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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers users complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Although Magento provides users with the power to create dynamic e-commerce sites, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and create sites that are tailored to your unique business needs.This book gives you a hands-on experience on Magento, helping you increase your revenue by implementing proven sales tactics on your Magento site.This book contains techniques to help you with each stage of selling to your customers: attracting visitors, driving them to your product pages, making the sale, increasing sales, engaging your customers, and more. It contains a powerful mix of techniques for increasing sales in your online storefront. Over thirty of the techniques are short and stand alone. A few are designed to be used together, such as the seven techniques in the chapter on creating an international storefront. Some techniques make creative use of Magento’s standard features. A few techniques combine Magento with other tools, such as social networking sites. All the techniques are explained in clear, step-by-step directions, with many screenshots. The book uses an example site for each technique, so that you can see exactly how it will affect your storefront. You can jump into the book at any point, or, work through it from beginning to end.
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Seitenzahl: 228
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook
William Rice
Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: April 2010
Production Reference: 1220310
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849510-12-7
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Ed Maclean (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
William Rice
Reviewer
Jose Argudo Blanco
Acquisition Editor
David Barnes
Development Editor
Mehul Shetty
Technical Editor
Alfred John
Copy Editor
Leonard D'silva
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Editorial Team Leader
Aanchal Kumar
Project Team Leader
Priya Mukherji
Project Coordinator
Ashwin Shetty
Proofreaders
Lynda Sliwoski
Lesley Harrison
Production Coordinators
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Melwyn D'sa
Cover Work
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
About the Author
William Rice is a software training professional who lives, works, and plays in New York City. He is the author of books on Moodle, Magento, and software training.
His indoor hobbies include writing books and spending way too much time reading sites like Slashdot (www.slashdot.org). His outdoor hobbies include orienteering, foraging for wild edibles in New York City parks, and practicing archery within site of JFK Airport.
William is fascinated by the relationship between technology and society: how we create our tools, and how our tools in turn shape us. He is married to an incredible woman who encourages his writing pursuits and has two amazing sons.
William can be contacted through his blog at http://williamriceinc.blogspot.com.
A huge "thank you" to my wife, for giving me the time and space to complete this book. And to my in-laws for their support during this project. An overdue thank you to David Barnes for recruiting me into the Packt family.
About the Reviewer
Jose Argudo is a web developer from Valencia, Spain. After finishing his studies, he started working for a web design company. After six years of working for that company, and others, he decided to start working as a freelancer.
Now, he thinks it's the best decision he has ever made, a decision that lets him work with the tools he likes, such as Joomla!, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, jQuery, and other known open source technologies.
His desire to learn and share his knowledge has led him to be a regular reviewer of books from Packt, such as Drupal E-commerce, Joomla With Flash, Joomla! 1.5 SEO, Magento 1.3 Theme Design, and Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development.
Recently he has even published his own book, Codeigniter 1.7, which you can also find at Packt Publishing's site. If you work with PHP...take a look at it.
If you want to know more about him, you can check his website www.joseargudo.com.
To my brother, I wish him the best.
For my son Liam, whose enthusiasm for life and sense of wonder renewed my own.
Preface
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers users complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Although Magento provides users with the power to create dynamic e-commerce sites, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and create sites that are tailored to your unique business needs.
This book gives you a hands-on experience with Magento, helping you increase your revenue by implementing proven sales tactics on your Magento site.
After creating an online store with Magento, you will follow a defined series of steps to boost revenues on your site. By following straightforward instructions, you can implement proven e-commerce sales techniques. You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your store and also learn about Magento's directory structure and where some of the elements of a store are customized. As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, your online store will be optimized for maximum sales.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Attracting Visitors shows you how to increase the traffic to your store by adding meta information, optimizing images for search engines, using title prefix or suffix to add the store name to page titles, generating a site map, and configuring Magento to automatically refresh the site map.
Chapter 2, Placing Products on Shopping Sites shows you how to place products on shopping sites.
Chapter 3, Driving Visitors to Your Product Pages shows you how to customize Magento's default CMS pages, create new CMS pages, decide which About pages to include, and decide what content to include on About pages.
Chapter 4, Making the Sale by Optimizing Product Pages walks you through the various techniques to optimize product pages such as adding custom options, adding video, links, and other HTML to product pages, optimizing product images, telling a story using product images, and changing the layout of a product page.
Chapter 5, Increasing the Sale guides you through the various techniques for maximizing sales by upselling, making additional sales with related products and custom options, and offering cross-sells, quantity discounts and free shipping.
Chapter 6, Offering and Advertising Promotions shows you how to offer promotional pricing by using catalog price rule and shopping cart price rule.
Chapter 7, Engage Your Customers shows you how to engage your customers by customizing transactional e-mails, creating and sending newsletter, and choosing the social networking site.
Chapter 8, Let Your Customers Speak guides you through the various tools such as reviews, ratings, polls, tags, and e-mail to a friend that enable your customers to communicate with you and others.
Chapter 9, Internationalization shows you how to prepare your site for international sales by translating your products and CMS pages, creating a new URL for your international store, and customizing transactional emails for your international store.
Chapter 10, Create a Wholesale Store shows you how to create a wholesale store for wholesale customers.
What you need for this book
You need Magento, installed either on your local machine or on a remote server, and your favorite code editor.
Who this book is for
If you are a Magento store owner or store designer who wants to boost sales with these tactics, then this book is for you.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Open the file robots.txt for editing."
A block of code is set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the Actions tab".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Attracting Visitors
In this chapter, you will learn how to increase the traffic to your site using the following techniques:
Introduction
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique used to improve a site's performance in search engines. A search engine is a search site like www.google.com, www.bing.com, and www.yahoo.com. According to conventional wisdom, sites that appear near the top of the search results will receive the most clicks.
For example, our demonstration site sells coffee. So we want our site to appear in search results when people search using phrases like "online coffee store" and "mail order coffee". If our site appears in the first ten results for those search phrases, then it will usually be displayed on the first page of results. We would not expect to receive more visitors if our site appeared on the second or later pages.
So let's refine our goal for search engine optimization:
Tip
For the search phrases that our potential customers are likely to use, we want our site to appear as high as possible in the search engine results, preferably in the top ten.
There are many books and companies that offer SEO services. Some of them claim to know how the search engines calculate a site's position in the search results, or how to find the most effective search terms for your site. We will keep our claims more modest as compared to that. Instead, this chapter will show you what you can do with Magento to help search engines index your site accurately and completely.
Adding meta information
In this section, we will cover how to optimize your product pages by entering meta information.
The word meta means "About this subject". Webmasters use meta tags to tell search engines about a page. A page's meta information should accurately describe the content and purpose of that page. This helps the search engines categorize the page better. Some search engines use meta keywords and meta descriptions, while others ignore them. Because search engines can change their policies at any time, it is to your advantage to add this meta information, just in case your favorite search engine begins using it.
I use the word "page" instead of "site" deliberately. While you may be concerned about the search engine rank of your store's website, search engines do not index sites; they index pages. Therefore, it is important that you try to optimize each page of your store for search engines.
Many store owners are concerned about the search rank of their store's home page. While I do not suggest that you ignore the front page, you should also optimize each product's page. When people search for a specific type of online store, you want your store's front page to rank high in the results. When they search for a specific product, you want at least one of your products to rank high. We will cover optimizing your product pages in another section.
Getting ready
There are three prerequisites for this technique:
How to do it...
How it works...
Let's look at how meta information works on a web page.
Meta information and search sites
Here is a product page from our demonstration site:
If you view the HTML code for this page, you will see meta information in several places. You can do this yourself, by selecting View | Page Source from your browser's menu.
Near the top of the page, we find the page title which is the first piece of meta information. We also find some meta information that describes the page. We are talking about the title, meta description, and meta keyword tags:
Search engines use the title and meta tags to categorize a page and to match a person's search terms to your page. No one, except the engineers who create the search engines, knows how much weight is given to each of these elements. However, there is much evidence that meta information plays a part in matching a page to a person's search query. That is why we will carefully construct this meta information for each product page.
Tip
Most SEO experts agree that Google no longer uses the meta keywords tag when ranking search results. However, they do not penalize you for having it, so there's no harm in using it. As of this writing, Yahoo! recommends using it (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ranking/ranking-02.html), and it is still used by some other search engines like AOL.
The title for our example page is Blue Mountain Triage--Whole Bean. If someone uses the words in the title in a search, or even better, uses the exact phrase, then the example page should be listed among the results.
In the following screenshot, you can see a very optimistic example. The user has entered the exact search term that we have in our title, and our example page is the first result:
So before you write your title and your meta keywords, spend time thinking about this question:
Tip
What search terms and phrases are most likely to be used by the people who are most likely to buy this product?
The answer is your meta keywords.
Let's take another look at the meta description for this product page:
Now, look at the first search result. Sometimes, search engines display the meta description for a page. This means that the person searching will use the meta description to decide whether to visit the page. So before you write your meta description, spend time thinking about this question:
Tip
For the people who are most likely to buy this product, what description will most likely inspire them to visit the product page?
There is much evidence that a page's title has a large effect upon how a search engine categorizes a page, and matches search terms to a page. However, if you stuff a page title with too many keywords, it can become unreadable. So you must also consider this question:
Tip
What page title will accurately describe this product and contain the most productive keywords for customers who search for the product, without becoming too long and unreadable?
Tips for using the most productive keywords, description, and title
In the previous section, we presented several questions that must be answered before adding meta information to your product page. Choosing the best meta information can help customers find your product. How to choose this meta information is the subject of entire books.
Here are some tips for writing meta information:
If you're interested in learning more about optimizing keywords, descriptions, and titles, then see some of the resources in the following sectionThere's more...
There's more...
Because Google has the largest share of the search market, many webmasters are concerned about how their sites rank in Google searches. For advice about optimizing your pages for Google, you can go to Google's help pages.
Webmasters/Site owners help
This is the starting page for webmaster help.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
Changing a site title and description
This is Google's help page about page titles and descriptions. It gives advice on writing good page titles and descriptions.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
Researching keywords
Use the Keyword tool to get new keyword ideas.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Optimizing images for search engines
Search engines use the information that you enter about images when matching a search query to your page content. In this section, we will see how to optimize image information in Magento so that search engines accurately match searchers with your product page.
We will use the following example page:
Our goal is to optimize the meta information and name of this image, so that it enhances our search value.
How to do it...
Before you log into Magento, rename the image that you want to use on the page. Use a name that describes the product in the picture.
A good name for the image above would be jamaican-blue-mountain-coffee-whole-bean.jpg. A bad name for the image above would be jamaican_flag_with_coffee_beans.jpg.
