the other pages default to the shop name.  I confess that I got frustrated trying to work out the structure to change this and resorted to a switch statement in the header to change the page title of the other pages based on the url of the page.  God help me when it comes to doing mod-rewrites of the urls!
2. Links to index.php.  This is one of my pet hates.  Why link to www.whateversite.com/index.php when www.whateversite.com is perfectly acceptable and removes a duplicate page issue.  A quick mod-rewrite sorted out that.
3. Canonical URLS.  that sort of goes with the above.  Again sorted with a mod-rewrite.
4. Search Engine Friendly URL’s.  There is an option in the admin to display search engine friendly urls.  The trouble is that the solution is worse than the problem. The original url to a product could be http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php?cPath=24_39&products_id=42.  Turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s makes this http://www.eternityjewellery.ie/product_info.php/cPath/24_39/products_id/42.  What the advantage of that is supposed to be I don’t know.  There is no product name in there (in this case an eternity ring).  Worse than that it appears to add 4 folder levels to the url.  The further away from the home page a page is (sub folders) the less important it is. Needless to say I have turned that off.
5. There is no description meta tag.
6. There is no built in sitemap (although there are mods available).
7. There is no auto update to google et al when a new product is added.

Another issue I have is that there is no visual editor when putting in product information.  If you want to put in a list with your product then you have to code it.  No problem to me, but not nice for a client who doesn’t know html from abba.  Frankly that is a bit embarrassing.

There are SEO mods available, but you will need to install these first, before other mods since making an OScommerce site truly SEO friendly is not a simple task.  I decided not to because they mostly include stuff that is outdated or not necessary.  I’ll do it myself.

Things I don’t like about OScommerce v2.3.1

1. OScommerce allows you to add attributes or options to a product.  they were clearly thinking of options like available in red or blue.  This part of the admin is a disgrace.  Each attribute has to be added in separately.  With the Jewellery shop I was working with they had things like ring sizes.  There were 52 different ring sizes.  To individually add 52 options to each ring would take a long time and leave me with royally P***ed off clients.  I spent a day making some modifications to this page including allowing multiple selection of attributes for a product and re-ordering the lists.  They were ordered by id number from the database.  I changed it to be ordered alphabetically or I would never be able to find anything!  A search function would have been nice here too.  What you end up with is pages and pages of options and then more pages of which options are assigned to which products.  Oh, and similarly named products are a problem there too.  You can input a code for each product, but that code did not show up in the attributes page.  So two “Eternity Ring”s with different ring sizes available would get very confusing.  I had to modify that to show the product code too.  While I was at it I modified the breadcrumb trail navigation too.
2. Shipping.  There are lots of shipping methods available.  Combining them is not so easy.  My client wanted free delivery on orders over x amount, but only in Ireland.  This was achievable only by setting up two different shipping methods, one by price and the other by weight.  I further had to limit the price method to only come into effect in Ireland.  The documentation was skimpy and shipping took a full half day to sort out.  Part of the process of setting up shipping was to input the country code of every country in the list, along with the shipping price by weight.  Having a maximum of 255 characters per line in the inputs meant that I had to split one segment of countries into 4 (at the 255 character mark).  A headache!
3. Shipping part 2. If you work in lbs, then weights are not a problem.  For those of us who are metric it is not so straight forward.  The database is set to two decimal places.  So if you use kilos then you only get two decimal places of grams.  This is a problem on light goods like earrings for example.  You can change the db to reflect 3 decimal places or you can just measure everything in grams.  After trying both I went for weighing in grams.  OScommerce allows you to specify maximum weights for packages and increases overall package weight by a percentage after that to compensate your shipping charges.  From Ireland, even if it actually worked it would be inaccurate and useless.  I turned that off and just put in prices for larger weights in my main shipping section.
4. No wishlist.  I didn’t mind that so much, but my client would have liked one.  The only mod I could find for 2.3.1 to do this was on sale for $850 (which rather goes against the spirit of open-source).

Would I use OScommerce again?

Yes I would.  Now that I know my way around it, it is not a bad piece of software.  It is not nice to work with but it does what you want it to do at the end of the day, so it gets a reluctant thumbs up from me.  I only say reluctant because for a time I felt it was ruining my life!

WEBSHED RSS Poster. Post your Blog and other feeds to Twitter automatically

I haven’t yet fully integrated it into my site yet and it should be considered a beta version, but here is a sneak preview of a new free service on my main site….

It is an RSS feed poster that will take your RSS feeds and publish them to Twitter automatically.  More than that, it is a feed aggregator that allows you to combine up to 6 individual feeds into one feed.  Why?  Well, for example, facebook only allows you publish one feed to your notes page.  So this aggregator allows you to publish up to 6 feeds.

It is called the WEBSHED RSS poster and to use it just click Publish My Feeds To Twitter!

I’ll update you all more when I have it properly integrated into the site an prettied up a bit.  In the meantime I’d welcome any feedback or comments you have on it.

SEO for Dummies does exist, you can buy it. It is far from the best book on the subject though. If fact, books are generally outdated nearly as soon as they go to print!

SEO for Dummies. It is an attractive prospect.  It brings to mind a quick, easily digestible way to get your website to the top of Google. There are lots and lots of sites and people proclaiming to be able to show you how to do this.  These are the snake oil salesmen and women of our modern world.

Is there an easy way to learn SEO?

Frankly there is no easy way.  This site “SEO training” will be going for years and will never cover everything completely.  There are a few reasons for this:

1. SEO is a huge topic
2. The SEO goalposts keep moving

I really want to learn SEO though.  How can I get started?

The starting place for every budding SEO practitioner should be Googles’ Webmaster Guidelines. Go and follow all of the advice they set forth and you will be half way there.  I do mean all of it by the way.  There is no point picking and choosing which bits suit you.  This is the “white hat” SEO way.  It means that you are doing what Google want you to do.  Your reward shall be no penalties.  This does not guarantee you better ranking though….. Google Webmaster Guidelines are just a starting point!

Following Google guidelines looks like tons of work!

Indeed.  Making sure that your site is structured as Google would like it to be can be a lot of work depending on how  well your site was put together in the first place.  In some instances it is easier to start from scratch!

Google Guidelines seem very technical, is there an easier to understand version?

No. There is no easier version.  The Google guidelines are the easy version.

You said this article was about SEO for Dummies!

This article is about SEO for Dummies.  The point is that if you go and look at Google Webmaster Guidelines and find it too technical or do not have the time to put into learning everything there then you are better off hiring a professional SEO consultant. They do not have to do all the work for you, but they should be able to at least give you the tools you need and the understanding to be able to tackle the job yourself.  More importantly, they can bring you to the next level and bring you from conforming to performing.  To do otherwise would be dumb.  Here is the reason:

SEO starts with diagnosis

In the last post I wrote I mentioned the importance of SEO analysis.  You need to know what is wrong with your site before you can fix it.  When my car breaks down I sometimes have a fair idea of what is wrong, but I will bring it to a mechanic to find out for sure.  He is a professional.  He knows more about it than I do.  If I fiddle about with my car I am likely to spend money on parts I don’t need, waste time “fixing” the wrong thing and end up with a car that may be fixed, but in my case is more likely to be more damaged than it was originally.

The thing I am missing is an accurate diagnosis.  This holds for SEO too.  If I start tinkering with a site without knowing what I am doing then I am in danger of actually causing damage as well as not fixing my problems.  I need to know what to fix and why.

As a professional SEO consultant, the first thing I do is analyse the website I am going to work on.  That tells me where the sites strengths and weaknesses are and helps to ensure I target the areas that need it most.

SEO knowledge can be learned.  That is what this site is for.

I do not want to be negative about learning SEO.  It is not rocket science.  It does take time to learn though.  This post is really aimed at business owners or management who think it is a good idea to do their SEO in-house with no help from a professional source.  It is not a good idea.  I say that from experience.  I had to learn too.  I got as far as I could by reading everything I could and following guidelines.  Then it was time to get somebody to teach me.  I realised at that point that I could have saved a lot of time (and time is money) by using a consultant in the first place.

Since then I have learned a lot more from a lot of different sources, but the point is that using a GOOD SEO consultant is expensive, but prudent – it saves money in the long run.

The default way that Wordpress displays your page/post/comment/tag pages title is to have the blog name, followed by two >> marks and then the post title, tag title, comment title, or just the blog name if it is the home page. Here is how to do some simple optimisation (ok ok optimization just for you Americans) on your Wordpress site or Blog.

As you can see, on this blog things are a little different.  The home page displays the blog name “SEO Training” and also the site description (small text below the blog title).

On the other pages I have made the blog name go to the right.  Why?  because it is better to have the more important keywords near the beginning of the title for SEO.  This is particularly true when the blog title is repeated on every page as it is in this case.

This is another issue.  Should I have the blog title showing on every page?  Jury is out on that one here… so I’m experimenting.  Another blog I write on my home site about online marketing does not have the blog title on every page. If it is a tag page then the page title will be just the tag.  If it is an article then just the article title will appear in the meta title tag.  The blog is new, so I will give it six months and see if I can notice any discernable difference in performance.

Anyway, I digress a bit. Here is how to change your title tag in wordpress.

1. You need to open the header.php file in whatever theme you are using.  You can do this directly from Wordpress, by clicking on the appearance menu item on the left of your Wordpress dashboard and then clicking on Editor which will show up below it.  Once you are in editor you can select Header (header.php) from the list of pages on the right.  Your files must be writable though or it will tell you it could not save your changes.  Alternatively, if like me you prefer to use ftp, then the path is wp-content -> themes -> (whatever theme you are using) -> header.php.
2. Find the title tag. It will look like this: <title><?php wp_title(’&laquo;’, true, ‘right’); ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>
3. Change it to this: <title><?php if ( is_single() || is_page() || is_tag() || is_category()) {  wp_title(’&raquo;’,true,’right’); bloginfo(’name’);} else {
   bloginfo(’name’); echo ” &raquo; “; bloginfo(’description’);
   } ?></title>
4. Save it.  You’re done!

If you would like the blog title not to appear on every post then you want to use this instead: <title><?php if(wp_title(’&laquo;’,false, ‘right’)){wp_title(false);} else { bloginfo(’name’); echo ‘ &raquo; ‘; bloginfo(’description’);} ?></title>

That is all there is to it. Better SEO for your Wordpress site and it’s not even difficult! Enjoy!

Online Marketing Forum

I have just created a brand new Online Marketing forum on my home site.  It will cover SEO at all levels, online and offline marketing and PR.  That’s just as a starting point.

I observed that while there is a huge interest in the business community regarding SEO and Online Marketing in general, there is a natural reluctance to ask questions to real life people.  I understand this completely.  Nobody likes to appear ill informed.  Social Media and SEO are relatively new fields though.  They are also fields where there is a lot of bad information available online.  Online Branding is a new concept to many businesses, particularly for SME’s.

SEO training and Social Media training are my own preferred areas, but while I can personally add a lot to the forum in these areas, I want people to freely express their own views in all areas.  The forum is to be a free information resource.

My purpose in creating the Online Marketing Forum, was to create an environment where people could ask the “silly questions” with a degree of anonymity.  It should also become a place where professionals can argue the pros and cons of their latest thinking.

The forum is brand new, so therefor it is fairly empty at the moment.  Don’t hold back.  If you are involved in Online Marketing or want to find out more about it then join it.  Post a question, comment or hypothesis.  This is a resource for you.  This is a free resource and while it is hosted on the Webshed site, I hope that it will be populated by professionals in competing companies as well as my own.