As the marketing arm of the Extreme Website Makeover project, it’s my responsibility to arrange and organize the marketing and SEO for Robbin’s Wreaths.

Since I started looking at Magento last year, I’ve been extremely impressed with it as an eCommerce solution; I really thought it would be a great tool for Robbin’s Wreaths.  The eCommerce framework is sound and there seemed to be a lot of extensions and add ons for it.

I say ’seemed’ because I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at it; probably an hour all told.  Knowing the the design for Robbin’s is on it’s way, I decided to have a look at the SEO options for Magento.  Thankfully, the kind folks at Hosting Nation allowed me to use their Magento demo to experiment with the options available.

I have to give a tip of the hat to Yoast, who did this amazing article on SEO for Magento.  If you’re a novice, the steps might be a little daunting.  I’m a salty old SEO dog though.  I’ve done SEO for Joomla and Virtuemart.  I’ve done SEO for WordPress and other custom PHP sites, even coordinated on a strategy for a giant .asp eCommerce site.

This is the first time I’ve ever done SEO for Magento, or used the system at all. I’m going into it virtually blind, counting only on Yoast’s tutorial to guide my way.

Step one: Configuration

This part is simple.  Once logged into the admin area of Magento, I follow Yoast’s steps to set global configuration and SEO settings.  Next, he recommends canonicalizing your domain – basically redirecting the WWW to non-WWW version (or vise versa).  No problem there, I can just refer to my URL Canonicalization Script and copy the rules over to a new file.   I continue with the tutorial and complete the configuration by installing the two extensions Yoast provides for meta management.  The whole process has been a breeze up to this point, much less complex than installations I’ve done with other content management systems.

Step two: Optimization

Easy.  Navigate through the upper menu to the page, category or product you want to add keywords for.  Open the meta information screen for the project and add the keywords you want.  Save, and your titles are added.

Now, there are a lot more steps to optimizing your site laid out in Yoast’s post and I haven’t finished about 90% of them.  I did accomplish what I set out to do, check my options for Magento SEO and make sure I had it down before tackling Robbin’s Wreaths.  No problem, within 20 minutes I had my first title entered into the system.  The most amazing part is that I’ve never used the system before. Now that I’ve started, I’m really looking forward to more.  Thanks to Yoast, and Magento, this is going to be a pleasure.

The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate and disagree.

It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner.  My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.

In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee.  The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again.  One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.

It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different.  Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.

Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries.  One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”.  My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.

I’ve been having an unrequited love affair with semicolons for some time now. Oh, if you look through my posts you won’t be likely to find any; I haven’t been comfortable that I’m using them correctly when I write.  That is, until now.  Inspired by a 2009 post on Daggle titled conjunction complex sentence misfunction that Danny Sullivan twote this afternoon and a recent comic by The Oatmeal titled: How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on earth, I’ve decided to bring semicolons into my life more.

5 ways I’m bringing the semicolon into my life.

• I will use “and”, “but” and other conjunctions less; I will confidently use commas and semicolons instead.
• I will make more winkies in chat programs; I will discover other emoticons that require semicolons.

Ok, that’s only two.  I’m sure I can come up with three more.  Follow me on Twitter to see what they are!

You may be wondering what this has to do with link building. Stay tuned, I’m making my next post about it.

If you haven’t heard, I’m involved in the Extreme Website Makeover project.  Extreme Website Makeover is a joint project with Hosting Nation, Oceanside Web TV, Fusion Creative, Square Eyes Media, and Harbour City SEO.

We’re currently working with Robbin’s Wreaths of Parksville and providing them with a FREE state of the art e-commerce system for their small wreath manufacturing business.  The site will include a custom design built on the Magento framework, hosting and a domain, graphic design, development, programming, internet marketing and search engine optimization.  As we work to complete their new site, we’re taking applications for new contenders.

If you have an engaging story to tell about your company and the challenges you have faced to get onto the web, we’d love to hear about it.  You never know, you could be selected to receive a custom website valued over $5000, absolutely free!

How do you apply?  Well, drop me a line through my contact form or visit extreme website makeover to get the complete application.

Incidentally, items like this are a great way to promote your business.  Getting involved with community driven projects and coordinating with other agencies work wonders for building your online presence.

Above: Verdana, Below: Georgia - which speaks to you?

Type speaks.  The typefaces you use on your website will change how users perceive and interpret information.  The last few years have shown some major advances in the ways we are able to use different fonts on our websites.  You can use the @font face syntax in your CSS files to load a font from a remote server (A List Apart has a great article), and companies like FontSquirrel go so far as to provide @font face kits, styles just need to be copied and pasted.

You can also try Cufón; Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.  It’s meant to act as a simple alternative to sIFR, which is known to be complicated to use and configure.

But we’re not quite there.  Fonts are very heavily licensed, and though there are free fonts available for use – chances are that you’ll end up using one of the 8 core web fonts rather than trying to find a free font that’s easily readable.  Those core fonts are all owned and licensed by the Microsoft Foundry, which is why you’ll find them in your version of MS office. They are made of up of three serif fonts (fonts with ‘feet’) and five sans-serif (no feet).

Serif fonts:  Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier

Serif fonts are often claimed to be more easily readable.  In my mind they project a certain inherent seriousness and trustworthiness, like the voice of a newscaster.  That’s not to say they do for everyone, there’s no empirical evidence that serifs are easier to read than sans-serif and in fact, sans-serif fonts weren’t widely adopted until the 20th century. Serif fonts are most closely associated with news and information; I like Times New Roman for headlines and Georgia for text in this case.

Sans-serif fonts: Arial, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans, Impact, Verdana.

Forget Comic Sans or Impact for general text, neither are easily readable at small resolutions though I find Impact works well for headlines.  For text, you’ll be choosing between Verdana and Arial most likely as Trebuchet MS can look nice, but can be tricky when users don’t have that font installed.  Given the choice, I would choose Verdana.  Created in 1996 for Microsoft, it’s one of the most commonly used and readable fonts out there – like the Helvetica of the web.

Don’t forget the spacing.

Whichever you choose, make sure you pay close attention to the spacing: that’s line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing.  Too close together and the words become hard to read.  Too far apart and you may have “rivers” running through your text.

For now, our choices are still limited.

While the foundries and the browser companies hash out issues of licensing more fonts for standard use on webpages, choices to users without a lot of CSS experience are still limited.  Just try to remember that it’s not about what you like, the goal of type is to make a thing easy and enjoyable to read.  Until next time!

Applied Theory is a web comic about axioms, models, theories, maxims, principles, laws and postulates.  This is the first issue.  Click on the comic for a larger version.  Also, go ahead and download it, share it, hot link to it, repost it or whatever – just leave the copyright intact.