SEO for the very, very nervous

There are countless companies out there just waiting to sell you this mysterious SEO that you’ve heard so much about. What they won’t tell you is that reading content that was created for SEO and only for SEO is a hollow (and sometimes confusingly dis-jointed) experience for the end consumer/user. An SEO might tell you how to write for better rankings but they probably won’t tell you how to write more interesting things people will want to read. That part is actually a lot easier than you might think, you just have to write like a human being.

For those who prefer to embark with integrity, SEO is set of basic steps anyone with a little know how can take to improve the chances of their relevant content getting fairer placement in Search Engine Result Pages.

For the unscrupulous, it’s a sneaky bag of tricks to push any content, relevant or completely otherwise to the top of the SERPS.

I do not think content that doesn’t matter should be boosted over content that does. The problem is everyone thinks their content matters. Especially when they have very little of it but demand to place before their competitors who’ve been creating relevant content for years. And even more especially when they can barely write a sentence without 5 spelling mistakes.

Privacy on
I mainly create my sites with WordPress. When I’m working on a new WordPress site I keep the Privacy settings turned on. This keeps the site from being indexed by search engines before we’re ready to go live. Doing that means the site’s pages won’t get crawled while we’re renaming,changing or trashing content in the development stages. So robots and spiders and etc will not “see” the site while it is not ready and as it follows, humans won’t either. The second the site is ready to launch I immediately take the site out of Privacy mode.

The Basics
Heading Architecture: search engines like pages that have heading tags where they’re supposed to be in a logical order. Think of Headings as a way to direct the bots through your text content. h1 should be used for the element on the page that is the most important – like the page title. If you use the h1 tag in order to have larger text just to have larger text – you should ask your designer to provide you with a workaround so you can have larger text without using the h1 heading everywhere.
Titles:relevant to actual page (text) content.
Meta descriptions:relevant to actual page (text) content – usually less than 160 chars but can go up to 200 or 250 depending on the crawler/bot.
Meta tags: no one pays any attention you might as well forget about them,too.
Image alt and title tags: describe the image and/or the context the image is being used.
Whether to use the no follow attribute on links to external sites. A lot of fuss is made over this one. People toss terms like link juice around.
Manipulating PageRank: “Google is concerned about webmasters who try to game the system, and thereby reduce the quality and relevancy of Google search results” – from Wikipedia.

Popular/Buzz
Sites that get traffic get more attention/buzz and are considered popular. Popular sites will get to the SERPs before the site that you launched 3 months ago and then never updated. But if the site that you neglected is also a popular site it will stay on the top until a site with similar content is deemed more popular. Sites that get updated frequently with relevant content are more likely to be popular.If you site is not popular but it offers new and exciting content that hardly anyone else is offering, take heart. If you keep it up you’ll be popular. Another thing that gets bots excited is if the site is very new. New content! Slurp,slurp.

Niche me
You’ve heard the following phrase before and you’ll hear it again: The Importance of Creating a Niche or Having a Niche or Establishing a Niche
Niche: The more specialized your content the more likely your site can be popular. But because there are so many web sites and so many of them are all about the same thing it is ever more difficult to distinguish your site among other similar sites. Because you’re all selling or writing about the same thing. Luckily you’re given many ways to help distinguish your site from your competitor’s sites, see The Basics.

Tables for layout vs. Table-less
I’ve seen tables for layout sites at the top of the SERPs. I’ve seen table-less sites there, too. My opinion is that if a tables for layout site has the most relevant content based on the search term or keyword,is of a good reputation and it has been around awhile it will place fine despite its being made up of tables. The argument against tables(in terms of SEO) is that the less HTML the better so search bots and crawlers can read relevant text content rather easier without there being a soup of tables to sift through. But table less sites can have HTML bloat,too. It’s called div-itis. So just because you don’t use tables for layout doesn’t mean you have less HTML (although it’s pretty freaking likely. I mean, have you ever seen the backend of one of these horrors?).

I’m no expert. But I do build websites for my job. So I guess I think I know stuff.

Importing Google Web Fonts, LightSpeed Web Store & SSL

As I am sure you know, SSL is very sensitive. Every link href, script src and img src in the document must be HTTPS for the page to be delivered completely secure.

If not, the encryption is partial and you may receive warnings about it. Worse, your customers will see warnings about it and might leave your site before buying or registering. So it’s better to never to let this happen, if possible. Especially in a production site (live). Goes without saying, I guess.

Anyway my latest thing is using Google Web Fonts because although I worship, love and adore WP-Cufon and Cufon and usually use them whenever I can I can’t use Cufon site-wide. Well, I could but not in good conscience if I care about how long the page takes to load and all of that.

Most of my clients choose 1 Universally available font for their main Body font and a couple of Specialty fonts for titles,headings and menus, to dress things up a bit. But my latest client wanted a Specialty font for their main Body font and so I found 3 compatible fonts in Google Web Font’s library. I used the @import in my main stylesheet and thought everything was going rather well.
Until we had to start checking SSL and wouldn’t you know it it wasn’t kicking in all the way.
Something was not getting encrypted and I could not figure out what it was.

Like I do whenever this kind of thing happens I reverted the template back to a default Web store Template and SSL kicked in all the way. After I looked through my customized files I still couldn’t find anything off…

Then I checked my main stylesheet and at the top was:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rokkitt:400,700);
@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Alice);
@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Kameron:400,700);

AHA! I switched it to:

@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rokkitt:400,700);
@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Alice);
@import url(https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Kameron:400,700);

And SSL kicked in all the way. JOY.

So don’t be silly like me. If you import fonts like this make sure the url is https. Good thing Google has SSL up the wazoo so this is not a problem. Awesome.

LightSpeed Web Store: What Product Attributes Get Displayed in the Slider?

Now that all the core files (any file that is not included in the template package is a core file) of LightSpeed Web Store are Open Source I can loosen the iron grip that many core files place on what the Web Store templates can do, within reason.

Case in point: the Slider aka the Accessible News Slider – by Brian Reindel http://blog.reindel.com. The Slider shows up in Product Details pages when you have used the Related Products option in a Product Card to relate other products with the current product being displayed by product_details.tpl.php. In your template the Slider uses slider.tpl.php file and also has a Class file located by this path: includes/xlsws/qform/XLSSlider.class.php.

Be careful editing any core files. It’s a good idea to keep a clean copy of core files around – in case your edits generate a blank white page of death you just overwrite the messed up file and your store will go back to normal.

Open XLSSlider.class.php and locate lines 58 – 63:

[php]foreach($products as $prod) {
$this->links[$prod->Rowid] = array();
$this->links[$prod->Rowid][‘image’] = $prod->SmallImage;
$this->links[$prod->Rowid][‘link’] = $prod->Link;
$this->links[$prod->Rowid][‘title’] = $prod->Name;
$this->links[$prod->Rowid][‘title2’] = $prod->Code;
[/php]

The last line, line 63 displays the Product Code – why the Product Code has to be displayed in the Slider, I’ve never understood. If you’ve ever seen a Product Code you’d understand – Codes are typically something like FRG-298Blah. Not very pretty nor useful to a customer. And if it isn’t useful or pretty why show it?

To change the Code to something else we can choose a different Column from the xlsws_product table in the database.

Webkeywords = In all product cards you get 3 key words you can associate with a product.They’re assigned a number in the database even though no number is actually shown in a product card. WebKeywords are totally useless when used as mere meta tags since search engines don’t pay attention to them. They are actually supposed to help Web Store’s Search engine. They can also be used to assign a product to a Custom Page. I’ve found them to be very useful when used like a WordPress Tag. Since you can then use them to add a class name to a div and etc…WebKeywords are extremely useful bits of data because the client can input anything they want and they do not have to be unique to the product so they can group a bunch of products together in even more specific ways that a Web category can.

WebKeywords are numbered from left to right:
WebKeyword1 = left keyword
Webkeyword2 = center web keyword
Webkeyword3 = right web keyword

ProductColor = the color of the product – as set by the Size/Color Matrix
DescriptionShort = sometimes used instead of the Product Name
Description = sometimes used instead of the Product Name
Family = the Brand/Designer/Vendor associated with the product
Sell = Price – the price of the product
SellWeb = Price – the web price of the product – usually the same as Sell

Tip #1: You can’t type in the Column name as it is stored in the database. Web Store uses CamelCase ( a naming convention) so sell_web = SellWeb. description_short = DescriptionShort and so on.

Tip #2: The Slider is also used in Custom Pages – custom_page.tpl.php. Changes made to the template – slider.tpl.php – will show up on Custom Pages.

If you Buy LightSpeed POS and Web Store Seperately

Common Enough Situation:

You buy LightSpeed POS and then down the road decide you want to add the eCommerce connector (for an online store, using either Web Store or Magento).

The Potential Problem:

After you make the purchase,LightSpeed issues you a revised/new license that includes the eCommerce Connector but until you perform the steps listed below, you’re still using the old license that does not include the eCommerce connector and the privilege of using the Connector doesn’t kick in until you do.

INSTALLATION

(*instructions were written by Babak/A Mac POS).
(Required for LightSpeed Web Store & LightSpeed Magento Connector)

To retrieve your updated LightSpeed Server license, please follow these steps:

1. Go to the LightSpeed Server preference in System Preferences

2. Click the lock in the bottom left corner of the LightSpeed Server
preference pane, and enter your OS X password to authenticate

3. Select your licensed LightSpeed Server from the left-side of the pane

4. Once selected, please click ‘Stop’

5. Click on the ‘Refresh’ button under the Licensing section

6. Restart the computer running LightSpeed Server (your changes will not take effect until you have done so).

**I’m not sure if clients don’t get the exact same instructions from LightSpeed after they buy the eCommerce thing.