Creating URLs that contain keywords help your site to be indexed by search engines.  A Keyword in a URL, combined with other factors helps a page be seen as relevant to that keyword in the search engine index.

Magento give us a handy way to control the URL for categories, pages, and items.  Sure, Magento will figure out a URL key to use if you don’t supply one.  But we should take a moment to think about what we are saying to the search engine about the page, category or item that we are creating.

Here’s how it works:Where are the URL keys found in Categories, Items, and Pages.

Category

When you create a category for items, the URL key is found on the page on the “General Information” tab.

Here is a good place to enter in a key word or two that defines the category.  Using a dash to separate keywords is good.  Don’t leave spaces.

Once the URL key is selected and the category is saved, you won’t be able to edit it in the Admin Panel.

Items

When creating an item manually, the URL key is found near the bottom of the “General” tab.

Unlike the catagory, you can change the item URL key by simple editing an existing item.

If you are importing your catalog, changing the URL in the import file will also update it for the item.

Its not a good idea to change the URL key often.  If search engines index the page, the URL they put in their index will be broken after you change the key.

Pages

When creating a CMS page, the URL key is actually called the “SEF URL Identifier” and it is found on the “General Information” tab of the page.

Page URL Keys can be changed at any time by editing the CMS page settings.  Again it is not a good idea to change these URLs frequently.

What are good keywords.

Keywords are words that are important to define the category or item.  Noise words like “the” and “and” are noise.  Proper nouns, are only useful if those proper nouns are well recognized.  And words that are accurate and unique.

If you are trying to optimize a difficult item, category or page, you might need to do some keyword research.  Google is always a good source, and using their keyword tools are free and very effective.

What else can we do about SEO in Magento?

• Many of these locations also have keywords and descriptions that can be used for SEO.
• There is also a site keywords and Description in the system menu.
• And there are preferred types of navigation that make it easier for search enginees to spider and index the pages in your store.

We will talk about each of these in related posts soon.

And I wasn’t missing anything.  It’s a matter of focus.  People that use twitter, (not bots that use twitter, but real live people.)  use twitter in a very deep fashion. They talk about many things.  They follow and re-tweet and use twitter for both a news gathering/sharing, and a social outlet.

But podcasts are normally about something.  People who consume podcasts pick the type of content, and then focus their consumption to that channel.   With twitter there are thousands of people following other thousands of people.  Most of them not saying much.  But with podcasts, there are hundreds of thousands of people each listening to a handful of podcasts.

What is a podcast?

A podcast is defined as a multimedia digital file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, etc..

What does that mean?

That podcasting is different than Twitter.  Okay, so that really isn’t a revelation.  And this really isn’t a recommendation to leave twitter in favor of podcasting.  There is no reason not to do and use both.  But where a person that follows you on twitter may or may not read a thing you tweet, most of the time someone that downloads your podcast will be listening to it.

What am I going to do about this?

I think it might be time for me to start podcasting.

How about you?

But what about larger organizations?

Again for the most part, if it is done right, it is nothing but good.  But during a recent discussion on user interfaces, I browsed to Bing to see how their webpage compared with Google.  Amazingly, I found that Bing has a line button.  It looked like this….

Okay, it didn’t look exactly like this.  I cropped the image so that it didn’t take too much space on the page.

Seeing this, I thought of two things immediately.

1. People who liked this are less that 13K people?  I bet Microsoft has more than that many employees.
2. And wow, NONE of my friends like Bing!

So it wasn’t hard to check.  According to Microsoft’s information page, they have 88,414 employees world wide.  Apparently many of them either don’t like Bing, or don’t use Facebook.  (I am betting that most of them do, in fact, use Facebook.)

Okay, so this post is starting to sound like an attack on Microsoft.  That is really not what I am trying to say.  I’ve been around more than a few people launching sites that ask all of their friends and employees to like them so that they can show a respectable number in the “like” statistics.  You can argue white hat/black hat if you want, but there is nothing wrong with asking your friends to “like” you.

To me this is a great example of a classic Microsoft failure.  Big company goes social, but doesn’t pass a memo to employees to participate.

Fail on looking like you are like-able.

Fail on using free resources to get the word out.

Fail on understanding how social networks work.

Take away from this?

1. Please like this blog.
2. Put a like button on your own site.
3. Don’t forget to tell all of your friends, employees and co-workers to like it.

As we customers do more and more of our initial shopping on the internet, businesses that don’t show up on a search are never visited.

My example:

A couple of years ago, the company I worked for was discarding some equipment.  Among the items being disposed of was a photography tripod.  It was of good quality, but was missing the piece that attaches to the camera and then clips into the mount.  (I don’t know what this is called, but will update this post with the right name if someone will put it in the comments.)

So I grabbed it and immediately searched for it on-line to see if I could find a store that sold the parts.

And I did, in Toronto.  (Not trying to pick on Canada)

And I bought it and had it shipped to me.  (had to wait like a week or something.)

Now my boss was a photography nut.  And soon after I had this new toy, he stopped in a photography shop to get some filters or something.  (I don’t know I just point the camera and pray.)  We had gone to lunch together and so I went in too, just to look around.

Well, of course I saw that they had the same tripod, and sold the mount thing for the same price.

But they didn’t have a website, or a list of products or anything on-line to let me know they were there!

I see this happening all of the time.  Perfectly good businesses and they are failing to do the basics.

• Every business, (yes, even the shoe store), should request and gather email addresses from web site and physical site visitors.
• Every business should have a website, and list some products on it.
• Every business should create some useful and pertinent content and send it to their customers to build a relationship and keep reminding the customer about the great experience they had.

I can’t think of any reason not to do three these basic things.

Will doing these get you to the front page of Google?  Probably not.  But I guarantee that not doing these is costing you money.  (and it costs the customer money to when they can’t find what they want and need.)

If you want to know more, lets talk. roy@theIntegrationEngineer.com

Or check out MarketMilestone.com to find out more.

Now let me explain this statement just a bit.  A business is a business when it starts to provide its goods and services to others.  In the past (distant past) people could and would “put out their shingle” to start serving their customers.  Times were simpler then.  And almost all markets were local.  At that time, the act of “putting out your shingle” was all you had to do to let your market know and you were in business.

In today’s market, a website is the modern day shingle.   Businesses aren’t really businesses if they don’t have a website.

But that is not all they need to do.

Some businesses are doing the equivalent to hanging their shingle out in the back yard or in back alleys where only people who know them will ever see it.  These are businesses that put up a website, but have used the wrong strategy, used the wrong keywords, and have no relationships with any other websites that can let search engines and people know where they are.

If you have a business, but aren’t getting visitors and customers from web traffic, you are probably doing something wrong.

Lets talk.  roy@theIntegrationEngineer.com

Or check out MarketMilestone.com to find out more.