Virtuemart

This is a guest blog post by David Dawson from Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

I have been working with google base on my website now for sometime. I’ve found a few different things that can greatly change the way that your products are viewed within Google Base. This is where you can upload products that are then show in Google’s search results. Because Google shows them so frequently, this can be beneficial even if you only have a few products that you want to upload.

Continue reading “Optimising Joomla and Virtuemart for Google Base”

Some components to a great job of incorporating basic SEO ideas giving you the chance to add metadata, unique page titles and more. Other components are so stubbornly opposed to basic SEO thats its best to just tell Google to ignore them altogether.

Virtuemart is somewhere in between. Its has been getting better of recent months, but one area in which it still needs improvement is metadata – it doesn’t allow you to add any at all.

Whats the solution? ….

Continue reading “Virtuemart SEO 5 – Metadata”

Google Analytics is far and away the most common statistics package for webmasters to use. Thats particularly true for ecommerce webmasters who often appreciate the fact that it integrates with AdWords.

There’s one problem: using GA in a mambot or placing the code inside templates doesn’t work well if you’re using an SSL Certificate.

Sometimes the tracking is lost and sometimes it leads IE to produce errors (usually pop-ups saying "Some parts of this page contain unsecure information. Do you wish to continue?")

Continue reading “Virtuemart SEO 4 – Analytics”

Today’s Virtuemart SEO tip is short and sweet: how to set up a sitemap for Virtuemart.

First Choice

By far the best choice is the SEF Service Map in combination with its Virtuemart plugin. After installing the SEF Service Map, download the plugin and upload it to /administrator/components/com_sefservicemap.

This plugin provides quite a few options including the ability to show/hide products and categories, and show/hide product and category descriptions. It also includes a .txt site map for Yahoo.

Continue reading “Virtuemart SEO 3 – Sitemaps”

Yesterday we talked about the downside of URLs in Virtuemart and how you can easily end up with too many URLs pointing to the same page. Today we’ll talk about how to solve those duplicate content problems and about how easy it is to use Search Engine Friendly URLs.

Continue reading “Virtuemart SEO 2 – Search Engine Friendly URLs”

Every day this week we’re providing tips and tricks to help you improve the Search Engine Optimization of your Virtuemart shopping cart.

Tip 1:  Beware of Virtuemart’s Modules

We’ve talked often before about Duplicate Content and how it can cause searchbots to crawl your site less effectively. There are some major potential culprit in Virtuemart … the modules.

Continue reading “Virtuemart SEO 1 – Beware of the Modules”