As the last of those Christmas sweets are eaten and the shops begin to fill with their Spring/Summer ranges, the online Christmas sales figures are beginning to trickle through and just like our waistlines after one too many mince pies they’re on the increase!

The latest figures for ecommerce sales during the month of December show an increase of 30% year on year, with sales for Christmas week being almost double compared to the previous year.

There were record levels of internet traffic with 2.18billion visits to online retailers in December, but, according to Experian Hitwise, this reached its peak with Boxing day achieving the biggest day ever for online retail in the UK with 96 million internet visits to retail sites, an increase of 19.5% on the previous year.

Much of the traffic to ecommerce websites came from search engines. A massive 43% of all visits came from search engine click throughs with Google providing 9 out of 10 of those visits.

While many big name high street stores have announced they are going into administration over the festive period, it seems that ecommerce is continuing to grow year on year. Even supermarkets are announcing their best online figures for grocery shopping during December, some reporting as much as 34% increase.

Companies with successful online stores are continuing to report growth, making an ecommerce website a fundamental part of any retail business. An ecommerce website offers many advantages including 24/7 access, the ability to compare products like for like to find the best buy and of course the convenience of having your items delivered to your door. For the ecommerce store owner there is also the added advantage of lower running costs, a very big advantage in the current economic climate!

Impact Web Solutions specialise in the design and development of Magento Commence stores which offer many great benefits to both the store owner and customer. Last month Magento reported in their blog that many Magento store owners were smashing their sales records in the run up to Christmas and that they were citing Magento as the reason for this success. The many extensions available allow store owners to add features that assist customers in making their purchases and increasing conversion rates.

As Magento specialists we also provide Magento search engine optimisation services to increase your visibility in search engines making your website easier to find. As I already mentioned, almost half of the visits to retails sites in December came from search engines so if your website isn’t on the first page of results, your customers will be going to your competitors who are.

If you want to find out more about how Magento can boost your online sales, visit our website at http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Commerce Web Design

Christmas is fast approaching and as people begin to panic about finding the right gifts and making their final purchases, you can guarantee that online shopping will make a sudden increase.

In America, Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark the beginning of the shopping rush with the majority of retailers offering special highly reduced purchases to draw the customers in. This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday appear to have gone especially well for Magento website owners as they report that they have smashed previous year’s sales records!

With easy to set shopping cart rules and special pricing, retailers are able to create time specific discounts and bundles ensuring that customers will be able to purchase products at the best possible prices while increasing sales.

Magento websites are easy to navigate letting your customers find the products they are looking for and purchase them quickly and easily.

Developer enhancements allow retailers to provide an online store that can support large amounts of users simultaneously perfect for dealing with the Christmas rush and ensuring that your website is available at all times.

Retailers and marketers often begin targeting holiday specific keywords through their search engine campaigns months prior to the holiday sales allowing them to maximise their sales further.

Is your website ready for the holiday season & sales? If you want to find out more about what Magento can do for your business, not only during the Christmas season but throughout the year, visit our website at http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Magento Search Engine Optimisation is quite different from the seo performed on general brochure and catalogue websites. As a specialist Magento Web Design agency, our team of internet marketing professionals are experienced in optimising Magento websites to ensure that your site appears on the 1^st page of Google, exposing your business to a wider audience.

There are many ways that our Magento search engine optimisation team work to increase your website rankings, here are 6 basic tips for optimising a Magento website:

• Optimise the default page title – When you set up a new website using the Magento Commerce system, the page title tags are set to ‘Magento Commerce’ by default. The default page title is highly unlikely to reflect the nature of your business so it is recommended that the default page title is changed as soon as possible to something more relevant to your company. By changing the default page title you will maximise the optimisation of your online store.
  You can change the default page title by going to Systems > Configuration > Design via the Magento dashboard, this will access the html head section where you can input your desired page title.
• Optimise CMS pages – In the screen where you create your cms pages and add content, there are also options to set a custom page design and to add meta data. By accessing the meta data screen, you can add a page description and keywords to your page. The page description you type here, is the description that will be visible in search engine results – so this is really your opportunity to draw the customers in. Most search engines set a 160 character limit so keep your description relevant and to the point while trying to include your main keywords for that product or service.
• Optimise categories – In Magento, you can also optimise your categories through the Catalog > Manage categories menu. For each category you can add a page title, page description and a keyword rich url through the ‘url key’ field.
• Optimise Products – Optimising your products is a very important part of Magento search engine optimisation as it will help your products to appear in a wider range of search results. You can optimise your products through the Catalog > Manage products menu. While creating your product, you can add a meta title, keywords and a description through the ‘Meta information’ tab. Any title added here will overwrite the default website page title.
• Optimise Images – Making sure that your website images are optimised is another important part of Magento search engine optimisation. Optimised images will appear in search engine image results creating an additional source of traffic for your website. Optimised images also add additional keywords to the copy of your website, again assisting with website ranking.
  While creating your product in Magento, you can add alt tags through the ‘Images’ tab, once your product image has been uploaded there will be a field to enter a ‘label’, this is the same as the alt tag.
• Duplicate content issues – A common reason for duplicated content on websites is that there can often be several paths leading to the same page. Search engines class these different paths as individual pages meaning that your website will be penalised for duplicate content and that you will lose link juice. Magento offers the option to use categories in your product urls creating at least 4 different variations of the url per product.
  To disable this feature go to System> Configuration > Catalog and under Search engine optimisation set the ‘Use categories path for product urls’ to no.

For information about how Magento Search Engine Optimisation by Impact Web Solutions can help your business visit  http://www.studio2online.co.uk/search-engine-promotion.php.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Search Engine Optimisation

There are many great extensions available for Magento websites, covering a whole range of functionality and features. Here are 5 Magento extensions that we like:

Twitter Integration Bundle http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/MagePlace/extension/7589/twitter_integration_bundle

Social commerce is fast becoming an integral part of many business’ marketing strategy allowing customers and fans of the brand to share products and services via websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The Twitter intergration bundle allows you to connect your Magento website to Twitter providing the following functionality:

• Visitors can sign up to your website using their Twitter account cutting the long registration process down to a single click.
• Customers can share content from your website to their Twitter account without leaving your website.
• Visitors can follow your Twitter account by clicking the onsite follow button.

SEO Suite Pro http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/MageWorx.com/extension/2448/seo-suite-pro#overview

One of the biggest problems we face with ecommerce systems is that they automatically generate information about your pages which can lead to problems like duplicated content, urls that are difficult for search engines to read and access to pages that we would rather search engines didn’t visit! The SEO Suite Pro extension covers several of the issues that affect Magento Search Engine Optimisation including:

• Converting automatically generated urls to be search engine and user friendly.
• Creates 301 permanent redirects for various urls that access the same content to avoid penalisation by search engines for duplicate content.
• Xml sitemap optimisation including the ability to hide certain pages that you don’t want to be indexed.
• Frontend sitemap optimisation.

Speed Booster http://www.aitoc.com/en/magento_booster.html

Magento is a feature rich system, this means that there will be times when the pages of the store may take a little longer to load. In order to speed up the websites load time, making both your customers and search engines happy, there are numerous speed boosting extensions that can be added to your Magento website.

We like the Speed Booster extension from Aitoc which includes does following features:

• Complete cache of all visitor areas.
• Javascript compression.
• Automatic cache refreshing when products are out of stock, edited or deleted.
• Up to 10 times faster performance for visitors.

Advanced reports http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/advanced-reports.html

There is no denying that Magento offers a lot of helpful reports in its backend that allow you to track the performance of your online store. If you are looking for even more advanced reporting then this extension includes:

• A sales by day of the week report allowing you to compare the sales of two days.
• Sales reporting by any criteria e.g. SKU, manufacturer, cost.
• Sales by product, this lets you track a product over a period of time or even compare it’s performance against another product.
• View customer conversion and retention rates all on easy to understand reports.

SBOeConnect http://www.sboeconnect.com/

Adding all of your products to Magento can take a while if you have a lot of them! One way to speed up the process is to integrate your online store with your inhouse solutions such as Sage or SAP.

With the SBOeConnect extension you can do the following:

• Synchronise the SAP system with the Magento website to import product details.
• Synchronise product stock levels.
• Set up tier and special pricing.
• Export multiple product images from SAP to your Magento website.
• Bi-directional customer information synchronisation.

If there are any great Magento extensions that you think deserve a mention, why not head on over to our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/ImpactWebSolutions and add them to our discussion on Magento extensions.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Magento websites are great because you don’t need a vast amount of technical knowledge to use them, something most store owners will be pleased to hear!

When you sign in to your Magento Commerce backend, you will see this page:

This page is the Magento dashboard and it contains lots of helpful information about how your ecommerce store is performing. The dashboard includes the following information:

• Lifetime sales: This lets you see the total of all your orders, great for checking your websites ROI!
• Average orders: This shows you the average order value, great for working out whether you need to include cross-selling to increase your order value.
• Last 5 orders: This shows you the last 5 orders including the customers name, amount of items and order value.
• Last 5 search terms: This is helpful as it lets you see what people are searching for, perhaps even highlighting a gap in your product range!
• Top 5 search terms: This shows you the most popular search terms, highlighting your customers’ must have products.
• Orders graph: This section allows you to view a graph of your sales based on amount or value of order for various periods of time. There is also a summary below the graph showing you values by revenue, tax, shipping and quantity, perfect for collating your business figures and projections.
• Order summary (see blow): This gives you a summary by Best sellers, Most viewed products and customer, perfect for keeping up to date with your most popular products.

One of the great things about the Magento Commerce backend is that everything is linked to via the easy to navigate menu. I’m sure all online store owners will agree, the most important thing they need to find is the orders screen! This can be found on the 1st menu under ‘sales’:

Clicking on the ‘orders’ option will take you to an overview of your orders which looks like this:

This screen allows you to view the details of the order along with the order status. You will see at the end of the rows there is an ‘edit’ link, clicking on this opens up the full order. The orders (see example below) contain all of the customer, payment and product purchased details, as well as one click options to send an invoice, mark the item as shipped, to cancel, place on hold or reorder.

Yesterday I heard a client asking a very good question about the Magento system, “does it automatically create an invoice for the order?”, well the short answer is yes and the default looks like this:

While this invoice provides all of the information the customer requires, it may not look exactly how you would want it to – this isn’t a problem though as your Magento Web Designer will be able to change the layout, colours and logos to get it just right for your business.

Another helpful menu on the Magento backend is the reports menu. This menu contains the following sub-menu’s:

The ‘sales’ sub-menu lets you create custom reports showing you information about sales, tax, shipping, total invoiced, total refunded and coupons. You are able to create reports for certain time periods, great for checking the success of a special offer campaign or completing sales reports. Once your reports have been generated you can even export them to Excel and csv.

The ‘shopping cart’ sub-menu provides information about abandoned carts and products in carts. These are helpful, especially for email marketing purposes and are perfect for targeted marketing.

You can also compare added to basket v purchased on the items in cart screen, highlighting areas where there may be a conversion to sale issue.

The ‘products’ sub-menu provides information about bestsellers, most viewed, downloads and that all important low stock report – again all of these can be exported to Excel or csv.

The ‘new accounts’ sub-menu contains information about new customers, customers by order total and customers by number of orders. These reports are great for offering special welcome promotions or customer specific pricing for your best customers.

The ‘tags’ sub-menu contains information about customer tags, product tags and most popular tags. Tags are a great way of matching your products to what your customers are searching for. The search report (see below) shows a list of the terms your customers are searching for as well as the number of results returned for that phrase. You can use the information in the search report to create better product tags increasing the chances of your customers finding the products they are searching for.

Below is an example of the search report, this can be exported to Excel or csv.

• Top tip: Why not email a copy across to your Magento Search Engine Optimisation Engineer so they can come up with some new and relevant keywords for your campaign?

Finally, just to show you how easy it is to create and update your products, under the ‘catalog’ menu there is an option ‘manage products’, this takes you to the product management screen which looks like this:

On the product management screen, an overview of the product details is displayed. As with the orders page, you will see there is an ‘edit’ link at the end of the row – clicking this takes you to the ‘product information’ page where you can amend any of the product details.

In the top right hand corner of this screen you will also see a button to add a product.

To begin creating your product you must first choose the attribute set (i.e. the type of product such as clothing, furniture, etc) and the product type (i.e. simple product, bundled product, etc).

Then you will be taken to the screen below where you can enter all of the product details. The additional tabs to the left allow you to add further information such as setting related products and upsells/cross-sells, create meta information for search engine promotion and setting custom designs (each product can potentially have a different design).

To view a live demonstration of the Magento system visit http://ecommercedemo.studio2online.co.uk/ or for more information about how a Magento Commerce Website built by Impact Web Solutions can help your business call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

The team at Impact Web Solutions have been building Ecommerce websites for 11 years now, and we have provided our clients with online stores that have really made a difference to their business.

While other companies in this field will call themselves Web Designers, Impact Web Solutions prefers to think of ourselves as Specialist Ecommerce Developers, building fully bespoke ecommerce websites that focus on converting traffic to sales rather than just having something that is visually appealing (although our websites do look nice too!).

Our websites are built to make the shopping experience simpler for both the customer and the store owner.

Our websites include features that will allow your customers to easily find the relevant products and information, shop safely and quickly, as well as including personalised dashboards that allow customers to quickly locate stored favourites and regular purchases for future visits.

For the store owner, our fully bespoke backend will allow your ecommerce website to integrate smoothly with your business and existing systems, giving you access to a wide variety of data relating to your customers’ shopping preferences and habits, as well as simplifying order receipt and processing.

Our development team use their extensive knowledge and experience to suggest additional functionality based on proven results to ensure your website provides the best return on investment.

Partnered with our in-house internet marketing team, we can help drive the right kind of traffic to your website using ecommerce search engine optimisation to allow your business to grow.

So if you’re looking for an ecommerce website that will ‘make you sales while you sleep’, why not visit us at http://studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php for more information.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Ecommerce Leicester

Another way you can give your rankings a boost for a keyword or keyphrase is by including something called anchor text. Basically, anchor text is linking your important keywords and phrases to relevant pages or websites, for example:

Often you will see websites including links such as ‘For information about Search Engine Optimisation click here’, this provides little value to the website.

A better way of adding a link to the information would be ‘Impact Web Solutions provide Search Engine Optimisation Services’, this allows you to link your important keywords to relevant pages within your website and also allows search engines to link the keywords to that page, giving the page an all important boost.

Search engines give high relevance to anchor text because the anchor text is usually specific to the content of the page it is pointing to.

Anchor text is usually limited to 60 characters or less, although it is possible to include anchor text more than once within the same sentence, either with the links pointing to the same address or with different links – for example Search Engine Specialists Impact Web Solutions, which can include links for Search Engine Specialists and Impact Web Solutions so it would display as Search Engine Specialists Impact Web Solutions and link to the two relevant pages.

Anchor text is a great way to give your website a boost for your chosen keywords!

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

I have seen many websites that contain great content, yet basic mistakes are stopping them from ranking well in searchengines. Although these tips won’t necessarily catapult your website to the top of the search engines, these 6 quick tweaks can only have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

1. Exchanging your Flash animation for JQuery or similar Javascript solution. Flash animation content cannot be read by search engines, whereas the Javascript solution allows the search engines to find the information within the html source making it more seo friendly.
2. Exchanging image based menu’s for text based menu’s. Search engines cannot read the content of images so having a menu made up of images removes this crucial piece of information from your pages. If you decide that your navigation MUST be made up of images, it is important to remember to include image tags so that search engines can understand the content of the image. Changing your menu’s to be text based will allow you to include important keywords within the pages of your website as well as linking those keywords to relevant pages within your website.
3. Exchanging image based content for text based content. One thing that occurs often, especially within self-built template websites, is that the text is added to the website in image form often to allow for pretty backgrounds or text effects. I have seen perfectly written copy that is keyword rich added to a website in this way, so the text has no effect on the search engine rankings at all because… search engines cannot see it! Make sure that your website copy is added to the pages in text format.
4. Exchange your keyword tag for keyword rich copy. Most search engines are either no longer using the keyword tag or only giving it minimal relevance, so ensuring that the content of your website and the important title tag are keyword rich are a must. Instead of concentrating on search engines, choose a couple of keywords to include per page and then write the content around these words while concentrating on your human visitors.
5. Exchanging your duplicate content for fresh content. Ok, so this can be a bit tricky when creating content for example with an ecommerce websites where information can apply to multiple products and can also be included in product categories. This is definitely an area where your search engine optimisation company can help you out by including things like no follow links and canonical url tags. This is also where detailed product descriptions can allow you to include keywords linked to that specific product and to create unique page content.
6. Exchanging your automatically generated urls for correctly formatted urls. Some CMS & blog software can automatically create page titles but often these titles are formatted badly including random codes filled with question marks and irrelevant mumbo jumbo that will not allow search engines to link the title to the content of the page. Including correctly formatted urls that include important keywords and product names, hyphenated rather than underscore separated (Google doesn’t see underscores which can cause it to read your title as one big messy word!) will allow search engines to associate the words in your page title with the content of your page.

There are many different search engine techniques that can be applied to your website but by making these basic changes it will have a positive impact on your websites rankings and start to provide visible web results.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

If you’re considering a summer getaway, why not take a look at the multi award winning Upper Rectory Farm Cottages located on the outskirts of the beautiful village of Appleby Magna in Leicestershire.

You only have to look as far as the ‘Trumpet Blowing’ page on their website to see just how special the friendly staff at Upper Rectory make the stay for their visitors. With comments such as “Best cottage we’ve ever stayed in” and “[I] Think I’ll sell the house and move here on a permanent basis!”, it’s easy to see why they have been rated 5 stars by the English Tourism Council.

Upper Rectory Farm Cottages are perfect for family getaways and a great idea for school summer holidays providing self catering near Drayton Manor theme park, Twycross Zoo and Donnington Park.

Looking for a conference venue in Leicestershire? Upper Rectory Farm Cottages have a large conference room that can accommodate up to 26 people and a smaller meeting room to accommodate up to 12 people, both including free wireless internet access. Business meetings and conferences can be fully catered for, either by The Black Horse pub or by Upper Rectory’s award winning caterer Sally Gold.

If you’re planning an office team building event in Leicestershire, Upper Rectory Farm Cottages are the perfect option! When booking your corporate retreat, Upper Rectory Farm Cottages can advise you of the best places for team building activities, with 4×4 driving, paint-balling, raft building, clay pigeon shooting, falconry, orienteering, go-karting, quad biking, cookery workshops, and a whole host of other team building events just a short drive away.

Upper Rectory’s central Midlands location makes it perfect NEC Birmingham accommodation. With regular bookings from visitors to the NEC, it makes a refreshing and homely change to staying in a hotel, in a peaceful location a short drive away from the hustle and bustle of central Birmingham.

With the Olympics fast approaching, Upper Rectory Farm Cottages is also perfect for accommodation near Olympic Games Coventry. Coventry is to host the Olympic football matches in 2012 as well as being a London 2012 live site venue.

Upper Rectory Farm Cottages are great for Leicester holidays!

Upper Rectory Farm Cottages are a long term client of Impact Web Solutions, originally working with us to design and develop their award winning website. After a relationship of almost 10 years, we have continued to manage their website as well as to provide them with search engine optimisation services.

Their search engine optimisation campaign has certainly proved to be a success! 9 out of 10 main keywords are ranking on the 1st page of Google and Upper Rectory Farm Cottages have received their highest ever January enquiries with 92 coming through the website!

Visit Upper Rectory Farm Cottages at www.upperrectoryfarmcottages.co.uk, follow them on Twitter @upperrectory or search for Upper Rectory Farm Cottages on facebook.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Leicestershire

Some pages can be accessed using various formats of the same address, for example www.impactwebsolutions.co.uk and www.impactwebsolutions.co.uk/home.html may take you to the same page.

Although these page may be the same, technically they are different as they are accessed through a different path. The main problem with having the same page being accessed through various urls is that some search engines may confuse these variations for duplicate content.

The canonical url is the url that is chosen as the best representation of that page. To make sure that search engines choose the url that you want to represent the page, a canonical url tag can be added to the page to ‘recommend’ the url as the page to be indexed. It is also important to use the same url throughout the website when linking to that page. Another way to show search engines that this is your chosen url is to set up 301 diverts from the other variations and point them to your chosen url, remembering that the same url without the www. is another variation!

What is a canonical url tag?

A canonical url tag is a line of code that goes in the header of your page to let search engines know that it has content that is duplicated on another page. Canonical url tags work in a similar way to 301 redirects, sending search engines to the new url but allowing your visitors to stay on the same page.

The canonical url tag can only be used to indicate duplicate content within the same site and cannot be used to indicate duplicate content on other websites, this would be achieved by using a 301 redirect.

What are the benefits of adding a canonical url tag?

Search engines don’t like duplicate content and will often penalise your website by removing pages or even the whole website from search engine rankings. There are times when duplicating content is unavoidable, by adding a canonical url tag you can tell search engines that the content is duplicated and direct them to the original, telling them that this is the version that should be indexed.

What are the dangers of adding a canonical url tag?

Adding the canonical url tag incorrectly can have a major effect on search engine rankings. An experiment by Dr Pete on SEOmoz showed just how badly rankings can be effected. Dr Pete added the same canonical url tag to every page on his website (the address of his homepage), he started with 237 pages indexed and after just three days pages had already started to be deindexed. By the second week of the experiment, there had been a significant loss of search traffic. By day 19, the experiment had such a negative impact on the search engine rankings that the experiment was stopped and efforts were made to recover the rankings.

After much work, pages were re-added to search results but had not regained their original top place rankings. In all, it took 4 weeks to make any kind of noticeable difference to the rankings.

Imagine the long-term impact a mistake like this could have on your business, losing visibility for your website, a decrease in visitors and in turn a drop in the number of enquiries and sales.

Canonical url tags can be a valuable seo tool when used correctly so it is important to ensure that you fully understand how they work before implementing them on your website.  Your seo specialist will be able to implement canonical url tags along with other important seo techniques to ensure that your website experiences improved search engine rankings for all relevant content.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands