Opencart seo manual

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Copyright, Legal Notice and Disclaimer:

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This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights: you are not allowed to give or sell this Guide to anyone else. If you received this publication from anyone other than opencart-seo.com, you've received a pirated copy. Please contact us via e-mail at sales@opencart-seo.com and notify us of the situation.

Please note that much of this publication is based on personal experience. Although the author and publisher have made every reasonable attempt to achieve complete accuracy of the content in this Guide, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Also, you should use this information as you see fit, and at your own risk.

Your particular situation may not be exactly suited to the examples illustrated here; in fact, it's likely that they won't be the same, and you should adjust your use of the information and recommendations accordingly.

Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if we use one of these terms.

This eBook is an original creation as a Whole, and may not be taken apart and/or reassembled in whole or part for any purpose, including but not limited to removing copyright and identity markings of the eBook and/or creating a derivative eBook, whether for personal or commercial purposes. For example, if printing is permitted, printed pages may not be rescanned and reassembled into another eBook edition (if this eBook was created from a public domain work, only an original copy of the public domain work — printed book or magazine — may legally be used to create another eBook); if printing is permitted, printed pages are restricted to the personal use of the Buyer and may not be shared, sold, or otherwise disseminated to third parties.

Violation of the copyright and fair use provisions of this eBook will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Copyright Š 2012 | Opencart-Seo.com by TabulaWeb Media

OpenCart SEO Manual |

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“The screenshots and examples presented in this eBook guide are made

using the default installation template (admin and user interface) from OpenCart ver1.5.3. It may differ if you are using another Opencart version or are using a custom template.�

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Table of Contents:

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1. OPENCART STORE CONFIGURATION

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1.1

Enable SEO URL Rewrite

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1.2

Store Title and Meta Tag Description

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1.3

Other Recommended Settings

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1.4

Product Feeds

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2. OPENCART PRODUCTS CONFIGURATION

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2.1

General Tab

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2.2

Data Tab

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2.3

Discount Tab

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2.4

Special Tab

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2.5

Reward Points Tab

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3. OPENCART CATEGORIES CONFIGURATION

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3.1

General Tab

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3.2

Data Tab

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4. OPENCART IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

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4.1

Image Quality

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4.2

Image Resolution and Size

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5. OPENCART USEFUL EXTENSIONS

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5.1 Free Extensions Modules

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5.2 Paid Extensions Modules

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6. AFFILIATES, COUPONS AND VOUCHERS

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6.1 Affiliates

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6.2 Coupons

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6.3 Vouchers

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7. OPENCART NEWSLETTER

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7.1 Newsletter Interface

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7.2 Newsletter Important Notices

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8. SEO TOOLS AND RESOURCES

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8.1

Google Adwords

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8.2

Google Analytics

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8.3

Google Webmaster Tools

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8.4

Free Online SEO Tools

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8.5

Paid Online SEO Tools

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9. OPENCART OFF-PAGE SEO

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9.1

Search Engine Submission

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9.2

Directory Submission

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Manual Directory Submission

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Semi-Automatic Directory Submission

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Automatic Directory Submission

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Submission Tips

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9.3

Social Networking

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9.4

Social Bookmarking

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9.5

Blogs

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9.6

Blog Commenting

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9.7

Forum Activity

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9.8

Link Exchange

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9.9

Classified Ads

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9.10

Article Submission

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9.11

Video Promotion

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9.12

Applications Development

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9.13

Paid Advertising

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a)

Paid Search Advertising

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b)

Facebook Advertising

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c)

Other Paid Advertising Methods

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OpenCart SEO Manual |

10. BASIC SEO DICTIONARY

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1. STORE CONFIGURATION 1.1 Enable SEO URL Rewrite Even if url rewrite does not have the same SEO importance as it has in the past, it is always recommended that you enable it.

Enabling this function will allow you to use custom keywords for products and categories url’s : www.mydomain.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=25_28 To www.mydomain.com/category-name Or www.mydomain.com/product-name

OpenCart SEO Manual |

To enable the url rewrite function, login to your store administration panel and go to System >> Settings | Server Tab , click yes in the SEO url field and save.

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Image 1 – Enabling URL Rewrite

You are NOT done yet. After saving, you will have to rename the .htaccess.txt file to .htaccess (delete the .txt extension). This file is stored on your server in the main folder where the OpenCart store is installed. To access your hosting server, login to your server administration panel or you can use a free ftp software like FileZilla .

If you have installed OpenCart in a subfolder like www.mydomain.com/mystore/ , then you will have to edit .htaccess file (use notepad) and at line 22 change: RewriteBase / To RewriteBase /mystore/ (the name of your subfolder)

If you can’t find the .htaccess.txt on your server , go to OpenCart download section and download a new copy of your OpenCart store version. In the archive you will find the original htaccess.txt file.

If everything was setup correctly, the url rewrite function should work perfectly.

Before you can test it, you will have to define the SEO keyword fields for each product and category (more details in chapter 2 and 3) .

OpenCart SEO Manual |

500 Internal Server Error – If you see this error on the store front page after enabling the url rewrite function please redo carefully all the steps described above , if the error (or any other errors) still persists, probably it’s from your hosting server and you will have to contact the server administrator.

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When editing the .htaccess file, to avoid duplicate domain content penalty, add these lines: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www. yourdomain.com /$1 [L,R=301] This will redirect http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com .

1.2 Store Title and Meta Tag Description To edit your index page title and meta tag description, go to System >> Settings | Store Tab .

Image 2 - Store Title and Meta Tag Description

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Choose your title and meta tag description very carefully. Regardless what people say, they are still very important, especially to improve your CTR (click trough rate) from search engines results.

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Take a look over the image 3 to see why the fields are so important. Basically they define the first contact between the search engine user and your store.

Image 3 – Google displaying title and meta tag description

The store title should be between 20 and 50 characters and the description meta tag between 100 and 155 characters. You can use this online tool to count the number of characters.

Bellow we will analyze an example how the title and meta tag description should look like for an OpenCart online store that sells women’s shoes:

OpenCart SEO Manual |

TITLE : “ Women's Shoes Online | 24 hours FREE delivery “ ( without quotes )

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In the first title sequence we used the main keyword that defines the entire store “ Women’s Shoes Online “ , in the second sequence we used an eye-catching phrase “ 24 hours FREE delivery “ . The second phrase is very important, use something that is very relevant from a customer point of view. In this case, the delivery time “24 hours” and that it’s “FREE“.

Another good title would be: “Women's Shoes Online | Starting from 19 $ “.

Here, the last phrase is price related which is another motivating factor from customer’s point of view.

You can always change the second phrase in your title, it won’t affect your rankings in any way. For example, on Christmas season you can change your second phrase to something like: “Women's Shoes Online | Christmas 2012 Special Discounts“ DESCRIPTION : “ Affordable quality women's shoes for all occasions. Over 80 women shoe brands are waiting for you. 30-day Returns Guarantee “ The description is short and to the subject and it includes everything a possible customer wants to hear: -

Affordable = not expensive.

Quality = even if it’s not expensive, we sell quality shoes.

For all occasions = you can find here any kind of women shoes.

Over 80 brands = we have a great variety of women shoes.

30-day returns guarantee = risk free to buy; trustworthy company.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Do not over spam the description tag with targeted keywords, it won’t help you in any way get a better search engine position and also your CTR will be much lower. Use only a maximum of 2 – 3 targeted main keywords in the description field.

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Keep in mind that Google will not always output your description meta tag text.

Sometimes, Google chooses to replace your description text with another text presented on your main page, that Google thinks it’s more relevant. If you want to be 100% sure that Google will use your description text, try to insert the same text somewhere on your store front-page. In OpenCart 1.5x , activate the “Welcome” module to enter a custom text on the front page, in OpenCart 1.4x the front-page text can be edited in Configuration>>Settings | Store Tab.

If your store is listed in DMOZ directory , some search engines (including Google) may choose to use the description from your DMOZ listing , in this case you will have to edit the header.tpl page and insert this meta tag : <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”> .

Bellow you can find a screenshot with a preview on how the title and description will look in Google search engine results.

Image 4 – Google Preview Results

You may notice that before the title I have included a heart shape. It’s something that will give your title more exposer by drawing attention to it. I do not encourage using (or abusing) html symbols in title field or description, use it only when you can find a relevant symbol directly related to your store (in this case a heart, symbolizing love, you know how women are ….).

You can find a list of supported html symbols on utexas.edu .

1.3 Other Recommended Settings

OpenCart SEO Manual |

There are a few other recommended settings that can slightly improve your sales and visitor/customer satisfaction. All of these settings are found in the System >> Settings tabs.

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- Contact Details: Always include a valid telephone number, publishing a real phone number in the contact page (or anywhere else) will increase your visitors confidence. The same thing is applied for the address details.

- Default Items per Page (Catalog): It should always be between 10 and 20.

This also depends on the template style your store is using.

- Login Display Prices (NO): Do not ever force your visitors to register in order to see the prices.

- Approve New Customers (NO): People don’t like to wait. They will just go to another store to purchase the desired products.

- Allow Reviews (YES): It’s a great way to get feedbacks about your products and also to get some new fresh content to your product pages.

You can also add your own reviews, I know that it’s an unorthodox method, but it’s a simple and efficient way to motivate visitors to purchase the product and also to add some new fresh content (use targeted keywords in your review text) to your product page.

1.4 Product Feeds A product feed is a file (dynamic) that contains all information about your store products. Those file(s) can be submitted and indexed by products feed directories or products comparison services like shopmania.com or price.com. It’s a great way to get some extra visitors to your store, but more important is that your internal products pages will be quickly indexed by search engines and it will also improve your SERP’s.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

In OpenCart the product feed administration menu can be found in Extensions >> Product Feeds. As default, there are two feed extensions installed: Google Base and Google Sitemap. The Google Base feeder file can be submitted here and the Google Sitemap must be submitted to your Google Webmaster Tools account (see chapter 8.3).

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There are many feed directories and product comparison websites. For the most important of them you can find already made extensions on official OpenCart website, some of them are presented below: - Bing Shopping Product Feed (for OpenCart ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) - PriceGrabber Product Feed (for OpenCart ver. 1.4x)

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Amazon Product Ads Feed (for OpenCart ver. 1.4x ) Shopmania datafeed (for OpenCart ver. 1.4x) Pricespy Feed (for OpenCart ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) TheFind Product Feed (for OpenCart ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) Kelkoo product feed (for OpenCart ver. 1.5x)

You can also use an universal data feed generator called Any Feed that allows you to build custom feed files depending on your requirements : feed format, feed data , feed columns , and so on.

2. PRODUCTS CONFIGURATION In this chapter, you will learn how to properly configure and optimize the product detail page to increase your visitor - customer conversion rate and internal SEO page value.

2.1 General Tab - Product Name: Choose the name of your product very carefully, the name of the product will also be the title tag of the product page.

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- Meta Tag Description: Should not be greater than 150 characters. The meta tag description and title (product name) have exactly the same importance as the meta tag description and title, described in chapter one (store configuration).

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- Meta Tag Keywords: It should contain a maximum of 8 words separated by comma. You will learn in chapter 8, how to analyze and choose the right keywords.

- Description: From SEO point of view, this is one of the most important part because in the description general text you can include targeted ranking keywords (main keywords / secondary keywords and tertiary keywords).

Do not let the description field empty. I have seen many stores that don’t use any description text to their products or if they use a description it’s a very basic one composed from 4 - 5 words. No matter if your product does not need any description, always write one.

Compose your description text so that it will include you main targeted keywords for that product. A density of 4-5% for each targeted keyword should be enough, you can download a free software called Primitive Word Counter that can calculate the word density and phrase density from any given text.

Do not copy paste the same description for a product from another competitor website, use your own unique description and offer as much details as possible. The description should contain at least 300 characters - Product Tags : Product tags are similar to categories . Basically it’s a filtered search that can group together all the products that share the same tag or tags.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Image 5 – Admin Product Tag Field.

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For example, if you have a DVD movie store, for the product movie page “Gremlins” one of the tag would be “Steven Spielberg”, for the product movie page “Transformers” one of the used tag would also be “Steven Spielberg”. When a visitors clicks on the “Steven Spielberg” link tag, all the movies that share the same tags will be presented in one single page even if the movies belong to separate categories.

Product tags are not only useful for visitors to quickly sort the products, they will also help your inner pages to be faster and better indexed by search engines and can also be used to increase your store search engine ranking for secondary or tertiary keywords ( more details in chapter 8.1).

The product tags are displayed on product pages bellow the description field (image 6).

Image 6 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Front Store Product Tags

OpenCart SEO Manual |

2.2 Data Tab

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If the url rewrite function is enabled (chapter 1.1) , you can use the SEO keyword field to personalize the url of the product page. Using the SEO keyword field properly itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the perfect solution to naturally increase SEO page value for the targeted product keywords.

Let’s continue the example with the online women shoe store. We have a women shoe product called “Samantha” organized in the a category called “High Heels”.

A recommended seo url keyword would be : a) high-heels-samantha b) women-high-heels-samantha c) women-high-heels-shoes-samantha From the three examples presented above, the most recommended is “C” because the page url will contain: - your primary keyword (by proximity) : women shoes - secondary targeted keywords : women high heels and high heels shoes - tertiary targeted keyword : women high heels shoes

THINGS YOU SHOULD KEEP IN MIND WHEN USING SEO KEYWORDS :

- the seo keyword should be unique for each product , you can’t have two products with the same identical seo keyword.

- try to avoid using product codes or any words and numbers that are not relevant from SEO point of view.

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- do not use more than 7 words, and do not repeat targeted keywords.

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- if you want to have an extension like .html or .htm , you can insert the extension at the end of the seo keyword : women-high-heels-shoes-samantha.html , the url page will be: www.domain.com/categ/women-high-heels-shoes-samantha.html

2.3 Discount Tab The discount function allows you to offer a price reduction for the particular product if the customer purchases the minimum necessary quantity. The discount price and required quantity will be presented on the product page (image 7). Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s especially useful to use discount prices if you have an overstock of that particular product or you just want to fast liquidate the remaining stock.

Image 7 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Discount Prices Display

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2.4 Special Tab

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Like discounts, the special tab function allows you to use price reductions, but compared to discount tab it does not require a minimum quantity purchase.

The products that have special prices will be more highlighted then the products with regular prices. The old price is strikethrough and the special price is bolded to draw more attention. Also, all the products that have a special price are grouped together in the special link category.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Image 8 – Special Price Display (category page)

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Image 9 – Special Price Display (product page)

2.5 Reward Points Tab This was a much awaited feature for OpenCart. It’s only available from 1.5x version but there are some extensions for 1.4x versions that offer similar features.

The main purpose of the reward points features is to increase customer’s loyalty, and it’s working perfectly.

In the reward points tab you have two sections: - Points: This is the number of points that a customer can use to purchase the product.

If you use the value 0 the product can’t be purchased using reward points.

- Reward Points: This is the number of points that a customer receives when he purchase the product using real money .

I strongly recommend using the reward points feature and always advertise your reward points system to your visitors and customers. Add a special page to the information section where you explain what reward points are and how the system is working. After that, create an eye catching banner on front page or in the left/right columns whit a link to that page.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

I usually recommend a maximum 10% Reward Points and 100% Points from product real price. This is only a suggestion and it entirely depends on your gross margin for that product.

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As example, for a product that costs 100$ (or your currency), a customer will receive 10 reward points when he purchases the product with real money and in order to be able to buy the product with point he will have to spend 100 points.

3. CATEGORIES CONFIGURATION 3.1 General Tab - Category Name: Exactly like the product name, the category name will also be the title of the category page - Meta Tag Description : Write a summary description (120-150 characters) - Meta Tag Keywords: It should contain a maximum of 8 words separated by comma.

- Description: This text content will be published in the main category page.

I advise you to start with the text introduced in the meta tag description field and continue with a more detailed category description.

3.2 Data Tab If the url rewrite function is enabled, you can use the SEO keyword field to personalize the url of the category page.

Choose your category seo keyword very carefully , the keyword(s) will be outputted in all the products pages url’s:

OpenCart SEO Manual |

www.yourdomain.com/category-name/product-name

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If you decide to change the category seo keyword later, the url’s of all the products added in the category will also change to:” www.yourdomain.com/new-category-name/product-name This will negatively impact your site SERPs and your new url’s will have to be indexed again by search engines.

After your store pages have been indexed by search engines if it’s really necessary to change the category seo keyword, always use htaccess to redirect the old url’s to the new url’s .

On the OpenCart support forum , you can find some simple solutions to disable the output of category name in product page url, see here an example >> . Only modify this if you are 100% sure that your category names will change in the future, otherwise let the category name be displayed in the product page url.

In chapter 2 ”Products Configuration”, on seo keyword field, I have given some seo keyword examples for a demo product ( high heels shoes samantha ). The recommended seo keyword was : women-high-heels-shoes-samantha.

Now, if this product will be included in the category High Heels (seo keyword) the product url page will be : www.yourdomain.com/high-heels/women-high-heels-shoes-samantha.html The product page url si perfect optimized from seo point of view including all the targeted primary, secondary and tertiary keywords.

Some people may argue that this url is a little bit overstuffed with keywords and Google will penalize it, but it’s not true.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

This is a url example that Google may penalize for keywords overstuffing: www.yourdomain.com/women-high-heels-shoes/women-shoes-high-heelsshoes-samantha-women-shoe.html

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4. IMAGE OPTIMIZATION Besides prices, I consider images to be the decisive factor for a customer when purchasing a product. Basically, images are the single direct contact between the customer and the product, so they must be perfect from all points of view.

There are two major factors for images that you should take in consideration: quality and size/resolution. We will discuss both of them in detail.

4.1 Image Quality Quality images boost sales, this is 100% TRUE! You are managing an online store, not an auction site. Low quality images are unacceptable!

Personally, I refused to order several times from online stores that had low quality images for products, even if the prices where motivating . It made me doubt about the quality of the product or the business trustworthiness.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

For example, compare the two image products from below, to see the difference between a low quality amateur image and professional image. Which one would you buy?

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It does not matter the niche of your store, if you are selling pencils, high tech gadgets or clothes, quality images will always boost sales.

Now let’s see how you can obtain quality images for your products: a) USE MANUFACTURER IMAGES It’s the cheapest and quickest way. If you are purchasing your store products directly from a manufacturer / distributor, there is a good chance that they already have quality images of their products. If the images are not publicly available, you can just ask them, for sure they must have an internal digital product catalog from where you can extract use the images. b) HIRE A PHOTOGRAPHER It’s more expensive, and usually it’s not applicable for online stores that are working with nonrenewable products stocks. c) MAKE YOUR OWN PHOTOS This is more time consuming and also requires some photography skills. It’s not that hard to shoot your own product images, it requires a good photo camera and a photo shooting table.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

Photo shooting tables are not expensive (starting from 50$ ) and can be purchased online. Just search on Ebay / Amazon for “Photo Shooting Table” and you will find a great variety. Before purchasing a photo shooting table, pay attention to the features and accessories like: lighting (if included), switchable backgrounds and size.

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Image 10 – Photo Shooting Table

4.2 Image Resolution and Size Always optimize your images, it will reduce your bandwidth consumption and will decrease your pages loading time.

Usually, a standard resolution for an adequate web image is 1024 x 768 pixels , with a maximum size of 50-75 kb. Of course, this will also depend upon your store’s niche. For a clothing store, the image quality and resolution should be much higher compared to a store that sells tires.

Here are some image optimization tools that are free and easy to use: - RIOT : http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/ - IMAGE OPTIMIZER : http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx - IRFANVIEW : http://www.irfanview.com/ Always add more than a single image to a product. Try to add at least 3-4 images.

5. USEFUL EXTENSIONS On the OpenCart official website you can find a lot of additional extensions that can boost your sales and improve your store from S.E.O and S.E.M point of view.

Bellow, you will find some that I personally use and recommend.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

5.1 Free Extensions Modules

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Deadcow SEO (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – This module will automatically generate the SEO keywords for you products, categories, and meta keywords. It will also automatically generate the product tags.

Tag Cloud Sidebox (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – It will add a tag cloud in the left/right column .

Watermark Images (ver. 1.5x) – Add a custom watermark on all your images.

Quick Update Price (ver. 1.5x) – A very quick solution to update your product prices with a few mouse clicks.

Address Book (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – Allows you to keep an Address Book in the backend of your store with contact information for vendors or general contacts.

Allows you to email the vendor or visit the vendors site directly from the backend.

Live Chat System (ver. 1.5x) – This utility allows merchants and their staff members to offer live assistance towards their customers.

Image Product Zoom (ver. 1.5x) – This mod will make float zoom in product page.

It’s especially useful if you use high resolution images.

Facebook Auto Like (ver. 1.5x) – Increase your facebook likes for your store.

5.2 Paid Extensions Modules Custom Product & Category Image Descriptions (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – This mod allows you to display custom text on both the alt/title tags and the description of the image on the enlarge image page.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

News & Events (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – A simple way to add news and events to your store.

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Product Questions & Answers (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – This modification enables customers to ask questions about specific products. After the question is answered by the admin personnel, it can be viewed on the product page.

AC CMS - News/Blog (ver. 1.5x) – AC CMS is a powerfull CMS system for OpenCart. With this extension you can place your news and format them as you want (positions, show / hide title, text, image, etc), create a blog, place articles in the menu and much more.

Multilingual SEO (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – This module adds support for multilingual seo keywords for products, categories and information pages. It comes with a script to instantly fill the keywords based on the product name, and a configuration file allows to manage some operation on keyword generation.

News / Blog Extension (ver.1.5x) – Allows you to create blog posts or add news.

Facebook Comments (ver. 1.4x and 1.5x) – After installing this simple module, your readers can interact with your site using their Facebook account and easy post comment to their Facebook profile and share with their friends on the wall.

6. OPENCART MARKETING TOOLS: AFFILIATES, COUPONS AND VOUCHERS Those are three powerful marketing tools that are available in OpenCart, and you should take full advantage of them.

6.1 Affiliates This is one of the most important features added in the 1.5 version of OpenCart.

OpenCart SEO Manual |

WHAT ARE AFFILIATES? You can compare an affiliate to a type of reseller that will refer people to your website. They will receive a percentage of the sale that results from their referral.

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HOW DO I FIND AFFILIATES? Do not wait for them to find you, always lookup yourself for new affiliates.

The most interested people to join your affiliation system are people that have a website / blog / forum in the same niche range as you or at least share the same targeted visitors as you (sex / age / location) .

As example, for our demo store (women shoes) we would search for webmasters that are managing websites related to: shoes, women or general fashion. We would search on Google for : "women fashion blog" , "women fashion forum" .

We could also search for: "blog food recipes“, it’s not in the same niche as our store but we share the same targeted visitors (female, age range 20 +).

After you have 5-10 optimized niche keywords to find relevant sites, it’s time to get to work. Create a message to convince webmasters to join your affiliation system. It does not have to be a long message, keep it simple. Write something about your website, describe your affiliation system, revenue percentage and payments options.

Search the websites for a contact page, a webmaster email address, or any other contact information to send them the message.

Another good source to find niche related websites is to search through blog directories (bloghints.com, blogarama.com) or forum directories (big-boards.com)

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In the most OpenCart templates, the affiliate system is displayed as a simple footer link in the extra column menu. Because some of your visitors might also be interested to join your affiliation, try to get a better exposure for your affiliation link by creating a banner that will link to your affiliation registration page. Also, a good idea is to add a notice in your newsletter , something like: Join our affiliation - www.yourdomain.com/index.php?route=affiliate/account

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HOW DO I MANAGE AFFILIATES? The affiliation manager is located in Sales >> Affiliates.

To change the affiliate percentage commission , go to System >> Settings | Option Tab , there you have the “Affiliate Commission (%)” field.

It’s very important to create your own advertising banners that affiliates can use on their sites to promote your online store. Do not rely on the simple affiliation

link, the CTR from your affiliates will be very low compared to banners. Create different banners (size, style, types) and display the banners in to the affiliate’s manager panel (Affiliate Tracking Menu). Publish the banners html/javascript code and store the banners on your server, in this way you can always change them if needed.

To insert the banners, edit the file “tracking.php” located in the store hosting server in “catalog\view\theme\default\template\affiliate”. Remember, it requires some php/html programming knowledge to successfully modify the file.

6.2 Coupons Coupons are one of the oldest marketing tools (since 1900). Since then, they still exist and are used by many giant companies, so this must mean something about their marketing effectiveness.

Coupons will help you attract new customers, reinforce brand image and positively influence the purchase cycle, in short words, it will increase your sales.

The coupon administration panel is found in Sales >> Coupons.

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Bellow, you will find some methods on how and when to use coupons, but it entirely depends upon you and your store niche. Just use your imagination, there are so many other methods on how you can boost your sales using coupons.

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GENERAL COUPONS These are regular coupons with a higher validation period (or permanent). You can advertise these coupons codes to different online classified sites (see chapter 9.9), newspapers (offline marketing), forums and so on.

A simple but catchy idea is to insert such a general coupon code in your about us page or terms and condition page. At the end, write something like: “thank you for reading our terms and condition, for your patience you receive a 3% discount

coupon: XXXXX. It’s simple and effective and it will distinguish a little your store from other stores, people feel special when they discover something.

HOLIDAYS COUPONS These are coupons available only on holidays or special events. Advertise those coupons on every available marketing channel, especially on your store front page or/and banner.

ADVERTISING COUPONS These are coupons available for your advertising partners. Using the same methods described in the affiliation chapter, try to find relevant websites that are related to your store niche. Contact the webmasters, and offer them a special coupon code for their visitors in exchange for a banner, link or a blog post on their website. It’s a win-win situation, they offer something valuable to their visitors and you get free advertising.

6.3 Vouchers OpenCart gives you the ability to sell gift vouchers for merchandise on your website.

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Gift vouchers are sent via email in the form of a code to be used during the checkout process. It’s important to understand that discounts are not offered on gift vouchers. Also, the gift voucher code will not be sent until the order status is updated to “complete”. This ensures that the gift voucher is paid for prior to sending the email.

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In default theme, the visitors can purchase gift vouchers on your site by clicking the “Gift Vouchers “link located in “extras” column menu from footer. Exactly like the affiliation link, the gift voucher is hidden in the footer menu and it’s not visible to your store visitors. Try to get a better exposure for the gift vouchers and affiliation link. A simple solution would be to move the two links to the top menu, in addition to Home | Wish List | My Account…. .

Also a god idea would be to create some banners and place them in the left column (default template) under categories.

7. NEWSLETTER A newsletter sent by email is a very effective online marketing tool. Used in the right way, it can help your store get more customers and increase store brand awareness. It is the easiest way to get free advertising and promotional information to a "targeted" base of customers.

The newsletter manager is located in Sales >> Mail .

7.1 Newsletter Interface - From: Usually â&#x20AC;&#x153;Defaultâ&#x20AC;?. If you manage more than one store, choose from the dropdown list the name of the store and the default email of that store will be used in the email from field.

- To: Choose the group persons to whom you want to send the newsletter. a) All Newsletter Subscribers : All persons who have subscribed to receive newsletters from you : customers , registered users or visitors (if you use the newsletter box extension inside your store pages)

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b) All Customers: All persons who bought at least one product.

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c) Customer Group: All persons who belong in that customer group. d) Customers: You can manually choose the customers who will receive the newsletter. Just type the first letter in the Customer autocomplete field and a name list will appear. e) All Affiliates: All persons who have joined your affiliation network.

f) Affiliates: Individually select affiliates. Exactly like “d) Customers”. g) Products: Send only to customers who bought specified products. Type the first letters of the product and select the product(s) from the dropdown list.

- Subject: The subject of your newsletter that will appear in the email subject field.

- Message: Your newsletter message. Using the built in html editor you can create simple plain text messages or complex html messages that can include images, links, videos and so on.

7.2 Newsletter Important Notices Important things you should know or do before using the newsletter function:

HOSTING EMAIL POLICY Some hosting servers (especially shared) allow a limited numbers of outgoing emails hourly or daily. Before you start sending newsletters, it’s very important to check the email policy of your hosting provider.

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If your newsletter subscribers exceed the allowed number of outgoing emails, you have a few options:

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- Use a newsletter service, like mailchimp.com . You can find some Mailchimp extension on the opencart extension page.

Mailchimp.com is not free but it’s the most recommended option. There are no limitations regarding the number of outgoing emails, you can view detailed statistics about your newsletter campaigns, create professional newsletter templates, and many more other powerful features.

- Contact the hosting administrator to increase the number of outgoing emails (usually without any success).

- Migrate to another hosting (VPS) or purchase a better hosting packet from your current hosting provider.

Please remember that automated email messages that are sent from your store, like order status notification, order invoices, registration notices, are also considered outgoing emails.

NEWSLETTER VERIFICATION AND OPTIMIZATION A large percentage of your store users are using email services like yahoo, gmail, hotmail and so on. To avoid your newsletter to be flagged as spam and added to the spam folder, always optimize and test your newsletter format. Create a few demo accounts on your store using different email providers like gmail, yahoo, hotmail and so on.

Before sending the newsletter, test it by sending it first to your demo accounts.

Check to see if your newsletter has been flagged as spam and added to the spam folder. If yes, change the newsletter format and avoid using to many link urls or images.

You can also use a free service like http://isnotspam.com/ to check if your newsletters will be flagged as spam.

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NEWSLETTER ABUSE Do not send more than two newsletters a week to the same email addresses. You are risking annoying your newsletter subscribers/customers and this will have a negative impact upon your business.

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NEWSLETTER FORMAT Keep your newsletter message simple and to the subject. I personally do not use images in my newsletters, besides the store logo. Majority of web browser have a built in ad filter (or as extension) that will filter images and banners, in this case the images wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be displayed and the general aspect of your newsletter will look very unprofessional. The same thing applies for people using desktop email applications like outlook, the bat or thunderbird.

The best way to gain experience is through practice. Try different newsletter formats, without images, with few images, only images, to observe the most performing newsletter format.

8. SEO TOOLS AND RESOURCES In this chapter you will learn about some free and paid online tools and services that can help you optimize and track your store performance.

8.1 Google Adwords AdWords is Google's search engine marketing/advertising program. Currently, it is the Internet's leading provider of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you don’t have a google adwords account, I strongly suggest to create one and test this extremely efficient advertising program.

We will not discuss here how to promote your Opencart store trough Google Adwords, there are many online tutorials about that, instead, you will learn how to use a built in Adword function called keyword tool.

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Adword Keyword Tool is a keyword research tool which estimates the competition for a keyword, recommends related keywords, and will tell you what keywords Google thinks are relevant to your site or a page on your site. Basically, you have an inside view on how people (potential customers) are using Google to search for your store products. Whit this powerful information, you can optimize your store and internal pages to get a better SERP’s position and gain more targeted visitors.

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Let’s get a little familiar with the Adwords Keyword Tools. Open your browser and go to Adword Keyword Tool page.

In the Word or Phrase field write the most common keyword or phrase that you think people will use to find your products. If you store is already installed and indexed by Google, you can also write the website url and the most appropriate category that your store belongs to.

Use the advanced options and filters to filter your search result depending upon your location, your language. The devices should always be set to “Desktop and laptops”.

Image 11 – Adwords Keyword Tool Interface

Before clicking the “Search” button, in the left column, make sure that only the “Exact” option is selected (image 12).

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Image 12 – Match Type Selection

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Click the “Search” button and wait a couple of seconds until the results are displayed. After the results are displayed, you get an inside statistical view for the keyword you have chosen: competition, global monthly searches and local monthly searches (in Google).

The most part of your research is displayed in the Keywords ideas section (image 13).Here are displayed common keywords related to your main targeted keyword that people also use to find your products or similar products to your store.

Image 13 – Adwords Keyword Tool Search Results

Sort the keywords ideas result based on “Global Monthly Searches” (worldwide searches) or “Local Monthly Searches” (only for chosen location).This depends upon your targeted customer’s location and delivery range. If you don’t deliver worldwide, sort your results based on “Local Monthly Searches”.

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Sort the keywords results in three categories:

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PRIMARY TARGETED KEYWORDS: The first 3 keyword results (in our example: women’s shoes, women shoes and shoes for women). Those are the primary targeted keywords that will deliver most of your visitors if you achieve top 1-5 position in search engines.

You will have to focus most of your attention to these keywords, use them in all keywords field, description field, and front page main text (5-8% density).

SECONDARY TARGETED KEYWORDS: The next 5 keywords are the secondary targeted keywords. If possible, you should use these keywords as categories (seo keyword) in your OpenCart store or use them as tags.

TERTIARY TARGETED KEYWORDS : The rest of 10-15 keywords are tertiary’s. They are less valuable as primary and secondary keywords, but usually they have less competition and are much easier to rank in search engines.

Always take the keywords research in consideration when creating: -

Store title and description ( chapter 1.2 ) Products title and description ( chapter 2.1 ) Products tags ( chapter 2.1 ) Product SEO keyword ( chapter 2.2 ) Category name , description and keywords ( chapter 3.1 ) Category SEO keyword ( chapter 3.2 )

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8.2 Google Analytics

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Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and increase your sales. It’s a powerful, free tool that can answer a variety of questions for a wide range of users.

- how many users are visiting your store - how often users are visiting your store - which of your pages/products are most popular - which search terms visitors found you through - where your visitors are coming from - and much more…

Implementing Google Analytics to OpenCart is very easy. If you are using the 1.5 version, go to System >>>Settings>>>Server Tab and paste your generated Google Analytics code to the specified field. In 1.4 version of OpenCart go to

Extensions >>>Modules and edit the Google Analytics modules to paste the tracking code.

The Google Analytics tracking code can also manually be inserted directly to your store template (works for 1.4 and 1.5 version of OpenCart): catalog\view\theme\YOURTEMPLATE\template\common\header.tpl If you are using Google Adwords advertising services, you should install an extension that will allow you to track your goals and monitor the sales generated through Google Adwords campaigns. Such and extension (paid) can be found here and here.

8.3 Google Webmaster Tools Google Webmaster Tools is another great free online application provided by Google. It provides site owners detailed information about your pages' visibility on Google: indexed pages and indexing errors, latest Google bot crawl, invalid url’s, traffic details, backlinks, optimization suggestions and much more. At least once a week, it’s recommended that you visit and analyze the information’s provided by Google Webmaster Tools.

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8.4 Free Online SEO Tools

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You can find online a great variety of free online SEO tools that will help you analyze and optimize your OpenCart store. Some of the best tools are provided by: iwebtool.com , internetmarketingninjas.com and avangate.com . Use these tools to analyze and monitor your backlinks, to check for broken inner links, analyze competition and much more.

8.5 Paid Online SEO Tools I highly recommend seomoz.org and raventools.com . Both of them are offering the same features and SEO tools suite in the same price range (99$/month), but

in my opinion seomoz.org is more oriented to on-page and on-site optimization and raventools.com is more oriented on social media promotion and advertising.

Both are offering an excellent service for monitoring your store SEO performance, you can quickly get an inside view about your backlinks, keywords ranking, crawl rate and much more.

9. OFF-PAGE SEO Until now, you have learned how to optimize (on-page and on-site) your OpenCart store, how to use the built in marketing tools and how to increase your visitors-customers conversion rate. Now itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to learn more about off-page SEO .

In short words, Off-Page SEO can be defined as the total actions which are performed externally to the store itself to achieve a better result on search engine ranking pages and to attract more visitors.

(

= difficulty grade ; very easy =

; very hard =

)

9.1 Search Engine Submission

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Submit your store domain to major search engines like Google (from webmaster tools) , Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Scrubtheweb, Jayde, Gimpsy, Entireweb, Anoox, Amfibi, Searchsight, Exactseek, Activesearchresults and Gigablast .

Many people comment that search engine submissions are worthless, but it canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hurt either and it takes less than 5 minutes to submit to all of them.

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9.2 Directory Submission In the past, directory submission was one of the most important and relevant step in any off-page SEO process. Today, the SEO value of directory submission

has been downgraded but it still can have a positive impact on your search engines rankings.

You can submit to directories manually, semi-automatically or complete automatically: MANUAL DIRECTORY SUBMISSION

If you are new to SEO, the best way to go is manually. Indeed that it’s the slowest method but the acceptance rate will be higher than any other submission method.

You can visit directorycritic.com and web-directories.ws , there you can find a great collection of free and paid directories sorted by language, niche and countries.

Also, you can search on Google your own directories by using keywords combinations like: “web directory” +”your main keyword” “free web directory” +”your main keyword” “web directory” “submit website” +”your main keyword” “web directory” “submit url” +”your main keyword” SEMI-AUTOMATIC DIRECTORY SUBMISSION

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If you are tired of manually submitting to directories you can try the semiautomatic method.

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Some of the best software’s I recommend for semi-automatic directory submissions are: Website Submitter and Fast Directory Submitter. Both of them are old established software’s with regular updates and great support. If you are looking for a free semi-automatic directory submission software, try Scorpio Submitter.

There are many other similar software’s out there, you can do a quick search on Google to find the one that best suits your needs.

AUTOMATIC DIRECTORY SUBMISSION

The fastest but most complex solution for directory submissions. I recommend this method only after you tried the manual and semi-automatic method and gain some experience about directory submission process.

Some of the automatic submission software I recommend: - Sick Submitter : cheap monthly payments but more difficult to use.

- GSA Auto Website Submitter : easy to use but expensive.

- Internet Business Promoter : itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an all in one SEO software but limited regarding directory submission.

- SubmitEaze : a good directory submission tool that can be used also for article submissions.

A FEW SUBMISSION TIPS:

- Avoid paid listings, unless the directory is very popular and directly targeted to your niche.

- Use different text for site title, use your primary and secondary keywords as your title ( Google Adwords - chapter 8.1) .

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- If the directory allows deep linking (to inner pages) you should always link to a category or a product from your OpenCart store.

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- Choose the most relevant category for your store, majority of submission rejections are because inappropriate category selection (this is more common when submitting in automatic method) .

- Avoid directories that mandatory require a backlink in order for your link to be accepted and published.

- Do not use free email services like yahoo or gmail, create an email address like web@yourdomain.com and use it when submitting to directories.

9.3 Social Networking Become a member of the most popular social networking sites like : Facebook , Orkut, Linked and so on. Be as active as you can on those social sites, post news related to your niche store, keep in touch with your potential customers and promote your store products as much as you can.

You can find many popular social networking sites with a simple search on Google.

9.4 Social Bookmarking Create accounts and bookmark your store website to as many bookmarking sites as you can. The most important are: Twitter, Digg, StubmleUpon and Reddit .

Again, search on Google and you will find many popular bookmarking sites.

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9.5 Blogs

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Even if you have your own blog incorporated in to your OpenCart store, register and create a blog at least on wordpress.com and blogger.com . Try to add new content to this blogs at least once a month. Publish anything related to your niche store, but remember to add original content, not just copy-paste it from another source. Use targeted keywords from your blog posts to redirect to your store domain or inner pages.

Remember to promote your blogs the same way you promote your store: directory submissions, social bookmarking, and so on.

9.6 Blog Commenting Blog commenting can also be a powerful method to promote an increase your store search engine rankings.

Image 14 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Blog Comment Form

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Blog commenting is not SPAM, as long as you add valuable and relevant comments.

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Use Google to find blog posts relevant to your store niche. One of the most used platforms for creating blogs is Wordpress. Knowing this, you can search on Google for: "powered by wordpress" "Leave a Reply" "your keyword" Again, continuing the example with our demo women shoes online store. A good search phrase to find relevant blogs would be:

"powered by wordpress" "Leave a Reply" "women shoes" Do not link only to your main store domain url. You can also add comments and link to inner category page, products pages or even tags pages. In our demo store we have the category “High Heels”, we can search for: "powered by wordpress" "Leave a Reply" "high heels women shoes" On this blogs in the website url field we would use the inner url page to our category page.

You can use semi-automatic software’s like Comment Kahuna(freeware) to simplify your blog comment posting. Some people will consider this as blog spam, I don’t. As long as you read the entire blog post and add unique and relevant comment to the blog post, it’s not spam. You do a favor to the blog owner by adding fresh and relevant content to his blog and in exchange you get a backlink to your store. It’s a win-win situation.

9.7 Forum Activity

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Forums are a valuable source to increase your store keywords ranking but also to get direct targeted traffic to your store from the forum visitors and members. The more target related the forum is to your store niche, the more higher the CTR rate will be.

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Find the most 10-15 forums that are in the same niche as your OpenCart store, register and start being an active member on them. Do not start your first thread and replies to something like “Hey, I found a great online store” or “What do you think about www.yourstore.com “, forum members don’t trust such advertising posts and most probably the forum admin will delete your thread or even ban your account. Instead, search through forum and add relevant replies to people’s questions and threads. Only after you gain some trust and reputation from the forum community, start advertising your store and products.

Also, majority of forums will allow you to use a signature (link or banner) in all of your threads and replies. This is the most important advertising method for your store.

Now, let’s see how you can find the most targeted forums related to your store niche. Again, Google is your friend. You can use the search phrase: “forum” “your main keyword” If you don’t find relevant forums to your store niche using the above search phrase, let’s fine tune the search phrase to find more target related forums.

The most used forum platforms are PhpBB and vBulletin. We can search for forums related to your niche that are using those types of platforms: "powered by vbulletin" “your main keyword” "powered by phpbb" “your main keyword”

For our demo women shoe store a good search phrase example would be:

"powered by vbulletin" "fashion" "women shoes" "powered by phpbb " "fashion" "women shoes”

Also, we can use a more general but target related search phrase like: “women fashion forum”

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Try different keywords combination depending on your store niche to find the most valuable 10-15 forums. Register and visit those forums daily or at least once a week to post new threads or to reply to other peoples threads.

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It’s recommended that you offer special discount coupons to the forum visitors and members. If you can add signature in your posts, always include a text like “use coupon: “COUPONCODE” and get 15%(your value) on all purchases” . This will motivate the forum users to visit your signature link and probably to make some purchases from your store.

9.8 Link Exchange Link exchanges are also a powerful method to increase your store link popularity.

Always make a link exchange with sites that are in a similar niche as your store.

You can make link exchanges with online stores that are in the same niche as your online store as long as you are not targeting the same customers (age, sex), same GEO locations nor have identical products.

If you want to automate the process of link exchange, use LinkEx or Link Manager . Both scripts are free and easy to install and manage, but some php / html knowledge is required.

9.9 Classified Ads Simple and efficient. Classified ads sites are receiving millions of visitors each day and it’s one of the oldest methods to advertise your online store products.

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Some of the best and most visited classified ads sites are:

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-

craigslist.org ( worldwide ) ebayclassifieds.com ( USA) backpage.com ( worldwide ) gumtree.com ( UK ) oodle.com (USA ) classifiedads.com ( worldwide ) usfreeads.com ( USA ) adpost.com ( worldwide ) classifiedsforfree.com ( worldwide ) epage.com ( worldwide )

There are many more other great classified ads sites. With a simple search on Google for “list of classified ads” you can find thousands of them.

Also, do not forget to post your ads on classified sites that are targeting directly your country, state or niche.

There are several software’s that can help you submit your ads to classified sites: creativesoftwaresystems.com , adsubmitter.com , bpbotpro.com and myfreeclassifieds.com . Some of the directory submission software’s presented in chapter 9.2 can also be used to post ads on classified sites.

My personal method is in semi-automatic method using Website Submitter. It’s much quicker than manual method and more accurate than fully automated method. A more cheaper alternative to Website Submitter is RapidFormFiller , it costs only 5$ and it can be used for semi-automatic submission to any kinds of platform types : classified sites, blogs, directories, and much more.

9.10 Article Submission Regarding article submissions, I go for quality and not quantity. Every time I want to advertise a new online store or product I use a few established article sites like: squidoo.com , hubpages.com , ezinearticles.com , articlesbase.com , technorati.com , goarticles.com and buzzle.com . Those are trusted sites that can help boost your store rankings and also get some direct visitors, possibly new customers.

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Always write articles that offers valuable information’s to users and not only to advertise your store or products. Do not forget to use targeted keywords in your articles and link them to your store or inner pages.

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The downside of article submission is that most of the articles sites do not allow using links in your article text and those who allow inner links are set to “nofollow”, but even those “nofollow” keyword links are valuable from SEO point of view.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND REGARDING ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS: - Write and submit unique articles to each article directory.

- Write articles that offers valuable information’s to users and not only to advertise your store and products.

- Use targeted keywords and link them to your store inner pages (products, categories or tags pages).

- Use targeted keywords for your author signature.

- If allowed, insert at least one image in your article and watermark the image(s) with your store logo or domain url text (use picmarkr.com or watermark.ws to watermark your images).

9.11 Video Promotion A free, simple and efficient way to increase your store/brand awareness worldwide. Create a few videos about your store and products and publish them on video sharing sites like: youtube.com , metacafe.com, dailymotion.com , and other similar sites.

To create such videos, you can use free software’s like Microsoft Movie Maker , Microsoft Photo Story or EzVid.

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It’s not necessary to create videos only about your products, create and publish videos that are related to your store niche.

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As example, for our demo women shoe store, we can create a short video about the latest shoe fashion presentations from Milano. Collect the most relevant photos, add them to a video slideshow and publish them to video sharing files.

Remember to insert in the video or in the video description text the url address of your store. Also a good idea would be to offer some discount coupons to encourage the viewers to visit your online store.

9.12 Applications Development This is a more costly method to advertise your store, but it’s a very efficient way to get direct traffic and increase your store popularity. You can hire a freelancer

to develop custom applications that are of interest for your targeting customers group and release them for free to the World Wide Web. For our demo store, we can hire a flash game developer to build an online game similar to zuma or bejeweled. Both games are very popular, played online by millions of people every day. More than 70% of players are females with an age range between 16 and 45, exactly the targeted customers group for an online women shoe store.

Just use your imagination, there are many applications and gadgets that can be built and used to advertise your online store, no matter whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your niche.

Some of the best places you can hire a freelancer, are: freelancer.com , elance.com , flashgameart.com , activeden.net .

Before you hire a freelancer, always search for a few reviews from people that have worked with him/them in the past. Also, never pay the entire project fee in advance, pay a maximum of 50% upfront and the rest when the project is finished and you have fully test it.

9.13 Paid Advertising Among all advertising methods, paid advertising is the fastest way to get almost instantly targeted visitors to your online store.

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A) P AID S EARCH A DVERTISING

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This is the #1 way to get targeted traffic to your website, but it can also be the most expensive. There are two major paid search advertising systems: Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter (Yahoo and Bing).

When you advertise through paid search you are basically buying your way to the top of the search results under certain keyword phrases, like "women shoes" for instance. There are thousands of keywords you can reserve in your account that will allow your ads to show up when people search those certain phrases, so you

have to make sure you choose the most relevant keyword phrase first so you know the traffic is the most targeted and will work the best.

Another tip is to make sure your paid search accounts are set-up to display your ads on actual searches and not on the "content network," which can make or break the effectiveness. Also, you need to make sure certain keywords are associated with certain ads you set up in your account, and then direct to certain "land pages" or product pages on your site that make sense, whichever page would be most targeted to those keywords and ads. Sending all the keywords to your homepage usually isn't the best policy.

Paid search is the #1 way to drive traffic to your store, so make sure you are capitalizing on it as effectively as possible. You can usually advertise more effectively and get a better "ROI" or return on investment by advertising on MSN Adcenter because there is less competition and you can build a larger, more expansive keyword file at a lower cost per click. The volume isn't anywhere near what it is in Google Adwords, but the ROI should be better and you can actually get traffic at a lower cost per click, whereas in Google you wouldn't likely generate any traffic at lower cost per click rates.

Before you start advertising trough Google Adwords or Msn Adcenter, search for some tutorials that are available for free on internet. Learn how to optimize your advertising campaign, how to choose the right words, how to create relevant ads that catches userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention.

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B) FACEBOOK ADVERTISING

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Facebook has a great online advertising platform because not only do they have a ton of traffic to realize, but their targeting technology is great. You can configure your advertising specifications to visitor location, demographics, and their interests in certain subjects. The closer their interests are to what your site sells the better it should perform.

You can advertise 2 ways on Facebook. You can advertise your online store or products, or you can advertise you Facebook Fan Page (recommended to have), which works really well to build targeted fans. Fan Page advertising is one of the

top ways to build targeted fans for your store, so make sure to capitalize on that as well.

You can also do "sponsored Stories" which place your ads around related content on Facebook.

C) OTHER PAID ADVERTISING METHODS There are many other paid advertising methods to promote your store and products. It all depends upon your budget and your store niche.

One of my favorite paid advertising methods is trough BuySellAds.com and BuyAds.com . On both of them, you can find a wide range of sites where you can purchase advertising spaces. The sites are sorted by categories, number of visitors, page views and advertising banner zones and sizes.

Other paid advertising sites I recommend: - stumbleupon.com (costs around $0.05 per page delivered).

- textlinkbrokers.com ( text links ads ) - text-link-ads.com ( text links ads ) - sponsoredreviews.com ( sponsored reviews or posts) - reviewme.com ( sponsored reviews or posts) - payperpost.com ( sponsored reviews or posts) - adf.ly ( url shortener service that offers advertising services. )

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Also, you can search for sites (usually blogs or forums) that are relevant to your niche and contact the owner to make an offer or ask for an offer regarding advertising spaces on their sites.

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This was the final chapter of this OpenCart SEO Manual. Hopefully, it has helped you to get a better inside view on how to optimize and promote your OpenCart store, to achieve your goals.

Thank You for purchasing this e-book.

Best Regards, TabulaWeb Media Email: sales@opencart-seo.com Website: www.opencart-seo.com

10. BASIC SEO DICTIONARY Algorithm When mentioned in SEO world it usually refers to search engine algorithms which is a complicated mathematical formula that sorts out web pages and gives them rank. These algorithms are constantly updated to follow up changes and to keep relevant results, also to avoid being understood by SEO wizards and exploited in that way.

ALT Tag ALT tag/ALT text/Alternative text is the text appearing while an image is loading on a site or while you hold your mouse over that image. The text that appears is good for SEO as search engines look for that part of the text and locate the keyword.

Anchor Text Anchor text is the link text, the clickable part of the text that is linked to another related web page. Use of anchor text hyperlinks is good for SEO as search engines calculate the relevance of the anchor text keyword and consider it related to the site it points to.

Backlink/Inbound Link A backlink or inbound link is a link from one site pointing to another website. Backlinks are used in SEO to increase the understanding of a website and to get it higher in the SERP, the two most important factors of a backlink are the anchor text used and the relevancy of the website it comes from and to which it points to.

Click-Through Click-through refers to a single instance of a user clicking on an advertising link or site listing and moving to a Landing Page. A higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) is one of the primary goals of Search Engine Optimization.

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Click-Through Rate (CTR) Click-through rate is the percentage of users who click on an advertising link or search engine site listing out of the total number of people who see it, i.e. four click-throughs out of ten views is a 40% CTR.

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Content Text, images, videos or any other types of visible media, information found on the website or a certain webpage.

Conversion Conversion is the number of visitors that complete a goal set by the web owner, buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter, or any other similar thing.

Conversion Rate Conversion rate is the next step up from Click-Through Rate. It's the percentage of all site visitors who "convert" (make a purchase, register, request information, etc.). If three users buy products and one user requests a catalogue out of ten daily visitors, a site's conversion rate is 40%.

Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is a return on investment model in which return is measured by dividing total click/marketing costs by the number of Conversions achieved. Total acquisition costs / number of conversions = CPA. CPA is also used as a synonym for Cost-Per-Action.

Cost-Per-Action (CPA) In a cost-per-action advertising revenue system, advertisers are charged a Conversion-based fee, i.e. each time a user buys a product, opens an account, or requests a free trial. CPA is also known as cost-per-acquisition, though the term cost-per-acquisition can be confusing because it also refers to a return on investment model.

CPC/PPC â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Cost Per Click/Pay Per Click CPC or cost per click is a PPC (Pay per click) advertising system where a user places an ad and only pays when that ad is clicked on. One of the most popular ways to drive traffic to your site.

Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) Also known as cost-per-impression or CPM for cost-per-mille (mille is the Latin word for thousand), cost-per-thousand is an advertising revenue system used by search engines and ad networks in which advertising companies pay an agreed amount for every 1,000 users who see their ads, regardless of whether a click-through or conversion is achieved. CPM is typically used for Banner Ad sales, while Cost-Per-Click is typically used for text link advertising.

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Crawler/Spider/Bot Crawler, Spider or Bot is a part of search engine algorithms, basically it is a program that crawls the web pages, gathers data following links from one site to another while making copies (cache, index) in a search engine database.

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Inbound Links Also known as back link, backward link, or backlinks, inbound links are all of the links on other websites that direct the users who click on them to your site. Inbound links can significantly improve your site's search rankings, particularly if they contain Anchor Text keywords relevant to your site and are located on sites with high Page Rank.

Impression Also known as a page view, an impression is a single instance of an online advertisement being displayed. Search engines and ad networks use impression statistics to charge advertisers on a Cost-Per-Thousand (CPM) basis.

Keyword SEO is mostly based on keywords, this is a word or a phrase used to optimize a website. When a user types a keyword into the search engine search box he will get a list of relevant sites to that keyword arranged by the relevancy found by the search engines. The better your website is optimized for a certain keyword the better your results will be in the SERP. Keyword Density The number of times your keyword is appearing in the text compared to the overall number of words. Article with 500 words that has a keyword repeating 10 times in the article has a keyword density of 2%.

Landing Page This is a page where a visitor lands on after clicking on a link from another page, banner, ad, search engines listing etc.

Link Popularity A measure of how popular a website or webpage is by the number and quality of backlinks pointing to the site. While many SEO companies will promise a great number of backlinks and promise that will increase your rank, the number doesn’t count as much as the relevance and the authority of the website where the links are coming from.

Long Tail In seo, used to describe the substantial group of search queries, using longer, less competitive key phrases.

Meta Description Tag This is a short description located in the HTML code only visible to search engines. It is used to shortly describe the website, not used by most of the major search engines anymore, well, not for rankings.

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Meta Keywords Tag Meta keywords are used to show the search engines what the content on the webpage is all about, they should help the overall rank of the website, but they have low significance now as the content keywords are what counts today.

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Nofollow Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index.

Off-page SEO “Off-page SEO” refers to efforts to improve a website’s search engine rankings by increasing the number and quality of backlinks to the site. This includes getting the site listed in Web directories (e.g. Open Directory Project – DMOZ), Yahoo Directory), getting more backlinks from

what are called “authoritative” websites (sites that have been around a long time, and have what is generally considered reputable content & e.g. .edu and .gov are considered authoritative), as well as improving the anchor text for the backlinks already existing by adding high-value keywords to the anchor text. Compare with “on-page SEO.” On-page SEO “On-page SEO” refers to efforts to optimize your own website, its coding, use of structural markup, directory and file nomenclature, and content. Compare with “off-page SEO”.

Optimization Refers to SEO, optimization of a page, website, off page, intended to improve the ranking position, increase traffic and conversion.

Organic Results Search engine query results that are presented for their relevance, popularity, etc., unlike paid results Robots.txt A text file located in the root directory that tells the search engine bots to include all or to exclude some pages for indexing.

Search Engine A search engine is a web site that collects and organizes content from all over the internet. E.g.

Google, Yahoo, Bing

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Refers to the paid listings that you see on Google and the other search engines above and to the right of regular (or organic) listings. With SEM, your business pays a certain amount (determined by you) every time someone clicks on your ad, which is why SEM is also often called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. SEM is controlled through programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing.

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Search Engine Optimization – SEO Process of improving a websites rank in the SERP by optimizing a website for certain keywords.

Includes improving the website’s speed, usability, keyword optimization, content optimization, improving link quality, building quality links and other SEO strategies and techniques.

Search Engine Results Page – SERP This is a report page that comes back once you enter a search query into the search engines, so when you do a keyword search, the result list you get is the SERP.

Social Media

Is any type of online media that expedites conversation as opposed to traditional media, which delivers content but doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t allow readers/viewers/listeners to participate in the creation or development of the content (e.g. Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter)

Title Tags This is an HTML tag used as the official title of a page displayed in the SERP. You can use a series of keywords that best describe the page, this is one of the very important parts of keyword placement.

Unique Visitor This is a measurement of how many unique visitors, unique IP addresses, visited your site in a certain time period. For instance, if you visited a site 5 times in 24 hours you made 5 visits, but you are counted as one unique visitor.

Visits The amount of times your site has been visited in a given time period. A Unique user can make multiple visits to a site.

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URL Web address, URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, each website has its own unique URL.

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