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We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables".

Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html

Would removing the category paths help?

Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables

More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest?

The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic?

Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.

Thanks for your advice, that completely makes sense. I think a Wordpress blog will create new opportunities that Magento is incapable of without serious development which is costly. We'll be sure to keep the same theme. Cheers

We installed the Magento 'Aheadworks' extension for our blog but it's quite limited as to what blogging capabilities it has. We are now considering integrating Wordpress for our new blog, but keeping both on the same domain to increase the domain authority.

My question is, should we keep the same theme throughout? The blog should be informative and not sales based, so we was thinking of ditching the whole theme for the blog and not having our category navigation bar. Yes we can still have internal linking which may drive traffic from the blog to the web store.

We have been recommended the Wordpress Integration by Fishpig but I understand this carries through the Magento theme so I'm not sure exactly how it works. Could Wordpress plugins cause issues with our Magento store or shouldn't we be worried about this?

Hi Kevin,

Great response, I will check out the Fishpig wordpress integration. I discussed the idea with our web development team and they dismissed the idea, although I do have a lot of experience with Wordpress and I feel that it has much more to offer than Magento from a blogging perspective. We already have a blog by the way but it's a Magento extension which doesn't really have much to offer. We will be keeping the blog and e-commerce site on the same domain to increase the domain authority although we was unsure whether to keep the same theme throughout.

We could either have a different theme for our blog and keep it 'information based' rather than keeping our product category navigation, although if someone adds an item to cart then decides to visit the blog, they cannot continue to checkout until they return back to the transactional website. It's a tricky one and an expensive mistake if we make the wrong decision.

Magento is fantastic for e-commerce although the blog capabilities are limited and our web development fees are just ongoing. I have great experience with wordpress sites and I don't have a bad word to say about the CMS, there are plugins available for everything you possibly need to develop the blog. Would it be a good idea to integrate a wordpress blog for our e-commerce store? To keep both the transactional website and the blog on the same domain, but have a different style for the blog so we're not trying to 'sell' to people looking for home improvement advice and DIY guides, our main priority with the blog is to grow the website authority.

Thanks Chad that really helps, I came across the experiment tool previously but wasn't aware this was for A/B testing. Cheers

This might be a silly questions as I may be missing something completely obvious here, but we are completely new to A/B testing. Our site doesn't receive a phenomenal amount of traffic although we are looking to set up some A/B testing for our popular products. Is there a way to split organic traffic for a specific product page. I'm aware that we need to experiment which one performs better in Analytics but I'm unsure how to redirect 50% of the organic traffic.

I've never come across this site but there are some excellent topics here that we could utilise. It does hurt the neck a little through!! Much appreciated.

We've had our blog for a little under 2 years now using Magento and we've only created 48 posts. As we're in the furniture industry topics are hard to come by and we've become stuck for ideas. Sure we have researched our audience, checked Q&A's and forums to analyse what questions our audience are asking, but the ideas are limited. It's a difficult industry to find niche articles that our audience would be interested in. Could anyone suggest any ideas on how we could find interesting topics that people would actually want to share and maybe our industry influencers would be interested in featuring on their sites, does syndication still work? Duplicate content is a big 'NO NO' for Google but as long as the third party site features a rel=canonical or link back to our original post, Google wouldn't have any problem with this?

Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.

Thanks for the advice, we will certainly implement this into our site.

Hi Ryan. Further to my original question, we've noticed some of the products we were appearing high for in the SERPS have now vanished. Although some are still showing. I assume this would be temporary whilst they are being reindexed. Should we be worried? The Web company did this without any warning.

I have recently come across the Schema markup and have researched what it's all about. Basically in short it helps search engines identify all the elements of the page. Our competitors have this implementated, so is this important for SEO? We have an e commerce store.

Life saver, I have made the changes you have suggested. Thanks very much for your help.

Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change.

Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up.

Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed?

Thanks

The import/export tool Magento has is really disappointing, especially when it comes to uploading images. Creating products manually is very time consuming. Could anyone recommend a method to upload products through a feed, is there any plugins etc?

We've recently taken off our Analytics universal tracking code and replaced with with the Google Tag Manager code for our website. I have set up a conversion tracking tag and linked it with our Analytics account, firing the rule for people who land on the thank you page url. Although it's still not tracking conversions, is there an additional code that we need to place on our thank you page in order to track peoples conversions and understand exactly where they are coming from etc.

Hi Joe, that's great advice. I guess as long as we mention the colours in the product description Google will pick up on that for searches.

Although there are a couple of downsides to having the alternate colours hidden. We have a colour filter on our website, so if someone is looking for an orange chair for example, the products wont appear.

The second issue is, say for example another customer is looking through our product catalogue for a grey chair, and they see the configurable product with a picture of a black chair... they won't know to click on the product to check out the grey variation. Unless we have further development done and have 'also available in more colours' etc.

Thanks

I can't find any information on this anywhere. We have hundreds of configurable products, all with coloured variations. For example, one of our popular selling chairs comes in 8 different colours. Now, should all these coloured variations be visible individually (and have their own url) or only visible when selected from the dropdown?

The problem is, when they have their own url it's going to cause duplicate content issues. It's merely impossible to write a different brief for the same product in 8 different colours. The second issue is, if they are visible individually, one colour is going to be shown TWICE to users, one being the simple product and one being the main configurable.

I hope you kind people can help!