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.
If you run a web shop you probably have the problem that now and then have the problem some products are unavailable or out of stock.
You can comfort your customers by back ordering the product or offering them equivalent product. Unfortunately this will not enhance the overall conversion rate of your website simply because you can’t offer your customer exactly where he is looking for (at that time).
That’s a pity: no conversion, no revenue, no profit.
What if you had a creative solution that would offer your customer a good alternative and would give you some nice extra revenue without having it in stock or available?
Today, PhoenixMedien released some bug fixes for “Google Analytics (beta) with E-commerce” contribution. This allows you to track your transactions with Google Analytics Beta statistics.
The following fixes are included:
- add_slashes() to allow quotes in product and category name
- number_format() don’t uses comma as thousands separator
- simplified installation in footer.php for ecommerce tracking
Get the new contribution: Google Analytics (beta) with E-commerce
I was aware of those nasty bugs (easy to say), but did’nt have the time yet to fix them (shame on me). Thank you a lot PhoenixMedien!
If you have problems with the contribution, feel free to contact me.
Always wanted to know which websites in your country have the most authority on the internet?
This clever trick will show it instantly. The ingredients: A web browser.
Open your web browser and point it to Google. Choose a country of the Google website you want to check the authority for - e.g. Google.nl for the Netherlands or Google.co.uk to check the websites with the most authority in the United Kingdom.
Now, to find the websites with the most authority all you have to do is search for www. So, do a search for www in Google and voila, Google will come up with the results. The resulting websites are the ones with the most authority for that specific country. Maximum coolex!
Why would these results come up for the www search query?
See how you can find the most authoritative domains…
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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