E-Commerce for All http://pro-webs.net/blog E-Commerce Tips, Tricks and Tribulations Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:55:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/02/08/search-engine-ranking-factors-2009/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/02/08/search-engine-ranking-factors-2009/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:55:21 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=871 Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Ranking Factors

SEOMoz’s 2009 Search Ranking Factors survey uses a collective polling of some top names in SEO, including Aaron Wall, Michael Gray, Jill Whalen, Rand Fishkin, Vanessa Fox  and 67 additional top industry contributors who are invited to give their opinion regarding the weight of algorithmic factors for natural search in 2009.

The value of this report for the average website owner is huge, for me it is both highly valuable and thought provoking information, and some redemption as well.

Google and the other search engines use a highly complicated, algorithmic math program to analyze and rank websites in organic search. These algorithms are not made publicly available, thus SEO’s, like myself spend most of our time testing theories and analyzing statistics in order to develop effective SEO campaigns.

2009 was a pretty tumultuous year for organic search, all three of the top search engines made huge changes to their algorithms and we also saw the launch of Bing. These events made significant changes in the way we think and optimize websites. Fact is, 2010 is already looking to be an even bigger year of changes and SEO’s will need to keep their ears to the ground to keep up and be successful.

If I had to pick a phrase to best describe SEO, it would be:

Analyze, adapt and overcome

Top 5 2009 Ranking Factors

  1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links (73% very high importance): This is simply other websites linking out to you with good anchor text. Anchor text is the visually click-able part of the link. We want to see links such as “SEO Services” opposed to “Click Here” to add the proper weight to the link. I personally strongly agree with this opinion from the panel, but would add that the surrounding text of the link, or lack of text is probably just as important. So essentially a link list is not nearly as effective as a link in the middle of a related paragraph for example.
  2. External Link Popularity quantity/quality of external links (71% very high importance): This ranking factors hasn’t changed too much, basically, more links are better… More of the better links are substantially better. What makes a link better? Links from trusted, authoritative or seed sites carry more weight, links from topically related pages and domains carry more weight and more is still better. I very much agree with this and would add only that, getter better links is far more important than the number of links.
  3. Diversity of Link Sources links from many unique root domains (67% very high importance): This means that for example, 10K links from different pages in the same domain is not as effective as 10K links from 10,000 different domains. You will hear many say that Google only “counts” one link from each domain, and while I disagree, I will say that they are severely discounted. So I agree with this finding as well and you should be seeking out as many backlinks from different domain sources as you can to get the most from your link building efforts.
  4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag (66% very high importance): Your title tag is not a Meta tag, but rather an element tag in the <head> of your pages. This is the information between the <title> tags and what generally displays in your browser tab heading as well. Your title tag and its relevance to the page’s content is hands down the number 1 on page ranking factor. Proper use of keywords in this element carries a great deal of weight. The more relevant the tag to the page’s content, the more weight. Additionally note that the first words (left to right) are also given a bit more weight that the words further right. I strongly agree and this is probably your best time spent with your on page optimization.
  5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted (66% very high importance): This is a little more difficult to understand, but essentially, just like PageRank, your distance from the trusted domain also factors as a degrade in weight/score. So if I have a page about “Green Bananas” and I have a link from GreenBananas.com that is best, but if GreenBananas.com links to FreshBananas.com who links to me, the weight is less. I very strongly agree with this, but conclude that most people are not able to determine what a trusted domain is. So for the sake of application, shop owners should concentrate on topically related links.

There are quite a few more ranking factors that were polled and we have found some additional tools for shop owners in these as well.

  • Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com): Without being spammy, hard to spell or easily confused, using a keyword in your domain name is a very effective tool. Avoid dashes, non-phonetic words, number/letter substitution and urbanized spellings… But yes, clean short domain names that carry a keyword will give you a leg up.
  • Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag: The very first heading tag on your page should be an <h1>. Proper, not spammy use of keywords in this tag carry some weight and should be executed by shop owners. Note that a heading tag logically describes the content right below it, and thus another on page factor of importance…. Most important as close to the top of the page as you can achieve, is given more weight than the content after/below it. (Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page)
  • Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page: Uniqueness! Is your page’s content duplicated elsewhere on the web, including your own site? Is there enough page unique content to allow the page to be considered unique within your template’s repetitive textual content? Using the manufacturers description is probably the biggest mistake we see here, it’s duplicate. Additionally, products and categories without a decent amount of unique text are duplicate with your own pages.
  • Recency (freshness) of Page Creation: This is one I have been preaching for over a year. Google especially, wants to know that the lights are on AND someone is home. Set your mind and schedule to create at least a new page a week.
  • Use of Links on the Page that Point to Other URLs on this Domain: Are you linking to yourself with good anchor text? How about your category menu, those are links too. Most effective internal linking will come from links to specific pages within a body of textual content.
  • Historical Content Changes (how often the page content has been updated): Your Zen Cart helps you a great deal already with this, by displaying changing content features in your pages…. But updating your pages frequently helps you rank.
  • Blogging and Engagement with the Blogosphere: Blogs are a very highly effective means of both delivering and maintaining fresh content… add the link bait factor and this becomes a must have tool for every shop owner in 2009 and more so in 2010!

Here are some comments on these factors from panelists you may find very interesting:

Russell Jones – If Google only ranked the “tried and true”, their results would be old and outdated. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to come by.

Andy Beal – Keyword use in external link anchor text is one of the top SEO factors overall. I’ve seen sites rank for competitive keywords—without even mentioning the keyword on-page—simply because of external link text.

Andy Beard – Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag – ignore them unless using a blogging platform which can use the same keywords as tags. Google ignores them.

Christine Churchill – Taking the time to create a good title tag has the biggest payoff of any on-page criteria. Just do it!

Peter Wailes – Domain name keyword usage gains most of its strength through what anchor text people are then likely to link to you with, not so much from inherent value, which is lower in my opinion.

Peter Meyers – Anecdotally, it feels like freshness is more important than ever. I’m amazed how often a blog post ranks within the first day, holding a top-10 position before finally settling a few spots (or even pages) lower.

Ann Smarty – Domain strength is a highly important factor (still). We keep seeing pages with 0 strength of their own hosted on reputable domains ranked very high for very competitive words.

Ian Lurie – Use of Adsense/Google Apps/Google Search or other search engine-owned tools, though, won’t impact results at all. If your site is so hurting, SEO-wise, that you have to point an Adwords ad at it to get crawled, you’ve got bigger problems.

Adam Audette – CTR on a search result is a large cumulative factor, and brings in page load time as well, which is something we’re very focused on at present.

You know, it’s funny… At least our customers find it humorous, but most of the SEO you need is really common sense. Imagine if Google was your business, what kind of websites would you want to deliver your searchers (customers)? Hard work, lite reading and an overall drive to be successful are exactly what every shop owner needs to succeed. If someone told you this was going to be easy….. They lied!

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/02/08/search-engine-ranking-factors-2009/feed/ 0 Business Blogging for Ecommerce Stores http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/02/01/business-blogging-ecommerce-stores/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/02/01/business-blogging-ecommerce-stores/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:33:36 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=859 Business Blogging for Ecommerce Stores

Ecommerce Blogging

Ecommerce Blogging

The need for “fresh” content has sent many shop owners looking for a blog. We have built many WordPress Blogs for shop owners in the last few months…. shop owners who realize the need to deliver content in a more effective manner. So today I want to give you some tips for looking at your planned or existing ecommerce blog.

First off, no offense meant to other blogging software… But I highly recommend WordPress. The features, speed and ease of use is the perfect match for most shop owner’s needs. Add the awesome widgets and other tools to take full advantage of your content for social media, and you have the perfect application for your online store’s blog.

Caution number 1…. I do NOT recommend that you host your blog anywhere else except your OWN DOMAIN. Something store.com/blog is perfect! Subdomains are redundant and unnecessary as well… They are in fact viewed as folders by Google and not a separate site anyhow. Host your own blog as the content is far more valuable to your business than any link from it hosted elsewhere.

Caution number 2…. I do NOT recommend using a module to integrate your WordPress within Zen Cart. Fact is you lose a bunch of WordPress ability and worse the issues caused by the integrations.

I agree that you want your blog consistently branded to look like your shop’s pages, but the level of skill needed to create a good looking, branded WordPress theme is pretty low as far a templating software applications goes.

Here is an example we did recently for a Zen Cart owner to port his offsite blog content in to his own site http://www.horseprerace.com/blog/. Notice that while it’s a blog the navigation on both the store and blog are linked to each other and it’s consistently branded (styled).

Caution number 3…. Do not build a blog unless you have something useful to post. Things like articles about your products alone will not fit the bill. You have to create content that is useful and searchable. A great example is another customer we built a branded blog for, Silver and Pewter Gifts. This Valentine’s Day post is excellent, and EXACTLY the type of content you will need to attract readers, searches and backlinks!

Creating valuable and unique content for your website is a big commitment…. with big rewards. The most effective thing you can do it create 1-5 brand new pages with great content on your site weekly. Google especially respects the frequency of the content and rewards you in rank and crawl rate increase.

But how will you write all of that content? Well, to be honest… you don’t have to write it all.

You can hire a writer to create content on the topics you supply. Make sure to check their copy here so you know it is unique and not copied. Content that has been duplicated… just doesn’t rank well.

You can solicit guest bloggers… Employees, distributors, high school kids… you name it. Find people who are passionate about your website’s theme and let them express themselves. You will find that many more are interested than you think…. AND guest bloggers are a great way to help to promote your blog as well.

You can buy private label articles related to your content needs…. BUT these articles, unless unique will need to be rewritten to remove the duplicate content. However, they are excellent inspiration for the new writer and provide a nice framework for the post.

You can write great blog posts yourself. Just jump in. There are ton’s of great resources availiable to help you get started. Check some of these out:

Some things I would like to add….

Blog with your own voice, words from you with your passion and emotion will be the most effective content and serve to build your readership as well.

Write your posts in 2 steps… If you are like me the ideas are just swimming around in my head and I can’t even type fast enough to get them all down. So when I finish fishing my head for ideas… I have to reorder, restructure and polish the gibberish I have pounded out on my keyboard. I am am really so bad that I will generally have 3 to 4 sloppy copies before I am done… My brain is much faster than my fingers. Read every post in preview view all the way through at least twice before you embarrass yourself by publishing poorly written or unprofessional content.

Lastly… NEVER leave a user comment unanswered. NEVER

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/02/01/business-blogging-ecommerce-stores/feed/ 0 Google Search Goes Social! http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/29/google-search-goes-social/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/29/google-search-goes-social/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:57:00 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=850 Google Search Goes Social!
Google Social Search

Google Social Search

Impressed? Well you should be! Google has just supplied you the glue to bind and promote your entire social media campaign! In October 2009 Google released the new Google Social search for the purpose of experimentation. The experiment, deemed successful as many jumped in and tried it out, is now released in the Beta public format.

 

Cool, how do I get started?

If you have a Google profile already, just update it. If not get one!

Most of the information is general social media profile stuff…. But low and behold some great networking opportunities exist too.

  1. The ability to supply a short Bio in html, including those precious links!
  2. Custom links to your blogs and other promotable websites … and Your Google reader and YouTube profile as well.
  3. Contact Info
  4. Last but certainly not least…. a Cool Vanity URL with your username to link to. Here is mine http://www.google.com/profiles/MPrough

Missing?

Well there are a few things we like to see in a social media platform that are missing… Well maybe not implemented yet.

  1. RSS feed opportunities … Well we can add a link, but…
  2. Better image loading opportunities
  3. More robust business related tools such as testimonials and recommendations

All in all, great way to give your social media campaign a nice boost…. In true Google fashion, for FREE!

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/29/google-search-goes-social/feed/ 0 Converting Your Biggest Losers http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/21/converting-your-biggest-losers/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/21/converting-your-biggest-losers/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:52:20 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=836 Converting Your Biggest Losers

Losers?

Losers?

With the current climate of Google’s new algorithm, I have had cause to reflect on a basic idea…. Seemingly long forgotten. Are you getting the sales you need from your existing visits? Or are you a “build it and they will come” person?

If you plan to increase your traffic to meet your sales needs and never worry about what you could be missing… Stop reading, this will bore you =-) However, if you want to build your qualified traffic and get the sales from them you need, then read on.

 

 

Conversions! Yes folks SALES! This is the point right?

So in light of all the indexing and rank changes, we sent our SEO clients a “Biggest Losers List“. The concept here is that these visits are lost sales, for some reason. Price? Usability? Information? Something is missing and the page cannot make the sale.

First off, lets find your top 5 biggest losers for the last 30 days. Login in to your Google Analytics account, hopefully it is set up properly to track conversion data. Unless you have moved things around from your lower dashboard click “View report” on the “Traffic Sources Overview” box. Then under the sources area, choose Google Organic for example.

In the gray bar, there is a dropdown set initially for keyword, drop this down to landing page. Now click the header link in the “Visits” column to sort them by visits, more visits at the top. Now click on your ecommerce tab.

We are looking for the pages with many visits and no conversions. I have one of my own sites open right now to provide some examples.

Loser Page #1 had 52 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #2 had 29 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #3 had 20 visits and no conversions.

Now, we can clearly see without going a step further there is something wrong here. In this shop, for example, the “per visit value” in the upper bar is $4.86….. So we know that for some reason these losing pages lost at least $490.86 in potential sales….. OUCH!

Now lets gather some more information. In the dropdown next to “Landing Page” select “Keyword” to add the column. This complicates things a bit, but sometimes, Google needs more information from you to send your pages qualified leads. If you find that one of your losers is getting a bunch of seeming unrelated search traffic, then it is a good bet that the text on the page is not clear enough to Google.

A good example of this is our pet store example, the 29 searches are for “bows in bulk”… which we sell, except they are dog grooming bows. So I will be updating this page so Google can deliver it for more proper search queries. This part is easy….

What if these losing pages have good, relevant searches?

In this case, we have to have a good old fashioned, come to Jesus look at the page. Is the price too high? Information unclear? Terrible images? Missing selections? Or just plain poorly organized even. Trust me when I say, you must train your eyes to shop like a consumer. In reality it doesn’t matter what you think or what your competitors do…. Matters that there is a problem with this page you need to solve.

These things can really be very small… Layout, color, button positions etc. So your best course of action is to have some friends look at it. The trick here is two fold. First, whatever you think about what they say doesn’t matter… You are not an average consumer. Listen to them, analyze what they have said and act on it. Secondly, don’t go changing a hundred things on the page…. Nothing you cannot measure can ever be successful. Take your list, make a few logical changes and watch it for 3 weeks…. Then measure your results and continue to implement the needed changes in small doses as well. Pretty soon this page will not be a loser anymore!

Need a hand? If you post your page link in a comment, with your own thoughts and the visits & conversions… I will be glad to have a look and make suggestions as I can =-)

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/21/converting-your-biggest-losers/feed/ 0 Did You Hack Your Own Website? http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/17/did-you-hack-your-own-website/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/17/did-you-hack-your-own-website/#comments Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:49:38 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=831 Did You Hack Your Own Website?

Ok, so that’s a funny headline…. But it’s true. We have had several cases recently where a Zen Cart owner or other personnel with access infected their own site with a Trojan.

JS Downloader X Did You Hack Your Own Website?

JS-Downloader-X

In both recent cases, a file called zcv.gif was inserted into the cart’s directories. A quick search on Google Groups reveals that not only Zen Carts were affected, but WordPress, Joomla and more. Although the Zen Carts seemed to hold up and no injection of scripting took place in the 2 I was involved with, apparently Joomla users were not so lucky as they had every single index file to clean up as well!

The issue kept reoccurring after users cleaned their websites up. When cleaning a hacked website we look for back doors which can provide future access to cause damage. In this case, the “back door” providing the access for reinfection resided on the website owners computers.

The infection, caused by a Trojan downloader threat JS-Downloader-X, infected from several different websites. The threat is listed as high, and unfortunately at the time it escaped many common virus software scanners. The virus essentially uses the hosting and/or FTP login info on the user’s computer to make its access. This is highly hard to track down and prevent, as normal hosting firewalls, security rules and even brute force detection are not triggered… You see the access is authorized.

Below is a list of things you can do to keep your own computer and other who access your website clean.

1. Use the following online vulnerability scanner and ensure your software is up-to-date: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/?task=load
2. Download anti-virus and fully scan your PC for malicious files. Here are some free online scanners for Windows, which is typically the most vulnerable to infection. If you have a different OS, there are similar programs that can be located and run on your system to protect it in the same way:
MalwareBytes ( http://www.malwarebytes.org/ ) and
ComboFix ( http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofix/how-to-use-combofix ) have been reported to be able to clean a recent strain of malware that resists detection by almost all other anti-virus agents. It is highly suggested that you one or both of them and one of the following:
-http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
-http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html
-http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
-http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml
-http://www.eset.com
3. Update all passwords for any account that you access/own that may not be up to standards. Any passwords that have been compromised will need to be changed as well. Standards for secure passwords are available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Guidelines_for_strong_passwords
4. Keep your computer secure from malware infecting it. If your computer is compromised, your account can be compromised through your password being used to access it.
- Ensure you use the latest browser version; Ensure that said browser subscribes to Google’s blacklist API (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari)
- Disable javascript
- Use the firefox addon noscript
- Make sure your antivirus has a subscription to new database and version releases. This may cost some amount of money, but is well worth the expense.
- Use http://www.avg.com.au/index.cfm?section=avg&action=onlinescan to test suspicious links you are given in emails or find online.
6. Ensure that all database configurations for your account are using a custom generated user and password combination, and that this information is not stored in plain text if this is feasible. Using your cPanel username and password to access your databases for your site may be convenient, but it introduces an incredible security risk.
7. Audit your account for unnecessary scripts, such as file uploaders. Ensure that if they are necessary that they are password protected, or if that is not feasible that they check the file type before allowing upload, to prevent upload of certain types of files.

Most important, if you see the file zcv.gif in your file structure, know that removing it will not remove the threat and all with access will need to properly scan and clean up their computers.

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/17/did-you-hack-your-own-website/feed/ 0 Brand Damaging & What it Means to Ecommerce http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/14/brand-damaging-what-it-means-to-ecommerce/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/14/brand-damaging-what-it-means-to-ecommerce/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:26:33 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=825 Brand Damaging & What it Means to Ecommerce

Brand Damaging

Brand Damaging

First let’s attempt to define what “brand damaging” actually means. It’s really a rather ambiguous, mostly legal term referring to statements, actions, images, content, theft and other actions causing damage or harm to one’s brand. Be that brand an authors name, a business or a service.

Many times this type of issue involves another nasty term, “identity theft”. The connection comes from associating a known brand, such as the case with Jeremy Schoemaker in 2008. This matter was one of the first notable cases I have seen reported. In this case,  the Hydra Network or one of its affiliates made unauthorized use of a picture of ShoeMoney holding a check and the accompanying ad claiming he had made the money using a scam called “Google Money Tree”.

How does this affect shop owners?

Many of you will have already received a letter of intent, or decided changes from your merchant bank if you process credit cards. The changes or proposed changes are quite frankly in answer to Visa Mastercard’s intent to take action in response to increases in consumer disputes related to card not present and direct response products and services.

It’s not really Greek, in a nutshell, if you, your practices, your security or your products and services are a bad risk, Visa Mastercard feels that this damages their brand.

These forthcoming and anticipated payment brand mandates and requirements will change a great many things for some merchants. For example e-online has already adapted the following policy changes:

e-onlinedata cannot accept merchant applications for products and/or services employing “Negative Option” enrollment, in addition to the following practices:

  • Marketing models that employ “Free-Trial”, “Deferred Billing” and/or “Shipping Only”. Customers must be receiving a tangible good or contracted service in exchange for charging of payment cards. Incentivized discount offers are acceptable when the cardholder is receiving something in exchange for payment, however we will be unable to support accounts engaging in hidden or delayed charges and ‘free’ offers that are not truly free.
  • “Cross-Selling” and “Up-selling” business practices. All sales should be directly between the business entities (merchant) processing the transaction and the cardholder, with cardholder authorization for all purchases.
  • Per Payment Brand guidelines, the use of multiple merchant accounts, billing descriptors and merchant processors may be viewed as an attempt to avoid chargeback monitoring programs and is prohibited. Perceived non-compliance has led to termination of processing relationships. e-onlinedata will review the business consideration for opening multiple merchant accounts to ensure compliance with Payment Brand guidelines.
  • Transactions generated from internet traffic and all other lead sources must be managed and monitored for potential fraud using an approved system. Third Party service engagement may be a requirement for account approval.

Of these, the most likely ecommerce merchant concern is the last. The last statement refers to properly managing, monitoring and PCI compliance of your shopping cart, hosting and merchant gateway. These are not recommendations, but rather already required for merchants. When you signed your merchant agreement, you also agreed to maintain the proper PCI/DSS standards and mandates.

Originally, PCI was Greek, however, merchants are learning and much support is available to meet the needs of small businesses whose budget for these matters can be quite small. Your merchant provider, merchant gateway provider or PCI approved scanner can help you to understand and manage the protocols necessary to keep not only yourself, but your shoppers safe. I have a post here to get you started on the road to PCI compliance.

It is clearly worth noting that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has already moved on the “Negative Option” marketing technique. Additionally, the FTC recently made changes to the requirements for paid testimonials, blog posts and endorsements. These are also clearly targeted at the web, and I think we can expect to see more of the same with big fines from the FTC in the future.

Not only are these things right and proper in my opinion, but changes to protect consumers on the web are long overdue. I think if you run and honest business in good faith you will not have any issues, frankly, those sapped by the movement to protect Internet consumers are in general those who would strive to deceive and take advantage of consumers…. Giving us all a bad name and damaging our brand as well!

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/14/brand-damaging-what-it-means-to-ecommerce/feed/ 0 Ecommerce for Your Business Marketing Endeavor http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/13/ecommerce-for-your-business-marketing-endeavor/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/13/ecommerce-for-your-business-marketing-endeavor/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:03:12 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=819 Ecommerce for Your Business Marketing Endeavor

Ecommerce Marketing

Ecommerce Marketing

Internet use is still growing year after year, and as more and more people have Internet access, more and more small businesses are recognizing the importance of integrating some form of ecommerce / online catalog as part of their business marketing portfolio. The Internet never goes offline, and websites are accessible every hour of the day – there are no opening and closing times on the Internet serving a worldwide market.

For the average person, the ability to be able to shop from the comfort home is a very welcome idea, and is becoming a very popular method of purchasing goods… Even for mobile users! Those customers who still prefer the tangibility of a brick and mortar store, the Internet still provides a way of researching the products they are interested in, to compare different prices, gain product knowledge and prepare to make an educated decisions without salesman pressure.

Another advantage of the Internet is its worldwide reach. Small business retailers no longer have to have brick & mortar stores in many different geographical locations to become a national brand – by selling on the web, they can get their product seen by a much larger audience.

However, it is not as simple as setting up online and customers automatically come flocking to your shop; a lot of hard work needs to go into developing, promoting and securing your online store, thus tackling many of the same related start up and maintenance issues with a brick and mortar store. The biggest difference is cost, while you may end up paying a couple of thousand dollars to properly develop your shopping cart… you will still be saving on start up fees, rent and other traditional business overhead costs These savings can then be passed on to the shoppers, making your business more competitive in its niche.

Undoubtedly then, a small business with a Internet promotable product would be foolish to overlook the power of the ecommerce. Businesses should plan and look to incorporate some form of ecommerce into their current business marketing portfolio. Be aware, however, as major differences exist between selling online and selling in real life, and you will need to build up a high level of trust with Internet customers… In perhaps ways you are not yet accustomed to.

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/13/ecommerce-for-your-business-marketing-endeavor/feed/ 0 New Website Toolkit http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/06/new-website-toolkit/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/06/new-website-toolkit/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:35:30 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=808 New Website Toolkit

Ugh!

Ugh!

I guess one of the most disappointing things we deal with in our business is the “ugly” or “darkside” of how others deliver web services. There is not a single day that goes by where some website owner doesn’t contact us with issues related to the development, design or even ownership of their site. Everything from broken promises and deceit to outright performance issues send these customers hunting for a “new webmaster”.

We have dealt with some very disheartening issues for our clients. They call and need to move their site to proper hosting and can’t because they don’t have access, they find they do not own their domain registration, they have been locked out of and charged for GPL/free built in software functionality or their webmaster flew the coop.

While these issues do pain me, I have decided that all we can do is provide quality, honesty and transparency in our own business. So to that end, I am providing prospective new website owners the following list of tips and precautions before choosing a designer/developer and beginning a website project.

  1. NEVER, EVER let a designer register your domain in his/her name. If this is how they insist on doing business, then find a professional.
  2. Make sure you have full access to your hosting services, including support. If they want to host you in their account, then insist that you obtain your own hosting. If they refuse to play ball… find another.
  3. Know what you want and need. Develop a list of the functions, look and services you need. Provide this list to several prospective developers and make them explain how these options are best accomplished. Those that cannot …. get dumped.
  4. Know your software. If you choose a software driven site, such as Zen Cart, read and learn about the software. Buy a manual and really know what you are getting, then find a developer with a great deal of experience with your chosen software. This really matters, you see a general web designer cannot handle developing a Zen Cart project for example. They will only hack, crack and break the software functionality with their inexperience…. Costing you upgrade, development and repair money in the future.
  5. Be ready to work…. This is your website right? There really isn’t any money for nothing going on here… That is a bullshit lie propagated by people who would seek to take advantage of you long term. If it sounds to good to be true, it is.
  6. Do not rely on a sole person or company for the maintenance of your website…. People go missing all the time. Make sure you have a backup person and you are able to provide them the needed access (hosting logins, FTP and admin information) to help you in a pinch.
  7. Remember when you hire a professional, they are the professional. If this person tells you something is a really bad idea, you should likely listen…. are you a web developer?
  8. Insist on a development time frame and frequent updates. Development schedules get busted up all the time, but you need a plan and to be kept abreast of the setbacks and new expected schedule forecasts.
  9. Check your developer out. Contact owners of some of the websites in their portfolio… Better yet, send links to each of the prospective developers of each others sites and ask for their opinion =-). Google the developer or company name looking for the good, bad and ugly comments you may find. Really check them out, this is alot of money to simply throw away.
  10. Ask alot of questions! Every single thing you want, need to know, or do not understand needs to be asked…. This is your website and you need to know.

It’s also a good thing to user a designer/webmaster that has more than email access for support and questions, what if you are not at your computer and your site is down?

Being successful on the web takes a great deal of dedication and learning, all you do is in a constant state of change in this business. You never stop learning, adding new content and building links…. This is the cost of Internet success, make sure you are ready to pay it up.

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2010/01/06/new-website-toolkit/feed/ 0 Ecommerce for All – Best of 2009 http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/31/ecommerce-for-all-best-of-2009/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/31/ecommerce-for-all-best-of-2009/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:47:30 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=801 Ecommerce for All Best of 2009

Top 10- PostsI really enjoy writing here to help and empower shop owners. Nothing about this business is more disappointing than the helplessness that many feel with their new Zen Cart software. From the beginning my main goal has been to provide information and services designed to allow these small business owners the skills, tools and support to be successful and not so dependent.

So to that end I would like to share with you the top 10 posts that users have found the most helpful to them. May you find them helpful and continue to prosper in 2010!

  1. Free Shopping Feed Marketing for Online Stores – This post is about marketing your products using shopping feeds and contains a frequently updated list of portals and venues which are free to submit your feed to.
  2. Color Psychology for Ecommerce Design – Here is one of my favorite marketing subjects! The use and psychology behind web design. What emotions and actions do colors invoke and how can we use this to our advantage.
  3. Zen Cart SEO – 12 Steps to Success – This post was written specifically with all of the Zen Cart forum posts I answer in mind. It is rather a discipline than a tutorial, a list of the things you need to do to successfully run your online store.
  4. Ecommerce Checkout Suicide – This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items? How to identify and fix the most common and dreadful cause of checkout abandonment!
  5. 5 Easy Things to Make Zen Cart Cook – 5 easy modifications that will make your Zen Cart faster and perform better!
  6. Yahoo Search Supports Google Base Formatting – How to use your Google Shopping/Base feed to submit your products to Yahoo Search Monkey enhanced shopping results… for free!
  7. Beating Your Links Down? – Working hard on link building? Here is a comprehensive tutorial detailing the counter productive things you should avoid to make your links count the best!
  8. In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries – How to identify, repair and prevent duplication content in your shop. There are in fact many different ways to end up with duplicate content… Here are some common ones we see in ecommerce.
  9. Where is My Site? Google Sandbox Filter – The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site.
  10. Shared Hosting & Bad Neighbors – Hosting is a very challenging subject for most shop owners. Sadly many attain less that acceptable hosting to run their businesses. This post covers the notable pitfalls of shared hosting from less than professional web hosts and the implications for your business.

There is one more post, this one actually finished 11th, but is a VERY common question and great information as well.

For those that are interested here are some stats for PRO-Webs in 2009:

  • 36 New Zen Cart stores were built
  • 89 Zen Cart site reports were completed
  • 37 SEO My Zen Cart packages completed
  • 106 Zen Carts hosted
  • 154,319 unique visits including 18,598 to this blog
  • I have answered 1,802 posts on the Zen Cart forum and averaging 2.3 per day!

We enjoy what we do for shop owners and look forward to serving you in 2010!

Here’s wishing all of you a successful and prosperous new year!

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/31/ecommerce-for-all-best-of-2009/feed/ 0 Google Patent – Duplicate Document Detection http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/google-patent-duplicate-document-detection/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/google-patent-duplicate-document-detection/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:32:36 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=793 Google Patent Duplicate Document Detection

Duplicate document detection in a web crawler system

Is your content unique?

Is your content unique?

12/1/2009 Google was granted a patent by the US Patent Office detailing how duplicate documents are detected in a web crawler system. This new patent details how Google detects and then filters or determines which documents are the “more important” version for the purpose of providing unique search results.

Most of the information we have had good reason to accept as true for some time, but detailing it in this manner can genuinely help webmasters to understand not only what duplicate content is, but how to create unique pages/content for searchers to find.

Duplicate documents are documents that have substantially identical content, and in some embodiments wholly identical content, but different document addresses.

The patent details 3 possible situations where duplicate content is detected and thus processed as such.

  1. Two documents, including any combination of web pages (documents) and temporary (302) redirect pages, are duplicate if they share the same page content, but have different URLs.
  2. Two temporarily redirected pages are duplicate if they share the same target or destination URL, but have different source URLs.
  3. A regular web page/document and a temporary redirect page are duplicate if the URL of the web page is the target/destination URL of the temporary redirect page or the content of the regular web page is the same as that of the temporarily redirected page.

In some of these situations redirects are involved which are temporarily redirected pages such as a Meta refresh over 0 seconds, JavaScript redirects and 302 redirects. Permanently redirected pages are not associated in this manner for duplicate document detection because the web crawlers do not download the content of the redirecting page, only the target or destination page.

How does Google detect duplicate content?

Google simply compares the pages/documents to each other to determine duplicity. They can use a whole page or thumbprint so to speak, phrases and essentially any content the crawler can read. What was not clearly disclosed is the amount or percentage of duplicity which would then in fact cause a filtering action from Google with regard to the index.

Upon determining duplicity between to documents, Google then attempts to determine which document is most important. This decision is about importance, not PageRank, nor ownership. Once this decision has been made Google then proceeds to filter the duplicate page(s) from search results in order to provide searchers with unique and qualified search results.

There are many ways that shop owners create duplicate content. Many are easily managed and some are not. Doing everything in your power to prevent it is the best course of action, as there will inevitability be duplicity you cannot prevent.

Some of the most common ways that shop owners duplicate their content:

  • Copying product descriptions from distributors or other indexed web pages
  • Lack of unique page specific content enough to make a page unique within a common site template
  • Posting articles or text from other websites
  • Not properly redirecting the canonical url to the non canonical (www or non-www)
  • Failing to add pages like the shopping cart page to the robots skip to prevent indexing
  • Not using Google’s parameter handling to exclude or ignore sorted page urls
  • Rewritten (SEO urls) which are not properly rewritten with a permanent or 301 redirect

If you think about it, Google is not trying to penalize anyone, but rather attempting to help searchers find fresh, unique and qualified results. Last time I checked this is the goal of a search engine =-)

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/google-patent-duplicate-document-detection/feed/ 0 Smarter Searchers Use Longer Queries http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/smarter-searchers-use-longer-queries/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/smarter-searchers-use-longer-queries/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:26:33 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=787 Smarter Searchers Use Longer Queries

Everyday I preach the benefits of using natural text within your site’s pages. Aside from the fact that most shop owners will inevitably spam if they dwell to deeply on keywords, it really works. I can give you tons of examples why, but we will cover just a few metrics today.

First and foremost, using natural text helps to grab customers more and high school report researchers less. For example, I was speaking with a customer today who sells engraved silver and pewter gifts. We were making a plan of attack for next year. The primary concern for this plan is to better target his Jefferson cups. While he is on page one for Jefferson cups, he is number 10.

So if you search Google for Jefferson cups, you will see that these very historical cups have many informational pages indexed and presented for this query. My point is, that the search rank for Jefferson cups matters little as these are not shoppers…. So if I was looking to buy one of these I would and most other searchers would use longer and more targeted queries.

  • Buy Jefferson Cup
  • Engraved Jefferson Cup
  • Jefferson cups for gifts
  • Pewter Jefferson cup

These are just a few examples of how one may search when the target is a purchase and not just information searching.

These longtail searches are more easily converted and easily targeted by using the naturally related words associated with the products and services in the product’s page copy. Not spam, just high usability and proper search-ability.

Traffic is traffic you may say…. But it doesn’t make it true. Fact is that ecommerce stores are designed to sell, therefore attracting customers is clearly the first order of business. Most information seekers will not be converted in to a sale… They just found the wrong site for the information they were seeking… Additionally, the likelihood that they will return someday to purchase because they remembered the site is store address is slim to none.

Why do you suppose users are searching with longer queries than say 5 years ago?

It’s really not that complicated. The many millions of unsuccessful searches have trained searchers to use longer queries to better target their search results. This isn’t the only thing searchers have been trained to do either. Another huge change is that searchers will read scan the text at the top of the page’s main content container for about 15 seconds upon arriving on a site. Not images… Not videos…. TEXT.

Searchers do this for a very clear and understandable reason… They are trying to very quickly determine if this page is relative to their search. Makes perfect sense… who wants to spend 10 minutes on a page that isn’t what we were searching for?

If I told you that less than 48% of all Google US searches were 2 words or less, would you believe me?

It’s true, fact is that the majority of Google searchers use 3 words or more in their query. In fact I would bet anyone that repeat searches are double and about 80% or better.

Longer Search Query User Data

Longer Search Query User Data

Source: Experian Hitwise

The need for helpful, descriptive and natural text on your store’s page cannot be understated. Your shoppers need this text to help them find you, identify your page as a good result and better navigate your site.

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/smarter-searchers-use-longer-queries/feed/ 0 Free Zen Cart Report Purely Poultry http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/free-zen-cart-report-purely-poultry/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/free-zen-cart-report-purely-poultry/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:44:08 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=783 Free Zen Cart Report Purely Poultry

Our November 2009 free site report winner is Purely Poultry. We welcome you to read their report below and visit their site as well. Please show some respect and do not create a bunch of test accounts and havoc on their website while poking around. We do welcome you to provide constructive criticism and suggestions for them to improve their store and business online.

Purely Poultry presents quite a unique online product, as a matter of fact this is one product line we have never worked with before. This fairly unique product line affords them an edge for rank, as the pool of fishes are few to compete with. Fixing some of the issues we found with the cart could clearly have very positive and fast results.

Below is a mildly edited copy of the Zen Cart site report we already provided to Purely Poultry. They have graciously agreed to allow us to publish this and share their issues. We thanks them for providing this medium to help other shop owners who may have similar issues and problems.

Load Speed Main Page: 237.53 seconds at 28.8kbs. We would like to see this well under 50, but the ideal standard is 30 seconds @ 28.8kbs.

On the main page only 5 HTML errors were noted, this is not bad at all… But repairing these will increase the ability for their site to be effectively crawled by the search engines and additionally increase the usability of the website.


Line Description
37 Warning: <img> lacks “alt” attribute
134 Warning: <table> lacks “summary” attribute
150 Warning: <script> escaping malformed URI reference
206 Warning: <img> escaping malformed URI reference
266 Warning: <img> escaping malformed URI reference

Title: Main page title is 14 characters long and the suggested search engine friendly limit is 65. Your title is 100% relevant to your main page content, but lacks good information relevant to the page. This tag should contain a short (65 characters or less including spaces) description of what this site is about.

Current Title: Purely Poultry

Description: Main page description contains 113 characters and is 100% relevant to the main page content.

This description should contain text under 250 characters in natural language to prompt searchers to click through to your website. The Meta description is NOT used for the purpose of ranking your site’s pages, but rather as a means to elicit a click through from searchers. Note that your description is somewhat spammy as it is essentially a keyword list. Additionally, this tag should be a minimum of 100 characters for Google not to give a short description error in webmasters tools.

Current Description: Purely Poultry : – Pheasants Chickens Bantams Guinea Keets Books Turkey Poults Ducklings Goslings Quail Peafowl

Canonical Domain url Check:
Your site is returning a proper canonical 301 redirect from www to non-www or vice verse. Google currently has cached versions of both.

This means that sitewide canonical duplication exists as both the non-www and the www versions of the urls work. Duplication of this nature can cause many rank issues and even split PageRank between the 2 different canonical versions.

Google indicates that pages have been omitted from regular search results for being to similar or duplicate in nature.

Total indexed in Google.com: 624

Pages omitted from Google’s Main Index: 129

Pages within the Google’s regular search index: 495

*Your site has 718 pages indexed in Yahoo search.

*Your site has 15 indexed pages in MSN/Bing.

*You have 1 page indexed in Ask.com’s search index

Sitemap and Robots.txt:

A valid search engine sitemap.xml for your site was not found. This document, which is a specific sitemap for search engines, is designed to help search engine spiders locate and crawl your content better and therefore should NOT be styled for human visitors.

A valid, but miss-configured robots.txt for your site was found. A robots.txt is a search engine universal markup to prevent well behaved bots from crawling pages which have content of no value to the searchable index, are duplicate or blocked from indexing.

This has been partially corrected.

Backlinks: Your entire domain currently has 647 total back link(s) from domains other than your own.

This isn’t bad at all, keep up the good work!

PageRank: Your main page has a toolbar Page Rank 4 and there is no issue with your PageRank dispersion with regard to canonical duplication.

Sites on IP: Your site’s IP is 000.000.000 and there are a total of 8 domains hosted on that IP, none of which appear to be flagged as “bad neighbors” or hosting questionable content.

Spam and Hidden Text: Upon scanning your site hidden text was found, that appears to be related to your CSS menu across the top of your page.

Invisible text found. Method(s): CSS ‘display’ property set to ‘none’.
Invisibility purpose: Impossible to say.
Text: New Products

Miscellaneous:

  • Your site appears to have what we call the “nofollow bug”. While this is a Zen Cart
    bug, a fix has been available for quite some time. Essentially every page on your
    site currently has a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” /> tag
    with in the head element that tells the search engines not to follow or index links
    found within that page.
  • You should nofollow ancillary page links, or advertising links within your site
    (once the bug fix has been applied) to stop the flow of PageRank and prevent the
    crawlers from crawling these pages unnecessarily wasting precious crawl time.
  • We would advise you to place a phone number in a prominent location through out
    your site. eg: in the header. To give troubled customers a sense of security, and a
    means of contacting some one should an issue arise. Without it shoppers tend to
    abandon the cart sales when they encounter any issues what so ever. They will not
    go looking for a contact number! Remember, not every search visitors lands on your
    main page, most land on interior pages.
  • The use of mailto links or valid email addresses even in a textual format, like on
    your “Privacy Notice” page will promote spam, as these are crawled and read by
    spiders for the purpose of creating email list for sale to spammers.
  • Your “Conditions of Use” is completely blank.
  • On your privacy page under “How do we protect your information?” the last line
    of the second paragraph reads “and are required to�keep the information
    confidential.”
  • You have unsecured elements on your secured SSL pages causing a broken lock.
    This is the number 1 cause of checkout abandonment.
  • Your main page and category pages have very little textual content in order to rank
    with. You will find it very difficult to rank well in the major search engines with out
    it. Additionally pages like http://www.purelypoultry.com/bantams-c-155.html with
    very little text and an overwhelming amount of links lacking textual support may be
    viewed negatively by Google.
  • It is a very large liability to have “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” checked by default
    on account creation, as shoppers will inadvertently get your newsletter and report
    you as spam. This is a FTC spam violation and has financial and business related
    liability in the US and many other countries.
  • Your shopping cart pages still shows part of the default Zen Cart default text
    (defined in includes/languages/english/shopping_cart.php).
  • Your “Checkout Success” page contains the following text “This file is located in
    /languages/english/html_includes/classic/
    NOTE: Always backup the files in /languages/english/html_includes/
    your_template”
  • You would greatly benefit by reducing the steps involved in the checkout process.
  • Removal of the side bars during the checkout process will reduce customer
    distraction as well as checkout abandonment. Once the customer has committed to
    the checkout process you should avoid giving them opportunities to click away.
  • Your checkout pages are no secured. This is a PCI compliance violation and your
    company can be fined by the credit card companies.

I want to personally thank Purely Poultry for allowing us to audit and blog their site report results. I invite you all to comment any additional factors and suggestions to help them improve their Zen cart and business.

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/16/free-zen-cart-report-purely-poultry/feed/ 2 Zen Cart robots.txt Tutorial http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/14/zen-cart-robots-txt-tutorial/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/14/zen-cart-robots-txt-tutorial/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:12:02 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=764 Zen Cart robots.txt Tutorial

robots.txt for Zen Cart

Zen Cart robots.txt

Is there a robots.txt with Zen Cart?

Do you have a default robots.txt?

The answer is no… But here is why.  Every cart is different, the very nature of Zen Cart’s flexibility prevents the ability to create a robots.txt that can be applied to even most carts. Things like easy pages and additional pages and installation paths make the process basically a custom procedure for each and every shop. The robots protocol isn’t really difficult, as a matter fact it’s quite logical once you get to know it a bit.

First, lets cover the basic function and ability of a robots.txt.

A robots.txt is a text document called robots.txt (exactly), which resides in the root of the domain. You can actually hide your robots.txt from basic Internet users by using a server side application such as Apache to deliver only qualified user agents access to the location and name of the robots directive on your site. This however, is really more work than necessary as password protect directories, such as login admin areas cannot be indexed unless there is a crawl able link to them somewhere.

robots.txt is an exclusion protocol for well behaved web spider or robots to access in order to receive directives regarding where they may and may not crawl your site’s pages. Blocking a page(s) from crawl in robots.txt WILL NOT prevent them from being indexed or referenced in the search engines results…. It only blocks them from being crawled.

I will cover the most common uses of robots.txt and their directives below for your Zen Cart.

First to cover is that there is NO Allow directive in robots.txt, this is in fact the default behavior… So only Disallow is valid. So if I have a page foo.html which I wish not to be crawled by any behaved crawlers, then the syntax will be as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /foo.html

If I wish that a specific crawler, such as GoogleBot not crawl this page, then the syntax is as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /foo.html

You can view a  list of crawlers in the robots database here. But for reference her are your most common ones.

So we know how to block a single page from crawl, how about a page in a directory…  But not the whole directory.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/foo.html

The index page within a directory only.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/

All pages in the directory blocked from crawl.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder

All pages within a directory can also be accomplished with a wildcard. However, not all crawlers support wildcards. Google does, Yahoo does… Ask.com does not and although Bing claims to have partial support for wildcards…. They don’t. So we must first name a support crawler to apply the directive with a wildcard.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /folder/*

The wildcard give us some greater control and ability with regard to robots.txt directives… Especially on our dynamically generated Zen Cart pages. The example below blocks a duplicate page from crawling in your Zen Cart shop.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*&alpha_filter_id=*

This is to block a URI created by the alpha sorter in your product index pages. Essentially, every URL containing the parameter &alpha_filter_id= is blocked from crawl for Googlebot.

Lastly, the Universal Sitemap Protocol is supported by all major search engines and should be included. This is simply the correct way to let the search engines know where your search engine sitemap resides.

Sitemap: http://pro-webs.net/sitemap.xml

Against my better judgment I am going to post what some may consider a generic/default robots.txt for standard Zen Carts installed in to the root of your domain. I strongly suggest you read and learn to properly use the robots protocol and directives instead. I will take no responsibility for this, as it is a suggestion and you have been warned that every Zen Cart is different. Additionally, this WILL NOT work at all if you have rewritten your page’s urls.

# Robots.txt file for http://www.domain.com/

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*&action=notify$
Disallow: /*&number_of_uploads=0&action=notify
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=discount_coupon
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shippinginfo
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=privacy
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=conditions
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=contact_us
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=advanced_search
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=login
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=unsubscribe
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&cPath=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=tell_a_friend&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=popup_shipping_estimator
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=account
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=password_forgotten
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping_address
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=logoff
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=gv_faq
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=*
Disallow: /*&sort=*
Disallow: /*alpha_filter_id=*
Disallow: /*&disp_order=*

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /*&action=notify$
Disallow: /*&number_of_uploads=0&action=notify
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=discount_coupon
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shippinginfo
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=privacy
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=conditions
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=contact_us
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=advanced_search
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=login
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=unsubscribe
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&cPath=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=tell_a_friend&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=product_reviews_write&products_id=*
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=popup_shipping_estimator
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=account
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=password_forgotten
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping_address
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=logoff
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=gv_faq
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=*
Disallow: /*&sort=*
Disallow: /*alpha_filter_id=*
Disallow: /*&disp_order=*

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=faqs_new
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=discount_coupon
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shippinginfo
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=privacy
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=conditions
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=contact_us
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=advanced_search
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=login
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=unsubscribe
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=shopping_cart
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=popup_shipping_estimator
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=account
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=password_forgotten
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping_address
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=logoff
Disallow: /index.php?main_page=gv_faq
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=1
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=2
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=3
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=4
Disallow: /gv_faq.html?faq_item=5

Once again, every Zen Cart has other pages that should be blocked from crawl, and many have pages within these blocked pages that should be allowed. This is best used as a guide, once you have learned to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol correctly.

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]]> http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/14/zen-cart-robots-txt-tutorial/feed/ 0 Google Caffeine – What to Expect http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/08/google-caffeine-what-to-expect/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/08/google-caffeine-what-to-expect/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:27:17 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=758 Google Caffeine What to Expect
Google Caffeine

Google Caffeine

Google Caffeine is essentially Google’s new, upgraded search engine. While Google has said the official launch of the new search will not be made until after the holidays, it’s actually live in a few data centers already.

Google announced the new search platform development back in August of this year (2009) and has provided us a cool sandbox to test results in. While the sandbox is no longer available, we can tell you that for *most the ranking changes will be mild. I would like to, however, discuss the expected ranking metrics that will likely be changed or tweaked when the the Caffeine update goes live.

Back in August Google had the following to say regarding the needs of a quality search engine.

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

  1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
  2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
  • Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

    • So what can you expect?

    We think you can expect Google to really go after website quality metrics such as, speed, broken links, navigation and content. This will likely have a far greater impact on rank that in the past.

    We also believe Google will add even more rank consideration to the signs of regularly maintained websites. We tell customers that Google likes to know the lights are on AND someone is home. The freshness and quality of content has been hugely important this year and we believe this will not only continue… But become even more important with Caffeine.

    You can expect Google to continue to show strong distaste for paid and reciprocal links and can add linking out to bad neighborhood and spammy websites to boot. Certainly you have little or no control over who links to you, but you *should have complete control over who you link to. This is just another responsibility factor…. Many of the noted items that we feel are being weighted better center around professionalism, maintenance and effort. These are all things you should already be doing, this is your business… remember?

    Spam. Google has consistently demonstrated that spam will not be tolerated. Things like hidden text, unnatural text, pumped up keyword density and comma separated lists are not going to be tolerated. We have already seen Google moving quickly and efficiently on these spam and quality issues over the last 4 months… Do not make this mistake, the cost can be more than your business can afford.

    I think you can expect to see some very long time huge ranking factors fall away from the added weight they currently carry. Metrics like the age of the website will still be important, but not enough to maintain rank as they have been in the past. Those old, unmaintained authority type websites will begin to topple, making way for fresh and maintained content from any age website.

    Shoot me now… But I think you will see Google taking a much deeper look at the type and quality of backlinks, as opposed to a number of backlinks or inventory type attitude. So links from Social media sources, which are considered highly fresh and indicate activity will carry more weight that they currently do. I think additionally, links from seed sites, which are ranking well and relevant will carry even more weight than ever before.

    The way i see this, is that Google is doing its job and delivering the best search experience to their users they can. As a company they have consistently made advances and changes to better their products and services… I think you should understand, they expect the same from you. Remember, being ranked and indexed by Google is NOT your right… You have no rights, it is rather a privilege by contrast.

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    ]]>     http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/08/google-caffeine-what-to-expect/feed/ 0     Privacy vs Local Rank http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/08/privacy-vs-local-rank/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/08/privacy-vs-local-rank/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:53:00 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=750 Privacy vs Local Rank

    Many shop owners seek to hide their WhoIs information for the sake of privacy. We have also advocated that, yes spam is a problem, but transparency within your business model is worth it. It would seem that Google agrees.

    Google Patent

    Google Patent

    Google has been applied for and been awarded United States Patent #7624101 called Enhanced Search Results. This new patent award will enhance Google’s local search capabilities, including the ability to return a result for a business that includes a phone number, address and often a map at the top of the search results for locally targeted search queries. The means for which this Google local search process will be improved are centered around Google’s ability to identify and verify addresses and phone numbers associated with the first natural search result.

    Previously, you basically had to submit your local business information to Google Local. However, now Google will be better able to query the WhoIs information for your domain in order to *match or validate locally targeted information within your website. Still suggest you submit and verify your business with Google Local, as there are many other tools available in this application to benefit you business… But now searchers will get better local results regardless.

    Google United States Patent 7624101

    A method includes receiving a search query from a user and generating search results based on the search query. The method may also include providing the search results and information identifying at least one of a telephone number or an address associated with a first one of the search results to the user. The method may further include providing a link to a map associated with at least the first search result to the user.

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    ]]>     http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/12/08/privacy-vs-local-rank/feed/ 0     Zen Cart Cyber Monday Checklist http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/28/zen-cart-cyber-monday-checklist/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/28/zen-cart-cyber-monday-checklist/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:21:57 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=744 Zen Cart Cyber Monday Checklist
    Cyber Monday 2009

    Cyber Monday 2009

    Let’s face it, this Monday you and your website will be facing one of, if not the largest online shopping days all year…. Cyber Monday. Preparing for this day is crucial to your business. So below I have some ecommerce and Zen Cart specific things to help you prepare and succeed this Monday.

    Certainly you should be prepared everyday, but this Monday is a very special day, which requires some special planning and preparation to ensure that you succeed.

    Housekeeping

    1. Check your site for broken links
    2. Check your add to cart buttons
    3. Check your checkout buttons and functions
    4. Contact info (preferably toll free phone number) displayed prominently
    5. Shipping fees, schedule and return policy clearly stated in the simplest manner possible
    6. Special sales, coupons and shipping campaigns clearly posted
    7. All of your product feeds are up to date with any sale prices
    8. Verify that your pages load quickly
    9. Make sure you have enough bandwidth left this month in your hosting plan
    10. View cart / checkout links are easy to find on all pages
    11. Specials and holiday promos easily located
    12. Ample products in stock and ready to ship
    13. Navigation clear and easy to follow
    14. Search is working properly
    15. Most common products and sale items are clearly advertised with direct links for purchase

    Shipping Tips

    While free shipping is your best and most effective holiday promo, even flat rate shipping will fare substantially better than standard shipping. Make sure you have the shipping options necessary and working. People will want to be able to know your shipping rates BEFORE, they begin to checkout. Keep them reasonable, upfront and completely transparent.

    If you are using a module which calls out to UPS, USPS or FedEx for example, make certain you have a backup shipping policy ready to go. Last year, both USPS and UPS were down on several occasions for long periods of time during the holiday shopping season. If these live webtools fail, people cannot checkout on your cart.

    Shop your competition and see what you are going up against. Holiday shoppers are less spontaneous and far more likely to price shop you. The most common way for them to do this is to compare shipping options… flat or free is much more discoverable and thus effective.

    Checkout Tips

    1. Shipping rates available before shoppers begin checkout
    2. Short and funneled checkout process, remove distractions and ways to get off track
    3. Check your site for the secure/non-secure error on SSL pages (even if you have before… do it again)
    4. Good selection of payment methods available and easily able to be discovered BEFORE checkout
    5. Coupons and sales tested and working

    Email Marketing Tips for Cyber Monday

    If you plan to do an email blast…. You better get it out by Saturday night. Many people will shop from work this Cyber Monday. Get them your deals early so they can take the info with them to work.

    Use a great subject line to engage the shopper. Most people will read as far as the subject before deleting your email, so your subject alone carries most of the burden in email marketing.

    Keep the email, clean, informative and short…. Holiday shoppers are impatient.

    Segment your email list to send the best offers to the most related shoppers. If you are using software to segment your list, now is the time to flex your marketing muscles by hitting each of your segments with a planned and targeted email offer. Cyber Monday is not the end of this…. so make certain you also have the ability to measure these results for improvement in the holiday shopping season.

    Impression

    Remember, this is ecommerce… You haven’t the ability to speak with every customer. Make sure your store is putting forth the feeling and impression you want your customers to have. There are no second chances to make a great first impression.

    Preparedness

    Ready go phones…. Make sure you have ample staff to handle calls and emails this Monday. Tools like live help can help to unclog your phone lines…. But people are going to call. The people answering your phone should be well fed, happy and completely aware of every product and promo. Empower them and unclog your own phone line by creating a coupon for each customer service person to use in handling issues and complaints as they arise… Instead of the customer waiting for you or other management. There is no better customer than that of a recovered sale.

    Fulfillment

    Ready to ship those products? Do not wait, start shipping orders as quickly as you can keep up . Many times a very quick shipping notification will lower canceled orders and actually help promote your store with your shopper’s co-workers.

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    ]]>     http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/28/zen-cart-cyber-monday-checklist/feed/ 0     Have We Screwed Ourselves? http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/25/have-we-screwed-ourselves/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/25/have-we-screwed-ourselves/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:33:25 +0000 Melanie http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=736 Have We Screwed Ourselves?
    Google Hier

    Google Hierarchies

    Rewriting urls for dynamic websites has been a long time, huge debate and even big business for some. Whether or not you chose to rewrite your urls for usability or keyword strength (which is really almost nil)… Many shop owners have chosen to do so.

    The original push to rewrite urls really had nothing to do with keywords. The issue was in fact that Google an the other search engines had difficulty handling all those nasty parameters. Adding logical keywords to these urls really doesn’t help you rank, but rather is a pretty big usability punch in your SERPs. People use the SERP url to help them determine if the result is what they are seeking.

    Google has known searchers do this for sometime…and they have preached the use of great and unique descriptions along the same line. Remember, your Meta description does not help you rank… but is rather a unique opportunity to elicit a click from searchers. This element however, if not appropriate for the query will be replaced by a snippet to better serve the searcher…. All good, no arguments here.

    Now, however, Google has taken the matter of SERP usability in to their own hands with their new hierarchies for the SERPs. These are beyond cool, and very similar to a sitelink. The process itself produces an very helpful search environment for searchers.

    This example from Google shows that, ugly… unusable urls can now be displayed in a very helpful manner for searchers… and the site owners as well.

    granola Have We Screwed Ourselves?

    Click to see the actual search result

    So, how have we perhaps screwed ourselves?

    What you cannot see in the image is that the “Healthy Recipes” and “Other Healthy Recipes” are linked to different qualified pages… Add the listing link and this one small search result and it now has 3 links to the site… Tripling it’s click through ability!

    The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

    Maybe those pretty urls will prevent you from this huge benefit? We can’t know that yet. In any case turn your breadcrumbs on (they should already be) immediately!

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    ]]>     http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/25/have-we-screwed-ourselves/feed/ 0     Google Quality & Removal for Hidden Text http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/16/google-quality-removal-hidden-text/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/16/google-quality-removal-hidden-text/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:24:35 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=728 Google Quality & Removal for Hidden Text
    Deindexed!

    Deindexed!

    Recently a shop owner contacted us with an email from Google for a quality violation. The nature of this violation was spam, specifically hidden text. This website was NOT setup in Google’s webmaster tools, but Google managed to send an email to the site owners using normal contact addresses such as info and webmaster.

    Exactly what hidden text is and why is it spam?

    Hidden text can occur for many reasons, most are in no way malicious. Text can be same color text and background, hidden in html commenting, stuffed in to alts and titles and hidden with numerous CSS styles. All of the common findings of hidden text, malicious or not are a violation of Google’s quality guidelines for hidden text. Hidden text is simply text the search engines can see, but human visitors cannot.

    In this particular case the text was injected by a third party through a software vulnerability. The email from Google contained a sample of the offending text and the procedure to recover. I will post the edited letter below…. But Google sent this letter with another message. Removal, on the same day this letter arrived the entire site (4k +) pages was completely removed from the index.

    So the procedure is to secure the vulnerability, clean up and quarantine affected files check it thoroughly for ANY quality violation and request that Google review and reconsider indexing the site.

    Subject: Removal from Google’s Index

    Dear site owner or webmaster of examplesite.com,

    While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

    The following is some example hidden text we found at http://examplesite.com/:

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tatio.

    In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from examplesite.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

    We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

    Sincerely,
    Google Search Quality Team

    Note: if you have an account in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can verify the authenticity of this message by logging into https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en and going to the Message Center.

    So what does this mean for you?

    Is all of the software on your site and hosting current? Are you an easy target to be hacked?

    You see, the cost of keeping your software up to date is part of the cost of doing business…. It is also inevitably cheaper than paying for the lost sales, cleanup and re inclusion request instead.

    Many times when discussing the status of their software with site owners I am met with the “we cannot afford it” rebuttal… Ask yourself this… Can you afford all of this? Worse yet, can you afford to be fined tens of thousands of dollars by the credit card companies for failure to maintain PCI compliance?

    Just like anything else…. You get back what you put in. If you never change your oil, your car will have much higher maintenance costs and downtime. This is just common business sense, right?

    For those who wondered… Google located this and moved on it with full removal within 3 days of the hack!

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    ]]>     http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/16/google-quality-removal-hidden-text/feed/ 0     Google & Search Behavior Ranking http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/09/google-search-behavior-ranking/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/09/google-search-behavior-ranking/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:21:11 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=721 Google & Search Behavior Ranking

    google search Google & Search Behavior RankingGoogle has for some time used behavior as part of their search ranking algorithm. Essentially, Google collects some non-personal user data to enhance and further refine their search results. This is very similar to the data that you collect with your website. Metrics like clicks, exits, IPs, location, search queries and such are all metrics Google has used to improve their search results.

    We have known for some time that Google can make adjustments to a page’s rank based on these metrics. For example, a page receives 5K visits for the search term “happy guy”, but 4K of them bounce and return to search again for related terms. This tells Google that this page is probably not a great match for the term “happy guy” and they adjust rank accordingly.

    On October 27th, Google was granted a patent for this ranking methodology. In essence, the patent referred to as “Rank-adjusted content items” seeks to use click logs and query logs are processed to identify statistical search patterns.

    BACKGROUND

    This disclosure relates to identifying content items.

    Content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc., can be identified by a search engine in response to a query. The query can include one or more search terms, and the search engine can identify and rank the content items based on the search terms in the query. Typically the content items are displayed according to the rank.

    The content items, however, are often identified only in response to a particular query, i.e., the search engine may identify and rank content items to independently for each query. For example, for three different queries, the search, engine may return a particular identification and rank of content items for each particular query, regardless of the other queries. In such implementations, a particular content item that may be highly relevant to a user’s current interests may not be identified and/or highly ranked and presented to the user until the user has conducted multiple searches. Additionally, other users may experience similar challenges when searching for content.

    SUMMARY

    Disclosed herein are systems and methods of identifying content items. In one implementation, click logs and query logs are processed to identify statistical search patterns based on the click logs and query logs. A search session is compared to the statistical search patterns. Content items responsive to a query of the search session are identified, and a ranking of the content items is adjusted based on the comparison.

    While I am certain that many will have a word about this and how it relates to both our own search habits and information, this is really a positive thing. Think about the last time you searched and the result was not as you had expected or was not a match…. This patent really seeks to use behavior and raw data to improve the entire search experience.

    Said it before, say it again… Google is running its business much as we seek to run our own. Happy searchers are happy customers. Let’s not forget that better search metrics mean better, more targeted and convertible traffic for us all.

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    ]]>     http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/09/google-search-behavior-ranking/feed/ 0     Jump to Results on Google http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/07/jump-to-results-on-google/ http://pro-webs.net/blog/2009/11/07/jump-to-results-on-google/#comments Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:12:35 +0000 admin http://pro-webs.net/blog/?p=711 Jump to Results on Google

    On Sept. 30, 2009 I posted some fresh new Google candy…. super snippets. A super snippet is simply a jump to link in your search results for relevant anchors within a page. Google understands that large pages with a great deal of content can be challenging for visitors to navigate. This is exactly the case with our main page.

    So, not only does a jump to anchors menu help your visitors on your page, but now in Google search results as well. Now, we have some helpful links in our search results for our searchers!

    web development1 Jump to Results on Google
    Our jump to menu was added on 9/30/2009 specifically to test this new search enhancement.
    zen cart development Jump to Results on Google
    I haven’t checked all along as I should have been, but checked and saw them today (11/7/2009).
    zen cart seo1 Jump to Results on Google
    How nice is it to do something that can increase your sales, helps your visitors, increases your reach and organic search real estate! Nice, we like this!

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