How to Fix Common Magento SEO Problems?

“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”  – Confucius.

Even a dominant e-commerce website platform such as Magento cannot escape from minor SEO mistakes. Ultimately, customer satisfaction is the prime goal. Simple mistakes can ruin their love for the website. A number of options are available to resolve these issues.

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Check out some common issues the platform faces and its remedies:

Non- Unique URL’s that Tend to Change: Magento SEO generally faces this issue causing negative numbers (-1 or -2 and so on) being added to URLs.  This predominantly happens when the URL is being used in the past or if a different page is using the same URL as a separate product. Magento usually rewrites the URL by adding on a number at the end of repeated URLs. To solve this issue, you just need to remove the rewrite entry against the previous URL. But one has to be really careful while dealing with rewrites, as deleting an incorrect one may cause serious issues.

Recommended Read: Why Move to Magento from OsCommerce

Duplication of Content: Creating product description is a painful process which takes a lot of time. It’s hard to refuse the temptation to reuse the same content from product to product when the website has got countless products. Such practices can lead to huge damage to SEO campaign. Product descriptions take up 80 to 90 % of total website’s index and when its majority content is duplicate Google would estimate it as poor quality. The best possible option is fine canonicals implementation; however this may take a long time to fix.

Pagination and Canonical Tag Implementations: This is usually simple: close all sorting and limiting pages in your robots.txt with “Disallow:” commands. Complications due to pagination in Magento can be repaired with rel=”next” and rel=”prev”.

Default Layered Navigations: This is one among the painful Magento features for the SEO’s. It creates numerous terrible URLs with identical page titles and descriptions and duplicate or near to duplicate content. There are several ways to handle this, though adding the Meta Robots Tag into the head of any parameter based URL is most effective.

503 Service Temporary Inaccessibility:  If you can’t access the 503 message in your browser, fix the issue by going to your Magento root installation, locate a maintenance.flag file and delete it. If this doesn’t work delete the cache and try again.

Recommended Read: Things You Should Take into Account Before Starting a Magento Store

Unclear Redirects: Every time you change the name of a page or delete a page without setting up, an appropriate redirect will lead you to 404 mistakes. Google expects to fix the error pages as much as possible using 301 redirects. To create 301 redirects go to System >> Configuration >> Catalog >> Create Permanent Redirect for old URLs.

The Issue with Logo Title: “Magento Commerce “is the default logo alt attributes of Magento installation and it must be altered to your store title. It’s a simple process; just navigate to Configuration => Design => Header => Logo Image Alt.

6 Amazing Magento Extensions to Improve Your Online Store

The emergence of new technologies at regular intervals has paved new opportunities to improve your online store. The most compatible and effective solution in attaining the desired heights is Magento. With a range of templates, plug-ins, themes and other Magento Extensions, you can control every aspect of your online store.

Following are the 6 amazing Magneto extensions to improve your online store:

  1. Full Page Cache

This is a great extension for Magento stores, significantly speeding up page load time. Full Page Cache improves website ranking, reduces server load and increases sales conversion. It is an extension which directly affects sales conversion and generates revenue effectively.

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  1. Page Builder

Magento page builder helps you in creating receptive Magento themes easily. It is a useful tool to build as many pages as you want. It also offers powerful and intuitive control panel with drag and drop features.

Recommended Read: 6 Major Companies That Provide Magento Extensions

  1. MageMail – Triggered Email Extension

MageMail is a triggered email solution allowing you to set emails to be sent when required. It aids you in finding which emails are suitable for the particular situation and also in managing and monitoring results.

  1. Magento Live Chat

Magneto Live Chat is an excellent way of conversation which can make your customer closer to your staff. This results in having more number of customers.

  1. Magento One Step Checkout

Nowadays, many users avoid online shopping due to the complexity in checking out. If you wish to overcome the issue, you can easily utilize one step checkout extension. This extension will help you streamline the checkout process and reduce its complexities on the go. Thereby making the process easier, thus increasing sales and revenue.

Recommende Read: How to Fix Common Magento SEO Problems?

  1. Social Media Extensions

This will allow your visitors to share the offers or products they like through tweets or on their Facebook wall within a click. These widgets can blend with the layout of your site and can come in diverse sizes and color schemes helping them to sync in.

These are just some of the extensions that can help you improve the sales of your eCommerce website. There are a lot more. If you know some good extensions, do share with us in the comment section.

6 Major Companies That Provide Magento Extensions

Magento is a powerful e-commerce platform that delivers amazing results. This platform has numerous extensions that make Magento development service easy.  These extensions help a lot in adding functionalities to ecommerce websites.

With Magento extensions, it’s possible to upgrade online offerings and reap benefits out of it. Even though online stores differ in functional requirements, ultimately customer satisfaction is the goal.

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Each company that provides Magento Extensions has got wide range of solutions and special area of expertise. While choosing one for Magento Extensions, you must be well aware about the best that is available.

There are a lot of companies that provides Magento Extensions, but there are always some considered to be better than the rest

Checkout some major companies that provides Magento Extensions

  1. Aheadworks

Aheadworks is an energetic provider of Magento extensions.  The site is neatly organised with wide range of extensions. Sales motivation, user experience, customer care, admin tools are the chief priorities of Aheadworks. The service provided by Aheadworks doesn’t compromise on quality.

  1. Amasty

Amasty aims at client satisfaction and quality. The site consists of varied range of Magento extensions. Amasty is available at an affordable price. Amasty is committed to full understanding of customer needs and meeting their expectations.

  1. Mirasvit

Mirasvit is a passionate provider of extensions for Magento-based online stores. They are capable of solving all e-commerce related tasks. Mirasvit helps in sales motivation and advanced Magento search. The site is budget friendly. The price range of the extensions comes for $100-$150.

  1. WebShopApps

WebShopApps is best for those with complex shipping needs with the web-store. The site helps e-commerce merchants to the core. WebShopApps functions according to individual needs or business types, making it more reliable among the rest. The average cost of their extensions range is about $200, but WebShopApps extensions are certainly worth the money.

  1. MageWorx

MageWorx is known for providing excellent customer service. They take good care of problems instantly. MageWorx offers list of Magento SEO products, including comprehensive SEO Suite extension which costs about $400. The company offers large number of extensions within $100.

  1. WebTex

WebTex is expert in providing extensions oriented to gift registry and gift cards. The company provides great support for its customers. Their services cover free post-delivery bug fixing, caring customer service and high quality.

#Properly selected Magento Extensions can be a powerful for e-commerce. Your business can benefit a lot out of it. With a reliable Magento development service, things become simple for your ecommerce store. Choose the right set of smart extensions that can help you leave the competition behind.

Why Move to Magento from OsCommerce

 

Only constant thing is change. If a change can improve your online business, then why not? There was a time when OsCommerce was the reigning king of e-commerce. Then Magento arrived and beat OsCommerce with ease. But, some online businesses who were early adopters, still run on OsCommerce. To know why one should prefer Magento and how to migrate to it, read on.

Updated

Since Magento development services is comparatively younger than OsCommerce, it’s frequently updated. Thus, technical glitches are quickly eliminated. It is very active in fixing bugs. Developed with latest technology, effective program structure and highly relevant features to today’s necessity, Magento is superior to OsCommerce without a doubt. Magento is developed by PHP5 coding and Zend framework. So it’s extensible. Developers drool over Magento just for this reason. It lets them tweak around the flexible coding system with ease.

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Design

Magento is highly refined in appearance than OsCommerce. With its dedicated marketplace, Magento provides lots of templates and themes that e-retailers can customise to suit their needs. Modular code let them upgrade the Magento installation while maintaining the customisations. OsCommerce doesn’t support these type of template installations. It is difficult to adjust the layout to an owner’s needs. It costs for every change you make in OsCommerce.

Organisational Tools

Whoever has coding knowledge, can testimony that Magento development service is superior to OsCommerce in the tools options. Organized administration panel, layout options, payment and shipping methods, clean coding system, language options and many more effective tools, Magento is a sensible choice in organising an e-commerce site. Though OsCommerce seem to be easy to install, it’s a real tedious job to configure and customise it, even with professional help.

SEO-friendly

Without a strategic SEO, it’s hard to drive traffic to an e-retail store. Magento platform is integrated and supported by SEO. With search engine friendly rewrites, meta-tag controls, auto generated maps, the options are endless with Magento development service to enhance the SEO for an online business. This feature can drastically improve the online visibility of a website and improve its ranking. At the same time, search engine optimisation is a highly complicated affair with OsCommerce.

Multi-Store Management

With brands branching out to multiple streams online these days, it’s easier to choose Magento. For instance, it lets businesses to control multiple online stores in a single admin dashboard. You can even use and control various domains from the same panel. It also provides multi language and currency options for maximum benefits. You can swap around customer base, catalogs and custom settings between the sites. This is not possible with OsCommerce.

Navigation

Magento development service offers layered navigation to enhance the user experience. With little time to spend, the consumers prefer filtering out the products that meet their needs instead of looking around the whole site. They can filter the products based on their size, price, availability, brand, etc,. It doesn’t cost extra for these features.

Marketing tools

A highly efficient content management tool helps in marketing the product within the site. It also offers various promotional options like coupons, discount codes, gift wrapping, gift vouchers, cross-sells, seasonal offers etc,. It helps focus on certain customer groups with features such as newsletters, membership, and shopping cart reminders.

Guest Check Out

The major advantage of Magento over OsCommerce is the guest check out alternative. Consumers need to register themselves in most sites. This saves time if they purchase products from the particular site often. But, they also have option to buy without registering on Magento-run stores. This feature values customer discretion if they prefer it.

With thousands of little features and customisations, Magento wins over OsCommerce big time. Anybody can install and modify a Magento site with little coding knowledge. With professional guidance, it’s truly a revolutionising platform!

How to Start a Magento Website?

Magento is loved by big entrepreneurs as well as developers as it is powerful as well as customizable. It is extremely well architectured, scalable, and amusing to work with. Magento development service is the perfect platform for global brands and starting a Magento website is quite uncomplicated.

“Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.”- That’s Magento in their own words.

The installation process is completely automated. The guideline to start a Magento website is as follows:

1. The first step is to download Magento setup from magentoecommerce.com/download and chose your preferred format.

 You can easily accomplish installation through siteGround servers. SiteGround cPanel -> Site Software contains automatic installation script which leads to setup within seconds. You can also try XAMPP Lite, a Take-Run-Delete-Forget-it package which doesn’t need any installation. It is a small edition of XAMPP which contains almost everything for Magento Installation. Next step is to create an admin account by entering your personal data and login information. You can leave the ‘Encryption Key’ field blank.

Recommended Read:Why Move to Magento from OsCommerce

2. Select Localization and your currency before doing configuration. Everything can be left as it is under ‘Configuration’.

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After completing your Magento site configuration, consider a custom template that goes well with the design requirements for your website. Once you are ready with template adjust the main page for your Magento site. For installing a theme for your website, there are platforms like “Magento Connect”. Magento’s theme has got a dominant role in the visual output of the site. You can switch between default theme that comes with Magento and the one your personalized version side by side.

While making their purchase, a website visitor should feel safe so it is extremely important to include SSL to your Magento website for secured transactions.

3. Last but not the least adjust your Magento website to make it Search Engine Friendly.  Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce applications by default.

If you have a Magento site and just want to transform your host, SiteGround offers website transfer freely.

Read Also: How To Select A Hosting Solution For Magento

By learning these fundamentals of Magento’s design terminologies, you can easily setup a Magento website. Enter into the world of enterprise-class features and tools that attract more prospects, promote products and gain more profit by creating the next generation e-Commerce platform-Magento. Magento is tailored to satisfy your unique needs in e-Commerce which allows to add functionality as your needs grow over time.

Magento enterprise edition includes merchandising tools that enhance conversion rates; incorporated Google Tag Manager that helps you to effortlessly tag your site for campaigns and reporting. It grants a wider reach and sales by providing a mobile app toolkit.

8 Reasons Magento is the Best Choice for eCommerce

Saying that the whole world depends on e-commerce is an understatement. We can buy anything with few taps of fingertips. There are n numbers of platforms available to build an e-commerce site. But, business moguls like Chopard, Liverpool FC, Paul Smith, Pepe Jeans seem to have a favourite – Magento. What made these high-end brands to side with one particular e-commerce platform? Read on to know more.

1. Exclusive Experience

Magento strongly believes in the concept of ‘Tailor-made’. With its intuitive administration interface, Magento development service makes building a unique e-commerce site a walk in the park. The client gets to control the site with efficient tools for backend, frontend, strategic marketing, search engine optimisation, inventory management, user dashboards and catalogue management. The retailer can tweak the site to his requirement and stay true to his brand’s focus.

2. Open source

Open source e-commerce platforms are the best and free. Simply download Magento Community Edition and start customising the site according to the requirements. It’s that effortless. Just edit the source code for changing a feature. Magento’s forums and developer community is always available at times of troubleshooting. With regular updates, the platform is always on top of the game.

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3. State-of-art technology

With lots of options given to the clients, Magento Enterprise Edition is one of the most versatile platforms. It comes with conversion rates tool, Google tag manager and a mobile app toolkit for an integrated business solution. It offers superior server response times. By driving more traffic, it gains more transactions.

4. User Interface

What makes an online business stand-out? The user interface. Stylish and simple sites usually tend to bring in more customers than shabby and complicated online shops. Magento development service strives to make customers experience your website with unique extensions, personalisation and cutting-edge solutions. Browsing through a Magento site is seamless, engaging and efficient.  No wonder fashion giants like Christian Louboutin, Harper’s Bazaar, 7forallmankind have Magento based online shops.

5. Freedom of choices

Magento Go is a hosted platform that comes with the Community Edition platform. Still, Magento provides the option to choose the hosting service one wants. No hidden thresholds with hosts. This is cost-effective and also flexible for switching between multiple hosting services. Expanding the business with Magento costs nothing. The client can add any number of features and products to the site with no additional cost.

6. Integrated Platform

Adding third-party apps to the site comes with no charges. With loads of ready-made apps available, Magento development service cuts down the coding time in large scale. Be it payment models, shipping, tracking, analytics, just choose an app and add it to your site with Magento’s API. With HTML5 capabilities of Magento, it’s easy to create mobile-friendly sites. It provides you audio and visual controls to fit in any kind of smartphone.

7. Common Backend System

An organisation that runs multiple businesses can control all its sites at one place. All the sites can be modified and managed with a unified control panel. Even though the backend system is common, Magento provides the necessary tools to design every site differently with different domains.

8. No Geographical Limit

With brands reaching out to worldwide customers, it’s essential to have a universal site. Magento offers efficient tools for multiple currencies and tax rates management. It supports swapping between local languages and product alignment. The site loads really fast, so that it’s perfect for customers with any internet speed. Magento development service processes large databases in fraction of seconds.

No matter what type of business, Magento fits all needs. With brilliant administration model, it assures the clients to bring out their best foot forward. Thousands of customisations, intelligent apps, minimal costs – Magento is the best e-commerce platform without a doubt!

WordPress or Magento Development Services: Which is better for Ecommerce?

With so many ecommerce platforms such as WordPress or Magento, it is hard to figure out which one is right for developing an online store.

Most often, retailers get confused in choosing the right platform for developing their online store. Choosing the right ecommerce platform is often a hectic job. While developing ecommerce websites, often confusion occurs as to whether to choose WordPress or Magento development services.

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What Makes Them Similar?

Both the platforms are content management systems that enable users to add, modify, and manage your content in a simple yet effective manner and may seem similar in certain terms such as

  • They are highly customizable
  • Both are Open Source tools and are free
  • They can add products
  • They can integrate blogging to their functionality
  • Very SEO friendly
  • Can be extensively themed and
  • Feature a strong online support community

In addition, of course, they are both essentially content management systems, enabling you to add, modify, and manage your content in a simple yet effective manner. However, the differences become obvious when their core purpose is examined.

Objective matters

If the goal of the site is to sell products, Magento is the most recommended option and if the objective is to post content and blog, then WordPress CMS will suit the purpose.

Administrators may find it difficult to navigate ecommerce website with lot of information. Magento development services can help them by making it easy to access any page at any time.

Let us evaluate these platforms in detail.

WordPress Magento
WordPress is a publishing platform but is extended to support some basic ecommerce functionality through a number of third party plug-ins.  The main thing to keep in mind is that Magento is developed specifically for ecommerce. World’s leading brands, ranging from small websites to large multinational businesses rely on this platform for their online business.
For a website that is content-driven with news updates and with few sale events, WordPress ecommerce plug-ins will work. This open source technology offers powerful features that provide retailers with the flexibility and control to create online stores. 

Most recommended ecommerce plug-ins include

  • WooCommerce
  • Jigoshop and
  • Shopp

Features include:

  • Multi-store management
  • Mobile commerce
  • Marketing-friendly
  • Business reports
  • Search engine optimization and
  • Catalogue-management tools

However this CMS is not as secure as Magento, as it has been hacked frequently. A new CMS template page can be created in WP just by creating a new template file, while in Magento a whole new module should be created. Reliability of third party plug-ins is also a matter of concern for selling products or tickets. Very safe and secure. It also accepts all kinds of money transaction accounts and credit cards. 
With an easier learning curve, working with WP is proven to be pretty easier than Magento. Unlike WP, a site constructed using this platform requires constant attention and maintenance 
But developing an online store with plenty of products in WP can be a hectic job, and so it’s better to choose an alternative platform available. Similar to WordPress, this CMS also facilities support for the creation of complex content pages, version control, and menus. Magento development services will help to import the entire product list easily and the changes can be made without affecting the website.

It is almost clear that though these platforms serve unique purposes, Magento is strictly an e-commerce platform while WordPress is a content management platform.

Level of functionality and customizability of Magento makes it an ideal platform for ecommerce stores. This platform, with the backing of eBay and PayPal is fully featured and recommended alternative to WordPress’ ecommerce plug-ins.

If you are a full-fledged ecommerce store, Magento development services from a reliable company should be your choice as it is far more comprehensive platform. It is much more user friendly and safe as well. For a smaller scale store with very few products and limited budget, WordPress would be ideal.

Why Magento Is The Perfect Platform For Your E-Commerce Business?

Magento is without doubt one of the most powerful open source E-commerce software platforms, and has earned the trust of leading brands in the world.

Online E-Commerce businesses require a smart CMS platform. Magento is an open-source PHP and MySQL platform that has the enterprise-class features and the flexibility you need to create an E-Commerce solution tailored to your unique needs. According to the report from W3Techs, Magento is used by 24.2% of all the websites, which is a content management system market share of 60.4%.

Magento

A number of Magento development services  prefer working with Magento too, as it is a feature rich platform that is also user friendly. Along with its rich features, this platform offers users with unparalleled flexibility to manage the content, looks and functionality of their online store. Unmatched among its competitors, Magento offers more than 1,900 themes, along with thousands of modules available for download.

     Recommended Read:How to Start a Magento Website?

Reasons to choose Magento as the CMS for your next e-Commerce website:

  • Created Specifically For E-Commerce – Compared to other CMS, Magento has all the features and specifications necessary to create an amazing online store. This is the major reason why Magento scores over WordPress, WooCommerce, Drupal and Drupal Commerce combos.
  • It is SEO Friendly – Magento also offers tools for online marketing and SEO. These tools will help to promote your E-Commerce store and thus get higher positions on various search engine results pages (SERP). Its SEO tools include 
    • Metadata for products and categories
    • Site maps for Google and other search engines
    • Full control over URLs
  • Cost Effective – This open source PHP based e-commerce platform is completely free to install, modify and use. While its Community Edition is a free version, especially for smaller shops, Enterprise Edition is a premium pay for use version mainly for larger merchants. Businesses can also benefit from a library of extensions in the Magento’s website, both free and pay for use. This can enhance functionality of your E-Commerce store. Experienced Magento development services will provide you the right services at right costs.
  • Robust And User Friendly – This platform is dynamic and fast, making it extremely easier for buyers to search and buy products through website. Its advanced features ensure an enjoyable online shopping experience. Magento E-Commerce platform can also be conveniently integrated with your existing online shopping website. Its dynamic interface not only sells and compels, but also offers an out of the world User Experience to your visitors.
  • Security – This full featured E-Commerce software provides secure payment processing. Magento Secure Payment Bridge enables merchants to efficiently attain PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance and also offers stronger data encryption. Customers can choose from multiple payment-processing options offered by this platform or use their preferred payment gateways such as Simple Pay, PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, and Authorize.net.
  • Includes Analytics And Reporting– With this Open source platform, you can also measure your online store’s performance with full analytics and reporting. Its options include 
    • Traffic monitoring with Google Analytics integration
    • Ability to generate detailed sales reports, shopping cart reports, most-viewed and best-purchased product reports, stock and inventory reports, search term reports, coupon usages, best customers, and many more

          Read Also: Things to Consider While Planning a Magento Store

  • High Performance – The speed of a site is important for all internet users, especially online stores. Any delay in processing user requests can slow down the E-Commerce website’s potential to convert site visitors into customers. This platform with high-end caching techniques such as Varnish and other DB optimization techniques ensures error free and timely results.

The success of your online store also depends on your choice of Magento development company. With professional Magento development services, it is easily possible to handle your website design, hosting, functionality and features. While choosing a developer, make sure to evaluate their portfolio, evaluate the development team and check out the costs.