Category Archives: Magento

Watch Out For These Common Magento 2 SEO Mistakes

Posted by Sushmita Sharma

March 1, 2016

Services, SEO, Magento

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In this article, we have noted some common mistakes in the new Magento 2 stores and listed them down in this article. This will help you to prevent these before launching a new or upgrading an existing Magento 1.X store.

Using Robots.txt to block layered navigation parameters.

Using robots.txt disallow to block category pages from getting indexed by Google may not be the optimal way of handling thin content issue. Instead, use Meta noindex, and follow on URLs with those parameters.

txt not blocking the site search data

Google Panda algorithm penalises websites that allow the site search results to get indexed. Google wants to stop such activity. Some Magento2 websites do not block their site results. In fact, some of them actively link to their site search results from homepage, making matters worse. If you website is dealing with these, you need to block this search results now.

Missing availability in schema.org microdata markup for product offer

Google gets help from microdata to understand the contents of a page. It helps them figure out the price, product reviews and so on. It is also necessary feature for auto updates of products in Google Merchant Centre.

Neither SERP results will be displaying products as “In Stock” not will auto update within the Google Merchant Centre.

Homepage with different URLs

You may have noticed that a website’s homepage can be accessed by different URLs, including the one with/without/index.php at the end as well as with/without WWW. These duplicate pages should be redirected to the canonical one. Google is smart enough to identify duplicate and near duplicate content but there is no assurance that it will select the preferred one. Set up 301 redirects in your .htaccess file to solve the issue of duplicated homepages.

Page title “Home page” instead of Homepage

Homepage is the most important page in term of link equity. It is therefore, not a good idea to have its tile say “Home page”. A self explanatory title is the best choice.

Pointing layered URLs back to category with rel canonical

Rel canonical was introduced with the purpose of solving the issue of duplicate and near duplicate content. Layered filters change the content of the URL and therefore are not duplicates. If you do not want all layered filters to index, you should not use rel canonical to solve this issue. Place meta noindex, follow on those layered URLs and thus get them out of index while allowing the link juice to flow through all the pages that you need to rank.

Most of these issues were present in Magento 1.x too. Hopefully, this will help resolve the issues.

How To Install Magento 2.0 On Wamp Server?

Posted by Sushmita Sharma

February 17, 2016

Magento, Website, ecommerce, Uncategorized

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Magento 2.0 is the next generation open source ecommerce platform, designed to deliver greater speed, scalability and extensibility of its previous version. Here is a step-by-step guide to download and install Magento 2.0 on wamp server:

1. Download source and sample data (if required) from the official website of Magento.

2. Extract the downloaded file and move it to the WWW folder in wamp server.

3. Open http://localhost/phpmyadmin (phpmyadmin) and create a blank database.

4. Open http://localhost/your-folder in your browser.

5. Click on the ‘Agree and Setup Magento’ button.

You might encounter issues like:

Here is how to fix these 2 common issues-

PHP Settings Check- The core issue lies in your current settings of xdebug.max_nesting_level=100 (Magento 2.0 needs it to be 200 or more). To fix this issue, simply edit .htaccess file from the Magento Directory and add ‘php_value xdebug.max_nesting_level 200’ at the bottom of the file. Save, restart your browser and try again.
PHP Extensions Check- This occurs when you have 1 missing extension. You only need to install the missing extension to resolve this issue. There are three ways to fix this
- Open php.ini file and look for extension=php_intl.dll. Simply remove the comma from the start and save file.
- Check php_intl.dll file in wamp\bin\php\php5.5.12. If you find the file missing, download it and paste it here.
- If you still face issues; go to wamp\bin\php\php5.5.12; copy all icu***.dll and paste them into apachae/bin. After making the necessary changes, restart your wamp server and reload the previous page for readiness check. You should get the screen in the next picture.

6. On the next screen, click on the Next button.

7. Enter the required information which includes:

Database server host name (default- localhost)
Data username (eg- root)
Password
Database name
Entering Table prefix is optional

8. Fill all the details on the Web Configuration page and click on ‘Next’.

9. Next you would be required to configure Time Zone, Currency and Language. After that click ‘Next’.

10. Fill up the admin account details including Username, Email, and Password. Click Next.

11. On the next page, click on ‘Install Now’.

12. After the installation process is complete, you would get a Success page on your link. Open the store address link and Magento admin address link.

13. Here is how your Magento 2.0 homepage and admin panel would look like.

(Homepage)

(Admin panel)

Now that you have successfully downloaded and installed Magento 2.0; you can make the necessary customisations to your online store through the admin panel. Take help from a professional Magento developer to help you set up the store and manage orders easily through the admin panel.

Top 5 Magento Extensions You Should Check Out Today

Posted by Sushmita Sharma

February 12, 2016

Magento

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Magento is one of the top ecommerce platforms being used worldwide to create online stores along with other popular platforms like Joomla, Shopify and Drupal. Although the basic setup provides a lot of necessary features required to set up a standard online store, you would need to install some extensions to customise and add unique features to your store. Here is a list of the top 5 Magento extensions you should consider installing:

1. Product Matrix – Custom Shipping Rates Extension
This extension makes it easy for you to customise your shipping rates according to any combination of destination, price, product, weight, quantity and customer group rules.

2. Actionable Google Analytics Magento Extension
This powerful app lets you use important Universal Analytics features like User ID Tracking and Enhanced Ecommerce. The plug-in also supports product refund, content grouping, form field tracking, IP anonymization and 15+ custom metrics and dimensions.

3. Zopim Live Chat
The Zopim Live Chat helps your users to chat directly with you through the widget and you can very easily manage multiple conversations through their Online Dashboard.

4. Social login extension by inchoo
This useful extension allows your customers to Sign Up for an account or Login their previous account at your store with their Google, Twitter or Facebook accounts.

5. One Page Checkout – by iwdExtensions
This wonderful extension dramatically reduces the standard 6 step checkout process to a single step and also allows your customers to auto complete contact information fields with the stored information from their browser.

Need help in installing and integrating these extensions in your Magento store? Contact a professional Magento developer from New Vision Digital at info@newvisiondigital.co.