Introduction

As a company, we’ve been installing, configuring, integrating and consulting to business regarding e-commerce systems for over 7 years, so from the beginning, we knew the direction when we wanted to take our own e-commerce product.   With roots deep in the wine industry, the Aptalent team understands the real direct-to-consumer issues producers face today; our e-commerce system seeks to help make wine purchase & shipping easy for the customer, and site administration a no-brainer for the producer.  With features such as product searching & comparision, compliance intelligence, simple checkout and built-in SEO optimization, the Aptalent e-commerce system (borrowing from Gary V. ) “crushes” it!

SEO Features

The democratization of the direct-to-consumer market is leveling the playing field for smaller producers with limited distributor access. Combined with a coherent social media presence, a sound SEO strategy can help raise a brand’s market presence; Aptalent’s e-commerce systems helps producers maximize their SEO strategy by combining best-in-class product search features with built-in search intelligence.

Easy-to-read product URLs

Based on the Magento open-source engine, Aptalent’s e-commerce system generates product URLs that are easy for both users and search engines to read (i.e. such as “http://{your-domain}/2007-grenache-rose.html”). Using product (and category) detail within the URL means that search engines know where your products are and can directly link to them — driving targeted customers directly into the core of your store.
* Search engine “spiders” can index your entire store and increase your product’s visibility — thereby increasing the probability of new customer acquisition and increased sales;
* Search engines and product comparison sites can link directly to your products, helping to drive revenue with highly targeted leads;
* Descriptive URL’s help users make sense of and increase the quality of your site’s navigation;
* URLs with incorporated keywords boost natural search engine ranking and increase site traffic.

Canonical URLs

Aptalent’s e-commerce system uses the canonical HTML tag, support for which was announced recently by Google, Yahoo! and Live. Essentially, this means that your products can be indexed in a multitude of ways (for customer review and searching convenience), and the search engines won’t penalize your site. Previously, many sites have encountered issues with multiple versions of the same content on different URLs. This creates three big problems:
* Search engines don’t know which content version(s) to include/exclude from their indices;
* Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions;
* Search engines don’t know which content version(s) to rank for query results
When this happens, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses and engines suffer lowered relevancy. Fortunately, the Aptalent e-commerce system handles all of this for you — potentially increasing your site’s visibility, search-ability, and search relevance.

Contact Aptalent today and let us show you how we can help you maximize your SEO strategy and increase sales!

Introduction

Can social media help producers expand their market, and extend their brand?  Is social media a fad or does it represent a siesmic sales-channel shift?

As you have undoubtedly heard by now, social media purports to change the customer-communication model; in many ways social media is like a cocktail party, making it possible for like-minded people to find one another and communicate.   Wine enthusiasts, for example, have a multitude of options for sharing their likes, questions and stories (more on this later), and since wine is inherently social, wine producers + (appropriately harnessed) social media should equal a perfect pairing.   What aspects of social media should a producer harness, and just as importantly, how?

Social Media Components

Decanting the panoply of relevant social media components can seem daunting, however, there really are a handful of useful tools that can get you started.  I’ve broken them out by category:

Networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter offer ways of connecting with customers: better than in the old broadcast (advertising, promotion) model — networking tools allow producers to start a two-way conversation with wine enthusiasts. In its most simplistic state, networking helps build brand awareness, and more importantly, listen to potential customers. Video and blogs help with brand identity and brand awareness (think: search).

Does Social Media Really Change Anything?

Using social media networking tools is a great way for producers to communicate directly with their current customers.  But in addition, the use of video and blogging tools helps build brand identity and market penetration — especially with younger enthusiasts.  

A couple of examples: Facebook has more than 175 million users (and there are more users ages 26-44 than 18-25 — insidefacebook.com).   Creating a Facebook community can help keep the brand fresh in enthusiasts minds.  In the same vein, Twitter allows a producer to present personality and a spirit of caring to current and potential customers.  

With youtube.com in the top 3 Internet sites, a video indexed by Google helps lift a brand in a related search. Video + blogging tools help increase a site’s (and associated product’s) search scores, and thus results (when used as part of a sensible overall SEO strategy). Combined, these tools represent a systemic shift in the ways a producer can open/create and keep new dialogs with enthusiasts. 

What Is the Community Saying? 

Customers are talking.  A producer should choose to listen. An easy example, here are a couple of Twitter posts representing customer opinions expressed during recent weekend tasting excursions:  

“Featherstone, ’03 vineyard of the yr. Beautiful resto on the veranda. Amazing 07 cab franc and sauv b credit card gonna suffer today #wine”

Outstanding!  Let’s share this with the world! Somms listen up!  Wouldn’t it be great to capture the feedback and begin an on-going conversation with this customer?  Perhaps he/she could be introduced to other varietals/vintages or perhaps more could be learned regarding value-added services (for instance wine club membership) that would interest them.

Here is a slightly different post:

“Can’t believe [XXX Winery] closed their picnic area to visitors. #Wine Club members only now. I guess they have enough business. Shame”

Even established brands can benefit from having a social media cognizance.  Can a producer capture or reply to every relevant post? Probably not. Should they try? Hell yes.

How To Harness The Tools

Harnessing the power of social media is an on-going effort, and one that will take time.  Start simply, and plan on it taking time to find the right “voice” for your brand, and to begin building a social media rapport with your customers.  Some brands have already recognized social media’s potential and are moving quickly to get their conversations going.  One well known example is Murphy-Goode Winery – hiring a “Lifestyle Correspondent” who will “report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country, and of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking”.   

Murphy-Goode’s approach may be all-out, but here’s an example of a common-sense approach to harnessing social media: V. Sattui Winery .  Check them out!  They have a direct-link to their Facebook account, and are using embedded YouTube video (“The Wine Guys”) to promote their brand. 

Pick the Low-Hanging Social Media Fruit

Can social media help producers expand their market, and extend their brand? Absolutely. As we’ve discussed, the thoughtful use of networking, video and blogging tools can help a producer better hear the enthusiast’s voice, and increase brand awareness.

Our goal was to add a few fields to the standard Magento Registration form (Magento 1.21, using the default template structure), enabling us to capture information such as company name, and phone.

Solution

The standard registration page URL is: /customer/account/create/

and calls register.phtml ( in the path: /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/customer/form/).

We accomplished our goal by following these four steps:

1) We added php/html form elements necessary to create new input boxes for each additional field in register.phtml: (i.e. here’s the code for the company_name element):

3) Add to the content of $customer in AccountController.php (path: /app/code/core/Mage/Customer/controllers/) by grabbing the new fields from posted info, in the createPostAction() function:

I wanted to make the permalink URLs for our Aptalent Solutions blog a bit friendlier — for instance in the format: “http://example.com/category/post-name/”. Since we are using Apache2 under Linux (2.6 kernel) and WordPress 2.7, we needed to make the following 3 changes:
1) ensure mod_rewrite is enabled in apache2: depending on your distro, mod_rewrite may be off by default. To enable, we needed to edit our apache httpd.conf file and ensure the following line was uncommented:
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

We then needed to find the mod_rewrite.so file (on our system it was located in the /usr/lib/httpd/modules folder) and copy it to the “modules” folder under apache (using a command such as “cp /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_rewrite.so /usr/local/apache2/modules/” (make sure to substitue the location of your apache modules folder).
We  then needed to restart the apache server (…/apache2/bin/apachectl restart), and check that mod_so.c shows up in Apache’s included modules (the command “apachectl -l” will show you which Apache modules are currently loaded). 
2) add an “AllowOverride” directive to the virtualhost entry: we had to make sure that our apache server’s WordPress site entry had the following entry (located within the conf’s <VirtualHost> entry):

 <Directory “/var/www/vhosts/WP-physical-directory/”>

                AllowOverride all

                Options FollowSymLinks

                Order allow,deny

                Allow from all

       </Directory>

Where “WP-physical-directory” is the actual physical folder where your WP site lives.

3) add an .htaccess file: in the root folder of our WordPress installation, we ran the following commands:
touch .htaccess
chmod 755 .htaccess

And finally, in our WordPress admin, under “Settings”, “Permalinks” we chose the “Custom” radio button, and typed “/%category%/%postname%” (without the quote marks) as the custom structure format.

Now we can post a permalink URL such as http://www.aptdev.com/wordpress/creating-pretty-permalinks-in-wordpress

Happy posting.