REC 2.9.1 Tune Up

Date: 29th Apr 2013

Summary
This is a minor release with enhanced SEO for product meta data, performance tweaks and dashboard changes plus a new drag'n'drop sort ordering for downloads.


Product SEO Meta Data

When you add/edit products you can now override the default meta data used for SEO and displaying in search engine results with your own custom meta data. 


By default, in 2.9.1 when you add a product it takes: 


meta title from the product title field followed by the value in Site Settings > Search Engine Optimisation > Website Title


meta keywords from the product title field followed by the value in Site Settings > Search Engine Optimisation > Website Keywords


meta description from the first 150 characters of the product description field


However, you can now optimise each of these fields for each product to improve SEO effectiveness. Edit a product, on the main  details tab scroll to the bottom of the page and click Page Meta Tags to access the meta fields and enter your optimised data which will then be used for indexing and displayed in search engine results.


Click Update to save your changes.


We recommend you customise your data for maximum SEO results. Remember to change this data when you update product information.

Re-ordering Downloads Sort Order

Via Downloads Manager you can now drag and drop downloads into the position you want them to appear in when displayed on the web page.


Admin Dashboard

The main dashboard when you login has been updated and now includes your visitor statistics for the last 30 days taken directly from your Google Analytics account (assumes you have connected to Google Analytics - see Site Settings > Integrations 


SEO On Page Report Button Added To Other Content Pages
The SEO On Page Report can now be run on product and blog pages for you to check your SEO position. The button is positioned under the CKEditor content entry box as normal.


Memcache Performance Improvements

This is a new experimental technique for speeding up database queries to improve performance for searches and retrieving products and related data. All ecommerce sites will benefit from this, in particular auto parts sites which tend to have the largest number of products to query against. It is turned off by default.


To use this feature, go into Site Settings and tick Memcache caching support. Leave Default cache expiration seconds: blank for the default (86400) or set to zero (0) to never expire. If you set it to zero you'll need to manually refresh the cache via the Memcache Refresh program in Admin. 


NB After changing this value please run the Memcache Refresh program.

SEOMoz API Integration

This allows direct integration between the Marketing Console and SEOMoz's marketing data without passing through 3rd party services, in order to improve the reliability of retrieving data and avoiding zeros from sometimes displaying in the Marketing Console data. 


To set this up, register with SEOMoz as a free user and then access API keys via https://www.seomoz.org/api/keys/ 

Click "I agree to the SEOmoz Terms of Service" and click to "Generate Secret Key" then record the API Access ID and API Secret Key in Site Settings > Integrate > SEOMoz and tick the field entitled "Use seomoz for Marketing Console reports" 

Click Update Settings to save changes.

Note: It is recommended you set this up to get consistently reliable information on your Marketing Console reports. If you leave this blank you will still get data through, but on some occasions it returns a zero in one or two of the columns.