I will tell you a secret of how I managed NOT to get negatively affected by any Google’s update since I started in the world of SEO back in 2005. I fear no Pandas, Penguins or Maydays and this is why:

I only do white-hat SEO. I read official Google blogs, watch their official videos and do what they tell us to do. It’s so simple, yet so many SEOs don’t get it.

The SEO industry is pretty big, yet I can see some official Google videos explaining some really useful things with just a few thousand views. Why don’t you listen to them? They are trying to help you. They tell you exactly what they want SEOs to do and SEOs just don’t wanna listen.

When the Panda hit, I thought people will finally get it, but nop, they continued using spammy SEO tactics. I fear Penguin update will be no different and that a big majority of SEOs out there will still use spammy SEO tactics.

So listen to key advice on your SEO tactics by a person who survived all of the Google’s updates since 2005. These are the top 3 things you need to do:

1. Create awesome content:

You heard it lots of times – content is king. Let me say it again: content is king. Repeat after me: content is king. What is content? It’s text, it’s images, it’s videos. What should this content consist of? It should consist of exactly what your visitor is searching for. Nothing more and nothing less. No magical formula for keyword density or number of images or amount of text. Just write / make exactly what your visitors need and that’s it!

Why does this work and why it will not hit me on the next Google update?

Because Google wants to deliver the best content for the search phrase the user has entered. If you have the best content for the query, Google is trying really hard to optimize the algorithm so that YOUR content is on the number one spot.

2. Promote awesome content but don’t spam:

We all want to see awesome stuff. This is why promoting awesome content is good. We don’t want to get spammed. This is why you shouldn’t spam.

Why does this work and why it will not hit me on the next Google update?

Because Google’s algorithms are not so advanced that they can know what’s the best content, they need to rely on content’s popularity. If you promote it to your audience and your audience likes it – retweets it, likes it on facebook, +1s it, links to it) its a sign to Google that they are satisfied with your content. But don’t spam them since Google cares about their searchers and wouldn’t like to show them on a number one spot for their query a website that got there due to spam and not due to having the best content.

3. Make your website’s navigation logical and easy to use:

Make important pages accessible. Make it easy for someone who landed “in the middle of your website” to figure out where he is and easily navigate from there. Make your site structure logical for the user, and Google will love it. Making unnatural anchor text link patterns will not help you in the long run.

Why does this work and why it will not hit me on the next Google update?

If user can easily find what he’s looking for, so will Google. If you make user happy, you make Google happy. It’s very simple. If you make navigation for Google and not for user, Google will not like it.

The number one question you need to ask yourself if you are getting outranked by your competitors:

1. Do I have the best content for that query?

It’s that simple. It’s the most important question to ask yourself. Don’t try to rank bad content. Don’t try to rank wrong content for the query. If your content sucks, create new content which is a better fit for the query.

And now you know. Now you know how to survive the Zebra attack that Google will eventually release and hit the SERPs (yea, these updates are usually named after black and white animals ). I’d say “good luck”, but if you listen to this advice, you will not need it.

The concept of open communication of sharing the way you work with your customers and clients is called Marketing by sharing. It’s first mentioned by Jason Fried who is the co-founder and President of 37signals.

But you need to know how to do it well and to show great respect to your readers and potential customers. Also be careful not to show any disrespect to your clients. Of course, you can’t share everything and you should think of your strategy and channels of sharing.

Here are some tips from our experience on how to be a good marketer of sharing.    

1. Get to know your key competences so you know what and how to share

You can’t mix and offer everything your business includes and deals with, since it might not be interesting and helpful to your readers as you may think. You are not forced to tell people everything your business works on, but you want to help them understand and want your products and services. Be aware of yourself and your business and learn what are your strengths that are worth talking about.

2. Empower learning in organization

Don’t do that just because its trendy to say you are a (lifelong) learning organization, but because you really aim for self-improvement and team growth. Let your employees see their job positions as platforms to develop themselves.

3. Be unique, be worth coming back to

Be consistent in delivering your promises by delivering only quality solutions (knowledge). You don’t want to share something that could be easily found by Google – but you want to be easily found by Google Build your type of knowledge sharing as something that could grow to be a positive habit of your customers, readers and community.

4. Don’t forget all about it when your business is enjoying prosperity

Knowledge sharing is about creating respectful relationships with your customers and people that want to listen to you. Don’t forget about them when you fulfil your initial goals. You might not get a second chance to be listened to.

5. Remember that those who actually have a lot of knowledge are not afraid of using it

Knowledge is the only resource that grows by sharing, so don’t be afraid of the opportunities to become better. If your company really has a lot of knowledge that can serve to others and eventually be sold through your products and services, you won’t even think of hiding it. If you really care (as you probably say you do), you will gladly involve customers and community in the life of your company, as your products and services are targeted at them. You will listen to them because they will be more than happy to tell you what you can do for them.

Don’t hesitate. Go market by sharing.

One of the most common issues I see with online stores nowadays that is rarely talked about are poor product descriptions. Although you can see it in almost every niche, it is extremely common in certain niches such as electronics online stores.

What online stores tend to do is, they take the default product description provided by the manufacturer and just copy/paste it to their stores, or import lots of products with their default descriptions through some CSV file. There are several reasons why this is bad, some of them more obvious than others:

• You will have exactly the same product description as hundreds or even thousands of other websites. Without unique content, how do you think you will outrank the competitors on search engines? What you’re doing to your on-site SEO with this is extremely terrible.
• The default description provided by the manufacturer is usually not written to be used as a sales copy, it’s more of a technical specification. To a user, this is just a boring read that he should be seeing in some sort of table.

How do I know my product description is poor?

Imagine yourself as a visitor on your online store. You are reading a product description. After you read it, can you answer these very important questions:

1. Why would I buy this product?

Is it completely clear to me what this product does? What is this product’s purpose? How it looks? What’s the size of it? Weight? Condition? Is it something I can eat or is it something that I, like, totally shouldn’t eat?

2. Why would I buy this product from this website?

Is there any reason why I’m supposed to buy this product here and not from some other website?

3. BONUS QUESTION: Did I just read something awesome I wanna tell my friends about?

And I know some of you use the word AMAZING lightly, but don’t. When I say amazing product description I mean, after you read it you were like opening Skype (or ICQ if you live under the rock or something) and going like “OMG mate you HAVE to see this s**t! lol http…” or “Dude, did you know you can do THAT with this? :O http…”.

How to make my poor product descriptions totally awesome?

The benefit of having unique, engaging and awesome product descriptions is pretty obvious: you’ll achieve better search engine rankings, you will convert visitors better, and if that’s not enough for you, amazing product descriptions will even generate traffic through viral effect. The real question is, how should awesome product descriptions be written? Well, there are no guidelines, it’s different for every product type and every target audience, but there are some awesome examples I can show you!

One of such examples is an online store we’re very proud we built – KeepShooting.com. Go have a look, read the descriptions of some products that are featured on the homepage, you’ll have fun, I did

There’s an entire series of descriptions about zombie Apocalypse on KeepShooting, you have to read the new products regularly to catch-up, it’s like a novel.

Do you have any examples of online stores with awesome product descriptions?

October 2011 was a very important month for us. After opening a subsidiary in Serbia, we decided to take another important step; as we have a team member – Lyssandro Reis working from Sydney for the last 18 months (you may recall his articles), we decided to nominate him our brand-new Operations Manager in Australia and New Zealand and we are now announcing that we are open for partnerships in the region. 

As you know, at Inchoo we highly value the Magento Community and have developed and are still developing strong partnerships along our way. The companies we work closely with are all Magento Partners or web-development companies with a passion for Magento e-commerce like us.

We cooperate in many ways, exchanging technologies and information, sharing projects and referring clients to each other whenever our teams are swamped with work. We even developed a partnership program that has given us a valuable experience working closer with the Magento Community.

We envision a fair and long-term relationship with exchange of knowledge and fine growth for both parties. We want to establish a win-win situation where the outcomes ensure a beautiful e-commerce experience to our clients and final users – and we mean business here.

Therefore, if you are located in Australia or New Zealand and you believe that we could work together, please give us a call or drop us an email, we are ready to talk – hopefully in person.

1. Real Time Analytics

Some of you who requested to be included into the Real Time Google Analytics beta recently received an e-mail with the happy news that real time data reports are now showing in your accounts. We were among the lucky bunch. In order to see it, you need to switch to the new Google Analytics interface (the red link in the top right) if you haven’t so far.

From what I can tell, real-time Analytics will be extremely useful whenever you’re starting a new campaign and promoting something aggressively, trying out which channel works best, or trying out which time of the day is the best for your marketing activities. You can get some nice data from it, and it really works real time, just like advertised. I tweeted a link and few seconds later, the traffic from t.co (twitter’s shortening service) went wild and perfectly corelated with the data of which URLs are being visited the most right now.

2. Keyword (Not provided.)

Nop, this is not the data from a non-linked AdWords account, this is actually organic search data from logged-in users. Google decided to protect the privacy of their logged-in users, redirecting their search queries to https and not providing the keyword they used in the Google Analytics data. This is terrible for website owners since we get less data, but good for the user as the user’s privacy is even more protected right now. The problem is, data was anonymous anyways and such a “protection” was really unnecessary. Also, PPC campaigns still show data for keywords from logged-in users, which means only organic privacy is protected (Dear Google, WTF?). Only possible explanation that I can think of is that Google wants to protect the data of how they personalize the search results, meaning PPC ads are not personalized while organic results are.

How much data is actually being protected this way?

From the data I can gather, and data publicly available, only 1-2% of organic traffic will be shown as “(Not provided.)”. This means the number of users that are searching through Google while logged-in is really low.

3. Traffic Sources – Search Engine Optimization

You probably noticed the new tab under the traffic sources in the new Analytics user interface. It’s called “Search Engine Optimization”. It can integrate with your Google Webmaster Tools account and data. The data you get from it is far from accurate and more of an approximation, but there are no “(Not provided.)” keywords for logged-in users in there (Again Google, why? Why not Zoidberg?).

Some people ask why is the average position for some top keywords so low. The thing is, the way they calculate average position is kind of stupid, data actually seams much more accurate once you understand this. In case your website appears on more than one spot in the SERP, all will be counted and avarage will be made from it. Meaning, if inchoo.net’s pages appear on first 8 results for keyword “inchoo”, the avarage position is not 1st, but rather the avarage of all of these positions, around 4th place.

Yesterday, Google explained how they look at rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in an official blog post. It solves the great problem of paginated products on category pages of online stores.

The most important thing you need to know is that Google will treat all pages inside the pagination that have rel=”next” and rel=”prev” implemented as one unit in regards to link attribution. This means you no longer need to worry about dispersing your internal link juice to paginated pages or external link juice that’s coming into these pages. They will treat them as a whole and collect link juice from all of them, while shoving the most relevant page in the search result (most often the 1st page of the paginated unit).

I’m actually very impressed by this solution, since the best thing we could do so far was implement a rel=”canonical” which is really applicable in some rare cases I described here, but not in most of the pagination problems (since content of the page 2 is often completely different than the content of the page 1 etc.).

The technical implementation of rel=”prev” and rel=”next” is very similar to the way you implement rel=”canonical”:

It is placed in the head in this form:

<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2"/>

and

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1"/>

The first page, obviously, should not have a rel=”prev”.

UPDATE: Google made a video that explains a lot of things about rel prev and rel next:

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

I quickly log-in to webmaster tools to see if Google figured out these links and see they are not there. After some googling and researching official answers from Google, I came to a conclusion that there is no need to worry about such an isolated incident. With a stable link profile and years of building unique and quality content, there is no way anyone could hurt us using this technique.

Official answers from Google employees say that if this happens to you, there is nothing you can do about it. In most cases, Google will simply ignore the link juice and anchor text value of these spam links and pretend like nothing happened. Some new domains that don’t have a stable link profile, however, could be damaged this way. So if you’re starting out fresh, the best thing you can do is pray to the Lord that no one tries to pull this on you. I know, it sucks. Someone suggested at the Search Engine Journal in the comments section that Google should make some sort of robots.txt markup that would allow us to point to links that we want to be discredited and tell the algorithm that we didn’t build those spam links and don’t want any credit from them. That would be an awesome feature but so far, there is no talk about it.

During the time I was researching this, I stumbled upon this comedic jewel inside the Google Support Forums:

Enormous Link Farm Discovered

Doing competitive research, found an enormous blog link farm. Over 500 domains. I reported it to google yesterday but I doubt they will do anything about it, so I thought I would share it here and ask what to do. Look at the backlinks for the following domain names;

www * comparewrinklecreams * com
www * electroniccigarettesreviews * net
www * buyengagementrings * net

Its one of the largest link farms I have ever seen, my niche is web design so while I dont like that they are cheating the system, at least its not destroying my rankings yet. However I found the network while researching backlinks in web design, and several page two rankings that are rising really fast are using these same links. I guess I am posting this because I fear losing my own rankings that I attained over a few years and natural linking. How can I compete with this? Should I just file the report, and does google care much about this type of behavior?

Id like to know because if google does not care then I should look into buying some links like this. And if they dont approve of this type of thing, I am asking for other webmasters help in reporting the links. Even if its not your niche, Think about it from an honest webmasters perspective. Losing ranking and income to someone who cheats seems wrong. Thoughts?

Updates:
Anyone? 3/3/10
Now that I know its called Domain Farm, can someone else place some input here? 3/4/10
Nobody? Cmon guys can I please get some feedback on this? 3/4/10
Update? 3/5/10
Thanks Anyway 3/5/10
How can I directly notify the spam team about this? 3/14/10
I read online on seomoz that google does not even read spam reports. They provided a link and tracked clicks. not on visit from anyone…but they still got the “we have completed our review of your website” email. I dont think the spam team cares as much about this kinda stuff as everyone thinks they do. If they did they wouldnt allow people do this kinda stuff. 3/15/10
Please report this link spamming so google will look at it 3/15/10
Conclusion: Build a Domain Farm or Lose the Battle… 3/16/10
Yea I decided not to waste my time doing any research for anyone on here. All I can say is Fck you Google. You dont want to enforce your own rules, dont be surprised when garbage sites build huge networks and rank number one. I am buying up pr domain names right now, and apparently google does not care. So I soon will have a page one number one ranking. Thanks for everyones help in helping me understand that google does not care about search quality, and giving excellent examples of how to build a network that can influence my rankings.

Andy 3/20/10
Update – I started building my own network. I bought some domain names from tdnam.com that are a pr4. I bought 5 of them, and then made them into one page websites with links pointing to my website as a test. Yes, it works. I jumped from page 8 to page 3. Google are fucking idiots – They not only invented this problem by introducing pagerank, but also warn against doing it while not enforcing their own rules.

My recommendation to anyone trying to gain better search engine positions is to buy domains and build your own network. Google does not give a shit, and if they do then my guess is the spam team are pretty god damned stupid. I have been trying to reach the owner of the websites originally posted, but he wont answer me. I want to see if I can work with him and get some links from his network too.

Sources I found that are great to buy domain names from for those who are also sick and tired of getting their asses kicked in google…and especially for those trying to compete with the guys with huge networks that google wont and likely can never stop;

check out;

dropday.com – expired domains sorted by pagerank
payperpost.com – pay 5-10 dollars for a post on someone elses blog that already has pagerank.

After jumping 5 pages nearly overnight I decided fuck google, an fuck their bullshit guidelines. The bottom line is someone has to enforce the rules, and if no one does, then it comes down to survival of the fittest. and Im not going to starve over it. 3/29/10

TL;DR: A guy finds a competitor is using enormously big link farm, wants to report it to Google. He figures out Google doesn’t care and starts regularly updating his original post with data on how he’s building a link farm himself so that he could compete. He gives links to the domains he bought to use as a link farm since Google obviously doesn’t care anyways.

Now here comes the punchline: The day after his last update, 3/30/10 Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team answers:

I just say thanks for this report. We got a lot of useful data from it–in addition to (just recently) taking action on things that violate our quality guidelines.

Lesson learned?

Be patient and play by Google’s rules.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

Third party review services vs on-site reviews

Well known eCommerce solutions such as Magento have a built-in product review functionality. The problem with it is pretty obvious: the store owner can moderate the reviews and some customers are well aware of that. This means you could simply disapprove or edit negative reviews, which sounds as an awesome feature but it makes experienced users doubt in the quality of your review score.

Amount of reviews and its affect on Conversion Rate

Does amount of reviews matter? Short answer: Yes it does! An aggregate rating of 5 out of 10 stars means a lot more if 50 people left the review compared to the same rating with only 5 reviews. Most customers are very aware of this and you’d be amazed just how much a large number of reviews can increase your conversion rate.

According to Reevoo, a company that analysed 2.5 million customer reviews, there is no cap on how many reviews add to your conversion rate. The more you have the higher the rate is. Interesting part of their research is where they concluded that there is a very small difference in the range of 10 and 30 reviews in regards to improving your conversion rate (~3% vs ~3.3%).

As you can see in the graph on the left, it’s pretty much the same thing if you have 20 or 30 reviews, but conversion rate starts going up rapidly after that. There is also a pretty big difference in range of 0-10 reviews and above, raising your conversion rate by 1% with the first 10 reviews on a product.

User reviews’ affect on SEO and search engine CTR

The affect of user reviews on SEO is pretty obvious. It’s a fresh, unique piece of user generated content that search engines can index and it enhances and enriches the content you provided in product description. It also enables you to rank for “product name review” keywords which are in some niches used pretty often. Product reviews bring another thing with them that doesn’t have much to do with SEO: they improve the rate at which users click on your result in the search.

So lets move on to the numbers. Just how much improvement in CTR can you expect after implementing reviews? According to Reevoo, we’re talking about 10-20% increase in CTR, depending on the amount of reviews and aggregate score.

How do you display reviews in the search results?

In June, I wrote about Schema.org, a new microdata standard that 3 major search engines agreed upon. Schema.org has standardised markup for reviews and agregate reviews that can be implemented into your online store. If you’re trying to implement them into Magento, you can talk to us, we have lots of experience with it.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

Yes, you already met the Inchooers, you got familiar with some faces on our team info page, but now it’s time to dig deeper into what we’re all about.

So, without further ado, let’s move on to Inchoo Team Segmentation.

Girls vs boys

First of all, yes, we’re mostly a bunch of geeks, but we do cherish our own geekettes, especially since there are so few of them:

Facial hair

Now, moving on to attitudes towards facial hair – we don’t adopt a strict facial hair policy at Inchoo, so some of the team members do like to show off, and you can try to guess who they are – hint – there are some pictures/videos available on our team info page

What’s a geek(ette) without their gadget(te)?

Smartphones have really upped the ante for someone to deserve the full bragging rights of being called a geek – and as we’re constantly having Linux vs Windows vs MacOS debates, what’s more charming than seeing a couple of developers arguing about Android vs iOS?

And still, there are some who are steering away from all those touchscreens and prefer to feel an actual keyboard under their fingertips.

So, let’s check out Team Inchoo smartphone usage stats:

Summertime, and my haircut is easy

With the recent heat waves came the need to cut one’s hair shorter than usual, but we still have some team members who are on the fence as to whether to cut their hair short or start preparing in time for the cold winter ahead.

Some, on the other hand, have the luxury of not having to worry about this at all

So, there you have it, part 1 of Inchoo team segmentation. Now you know more about us. Would you like to learn more? What are some key things you’d like to know before you start sending us free stuff?

Do you track this type of information about your own customers? If not, better start gathering them, otherwise you just won’t know who you’re dealing with.

All the best for your summer vacation from all of us at Inchoo – and don’t forget to visit Croatia at least once this summer!

Robots.txt noindex vs meta noindex, which one has priority?

Case 1: Robots.txt forbids indexing of a URL but meta tag allows it. Outcome: Page will be blocked by robots.txt, meta tag will never be seen by googlebot thus will be ignored, page will only be shown in results as a reference in very rare occasions (it will not have a description, only title and URL).

Case 2: Robots.txt allows indexing of a URL but meta tags forbids it. Outcome: Page will not be indexed and will not be shown in the search results at all.

Case 3: Both Robots.txt and meta tag forbid the indexing of a URL. Outcome: Page will be blocked by robots.txt, meta tag will never be seen by googlebot thus will be ignored, which will allow the page to be shown as snippet with no description in rare occasions in the search results.

Meta noindex vs meta index conflict: If a single page has both meta noindex and meta index tags, meta noindex will resolve. The page will not be shown in the search results.

Advanced stuff, passing Page Rank in robots.txt and meta conflicts

Now that you understand the cases above, lets move on to something even more advanced. When will the link juice be passed and when it will not. As you may or may not know, even pages that are forbidden to be indexed via any means can still accumulate PageRank. If you don’t know how to handle it properly, you might be wasting a large amount of your link juice that could have flown to pages you actually want to receive it.

If you forbid indexing on a URL with robots.txt, Google is not able to see the content of the page, thus no links on that URL will ever be seen and they will not be able to pass their link juice.

On the other hand, if you use meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” and don’t forbid that URL through robots.txt, Google will be able to index the page, follow the links and pass the link juice, but will not be able to show the page in the search results.

From this we can conclude that in most cases, it’s much better decision to forbid indexing through meta tag than use robots.txt for the same purpose.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

eCommerce related microdata markup

Schema.org brings several interesting opportunities to structure eCommerce data. Here are some that would be very useful in a Magento store:

Schema.org Product markup – example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span>
  <img src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" />
  <div itemprop="aggregateRating"
    itemscope itemprop="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
   Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span>/5
   based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
  </div>

  <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
    <span itemprop="price">$55.00</span>
    <link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
  </div>

  Product description:
  <span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.
  Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like
  Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.</span>

  Customer reviews:

  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Ellie</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1">
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">1</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
  </meta></div>
  <span itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace it.
  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/>
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
    </div>
    <span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is
      small and fits in my apartment.</span>
  </div>
  ...
</span></div></div>

Schema.org Review markup – example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span>
  <img src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" />
  <div itemprop="aggregateRating"
    itemscope itemprop="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
   Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span>/5
   based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
  </div>

  <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
    <span itemprop="price">$55.00</span>
    <link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
  </div>

  Product description:
  <span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.
  Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like
  Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.</span>

  Customer reviews:

  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Ellie</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1">
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">1</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
  </div>
  <span itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace it.
  <div itemprop="reviews" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> -
    by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,
    <time itemprop="publishDate" datetime="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011</time>
    <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
      <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/>
      <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/
      <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
    </div>
    <span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is
      small and fits in my apartment.</span>
  </div>
  ...
</div>

Schema.org Aggregate Rating markup – example:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Restaurant">
  <span itemprop="name">GreatFood</span>

  <div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
    <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span> stars -
    based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">250</span> reviews
  </div>

  <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
    <span itemprop="streetAddress">1901 Lemur Ave</span>
    <span itemprop="addressLocality">Sunnyvale</span>,
    <span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">94086</span>
  </div>
  <span itemprop="telephone">(408) 714-1489</span>
  <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.dishdash.com">www.greatfood.com</a>

  Hours:
  <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mo-Sa 11:00-14:30">Mon-Sat 11am - 2:30pm</time>
  <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Mo-Th 17:00-21:30">Mon-Thu 5pm - 9:30pm</time>
  <time itemprop="openingHours" datetime="Fr-Sa 17:00-22:00">Fri-Sat 5pm - 10:00pm</time>

  Categories:
  <span itemprop="servesCuisine">
    Middle Eastern
  </span>,
  <span itemprop="servesCuisine">
    Mediterranean
  </span>

  Price Range: <span itemprop="priceRange">$$</span>
  Takes Reservations: Yes
</div>

What if I already implemented Google Rich Snippets?

We have a tutorial on how to do that. For now, we’re sure Google will support the good old GRS format in the foreseeable future, but if you’re doing some major upgrade on your website or you’re starting out from the scratch, I’d switch to schema.org markup.

Include a QR code in your printed materials

Do you have a printed product catalog? It is easy to include QR codes that will lead to individual product pages or offer a discount. Are you running an ad in a print magazine? Include a QR code to a special landing page on your online store that addresses the needs for additional information that this reader might have.

Give me some numbers

A recent eMarketer study shows that a pretty big percentage of all QR code usage can be attributed to mCommerce. According to the study, 23% of all US based QR code usage is for the purpose of making a purchase. The same study shows that QR codes are mostly used to get a coupon, discount or deal (53%) and access additional information (52%).

This data shows that you could really increase the amount of products you sell through your printed materials if QR codes are properly implemented into your campaign. It also shows the importance of creating special landing page for every QR code, since people will expect to be landing on content directly related to where they saw the code, not your website’s homepage or some generic landing page used in all of your campaigns.

We recently started using QR codes in our campaigns at Inchoo as well, even though these are not used in Croatia nearly as much as in the US. During the “Career Day 2011″, we printed big QR codes all over our business cards and flyers. I’ve seen people use them, but I also saw people with a big question mark above their head when they saw the QR code. Luckily, we can expect the amounts of question marks above people’s heads to start falling drastically very soon. According to a February 2011 report by Mobio Identity Systems, Inc. usage and adoption of QR codes in North America jumped 1200% in the last six months of 2010!

Although the growth in North America is mind-blowing, the global adoption is a bit slower but significant growth can be seen globally as well. The graph on the left is result of the study performed by 3gvision.

According to that study, US holds the number one position in terms of absolute number of scans in the time period. Italy holds the second position, but with the growth Hong Kong has I expect it already passed the Italy since the time this report was published. Note that this report excludes Japan, a well known leader in mobile barcode usage.

Attention

Using search engines, in most cases visitors will land on product or category pages. We will concentrate on your product pages within the AIDA process. Once the visitor lands on your product page, you have merely a few seconds to grab his attention. In these few seconds, this visitor will decide weather this is what he was looking for or he’ll move along. We are talking about attention, the first part of AIDA process. In the real world, you’d be trying to catch the attention of the buyer in this step, but online, you already have his attention. All you need to do is make sure you don’t lose it.

You’ll lose the attention you’ve been given in case your product page is to crowded and doesn’t give the impression of what it’s really about from the first look. Too many distracting items can cause your visitor to think he didn’t find what he was looking for, even though he was on the right product page. You can spot this behavior if you are using Google Analytics. Try finding people that landed on the right product page that perfectly fits the keyword they entered into search engine, but right after they landed they used your internal site search to try to find the product they were looking at. In case there are none of these in your Analytics, your product pages might be built pretty good from the attention retention point of view.

Interest

In the real world, you would try to make the buyer show some interest in your product. Luckily for you, visitors that came from search engines searching for your product already showed the interest, now you need to show them why they should act. You need to make them desire the product.

Desire

The visitor landed on the product page and you managed not to lose his attention. Awesome! In this step, you need to make him desire the product. You can do this in several ways, but what really works well is good product representation – readable, scan-able product description, high quality multiple images from different angles and if possible, video showing the product. If the product can be shown “in action” that would also be a thing that encourages desire.

Look at the product page and information you provide there from the visitor’s perspective. Ask yourself if you could envision this product’s size and feel if you’ve never seen / felt it in the real life. If you can’t, work on the description, images, and video.

Action

Visitor landed, you have his full attention, you made him desire the product. Now it’s time to make him take the one last step, to click the button. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a clear call to action. Your “Buy now” or “Add to cart” button has to be the most easily found element on your product page. It has to be big, in different color than surrounding elements and on a logical spot. Bring in a person that never saw your website and show him the product page. Tell him to add the item to the cart. If he can do it without reading anything or looking around the site for more than few secunds, thats a good button. If not, you should improve it.

Some elements can distract the visitor from completing the last step of the AIDA process. Those can be different banners, or some other buttons that compete with your “Buy now” or “Add to cart” button’s attention. I know you want multiple things from your visitor and several call to actions are likely to be placed on modern online stores, but always ask your self, is it more important for you that visitor checks some other item on discount on your store, to follow you on Twitter / Facebook, to subscribe to your newsletter or to buy the item he is looking at at this point. All of these other calls to actions can be present on other pages – such as category page, CMS pages, checkout success page – but the product page should be as free of these distractions as possible.

This wasn’t the first time Tomislav played the role of a guest lecturer. Many professors at the Faculty of Economics appreciate his expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to give back to the community. During the past eight years Tomislav was invited on many occasions to be a guest speaker for courses in IT and general management. Besides, there is a growing interest in Magento development among students, so we hope to see Tomislav and his team as the leading lecturers in Magento workshops at the Faculty. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted about this great synergy between practice and theory

A recent article at eMarketer points out a very interesting study performed by YouGov for Antenna Software on a sample of ~1.8k US mobile phone users. This study indicates that only 24% of mobile phone users in US can’t (or think they can’t) access internet via their phone. Even though they can, 34% choose not to use internet through their mobile phones.

When asked why don’t they use the mobile internet, 44% of men and 38% of women said they don’t like the small size of mobile screen. I think they don’t have so much problems with mobile screen size but rather the design and layout of web pages that were never designed to be used on such screens, but we’ll need to dig deeper into the research to explain why.

The same groups tends to complain about the mobile internet speed – which we know will continue to grow – so we can expect that those that are reluctant to use the mobile internet due to the speed issues might change their mind in the near future. 50% of the mobile phone users aged 18 – 24 were annoyed that some website designs did not work at all on their phones. This is the group of users that “gets” where the problem is. It’s not the screen size thats broken, it’s the design and layout of the webpage.

Expanding eCommerce business to mCommerce

According to the same study, 28% of the mobile users in USA would be more likely to perform shopping via mobile internet if online stores were tailored for their screen size. Unfortunately, this study doesn’t cover the use and likelihood of using native mobile applications for online shopping.

So if you build a mobile version of your online store today, you can expect ~28% lift in mobile visitors’ conversion rate! This piece of data could help you calculate the short term ROI of building a mobile version of your online store and I hope it will persuade many of undecided online store owners to do it.

Also note that only 6% of mobile phone users said they don’t have problems with the display on their mobile phones. Since 46% said they would be much more likely to use e-mail on their mobile phone if the display problem was eliminated, we can expect more of your newsletter subscribers to read it on their phones as the e-mail and web-mail mobile clients continue to evolve.

Another study gives us one more very persuasive argument to build a mobile friendly eCommerce solution – the mobile only internet users. According to the study, ~25% of mobile internet users in the USA are using the internet only via their mobile phones. This means that if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you are leaving these people without options, they are likely to use your competitor that has one. In some other countries the number of mobile only internet users is ridiculous, in Egypt it’s astonishing 70%!

These studies are well correlated with Jakob Nielsen’s study entitled “Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult” in which he said:

When reading from an iPhone-sized screen, comprehension scores for complex Web content were 48% of desktop monitor scores.

Last year, Nielsen also performed a study on iPad native apps usability which concluded that there are some serious issues with user interface inconsistencies. I quote:

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

From these studies we can conclude that users are adopting the mobile internet usage much faster than the industry. If we are going to make significant progress, we’ll need to develop usability standards for mobile browsing and evangelize the importance of serving a mobile version of the website or a native app to the mobile internet users.

I’ll leave technical implementation and decision should you use any of the existing extensions or go for custom implementation to you. I’ll just cover the marketing and SEO perspective on the issue.

First, you need to understand why are you using rel=canonical and NOT using 301 redirection. You are using rel=canonical over 301 because you have pages that should be accessible to users but feature identical content as some other page. This means you can’t implement a 301 redirect since you don’t want user to be redirected back to original but you want to tell search engines that the page they are about to index is actually a copy of another page and all of the SEO credit should go to that original page instead of spreading it evenly across copies and thus lowering original page’s ranking position in SERP.

The most critical point in Magento where rel=canonical implementation is extremely necessary is product listing on category pages. Lets have a look at such a page on a Magento demo store with sample products:

What we have here is a page with just 5 products that actually has at least 180 identical copies with different URLs by default (credits to Mladen for taking time to calculate the number of combinations). What am I talking about?

• You can sort them by Grid or by list
• You can sort them by Position, Name, Price and Contrast ratio
• You can show 9, 15 or 30 per page (although there is only 5)
• You can sort them ascending or descending

Each of these can be selected on it’s own or in combination with any or all of the possible selections and it will bring back identical content but with different URL. You can’t use 301 to redirect user back to the category page since you want user to be able to sort the products this way and if you redirect him he’ll see the old sorting again, so you have to use rel=canonical and redirect only search engines back to the original page.

The same thing applies to https vs http URLs, print pages, and basically any link that changes the visual elements but doesn’t change the content of the page.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

According to Google Analytics, your dearest website had 663,369 uniques in 2010. Here is the list of top 10 cities where most of our visitors were coming from at 2010. There are some that you could expect and there are some surprises.

1. London, United Kingdom

Visits: 22,368
Although it is not a huge surprise that London is the top city, it is a surprise that it has over double visits compared to 2nd closest. Since there are many ISPs visitors are coming from, it looks like there is a lot of Magento development subjects that are generating majority of the visits.

2. Osijek, Croatia

Visits: 9,537
Our dearest Osijek is not a surprise also. Inchoo is located at this cozy town of 100.000 population at north-east of Croatia. I guess most of those visits came from the employees.

3. Paris, France

Visits: 9,326
Another European capital. Looks like there are French people who want to read English language after all. Magento community is strong in France, gathered around Fragento site I guess.

4. Chennai, India

Visits: 8,231
I’m not sure how did it happen, but this city of 4,6 mil people is full of Magento developers. If you google for “Chennai Magento”, you will find whole army of Magento developers, freelancers, hosting companies, courses and teachers. There is a rumor that they are building a monument for Roy Rubin at the central square. (Just joking)

5. Sydney, Australia

Visits: 6,887
Although 3 of our designers (Lyssandro, Renato and Rafael) are living or were living there, I am sure they were not the only ones who are visiting us from there.

6. New York, USA

Visits: 6,706
Ok, ok. This one needs no explanation. It would be weird if we didn’t have Big Apple on this list. We usually have cca 18 visits/day from New York, but for some weird reason on February, 4th we got 194 at the same day. 90% were direct visits. Maybe some article was published about us at some newspaper. However, it looks like we’ll never know why on this particular day number of visits increased so drastically.

7. Pune, India

Visits: 6,509
1,121 km from Chennai lies Pune with 3,4 mil people and very similar percentage of Magento developers. I am wondering if you guys are organized somehow. Do some institutions support this kind of massive specialization in your city?

8. Hanoi, Vietnam

Visits: 6,079
We know that our beloved Asia Connect guys are from this city. Long time ago they were stealing our articles, but later we made a peace pact when they started to place a credit line and backlink to original article. Beside Asia Connect, there are a lot of freelancers and companies specializing in Magento.

9. Mumbai (Bombay), India

Visits: 5,542
This wast city of over 13 million people is not a surprise. City is well known for software industry and Magento knowledge-seekers should not be much different.

10. Zagreb, Croatia

Visits: 5,283
Although this is Croatian capital, it is a little surprise. Magento is not so popular in Croatia. I believe there are only few stores here and we get only rare Magento inquiries. Despite the fact, we are very glad to have purgers on the list.

Once more, thank you our dear visitors for coming here, arguing, asking questions and sharing knowledge. We’ll be with you in 2011.

So, where are you from?

There is no trick, no small hidden text, it’s all out there, perfectly clear. The thing is, it’s not the person who is receiving the coupon that’s going to pay Google $100, it’s other already existing advertisers that are going to do so.

Google AdWords is bid based system. Once you inject more money into it (free coupon), you are automatically raising the keyword bids needed to advertise. So when Google hands out a $100 coupon to a new advertiser, this advertiser’s competitors who are already Google’s most valuable paying customers are going to loose $100. Unbelievable, right? Google didn’t just attract a new customer for free, Google actually earned money by hurting its longterm customers. Do no evil… right.

Now that you know this fact, you’re probably not really happy about Google’s new campaign in which they will give $100 coupons to first 1 000 000 small businesses that sign-up for local search advertising. Yes, you got the numbers right, Google will take 100 million from our pockets for this campaign.

Online store owners often don’t realize how much more money they could earn if they invested just a small amount of time and money into conversion rate optimization. Each store is unique and different, with different products and design, different customer’s demography etc. This means that each online store needs to be fine tuned to achieve optimal number of sales. This fine tuning process is called conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Although each store is unique, some things in Magento are universal and some mistakes are made very often. I will outline two of the most critical conversion rate issues with Magento’s cart and checkout page…

Magento’s Shopping Cart Page:

Shopping Cart – a place on your online store where you want your visitors to click on the “Proceed to Checkout” button as soon as possible. Remember the mentioned definition for if you stick to it while you are designing this page, you will reduce the risk of making conversion rate problems on this step.

Design of shopping cart page in Magento’s default theme is very good. The problem often appears with custom designed online stores. We had a client that had a custom design in which the “Proceed to Checkout” button was the same size and color as other buttons on this page. The cart abandonment rate was amazing 52%! After we changed the button to be bigger and in different color, we made cart abandonment rate decrease to only 19%. This means that we almost doubled the amount of sales this online store makes by changing the size and color of one button on the Shopping Cart page!

While we’re talking about the checkout button, note that there is one pretty important link in the top right corner of your Magento store that usually reads “Checkout”. As you can see on the example of this button, “Go to Checkout” sounds like very effective call to action, so I suggest you rename the “Checkout” link into “Go to Checkout!” link. Additional, here is a case study at GetElastic that supports this argument.

Magento’s Checkout Page:

Once we made our online shopper click on the magical “Proceed to Checkout” button, he is faced with the biggest challenge of his online shopping experience – completing the first step of the Magento’s onepage checkout process. This one is actually seriously flawed in the default Magento design.

Have a long critical look into this screenshot and imagine yourself in a role of typical non-tech-savvy person. Do you know what you need to do on this step?

This page makes no sense whatsoever to an average online shopper and he will have terrible time overcoming this obstacle. If your visitor didn’t leave you on this step, consider yourself lucky, for this shopper loves you very much and he made lots of trial and error attempts trying to move forward.

According to Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s study, the average user will not be able to figure out which button belongs to which part of the screen and will probably fill in the details on the right and hit the button on the left. User will repeat this behavior numerous times, not figuring out what seems to be the problem. This is caused by users not reading. They automatically fill what seems to be necessary.

Magento makes this problematic step even worse by putting the red star symbol and marking input fields on the right appear as required while they are actually not required unless you want to log-in.

I propose this solution which requires some custom programming:

As you can see, everything is in one step and requires not much thinking or reading. User have guest checkout preselected so that “Continue” button is immediately clickable. You can either show the login fields once the Log-In radio button is clicked on the same page or simply put the login form on the next step.

Enjoy your higher conversions!

Everyone knows that the ecommerce industry is growing.
But do you know how fast? Or what percent of all the retail sales it takes?

United States Census Bureau published Quarterly E-Commerce Report on November 17th, 2010.
This is the latest statistics on ecommerce available for United States.

The U.S. Census Bureau, pre-eminent collector and disseminator of timely, relevant, and quality data about the people and the economy of the United States, conducts a population and housing census every 10 years, an economic census every five years, and more than 100 demographic and economic surveys every year, all of them evolving from the first census in 1790.

3rd quarter of 2010 shows rather good results with 41,5 billion USD retail sales in ecommerce. It accounts for almost 4.2% of the total retail sales in US.

What is interesting is that the estimated ecommerce sales increased 14.1 percent in Q3 of 2010 compared to Q3 of 2009 while total retail sales increased 5.8 percent in the same period.

This proves that ecommerce is growing much faster than the overall retail market.

You can follow the growth of the share of ecommerce sales over time in this graph:

Estimated Quarterly U.S. Retail E-commerce Sales as a Percent of Total Quarterly Retail Sales:
1st Quarter 2001 – 3rd Quarter 2010

Red line shows estimates that are not adjusted.
Blue line shows estimates adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes.

It will be really interesting to see how holiday shopping season (with Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner) will affect these numbers for the last quarter.

Go Ecommerce!

Related links:

• http://www.census.gov/retail/ – Monthly & Annual Retail Trade
• http://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf – Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales 3rd Quarter 2010

This is a guest blog post written by “Turnkey Ecommerce Solutions” web design and development company.
Turnkeye.com specializes in ecommerce solutions with full life cycle support.