That’s right! This year I will be attending Search Engines Strategies in New York. While the SES Amsterdam is going on as I write (not attended), i’m really looking forward to my days on the SES. I have never been to New York, so that will be worth the experience as well. I’m arriving in the afternoon on the first day of the SES so I will miss most of the first day, but the other days look great too.
Last week Richardo Dacosta asked me a very interesting question:
Your contribution prevents the spiders from reading the osCsid. Would I be able to use it to prevent spiders from seeing lets say: “ref=53&affiliate_banner_id=16″ from my affiliates? if so, what do I have to do to make it work?
In my last days to my wedding, it got me thinking and finding (another) quick and dirty solution, to redirect search engines to the right URL without the affiliate references. This way links from affiliate websites add up to your original (product) page!
Yes. I’m sorry.
What’s keeping me busy is my new job (since february) as SEO consultant at Netsociety. Not only a great place to work with fantastic (and challenging) customers, but they are also kind enough to let me follow my dream: officially start Webshoptimizer as a business for my own.
There you have it, my excuse for my absence.
From now on you can hire me for optimizing your online business.
Yesterday I launched my quick and dirty proof of concept for the implementation of the “canonical urls” link tag. Now I gathered some more information, tidied up the code and released it as a contribution. Always a great moment.
Grab the contribution here: Canonical URL link Install instructions for the canonical URL links
Ok, I did it (well, sort of). Here is a beta (or better: proof of concept) for the new tag which tells the search engines Google, Yahoo! and Live which URL it should have for the current page. Matt Cutts (software engineer at Google) explains the new canonical tag:
The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .
What can it do for my webshop?
If search engines find the same content on irregular/different URL, the page/content will be marked as “duplicate content”. This is a common mistake which you want to avoid since you want to have all your pages indexed properly. However, there are some factors that can lead to several URL’s for one page.
Canonical tag for your osCommerce webshop…
If you have your own shop, you are on top of numbers. In order to serve your customers better you give them as much as you possibly can in terms like service, product information and product suggestions. Since the most valuable numbers can be collected in Google Analytics (like amount of visitors, keywords and general e-commerce tracking) this contribution adds even more valuable information to Analytics.
Collect what your visitors search for
To spot trends early it’s a good idea to track the search queries of your visitors. This allows you to catch misspellings or related items with an high demand. With this information you can e.g. put common misspellings in the description of an item or start selling related products to items you already sell.
A few contributions already allowed you to track search queries, but most of them collected them in the administrator panel. To keep the administrator as clean as possible, you want to collect information in a environment capable and designed for tracking information. Google Analytics suits this job. Therefor you can find your visitors search queries from your shop back in your Analytics account.
To make it somewhat easier for your customers to complete an order, we skip one step straight to the registration form. With this very easy modification you will have your customers faster to the goal where you want them the most: a complete order from a new happy customer.
With this modification you leave out the “Welcome, please sign in” page. If you have 99,9% new customers (like most of my webshops) ordering in from your shop, you can imagine that the “please sign in” step is pretty redundant. With this page left out customers can complete their order faster, without the nagging “please sign in” page. This makes your web shop slightly more user friendly and the funnel to your goal shorter.
Don’t worry: returning customers can still login to their account using the “login” reference at the top of the registration form or “My Account” button top right. installation of the contribution is easy…
Yes, i plea guilty. I’m responsible for the ultimate geeky song: “we like seo“.
What can I say? I just love my job!
We came up with the concept while whistling and singing (like we usually do) at work. Peter called me afterwards even more excited as he normally is: “Matt, I have a great idea. We are going to record a song!”. With absolutely no idea of the intention we worked out the concept the next day. We were going to record a song with alternative lyrics to the all time disco hit song “D-I-S-C-O”. The alternative lyric we came up with: “WE-LIKE-S-E-O“. Rhyme technically completely correct. Now we just had to convince the “board” for some budget to shoot a video. The website and recording of the track would be completely volunteered by us (in return of a link ofcourse /evilgrin).
The result of a few weeks hard work:
As you can see, we had great fun while recording the video and the song (my colleagues). Feel free to leave a comment. I will not discuss critism on the singing tho ;-)
Unfortunately I was a bit too late to renew the domain seo-for-osc.com. I was not really worried that I would loose the domain, I just had to wait 35 days for the domain to be released from the registar. Ofcourse the last 5 days untill the release I F5′d my butt off. Unfortunately when I actually tried to register the domain again, it was already taken! Damn. A domain harvester registered it just before me, grrrrr. SEO-FOR-OSC is dead... Let's reveal the new name
I want to say “obrigado” to Marcello Eduardo for translating the Google Analytics Beta Tracking contribution in Portugese. Thanks a lot!
You can get the contribution here: Google Analytics Beta Transaction tracking
Translations are welcome. Anyone prefer a Dutch translation?
Off-topic: yes, I am gonna write some more posts in the near future. I promise.
Matt is a full time internet marketeer, specialized in search engine marketing. Everything that can improve business, lead or ranking is worthwhile trying. And why not should you?
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