Setting up an HID kits website in Magento

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well it is finally finished, me and my m8 Vincent have spent the last week solidly working on his new website which sells HID kits and HID bulbs (those pages are probably blank at the moment as he still needs to add a lot of the products). I’d been researching which software to use a few months ago and had decided to use Magento, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised.

Magento - brilliant for SEO
Magento – brilliant for SEO

There was a hell of a learning curve, some things just aren’t explained anywhere – for example we spent four hours trying to figure out why the menu wasn’t working – we tried loads of things included re-installing. In the end it turned out it wasn’t a problem with the template/code – we simply couldn’t add new root categories (kinda stupid) – which is fine, once you know how!!! Anyways, this was just one example of the difficulties we faced, but in the end we persevered and I’m quite pleased with the result.

We actually bought a Magento template for $180 for Template Monster – and it was well worth it, when we couldn’t get it working properly we just passed over our login to Template Monster and they got it sorted, from there I just had to edit images, links and text.

SEO wise it is pretty good, although there are a few issues like the filter by category not linking to the absolute category page and instead linking to a dynamic one, creating duplicate content issues – also the way the drop down menu works means you are linking to every single category on the site!!! Both of these issues can be fixed quite easily though (although I still have to get round to doing it).

If you want to take a look at the site, it is called HID Origin.

Modern Warfare Ranking Overloads My Site on Day of Release

Posted by David Whitehouse

I wasn’t really ready for this, in fact I hadn’t really paid attention to my Modern Warfare Help site.

Today, in case you didn’t know, Modern Warfare 2 was released and it was:

  • All over the news
  • A hot trend on Google
  • Trending on Twitter

Little did I know I was about experience my first visitor overload, which until now my cheap shared hosting account could cope with (largely due to the fact that I get very little visitors, except for SEO Specialist which does ok). So I was checking my email when I noticed around 5 people all subscribing to my Modern Warfare site within a few minutes, at which point I knew I must be getting some decent traffic. I checked analytics, the top term was “Modern Warfare 2 Tips“, so I happily went to Google and typed it in, to find that I was number 1! Nice surprise, huh? So I clicked the link and then saw my site die on its arse, along with all my other websites!!! Despite having the WP Super Cache plugin!

Anyways, I contacted support, and they said it was just the server, they did some adjustments and now all is tickity boo! Although perhaps I need some better hosting? Who knows…

Piano Planet giving SEOs a bad name!

Posted by David Whitehouse

Can you believe it? Spam. For Pianos. No, really!

Paul’s just written a post about Piano Planet Spam, it is exactly the type of thing people have been complaining about recently, and it just gives SEO’s like us a bad name.

I don’t consider myself to be a spammer, ocassionally I might lose myself and doing something slightly spammy, but usually I try and keep it above board, on topic and high quality.

What is even worse is that the idiot had the audacity to have a go at Paul (and his bad driving). It seems Paul isn’t the only one being plagued by these spammers, either.