Most ecommerce merchants want their products to stand out from the competitors’ in search engines and attract more site visitors. By using Google’s Rich Snippets you can get the desired results and increase up to 30% the number of people who click on your site link.

WHAT ARE RICH SNIPPETS?

Rich Snippets provide users with the detailed information about the page’s product price, availability (whether it’s in stock or not) and reviewer ratings. The most vivid benefit of rich snippets is that they increase click through rate chances. They help potential customers to identify the info they’re searching for with the concerned link without clicking on it.

BENEFITS OF RICH SNIPPETS FOR ECOMMERCE MERCHANTS

1. Draw users’ attention and attract more qualified visitors.
2. Increase click-through rate and reduce bounce rate, as people see the information before accessing the site.
3. Help your site stand out from the competitors.

GOOGLE DOESN’T SUPPORT:

1. Rich Snippets for adult related products;
2. Product markup on listing page (only specific product page);
3. Promotional names in reviews like “15% off for all organic balms” (only real names like “Peter Janson” for individuals or “MageWorx reviewers” for organizations)
4. Websites that don’t provide direct purchasing and resend to the reseller’s/ vendor’s sites.

TYPES OF RICH SNIPPETS

Rich snippets are different depending on what type you want to implement on your ecommerce store:
1. Breadcrumbs - help Google understand what your pages are about and show the links within individual search result.
2. Products – display the price, availability and reviews
3. Events – display dates, price, location, images of the events
4. Authorship – Authorship Markup for your articles or blog posts
5. People - display photo, job title, company’s name, social connections
6. Reviews - display reviews and ratings for products
7. Recipes – display ingredients, cooking time, calories, reviews, photos
8. Business Organizations – name, phone number, website

Some more helpful articles about Google Rich Snippets and Structured data.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT RICH SNIPPETS IN MAGENTO

The process of implementing rich snippets to your ecommerce store will depend on the platform you use, so you might do some research at first.

Magento store owners could either implement rich snippets by themselves using special guides like:
Inchoo – Sample of Breadcrumbs integration (Don’t forget to read the comments to make everything clear)
Yoast- great overview on how to include Reviews and Product tags into Rich Snippets.

Or you could use Magento extensions like:
SEO Suite Ultimate – rich snippets support (integration of any type of RS: reviews, products, events and so on)

WHAT TO DO AFTER YOU’VE INTEGRATED RICH SNIPPETS

TEST THEM: Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Conclusion: Rich Snippets are absolutely great and we see no reason why you  should wait with adding them to your ecommerce store. Remember, rich snippets may take some time to appear in search engines, so don’t worry if you won’t see them the next day.

If you run an online store, write blogposts about your products or service and promote your brand in social media you can’t overlook image optimization. Images are both important for search and marketing. For ecommerce retailers proper image optimization can give important visibility in search engines thus catching the consumer’s attention.

Some of you may be thinking: ”Who cares about image search?“

But wait a second and take into account these 2 main advantages you get right after proper image optimization:

1. Image Ranking for relevant search in Google Images, Image Search Yahoo or Bing Images.
2. Keyword Relevance of the Page will generate more solid traffic.

Get ready to make search engine friendly images and improve their rankings with our tips:

STEP #1: MAKE YOUR FILE NAME DESCRIPTIVE AND KEYWORD RICH

Google bots can determine what your page is about only by the text on it. They can’t read images but they can search for the keywords within the image file name.

Make sure your file name is relevant, because no one will find or search for the image titled DCIM005.jpg.

Keywords are everything, so why not to make your file name incorporate them (but do not overstuff).

For example, the file name of the image “aviator-sunglasses-with-orange-lenses.jpg” would be more preferable than just too generic “sunglasses.jpg”.

STEP #2: UPDATE YOUR ALT TAGS

The Alt tag is probably the most important image optimization factor.  Writing descriptive and keyword-rich Alt tags helps search engine robots to “see” your website’s image.

The Alt text for the image above should be: Alt=”aviator sunglasses with orange lenses”

The full code will look like:

<img src=“http://www.mageworx.com/aviator-sunglasses-with-orange-lenses.jpg” alt=”aviator sunglasses with orange lenses“>

HOW TO CREATE GOOD ALT TAGS:

• They should be keyword-rich.
• Avoid keyword stuffing, as it makes your website look spammy to the robots.
• Be specific, as general keywords are difficult to rank high.

STEP #3: RESIZE YOUR IMAGES TO REDUCE LOAD TIME

Load time is absolutely important for site visitors.What is more, load time affects Google Rankings.

The size of your images influences the load time which in its term is the major factor of page abandonment.

• 40% of consumers abandon a website that load more than 3 seconds on their desktops or laptops;
• most customers will wait about 5 seconds for a website to load on their mobile devices.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE IMAGE FILE SIZE

There are 2 things you should always consider while optimizing your image file size:

1. File Type
2. Saving Methods

Mostly 3 file types are being used for the web product images: JPEG, PNG and GIF. The difference is in the quality result.

GIF format is typically used for small resolution files like logos, buttons, icons, simple graphics, symbols and animation. The format supports transparency which is great when you place it over color backgrounds or photos, as in this case you won’t see any border between the images.
DON’T use GIF format for photos due to the limited 256 colors.

JPEG format is the best for photos and complex images as it supports 16,5 mln colors. The main advantage of JPEG is that it can have relatively small size with really good quality.

PNG format is used when you need to preserve transparency and a large amount of colors. There are 2 PNG formats: PNG-8 and PNG-24.
PNG-8 doesn’t support transparency and is used for images with simple colors like logos or buttons.
PNG-24 does support transparency and as it handles many colors it’s good for complex images and photos like JPEG.

IMPORTANT: the size of PNG format will be 5-10 times bigger than the size of JPEG.
TIPS FOR CHOOSING FILE FORMAT:

• Use GIF for animated files;
• Use PNG-8 for simple color images (buttons, logos);
• Use PNG-24 for photos or complex images when you need transparency and not afraid of large size;
• Use JPEG for photos as it provides the best quality & the smallest file size. So, ecommerce merchants, in most cases JPEG will the best choice for you.

SAVING METHODS
Once you’ve made your image look perfect for the site visitors & decided what file format to choose it’s high time to save it. If you use Photoshop than go to the Save for Web & Devices dialog (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Alt + S).

There are only few features that you’ll use most:

WHAT SIZE SHOULD WEB IMAGES BE?

Try to keep the image size at around 70 kb. But if you could make your file images even smaller without them looking awful, go ahead.

STEP #4. DON’T FORGET ABOUT IMAGE SITEMAPS

Give Google information about your images by including them in the sitemap. In this case you’ll need to add image specific tags. You could find a lot of guides on how to do this, one of them is Google Image Sitemaps.

CONCLUSION

Take care of file naming, alt text and image size. Don’t forget to check the loading time of your images on different browsers and always keep in mind: TESTING is the key element of your work. Test everything – the keywords, the number of product images on the page, the number of product items on the page, what kind of photos your visitors want to see and so on.

Digital marketing in today’s world has become an essential part of business promotion. No need to explain that having just a website isn’t enough for prosperous development. Without quality SEO optimization, blogging, email, mobile and social marketing your brand may stay somewhere in the middle of endless similar-looking websites. So what is digital marketing and how to use it correctly? The answer is in the infographic below.

The world of ecommerce is a playground of ideas and creativity. Fancy a business built on art and recycled scrap metal. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?
If yes, then go on reading and learn more about Art From Steel - the largest workshop in the world producing handmade metal statues.

Everything started 7 years ago…
“When I saw my first 7ft scrap metal alien at a local Thai market I knew immediately that it was unique and would impress everybody who saw it. I had a great opportunity because there are just a handful of workshops here and none of the owners have experience marketing online. This industry needed somebody with an understanding of the western customers, an ability to speak Thai and an understanding of e-commerce – so I stepped up to the plate.” – says Martin Pavion, founder of Art From Steel.

Art From Steel offers…
Art From Steel is a company producing handmade artwork statues from steel, recycled from automobiles and other scrap metal. The store offers and sells amazing statues from Aliens, Transformers, Superheroes and Star Wars characters to Wall-E, Mickey Mouse, Shrek and Michael Jackson statues. All of them range in size from 3 inches (7.6 cm) to 13 feet (4 meters) and cost from $15 to $15.000.

Art From Steel and competitors…
Martin Pavion continues: “Art From Steel has both a fantastic workshop, a modern website and the largest selection of recycled scrap metal statues in the world. We now hold stock in America and England to save customers on shipping costs. Perhaps our biggest industry advantage is in the western-Thai partnership that exists between myself and the Thai artists. It’s my job to speak with the customers and to communicate their needs to the workshop. We’ve earned ourselves some truly fantastic customers this year, a few of who ordered from our competitors first and had a poor experience.

Art From Steel and key points of success…
In hindsight I’d advise everybody to consider multi-channel selling. If you have your own website then the responsibility is solely on you to get visitors to find you. If you sell on existing marketplaces like Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, Etsy etc. then these companies already have an established marketing machine aimed at promoting everything you sell. Definitely run your own website but make yourself known on every other sales channel you’re able to list on too.

Art From Steel and Magento…
My site, and most e-commerce sites are ultimately about selling products. The most important consideration is how simple it is for my customers to place their order and Magento does a great job with this. Every promotion I’ve considered; coupons, group-buy deals, free shipping, deal-of-the-day, refer-a-friend deals are available with Magento.

Another feature which got me really excited with this platform is how Magento scripts are available to sync orders and stock with eBay and Amazon stores. We have a lot of statues that sell for less than $20 and the last thing I wanted to do was spend my life copying and pasting orders from external stores and updating the stock levels. The beauty of having this type of integration is that eBay and Amazon are already working hard for you to market everything you sell.

Art From Steel and MageWorx…
I’m a big fan of your SEO Suite Pro extension because it’s largely responsible for landing us our biggest customer. I installed it on the advice of my programmer and it really got me to be conscious of how our site was being seen by search engines.

The story of how MageWorx extension helped Art From Steel…
SEO Suite was the first step we took in getting ourselves ranked in search engines. Within 4 weeks of installing SEO Suite we got contacted by an American museum chain who’ve given us some fantastic orders during the last 12 months and they found us through a Google search. They conducted a similar search 6 months before and gave the business to a competitor because we were ranked below them.

Art From Steel advice…
Keep out of my industry!!! :) Seriously, I’d work hard to identify things you can sell where you have a clear advantage over others in the industry. Perhaps you hold specialized knowledge over a machine that you work with every day, or you know a great artist who loves creating things but needs somebody to help him get sales. Perhaps you know of something that’s already popular but hasn’t been marketed overseas. Perhaps the industry is run by rusty old businessmen with no understanding of online marketing and you can enter and outmarket them.The best and worst thing about the Internet is that its very easy to hire somebody to completely rip off an existing website. If you’re running your business where somebody could do that to you and take away your sales, it’s probably worth selling something else.

It’s never easy to set up a business,  that’s why you need to think carefully of every single step: from the idea to the choice of platform. And the latter one is evident…Magento!

Magento is the most popular and feature-rich ecommerce software. According to October 2012 Ecommerce Survey Magento, with a 23% share of the market, still leads the pack in the Alexa Top 1 Million… and it’s not a surprise Magento is used worldwide by many small businesses and big brands. And the latter we are going to discuss today. 

Below are just 10 great brands based on the most popular ecommerce software platform. Here we go, Ladies & Gentlemen… Top 10 World Brands Using Magento.

1. Samsung

There is no need to introduce this South Korean giant. Being one of the leading brands in electronics Samsung uses Magento ecommerce platform for its online Mobile Shop site.
Website: mobileshop.samsung.fr

2. Ford

World-famous American brand Ford uses Magento for its Ford Accessories Online website. As for the technical part of the site, it uses PHP framework, Fancybox Javascript and Shockwave flash embed.
Website: accessories.ford.com

3. Fox Connect

Magento based ecommerce website for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment company was launched on 6 January 2010. Since then Fox Connect uses Magento for their ecommerce growth.
Website: foxconnect.com

4. Lenovo

Magento is an open-source platform that promises to revolutionize ecommerce industry. That’s why many famous brands like Chinese hardware and electronics company Lenovo have chosen exactly Magento as their ecommerce solution.
Website: outlet.lenovo.com

5. Olympus

Japanese corporation Olympus is one more example of a well-known and large brand that is also run on Magento ecommerce platform.
Website: getolympus.com

6. Men’s Health

Founded in the U.S. the world’s largest men’s magazine brand Men’s Health has chosen Magento for its online store. 
Website: shop.menshealth.com

7. Vizio

Consumer electronics company Vizio is one of the largest and well-known brands in the U.S. that offers the latest Home Audio, HDTVs, PCs, Tablets, Blu-Ray Players and Accessories products. No need to say that Vizio is a Magento based store.
Website: vizio.com 

8. Christian Louboutin

Louboutin shoes … Any fashion-monger or trendy person knows and loves this brand. Famous shoes became the cult of its time and are chosen by fashion icons and celebrities worldwide. French designer Christian Louboutin has decided to run his online store on Magento of course
Website: christianlouboutin.com 

9. Nike

“Nike’s first Facebook store was launched in Australia with the help of a digital agency, IE, and Magento Enterprise”, says Dallas Boland, Retail Director of Nike Australia, in the interview to Magento community.
Website: apps.facebook.com/nikestorerunau

10. Nestle Nespresso

Swiss brand Nestle Nespresso offers its customers coffee machines, coffee capsules and related accessories. Nespresso company uses Magento platform since 2009.
Website: boutique.nespresso.com

More than 100.000+ merchants all over the world use Magento platform for their business development and improvement. World brands are not the exception. So,  maybe it’s high time for you to choose Magento!