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magento seo
With the rapid growth of the magento e-commerce platform, it is great to see the community working so quickly to improve the SEO of Magento. Out of the box there are a few problems with Magento’s default SEO standards, but with just a little effort, Magento is very easy to optimize. Here are the best steps to improve SEO in magento:
Get rid of duplicate product URLS.
Thankfully Mike Smullin has already taken care of this with his easy tweak. Visit Mike’s post about this here. This requires one small modification to Magneto core, so hopefully someone will write an extension to take care of this without having to edit the core. Otherwise you will want to make sure you take care to make sure this isn’t overwritten during upgrades. In case the link above isn’t working, the modification is explained below.
Navigate to:
/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php
Locate:
->where('category_id=? OR category_id is NULL', $this->_urlRewriteCategory)
Change it to:
//->where('category_id=? OR category_id is NULL', $this->_urlRewriteCategory)
Make good use of robots directives to hide pages that will leak your pagerank.
There is a free extension from Yoast that will make this process very easy! You can view the extension here. Detailed instructions for using the extension (along with some other seo suggestions) can be found at the yoast website.
The Yoast extension will eliminate the indexing of pages that cause problems with search engines, while still allowing access to the good links on those pages.
I will add more as I find them, but these two resources will go a long way in getting your Magento installation ready to take advantage of good organic search results.
magento disappearing grid page navigation
If you’ve played at all with Magento since IE8 you’ve probably noticed an annoying bug that causes the pagination to disappear whenever you hover over it. That’s not a great way to build customer confidence in your store!
There are two options to fix this:
1) The easy fix is to place the following code in your header, just after the ‘title’ tag:
<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“IE=EmulateIE7″ />
You’ll find it here:
app/design/frontend/default(your interface)/default(your theme)/template/page/html/head.phtml
2) The best fix is to add some code to your css so that you aren’t making a global change away from IE8, which is going to become the standard whether you like it or not. Open your iestyles.css file and add the following code:
.pager a:hover { zoom:1; }
You’ll find it here:
/skin/frontend/default/(yourtheme)/css/iestyles.css
Once you’ve made the change, refresh your cache (magento and your browser), and you should have the problem fixed.
meeting the roches … again!
What a great concert in Fairfield Connecticut! This was my 4th Roches show, and they never cease to amaze me. They did a good mix of songs, old and new, and Suzzy’s daughter Lucy opened the show with songs from her two albums. I was amazed at how good Lucy was with the crowd, given her relative short time touring. She had the crowd with every story, and every song.
After the show we were able to talk with all of the Roche family, including ‘mom’ Roche who took a picture for us!
What a great band with great musical heritage…
Long live the Roches!
free fonts web launched
After a busy weekend and much coding, design, and optimization, Free Fonts Web is now launched and online for your viewing pleasure.
The site is xhtml, php, and mysql based. Currently there are over 8,000 TrueType fonts available for download, all free of charge. I will start working on the search engines and traffic building next.
Checkout the website at free fonts web
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vista radio gadget
I commissioned the vista radio gadget to allow microsoft vista users to access the unsigned band web right from their desktop. The widget makes extensive use of the free music api provide by unsigned band web, and allows either charts, editors picks, or new songs for every genre of music hosted at the unsigned band web. The player features a sleek interface, and was developed by the programmers at buildagadget.com .
As of this blog post there were almost 57K downloads at the windows gadget gallery.
Download the gadget:
[download#4#image]
wordpress free music widget
I commissioned this widget to allow wordpress and wpmu bloggers to have access to music from my music site, unsignedbandweb.com. After installing the widget, users can choose a specific artist, a specific genre, or choose songs preselected by the editors at UnsignedBandWeb.
Screenshots:
Download the widget below:
[download#3#image]
wpmu md5 database conversion script
I wrote this script when I moved my wpmu site freeblogit.com from a single database to a multi-database, using md5 as the routing key. I was amazed that this script didn’t exist when I converted to multi-db, as it would have taken forever to move the blogs one by one. The script itself is pretty simple, and the code is documented. My original script was modified slightly by the folks at wpmu dev premium to match their naming convention. Although I wrote this with the premium multi-db plugin in mind, it should work for any wpmu md5 database move. It has built in support for 16, 256, and 4096 database conversions.
Also included in the zip is a little utility for displaying the md5 hash id in numerical order. This can be handy when trying to figure out which db a specific blog is in.
[download#1#image]
Hope this helps someone!