Many in the community have voiced concerns for the smaller websites and businesses who may lose more searches and search real estate. I want to take a minute to give you my thoughts on this….

1. Only VERY relevant searches will trigger this
2. Even small businesses with this type of search can and will trigger this
3. It doesn’t matter, done is done… adapt and overcome

For example if I search for pro-webs or pro webs, I get the following enhanced result.

Enhanced SERP

Now this is perfect for us, because we have taken great care to promote our “brand”. Essentially, both pro and webs are tough terms, even together to rank for. So, we use our brand consistently throughout the web and in everything we do. The result is that between, pro-webs, prowebs, pro-webs.net, pro webs company etc… We get a great deal of these very relevant searches for our business and domain name.

While this type of brand consistency is certainly the best practice for everyone, we learned this lesson the hard way.

Early on (2003), when we just built a few websites here and there and we started PRO-Webs, we were I was dumb! Yes, I personally own all of my mistakes… and the knowledge I have gained from them. Lets cover a few of the things I screwed up.

• Dash in the domain name (very bad!)
• Registered the .NET and not the .com (Remedied last year, for a chunk of change)
• I marketed PRO-Webs.net, instead of PRO-Webs
• I used link text that I thought was helpful for my SEO efforts… Never using “PRO-Webs”
• I answered questions and blogged without regard to branding myself as “PRO-Webs”
• I changed the logo several times over the first 5 years (Finally our graphic designer took all of the “versions” and made our current logo, which we put on EVERYTHING!)
• In content I used we, us etc… Now I use “We at PRO-Webs” for example, more frequently
• I used a silly nickname for logins and IDs instead of PRO-Webs
• The list goes on… But I think you get the point

What the result was… IF anyone thought I had helped them, or remembered PRO-Webs…. They NEVER remembered the address. Worse yet, if the “Googled” PRO-Webs, we were on page 5… UGH.

Remedy: We started and continue to use consistent and aggressive branding for our company. This means every opportunity you have to get your brand out there (email sig, forum sigs, blogs, directories, social media, etc.) you do so! Simple huh?

Some can find it challenging due to some poor uninformed decisions early on, but regardless of the past mistakes you must take the initiative to “own” your brand… This may even mean re-branding if the issues are insurmountable. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the need for branding. As we move forward in to this mashable, social media controlled web you will start to feel the pain of poor branding more and more. Don’t wait… Do this now, it matters!

So in closing, we still very much consider ourselves “little guys” ( we like this ), but we have benefited from Google’s change nonetheless. Maybe it’s not so much the “big business” or “little business” that is really the issue here… But rather the effort to brand.

We all worry about the security of our websites, but do you maintain your computer properly to avoid transferring malware and trojans to your website?

Fact is, we know most of you do not. We find that overall people do not take the necessary and proper steps to keep their computer and it’s software up to date and patched…. It’s a silent hacker!

Whether you have a static HTML website, blog or shopping cart… You are at risk of hacking your own website and spreading malware to your visitors…. Or worse, compromising their information and security while transacting on your website. Not to mention that most times Google will find the malware/hack before you and tag your listing or remove you from the index!

According to Web security firm McAfee’s second-quarter data, Malware reached its highest levels ever in the first half of 2010. The company found 6 million malicious files in the second quarter, making for a total of 10 million malicious files over the first six months of the year.

So we are going to give some tips to help you keep your computer up to date and your site’s visitors safe. These tips are a culmination of stuff provided to us from our ISP, our webhost and our son Troy the PC guy. We often share this list with customers to help them stay safe and will today share it with all of you. Stopping incidental and accidental malware and viruses from the Internet starts with you.

1. Make sure you have good virus software and it’s up to date. Troy recommends AVG for a very powerful and free solution. I personally use McAfee, but it is a paid solution.
2. Keep all your software (especially internet related software) such as browsers, plug-ins and add-ons up to date with the latest security patches. Examples are Adobe Reader, Flash, and Java. You can check whether your Firefox plugins are up to date at Mozilla Plugin Check…. And for secure browsing we do recommend Firefox or Chrome as your browser of choice, as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been historically subjected to the largest number of security threats.
3. Change your passwords regularly and do NOT store them in your browser. Strong passwords of at least 8 characters with numbers, letters and symbols will protect you best. Use a different password in every location.
4. Keep your computer’s operating system up to date. Software manufacturers release updates in response to bugs, and other changes… But most importantly in response to security issues discovered after release.
5. Do NOT access your website’s administration section from a public or unsecured wireless network… EVER!
6. Make sure your home or office’s wireless network is secured and closed to all but you and your staff. Here is an excellent tutorial. Have you heard of the new trendy hacker thing called “Drive By Hacking” or “Wardriving” … Check it out.
7. Limit access between computers on your network to all but that which is necessary (file sharing).
8. Get a good malware scanner for your computer, something like Malwarebytes is free and excellent.
9. Avoid adding unnecessary toolbars and plugins to your browser.
10. NEVER click cancel or another selection on popups in websites. It’s usually a trick. So if something pops up that is begging to to click to scan or similar…. Instead of clicking shut your browser down immediately and scan your machine.
11. Make certain your computer’s firewall is enabled, up to date and correctly configured at all times.
12. Whenever possible access your site’s admin, hosting control panel or FTP in a secured SSL connection to help prevent eavesdropping.
13. Know your computer’s normal processes and occasionally monitor what is running in your task manager or similar.
14. Only install software, addons and plugins from trusted publishers… Make sure all applications are signed so that you know what they are while monitoring your processes. When installing software always choose advanced or custom install as many are bundled with toolbars and other garbage you will unknowing install.
15. NEVER click links in emails or messages that look fishy or are from an unknown sender. If you get a PayPal letter, for example, asking you to update your information, view the link in your mouseover to see if it’s really from PayPal and look at the email address of the sender. When in doubt do not click the link and access the website directly by typing the url you KNOW to be correct in your address bar.
16. Never download attachments from senders you do not know… and scan them first even if you know them
17. Even if you do not normally visit gambling, p o r n or other known platforms for extreme malware, you should use a rootkit detection tool occasionally. Anti-Rootkit for example is free and does an excellent job.

Now, saying you will do these things is not enough. You have to actually do them. Set your scanners to run daily in your task scheduler, while you are sleeping even. Set your computer’s operating system updates to automatic, and think before you click. These are the things we charge you with to help make the Internet a little safer for all users…. It starts with you and your website, we all share this very important responsibility.

Customers behave in the same manner… 1000 great orders delivered fast and perfectly, no comments at all. 1 distribution screw up, and boom you are ranking on page one for “XYC company are idiots!” Some will say. “it’s not fair”… Tell you what I tell my kids, “Life is not fair”. Just like anything else in life, if it’s worth it…. It’s also hard work. You will have to fix this.

So today we will cover some of the things that can happen to your business, and some ways to “fix” the problems created.

While these interactive services are a wonderful part of the web, they are also easily misused and cheated as well. This is not however the most common problem, most times it’s that one bad order that will sting you. So spend your time concentrating on fixing the issue and not finding the competitor who caused it.

Some Ways You Can be Hurt by User Supplied Information on The Web

Testimonials: We know these can be a great thing for your business, but they can be a silent killer as well. Sites like GetFave.com and RipOffReport.com allow users to say what they like without much if any supporting information. These types of sites have essentially un-moderated content by way of making the “submitter” solely responsible for their own ….. Searchable content!

Product Reviews: Word of mouth advertising for products and services is as old as human commerce. These types of customer generated comments have often been the maker or breaker of small businesses for some time. A good review in a newspaper could send your business soaring to the top, while a bad one could sink your boat. This hasn’t changed much in theory, the dangers and territory have expanded. So instead of waiting out a poor review in a newspaper for 6 months that touched your local area, you now are dealing with a global area and a potentially unlimited time line.

Security Reports: For ecommerce this is a BIG deal, tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor and other toolbar phishing and security reporting devices can sting your business big time. These tools, while for the most part are fairly moderated can cause you terrible troubles if the not so savvy web user reports you for phishing or security issues. A great example is a client who was reported because his main page of his Zen Cart was NOT SSL encrypted. Why the hell would it be? But, McAfee accepted the report and was flagging the search results for the website for all of it’s users! While I am sure that the user who submitted the rating was honest and concerned, he/she was clearly NOT qualified to supply the report…. as a result the client’s business suffered while we attempted to work it out w/ McAfee.

Social Media: Sharing is the buzz word for this generation, and share we do. We share photos, experiences and of course the businesses we come in contact with as well. Again, just like we discussed, humans are far more likely to add a negative experience to their Facebook than a positive one. The dangers of not monitoring and involving your business in social media are exponential. The up side it that many social media users will ask advice before visiting a restaurant or making a purchase, and the responses from network friends will generally be positive in these cases.

As a shop owner there are some things you can do to monitor and influence these items. The term is actually a fairly new classification called “reputation management”. In essence this is the monitoring, management and repair of your’s, your business’, and/or your website’s online activity and reputation. There are professionals that can for a fee, provide these services to you… But we will try to help you, help yourself a bit first.

Monitoring Online Reputation

While we suggest you contact a professional for damage control and cleanup in the event you are “bad mouthed” on the web, there are many free tools you can use to monitor your online reputation yourself however.

• BackType: is a free search tool which will grab mentions of your company name, products, web site url etc. and deliver you results from social media, blogs and other user generated content sites on the web.
• Monitter: will scrape real time Twitter notations for up to 3 keywords at a time. Nice tool, but a bit addictive!
• Google Alerts: is by far the most comprehensive and my favorite. Way back when, originally suggested to me by the late David Castle, this tool scrapes anything you want from Google. Great for trends, keyword research and reputation management too!
• PureWireTrust: is an online search for email addresses, websites (places) and things. Results include social networking accounts, security, blacklisting, IP and WhoIs results.
• Yasni: is a pretty cool scraper for Google Blogs, web, etc… But most impressive is the “monitor tool” provided to email yourself results and save your results as well!
• BBB: has user submitted issues even if you are NOT a member. Note that at least these are well moderated user submitted comments.
• Google: is great for searching for things like your business/domain name and one of these the words: testimonials, reviews, complaints, reports etc.

Taking Action

There are many things you can do for yourself if you find your site in a reputation mess, BUT, we strongly suggest you at least consult a professional if you have been wrongly bad mouthed on the web.

1. Investigate the allegation: Do you know this user? Does the submitted report look real? Do they have the right site?
2. Contact the webmaster: Use the website’s contact information to inquire about the negative comments, provide your side of the story and request removal.
3. Make amends: Contact the user, offer to make it right…. Apologize. A wise restaurant manager (Rick Nader) once told me that customer complaints are a much greater opportunity to “wow” a customer than plain old great service. Making it right can be a huge word of mouth advertising tools for your website.
4. Address the issue: If you are unable to get the problem resolved/removed, then factually and honestly address it on your own blog or social media persona. Tell the truth, reference the page link of the negative comments and tell your side of the story in a very positive and constructive way.
5. Bomb the page: This is obviously a last resort, but popularity and freshness are huge in search engine ranking, so you can conceivably “bomb” the offending page with fresh positive results and push them down the SERPs (search results pages).

The moral of today’s post is that while nothing has changed in business reputation, the tools, playing field, influence and accessibility of these reports has grown to mammoth proportions…. And so must you step up and monitor your online reputation.

Google Caffeine

Google officially announced the completion of the new Google index, dubbed Caffeine for it speed and freshness. This new index has been a long time in the sandbox and even longer implementing, but it seems to deliver faster, more relevant and fresher search results. While as website owners this has complicated our job on many levels, I think the positive experience for searchers is profound. Less frustrated searchers are more likely to buy, complain less and tolerate more.

Google’s new index is faster, larger and far more comprehensive. Media results, news, blogs…. They are all fresher.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Back in August of 2009 Google began the undertaking of streamlining and bug fixing the Caffeine update… They even provided all of us an opportunity to use the development index in the sandbox and provide feedback. How nice that we, developers, searchers and rubber neckers could see, touch and participate.

In the “future web” we see everyday feedback, transparency and trust are commanding factors… Google seems to have a solid grasp on this concept. They expect it from you and demonstrate it themselves in the way they run your business. So caffeine is very simply put, Google’s effort to grow effectively and deliver the best product (search) to their visitors. I think aligning yourself in this type of mentality is the key to your Internet success.

To summarize, between 4/28/2010 and 5/3/2010 Google made an algorithmic change affecting the organic rank/traffic for long tail searches. Head searches are not as widely affected, but some have been reported. This change is in fact a quality update which has passed all the normal Google department approvals and testing. It is not part of or related to the Caffeine update, but the goal is similar, as in any algorithmic change the target is to improve search results. Lastly, this change is not temporary, so if you have lost traffic, you will need to make some changes to recover…. they are not going to just come back.

You will find that solving this issue for your site is going to be primarily accomplished through quality, specifically content quality. With relationship to ecommerce, the longtail keywords will generally exist only in the product/page title. Ideally, this does not provide the relevancy needed to rank this page for the longtail.

Longtail keywords have traditionally been an easy target for ecommerce… Just pop the longtail in the page title and bingo you rank. Easy pickens. However, as many already know, this allowed pages to rank for longtails, which were not necessarily the best result. Essentially, some pretty low quality, content lacking and non-authoritative pages were allowed to rank. Google seeks to now make the criteria for longtails more closely matched to the criteria for bigger box searches.

Ok, so your traffic is way down… You’ve determined that the majority of the loss is in 3 to 5 word keyword phrases (longtail), what can you do?

While the answers are pretty clear, there is no escaping the hard work and time which will be needed to resolve this issue. As noted before the most effective use of your time will be spent on content, quality content.

Quality Content for Ecommerce Tips

• Write unique, descriptive and substantial product descriptions for your products. Include several variations of the longtail keyword in your copy. For example if the longtail keyword is bright red light bulbs, you might include red light bulbs, bright red lightbulbs, bright lightbulbs: red…etc. These inclusions support the longtail keyword and are adding relevance to the search query.
• Link specific longtail variations in the link text from your other pages, especially category pages above the longtail product. (internal linking)
• Make a concerted effort in your pages to keep the content topical. Unfortunately, for ecommerce this can mean you will need to limit unrelated marketing on page, or wash it with more topical content on the page. For example, a product page for a green banana may be cross selling many other products on the page… These products, even if related, dilute the main theme or topic of the page, the product.
• Concentrate on product pages to start and then work your way towards the top. Product pages inevitably have more ability to rank, as ideally these pages have a more targeted content base. So your time working on these pages is the most “bang for your buck”.
• Now might be the best time to consider getting a blog going. A blog hosted ON YOUR DOMAIN (domain.com/blog) will provide additional longtail opportunities, internal linking, popularity and of course help to boost your authority. Post things like reviews, tips, holiday or seasonal trends, product suggestions and even a coupon or 2. Don’t forget to promote your Facebook fan page and Twitter accounts as well.
• Make sure products have unique page titles and Meta descriptions. Titles should be short (about 65 characters), relevant, direct and unique to every page. Descriptions should be 100 to 250 characters, relevant to the page and of course unique to the page. While the Meta description does not help you rank, it certainly can cause duplication and quality issues with Google if ignored.

I think the most logical explanation of Mayday is to say that Google finally recognized the fact that longtail searches were slipping through the cracks. Longtail searches have never had even close to the same relevancy, quality and authority requirements as shorter, bigger box phrases do. As a result, many, even if unwittingly, have cheated the system by having low(er) quality pages able to rank fairly well for longtail searches.

Truth be told, as we look through our SEO client’s analytics…. The only ones who have dropped, are not creating the quality, unique and descriptive content on their product pages which we have always required. Those sites that are spending the time to have unique, quality descriptions are pulling the same or more organic traffic in their longtail searches.

No doubt that creating this level of content is hard work, but when you think about the increased convertibility of longtail search referrals…. How can you not allocate the time and resources needed to eliminate duplication and create great content.

Since the optimization, we have seen a small boost in traffic, which is potentially unrelated, but also some meat and potato, hard core statistical responses to the optimization from Google. We are going to share these with you today, so you can better understand the benefit of optimizing your site’s speed.

Bet, hardly any of you noticed this cool new tool in your Google Webmasters account…. Site performance. In your Google Webmaster Tools account (selected domain), expand the “Labs” menu to see “Site performance”. At the top of this page you see the following description.

This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users. Learn more

Then below a graph and some incredible information with regard to your site’s speed performance. We will share ours with you here.

PRO-Webs Performance Chart

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 1.4 seconds to load (updated on May 12, 2010). This is faster than 82% of sites. These estimates are of medium accuracy (between 100 and 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Then below you will find a wealth of information and data on some specific pages within your site, including PageSlow reports and other suggestions to improve your speed! See example below:

URL PageSpeed Report Details

These detailed reports contain information to improve the load speed of the pages. Some of these things just cannot be accomplished for every website, but that which can be done will improve your performance.

So what about those hard core results?

Got them right here, how about a nice increase in “Pages crawled per day”, a decrease in “Kilobytes downloaded per day” and the bottom fell completely out of “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)”.

So, we allowed Google to crawl more pages, use less resources and get it done faster…. Nice!

PRO-Webs Crawl Stats

What more motivation could you possibly need to start thinking speed optimization?

Deliver-Ability

Scary or not, it is very true and many of you are affected already and don’t even realize it. You see, your Zen Cart sends mail from the software. In many cases software generated email is less deliverable to begin with… add some bad hosting and Zen Cart configurations… and boom, very low deliver-ability.

There are several tools to check your email protocol and server/DNS setup, and we will get to those in a minute. But, for now, lets run a simple test that will identify one of the hardest mail networks to deliver software generated email to…

Go to Yahoo and create a brand new email account using a non-domain based email as the backup email address. Next go to your Zen Cart and create and account and order something using the new Yahoo email address. Now check your new mailbox to see if the account creation and confirmation emails were delivered. Most of you will find Yahoo sent these directly to spam.

Why would they do that?

Some time ago, Yahoo, who is owned my SBC (ATT) decided that they would do a “better job” of filtering email spam. In doing so they went over the edge and in a few days time blocked about have of the email addresses on the planet. In order to be unblocked from Yahoo, SBC, ATT and a few other small ones, you have to provide answers and requests on a laborious form. The level of questions on this form made it so hosting company would likely have to complete it for you.

Having screwed up so severely, they were then unable to keep up with the “unblocking” requests and mandated that every IP could only submit so many requests in a certain time frame. Crazy huh?

Our hosting company did an awesome job of creating proxy IPs to get the submissions done for ourselves and hundreds of hosted clients…. But did you get unblocked and un-spammed?

Email tools provide some insight as to the DNS and server configuration for your domain based email accounts. These tools provide information regarding blocked/banned/blacklisted hosts and IP addresses…. as well as some metrics necessary in this day and age to ensure your emails are delivered.

Reverse DNS lookup

This method of blocking spam is very server intensive. The receiving email server performs a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of the incoming mail connection and checks if there is a valid domain name associated to it. While this is not used for most ISPs as a wholly determining factor, AOL and their subsidiaries will refuse your emails without it. Check your rDNS here.

SPF Record

SPF Record or Sender Policy Framework is a method for preventing sender address forgery. Have you gotten those emails appearing to be from someone else, besides who they are really from? Spoofed. Your server’s SPF record can help to prevent this…

An example…

1. Suppose a spammer forges domain.com and tries to email spam you, the sender connects from somewhere other than domain.com.
2. When the email is sent, you see MAIL FROM: <user_address@domain.com>, but you do not have to take his word for it. You can ask domain.com if the IP address is really from their network.
3. In this example, domain.com publishes a valid SPF record. That DNS record tells the mail receiving server how to find out if the sending machine/IP is allowed to send email from domain.com.
4. If domain.com responds that they recognize the sending machine/IP, it passes, and you can assume the email sender is who they say they are. If the email message fails the SPF tests, it is a forgery, and likely a spammer.

More information on SPF, and how it works, visit the Sender Policy Framework site.

To check and see if your domain has a proper SPF record, use this SPF record tool. If your domain based email addresses do not, contact your hosting company and ask them to set it up. More and more email receiving servers are checking for a valid SPF response, this is crucial to your email deliver-ability.

Interestingly enough, some web hosts claim they do not have this ability, which is likely BS… But face it this is your business and if you web host cannot or will not set up a proper SPF record for their servers… then you are likely hosted with a bunch of spammers who can hurt your site’s ability to rank and set off trust issues with McAfee and Norton in search results!. Time to move to a proper web host.

DomainKeys, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

These are also used to fight against forged emails. The protocol uses encryption technology to verify that an email is really from the domain from which it appears to be. If a message has been verified through DomainKeys/DKIM (developed by Yahoo), many email programs and web mail will display an icon or message verifying the sender for your email recipients. DomainKey will likely need to be set up by your web host, but many hosting control panels, including cPanel have this ability at your fingertips… Click, click done. Then check it (be sure to follow the instructions).

Sometimes, you can be blacklisted (labeled as a spammer), when you did nothing wrong! What if for example your web host re-uses an IP that was previously blocked for spam and never resolved…. Well, now you are blacklisted too! Use this tool to check your MX record and blacklist status. If you find you are blocked on any, your hosting company ***should handle this for you, but if they won’t you can try to contact the resource directly.

There are some things you can easily do to help ensure the deliver-ability of your Zen Cart’s emails.

• Check and ensure a proper SPF record, DomainKeys and rDNS are setup on your server
• In your Zen Cart admin under Configuration >> Email options check and set the following
  1. Email Address (sent FROM) is set to a valid email address, preferably @yourdomain.com
  2. Emails must send from known domain? is set to “Yes”
  3. Email Admin Format? Set to TEXT, as it has the highest deliver-ability rate
  4. Allow Guest To Tell A Friend set to false, so that spammers cannot route email through your website
  5. Display “Newsletter Unsubscribe” Link? Set to True
• Use a proper service to send email marketing and newsletters
• Leave your CAN Spam policy and remove/unsubscribe instructions in your cart’s emails
• Handle remove or unsubscribe requests immediately
• DO NOT check the newsletter to true on your create account form. Many will not notice and then later spam or report your emails. (Configuration >> Customer Details >> Show Newsletter Checkbox) set to zero or 1
• Set default email format to text (Configuration >> Customer Details >> Customer Default Email Preference) set to zero, text

Face it, the deliver-ability of your Zen Cart’s emails is crucial to your business and is not something to be taken lightly.

What’s the difference?

Upgrade, Redesign or Both?

Well, likely most many of the bugs are out of the way for the new release, but some very serious module and customization issues exist for upgrades. While, these modules and customizations are in no way the responsibility of the Zen Cart development team, they are something we all have in our stores.

So, while we look forward to having a development package for new stores in 1.3.9b in the next few days, we are still cautioning against upgrades.

If you really think you need to upgrade, you might consider a “Rip n’ Rebuild” situation instead. In this type of scenario, unused and non-compliant modules are removed, broken functions are eliminated and you get a brand new store with all of your products, customers, coupons, orders etc… But no upgrade exceptions and incompatibility issues.

A “Rip n’ Rebuild” also gives you the opportunity to look at a new design and layout. Change the things which have been bugging you and optimize your site properly from the start.

The basic idea of rebuilding as opposed to upgrading is to forgive our previous mistakes and have a fresh, clean shopping cart. When deciding to do a rebuild, you will want to consider many things… Including all those modules installed in your current cart, which “you had to have”, but never use. Having unnecessary modules only adds load, future upgrade issues and generally headaches.

You might even consider dumping those SEO URL rewrites (we did!) that cause your cart’s performance and load to be less than optimum. We will even redirect these pages for you, so that they will re-index and you can recover with a fresh start and a fast cart!

All in all, make no mistake, this is still no inexpensive project, but if you are ready to upgrade it is a genuine consideration for your business. No one likes errors, slow pages and limited ability… You might just have a better idea of your business’ needs and cart’s operations than when you built your current cart =-)

Check out our own rebuilt store in 1.3.9

Expectations for Zen Cart 2.0 are quite high and impatient. Originally, and still in documentation, 1.3.9 is a security or rollup release. While this is true, it’s not the whole story….

As we sift through the changes and play around with the new software, security is definitely a high priority. Some added features include htaccess files to limit access, filetype and other previous vulnerabilities we have been fixing by hand. Some things remain the same, you must still rename your admin folder by hand. This is a very frustrating process for less experienced shop owners, and I hope that 2.0 will allow this function to be accomplished in setup.

The offline credit card processing module has been removed for PCI/DSS compliance standards. You can steal code from 1.3.8 to reinstall this, but consider the risk and look at a proper gateway for processing. The cost of a breech can be in the thousands of dollars, vs a few bucks a month for a proper gateway account such as Authorize.net.

Quite a few changes in payment modules, as they were upgraded for new security protocols, API and integration changes and overall updates that have been previously gimping along or required manual updating. The only downside here is when you upgrade you will need to uninstall these modules in your Zen Cart admin and then reinstall once the upgrade is complete.

All order total and shipping modules were updated with bug fixes and such from 1.3.8.  Nothing new here, just added the bug fixes we have been completing by hand. Again, when upgrading, uninstall these modules and then reinstall them after the upgrade.

Templating is not a big upgrade issue, as the only file touched is tpl_reviews_random.php, which is a bug fix. So your templates for the most part will upgrade without issue.

Modules are a huge issue. Many Most are untested and not compatible with Zen Cart 1.3.9. Forum users have been maintaining a makeshift list of working modules here, but your own testing is an absolute necessity. The truth of the matter is that you will likely want to wait a few months to upgrade if you have customized and modded your cart.

There has already been a patched release of 1.3.9 which is only less than a month old. While this was only a file update, there is no guarantee that other updates will not occur and be more complicated. This small file update took me 45 minutes to accomplish with only one module to re-merge files for…. I also had issues with the new .htaccess files in the admin section and replaced them with the working ones from 1.3.9a. About 18 new bugs were fixed in the 1.3.9 second release (B).

Zen Cart 1.3.9

So what’s new?

Actually quite a bit is new, and that is why the release is not really just a security update. Some additional functionality and compatibility was added….

• Zen Cart 1.3.9 is PHP 5.3 ready, without patching
• PCI issues have been dramatically reduced
• SSL handling and renegotiation, session handling and detection are fixed for most server configurations
• Canonical url tags were added
• Developers toolkit has most robust filtering and search ability
• New PayPal support added for UK – 3D-Secure and micropayments
• Fixes for the handling of failed PayPal IPNs to be processed with cURL
• Integrated split tax lines without previous customization needed
• Easy Pages can now have their own individual stylesheets
• ISO countries update
• Updated spiders.txt including Yandex
• configure files now attempt to automatically set their own permissions to 444
• Normal operations are significantly less query intensive and run faster
• On page PHP errors removed for PCI and logging enabled automatically
• PCI compliance for auto complete on credit card forms is resolved
• The “Tell a Friend” feature, which should still be set to require a login, now throttles the spam that can be sent through the form
• Brute force protection added to the admin login
• Improved attribute selector
• Audience selector crashes have been fixed
• Who’s online is updated and works significantly smoother and lighter
• Example robots.txt was added
• Customer and product search was improved in your admin
• Catalog search is significantly better
• Downloadable product bugs are fixed for “most” server configurations

So I still suggest that if your Zen Cart is very customized or heavily modded that you wait a bit to upgrade… Fact is you might just consider a rebuild to get a clean start with the new software.

Training GoogleBot

Increasing your crawl rate and crawl budget from Google is as simple as training GoogleBot. Crawl rate is simply how often GoogleBot visits your website to crawl. Crawl budget is a much harder metric to define, but in its simplest terms is the amount of data transfer Google allocates to crawling your site. These metrics are based on many things, but most effectively on the need to crawl. If you always have fresh content, Google needs to crawl more often.

Why would we seek to increase our crawl rate and crawl budget?

Very simply, a more frequent crawl rate and more in depth crawl budget will allow your pages to be indexed quicker and your site crawled more deeply. While neither of these things help you rank in a specific manner, they both attribute to your site’s trust and freshness score, which are part of the algorithm. Additionally, there is much information coming out recently with relationship to freshness of content and PageRank…. So even those “old time” PR watchers have reason to take notice.

Fact is, aside from the time needed to create fresh, unique content for you website, this is the easiest thing you can accomplish for your site’s SEO campaign. Creating content regularly is key for these metrics. Note that this is generally going to be new pages, which have the best effect. Freshening content is also important, but not as effective as a new page. Like the old saying, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying”.

So a great example is a client who pays for content for his blog. He buys and receives 30 blog posts in a batch…. He would most effectively make use of this content by releasing them over a longer period of time, instead of in one batch on his website. Again, this goes to creating the habit to crawl more frequently, thus training GoogleBot.

Many ask me what the magic number is…. How many pages a week should I create?

I suspect that this number is going to be a minimum of 1 to 5% of your total pages. Higher percentages are obviously more effective, but if you cannot keep it up on a regular schedule, then the effect is lost. You also do not want to create so much new content that Google has to sandbox you or you start to see huge fluctuations in your indexing and rank. I would think the high end of the number is 10% for this purpose. Remember, sometimes you will have more, like when you launch a new section on your site or have a huge influx of seasonal products for example, that’s okay…. Remember to continue at your regular rate, forever.

How does Google know I have new pages?

Believe it or not, Google knows. Google finds new pages from links, from crawl, from your sitemap and from social media platforms. There was an interesting answer to a sitemap question posted at Google Webmaster Help, where Googler John Mu responded as follows:

Google’s Sitemaps crawler usually reacts to the update frequency of your Sitemap files. If we find new content there every time we crawl, we may choose to crawl more frequently. If you can limit updates of the Sitemap files to daily (or whatever suits your sites best), that may help. Similarly, if you create a shared Sitemap file for these subdomains, that could help by limiting the number of requests we have to make for each subdomain — you could let us know about the Sitemap file by mentioning it in your robots.txt file using a “Sitemap:” directive (the Sitemap file does not have to be on the same host or domain as the site itself). If we’re generally crawling your sites too frequently, you can also set the crawl rate in Webmaster Tools for those sites.

So if you use an xml sitemap, make sure your crawl frequency and last modified stamps are used. If you have a blog on your website, Google can be prompted to visit more often with the pinging service. Once Google gets the link they come check it out, following links from the new post deeper in to your website.

The end result of training GoogleBot is a healthier site, stronger organic ranking ability, fast indexing of new pages (like 10 minutes for example!) and of course a better trust score from Google. Also worth noting that duplicate content and non-textual pages really do not help this “fresh” metric at all…. In fact they hurt your overall crawl rate. Why would GoogleBot crawl your duplicate content more frequently?

Speed Optimization

It’s official, Google has stated that load speed is a part of the 200 or so ranking factors within their ranking algorithm. This is not a surprise as the new algorithm seems to be very tuned for a very wholesome set of factors. Factors such as relevancy, quality, usability, freshness, uniqueness and now speed are on the rise. Some more historical elements such as inbound links and meta tags are gone or carry significantly reduced weight. While the speed influence is small now, you can expect it to become more weighted as Google continues to develop Caffeine.

This is really a positive thing for Google and for most shop owners, as Google is in essence leveling the playing field. Those large budgeted, link buying stores that have traditionally outranked you with cash, will now have to start dancing to a new tune…. Just like you.

So even though the weight is small now, there are other even more relevant reasons to optimize your site’s load speed. Proper speed optimization increases the usability of your site, reduces shopper frustration and improves conversion rates. Good enough for me!

So how do I make my Zen Cart faster?

1. This post will help you tackle some very specific Zen Cart performance optimizations, How to Make Your Zen Cart Cook
2. Reduce the size and number of images in your template. Opt for a lighter CSS solution whenever possible for backgrounds and template images
3. Optimize your CSS and JavaScript. This is really huge, you will be surprised when you see the improvement. Combine some of those stylesheets as well for another speed boost. Remove CSS styles that do not pertain to your custom template as well.
4. Reduce line breaks in defined html code and clean it up
5. Optimize your product images, they can still be large and descriptive…. But there is no need for them to be any larger than your largest display. Checkout image handler to cache them as well
6. Choose a webhost that can properly host your Zen Cart. I know this is a touchy subject, but there are some very popular hosts out there that just have NO BUSINESS hosting Zen Carts! Ask in the forum and someone will advise you =-)
7. Converting your database to InnoDB over the standard MyISAM will allow you much faster query processing in most hosting environments. Additionally, caching queries in your database as opposed to none or a file will greatly improve your cart’s speed
8. Even if you lack a great deal of skill you can remove some weight from your .htaccess by removing commenting and unnecessary line creaks from it
9. Converting your Zen Cart to use compressed CSS stylesheets is an advantage that is possible, but involves some more technical knowledge (we are actually looking at this for a module release once fully tested and will inform you here)
10. Become a minimalist…. Display what you need, when you need it and turn everything else off. A great example of this the the download module, if you aren’t using it, turning it off will increase your speed. In your layout boxes controller, turn off unused sideboxes for another speed boost

This is not really designed to be a tutorial, but rather to get your thinking speed for rank! Suggest you checkout Page Speed for FireFox as opposed to using external tools, as they will all vary due to hops and different network connections. Also, SiteReportCard does a great job of telling you where you have slow images, JavaScript and errors causing slow speeds.

April 2010 Update

Over the Easter holiday weekend, Google began a toolbar PageRank update. I say began, because even today I am still seeing changes happening. This was not unexpected as Google seems to favor an April PR update historically.

Normally, I would not blog this, as I am a fervent believer in the “PageRank is not a big deal” mentality. I put little if any stock in that little green bar, and instruct our clients likewise. We rather belong to the “build it and they will come” theory of SEO. In part we belief that natural links, on page optimization, fresh content, elimination of duplication and unique text are the key to organic search success.

Google has been monkeying around with the algorithm since before Christmas, and it’s not even close to being over yet. A great deal of the changes, fluctuations and odd behavior recently can be attributed to Google’s new search engine, Google Caffeine. We have seen pages drop, pages rise, indexed pages fluctuating from week to week with discrepancies in the thousands, incredibly quick indexing of pages…. And now a TB PageRank update (again).

First let me say that I have said, and will continue to anyone who will listen, that this update is to get Google “back to good”. We find that the site’s fairing well are updated regularly, fast loading and content rich. While backlinks and PageRank obviously still play a part, their influence seems to have been reduced significantly. This is a rather summarized snapshot of the ranking factors, but the “meat and potatoes” of Google’s quest to improve search results and squash the seemingly uncontrollable pieces of the algorithm which seem most likely to be abused or cheated. Like paid links for example….

Google has in the past, and continues to make a dedicated effort to stop the influence caused in their search results from paid and reciprocal linking. You see these links are not earned, but rather purchased or traded… Thus making them and their influence rather fake.

I think that in effect, while Google has made significant progress in identifying, penalizing and removing many “cheaters”…. They were still overall unsuccessful. So to top off the campaign war on paid links, Google did the one thing guaranteed to slow down the link brokers…. They removed a great deal of the weight that these unnatural links are allowed to carry. Bravo! They solved the paradigm.

So in effect, the folks selling links have just had the bottom fall out of their market. Their products, once more precious than gold, have significantly less retail value to a trained eye. Sure, they will continue to sell links, and many will still buy…. But, as people catch on and the word is spread, their clients will dwindle.

Back to topic, the reason I an blogging this is simple…. This appears to have been a bit more than a toolbar PageRank update. Many site’s have seen a significant drop in organic search traffic from Google as a result of this update. Sure it would be easy to say and even prove in a fishbowl that the sites have less PageRank and call this the cause as a short sighted theory. However, I think that along with the little green bar, we are seeing the soft implementation of Google Caffeine.

So what does this mean if your traffic has fallen off and not recovered?

I would suggest that you examine the content on your website, for freshness and uniqueness. Work on your page load speeds, eradicate all controllable duplicate content and give your website some TLC. Growth is a big key factor, but growth of pages is not the answer… You have to create unique and valuable content. Then if you find some time, go after some quality and highly relevant backlinks. Don’t worry about the PR of these inbound links, but rather concern yourself with link text, position of the link with regard to the textual content and related content on the page.

If you build it they will come

Facebook Fan Pages

Many shop owners are really lagging behind on the social media angle. Let face it, time is short and so much to do. Fact is, so many things to promote your ecommerce business cost money, this one is free… Just a bit of you precious time to get free promotion for your online shop. There are some very good business reasons to spend a few hours creating your business’ Facebook fan page.

Did you know that someone else could steal away your business name for their own fan page?

We talk with shop owners about a great many things, one thing we advise on frequently is protecting your brand. Now I know you are not Coca Cola or Gieco, but your brand is the heart of your business. It may not seem important now, but what if I told you that if you do not act, when the importance of brand protection smacks you in the face it may be too late?

Yes, too late. There are some things you just MUST do to protect your brand, NOW…. Not later.

Register the alternate spellings, TLDs and versions of your domain. This might cost you $50 a year, but it’s probably one of the best investments you can make. What will you do if years from now, when hopefully you are knee deep in success, a competitor has a misspelling of your domain?

You will lose traffic is what you will do…. To your competitor at that. A great example is a client of our who registered a domain with a number in it. The number 4 instead of for. His competitor using the “for” domain, grabs a great deal of his traffic…. and sales, as they sell very similar products. Hell, he even gets phone calls for the other business…. Imagine how many of his customers are calling them.

Another recent situation involves a shop owner who has the .NET version of their domain only. Now this is a bad move to start with, but if you have the .COM as well, no worries as you can redirect them. Like we do PRO-Webs.com. This client has only the .NET and the .COM houses a VERY adult website. Many returning customers will not only be lost, but very likely offended as well.

Facebook and Twitter are important for the same reason. They both have vanity urls, like http://www.facebook.com/prowebs and http://twitter.com/prowebs. Once someone else registers YOUR business name, that’s it…. Gone.

So while I realize you are long on work and short on time, spending a few hows setting up your Facebook fan page… and your Twitter account as well, is a damn good investment. In the future we will see these social media profiles and pages become an active part of your business’ equity and domain worth. Not to mention, how awful to find that your customers are being stolen away by some look-alike business using your rightful Facebook url. Worse yet… Find out there is nothing you can do, because you failed to spend a few hours when it counted.

Interested? Let’s set up your Facebook fan page.

First thing is to get a fan (official) page here. Note that businesses have fan pages, not profiles. See this isn’t so tough. hey you are on a roll, get your Twitter page while you are at it, here.

You probably noticed that Twitter, unlike Facebook gives you a personalized url right off. Facebook requires an act of dedication on your part to get your personalized fan page url. There have been many numbers for the amount of fans it takes, but currently you need 25 fans before you can secure your own url. We’ll talk about getting those fans in a bit.

Here is a pretty easy video to make your fan page, no excuses here =-) For my readers, check this very good tutorial to create your fan page.

I have some additional tips to share with you, so you can maximize your time and effort.

While Facebook has a pretty standardized structure, they do have some cool aps to help you promote your page and build your followers. One in particular, profile HTML is a very handy ap which will allow you to add custom HTML to your profile or fan page.

Very important to add your RSS feeds for your store and/or blog to your fan page. This is really a snap to do an only take a few minutes… Then it will work automatically for you.

Adding RSS to Facebook

Facebook allows you to quickly and easily import an external blog from another website.

1. On your notes about me page, click the Import a blog link on the right side of the page. (hard to find in the new layout — But here’s a link)
2. Enter the URL (web address) of your blog into the text box, and check the box underneath that states that you agree to FB TOS. This is the whole URL, like http://pro-webs.net/blog/feed/
3. To complete the process, click on “Save Settings.” Once you do this, your previous posts will appear as notes and any new posts you make will automatically display.

See easy! I also highly recommend the Networked Blogs ap for Facebook.

Going through the settings and such are pretty logical, just read and fill them out. Believe it or not, your teenager is a great resource for this! You can spend a few minutes a week to post tips, coupons and other business related items in a snap.

Now for the important part…. Getting the fans required to get your personalized url.

• If you already have a Facebook profile page, send a note to all of your friends and ask them to click the “Become a Fan” link to your page.  <– Selfless promotion =-)
• Include your fan page link in the signature of all your emails
• Add the “Become a Fan” widget to your site and blog
• Offer additional savings or promotions specifically for your Facebook fans
• Beg…. LOL

Once you have the required number of fans (currently 25), you will see a link on your home page, but here’s a link to grab your personalized Facebook url and protect your brand!

This isn’t so hard, and even if you choose not to promote it actively… at least someone else won’t =-)

Got Blog?

There has been an absolute onslaught of shop owners wanting a blog. This is not very unexpected, as the freshness and regularity of content carry far more weight then they ever have before in Google’s algorithm.

Certainly, I advise clients that this creation of fresh content on a regular business is a very good thing…. But I also tell them how NOT to shoot themselves in the foot.

Okay, so that sounds funny, but it’s very true…. Your shiny new blog can do you a huge disservice if you don’t know the basics. So today tonight I will attempt to give you new bloggers a fighting chance.

Perhaps in many cases the word content, by its very definition is too vague or not as descriptive as we mean to say. So if you read somewhere or your SEO tells you you need to create fresh content…. We should in fact say: You need to create unique, descriptive, fresh, honest, longtail keyword enriched content. Wow, that’s a mouthful. But, true none the less.

Unique is a word you should really wrap your head around for everything web you do. In a nutshell it means simply that the content is not published anywhere else on the web. So clearly grabbing those free articles and republishing them on your blog is not the ticket. Every page on your website should be unique from your other pages and all other web pages. It’s this uniqueness that holds the advantage.

Descriptive content is also often misunderstood. I will ask a client to write more descriptive product descriptions and he will provide me a product description with 50 key points in a bulleted list. Okay, so again, I was too vague… I mean that your pages should contain copy descriptive enough for users to read and scan naturally which generates an image or understanding of the product or page.

For example, if I called you on the phone to inquire about the widget for sale in your shopping cart, would you blow through 50 key points? No, you would use descriptive language and natural language to help me to visualize the product and it’s qualities. You would use examples and experiences to instill trust in your product, and lastly you would most certainly speak in a confident tone. My point is simple, you do not have to be a very talented writer to write descriptive text… Mostly, you just have to want to.

Fresh content is pretty simple to understand, this is new content. While updating existing pages is very good and important, your site will perform much better if you are creating new pages on a regular basis. Face it, this demonstrates both maintenance and growth.

Honest content is something every blogger should know and understand. This is simply the fact that this blog, while an incredible marketing tool is an extension of you and your company. These are posts, not white papers. Reach out to your readers, show some humanity and personality.

Sanitized blog posts will never bring you the readership and following needed to make your blog a success. If you are Joe, then blog as Joe…. Not admin. Make yourself approachable, identifiable and easy to follow, and your readers will love you.

Longtail keyword enriched content is rather a simple thing and easily accomplished. The best advice I can give you to create great longtail keywords is to refer to descriptive content above.

Too many times a week to count, clients will ask me what I think they should be targeting in their keywords. Now they don’t mean the Meta keyword tag, most of the time anymore… Instead they mean for me to give them a list of keywords to stuff in their content. Aside from coming up empty handed, they have now made me get my soap box out and begin to preach.

You see, most of you are not in a position to know what keywords you should be targeting. Instead you should be creating unique, descriptive content so in a year you will know.

For example, if you sell bananas, you will inevitably tell me you need to get to page one for bananas. This produces 2 problems. 1 the shorter keyword phrase is much harder to rank for, 2 it’s not likely to be a high converting or money making phrase. Something like buy bananas, or fresh green bananas are more convertible search queries. These longer phrases are created by descriptive content, AND they do support the necessary relevance and content for the bigger box search query bananas.

So after you have some data, you will begin to see in analytics that some phrases you are ranking for, which you may have NEVER thought of trying to…. are making sales. Bingo, that’s a phrase we want to target.

So now that we have covered some geek translations for shop owners, lets cover some do’s and don’ts for your new blog.

1. Do post regularly and about topics related to your whole website theme
2. Do Not post exclusively about sales, products and other marketing venues
3. Do answer every comment you ever receive
4. Do use catchy post titles
5. Do make your posts at least 3 paragraphs <– Yes folks, I mean text
6. Do use images and other media to engage your readers
7. Do encourage comments and discussions from your readers
8. Do use 10 or less post tags
9. Do categorize your posts in a logical manner
10. Do have your blog designed in the likeness of the rest of your website (brand continuity)
11. Do use natural language that all most of your readers can understand and identify with
12. Do try to use some semblance of proper grammar, so your posts can be scanned and read
13. Do have fun and stay positive

Topic selection is a big hurdle for many shop owners… What the hell do i have to blog about?

Well, honestly, this is a tough one for many. You will have to think outside of the box to find your blog’s calling. To start your creative juices flowing consider related groups, events and organizations. How about historical points and tradition, myths, news and hey… Your own personal experiences?

These posts will be the meat and potatoes of your blog, the link bait so to speak. You cannot just run sale ads and product reviews in your blog…. No one shares these much, heck many don’t even read them. When you only market from your blog you seem fake, pushy and certainly uninteresting. So look for the things in your niche that your readers will find value in.

I have used these guys as an example before, but I will again as I am very proud of them. Silver and Pewter gifts is a Zen Cart store who has had their blog for about a year now, but their posts are incredibly intelligent. They go out of their way to find stories, traditions, uses and tips for their products in their posts.

This recent one is a favorite of mine, the post is about Salt Cellars and Shakers… Yeah I know, what the heck is a salt cellar. Well, that’s the key folks, they posted the history and the current trends into a very informative post that also effectively markets their products. Bravo!

Don’t be scared, you can blog successfully… Just loosen up a bit and relate to your site visitors on a more common and approachable level.

Ecommerce Deal Breakers

So what is a deal breaker? Simple, these are the things in your cart that shoppers fret about, thus causing them not to make a purchase. So while every shopping cart, product and website is different, there are some very common factors which cause your shoppers to leave. Let’s address them and some of the solutions you can use to set your shopper’s minds at ease.

We are going to address these issues in a common navigational flow, so that you get a feel for the entire process.

Step 1 Landing Page:

Certainly many people do land on your main page, but usually not as many as your other pages combined. So treating only your main page with some TLC will certainly do nothing for the majority of your customers.

Landing Page Factors:

• Trust: Is your phone number (preferably toll free) highly visible and easy to find?
• Navigation: Can your shoppers easily navigate your shop to other interests and products?
• Text: Does each page have enough text near the top of the page for shoppers to scan and determine that this is where they should be?
• Images: Are your images, descriptive, fresh and professional?
• Load: Do your shoppers have to wait and wait for your pages to load?
• Presentation: Does your site work and display properly in all browsers?

Step 1/2 Product Page Marketing:

Many brick and mortar stores spend high dollars to hire the best salesmen they can, they do this to improve sales and be successful. But what about your ecommerce website? You are not going to have the individualized opportunity to make the sale. So let’s eliminate some of the common stresses and frustrations your shoppers experience.

• Is your price clearly marked?
• Are options easy to use and find?
• Are your description and images detailed enough for shoppers to make a decision?
• Is your return policy and payment methods posted clearly and easy to understand?
• Can they contact you easily from the product page to ask a question?
• Do you have live help of some sort?
• Is your add to cart button clear and noticeable?
• Is your product information above the fold on your pages, or do your shoppers have to continuously scroll?
• Is your price fair and competitive?

Step 2 Shopping Cart Summary Page:

This is a very difficult page to measure the genuine abandonment because so many people will check shipping prices here or return many times with additional items. However, I suspect that this is likely the most crucial deal breaker of all.

• Can I clearly get the shipping cost without giving you my information or creating an account?
• Do you display a secured seal, phone number and other trust factors here?
• Do you have a “Checkout Now” button above the fold as well as below?
• Do you use pictures of the products within your cart summary?
• Can I change my quantities and remove products easily and logically?
• Is this page fast enough to deliver the data, such as a shipping quote, before I become impatient and leave?

Step 3 Checkout:

If you have been thinking about abandonment and conversions at all, this is likely where you spent most of your time. While I agree this is a very large factor, I would also say that most of you are probably losing them well before checkout.

• Is the text and information sorted properly and easy to read?
• Are your payment, shipping and other options clearly noted?
• Do you force shoppers to reconsider by making them create an account?
• Do you tell your shoppers how long the shipment will take in your checkout?
• If your checkout is several steps, do you control the flow and keep shoppers on track by removing distractions and highlighting the necessary action areas?
• Is your checkout secured with SSL? Do you have a broken lock?
• Do you bother your shoppers in checkout with pop up offers and other things to get them off track?

Step 4 Checkout Success:

• While this may seem obvious, you would really be surprised… But do you thank your shoppers after checking out?
• Do they get an order summary, shipping and customer service information on your checkout success page?
• Do they receive a TEXT email (for maximum deliver-ability) with their receipt and order information following checkout?
• Do you welcome your shoppers back with a coupon or loyalty program?

While this is certainly not meant to be a bible for your usability, it is rather intended to make you think and consider the fears, stresses and reasons shoppers leave your site. I find that many shop owners have never checked out on their own site…. and many more stumble to describe the navigation needed to direct me to a certain product. Certainly, you and your staff should know your website inside and out. Just think, if it’s hard for you can you imagine your shopper’s frustration?

Out of Stock

Recently I was involved in a Zen Cart forum discussion regarding the issue of Zen Cart’s 404 “Sorry, the product was not found.” response to removed (deleted) and disabled product pages.

The original question from the poster was “I’ve deleted products. How do I redirect customers to new ones? or to search instead? ” This is a great question as the products not found page certainly lacks the navigation and user support to make a sale.

How to handle out of stock products correctly in your Zen Cart.

Let’s say you have a product that is out of stock for 6 weeks. So for your SEO and indexing you would like to keep this product page, but not allow purchase. The suggested method of maintaining the page and not allowing the product to be purchased is to simply zero out the quantity in your product’s entry page. This leaves the page intact with an out of stock replacing the add to cart.

In order to use this method, you must be using stock numbers in your products entry, you do not have to display the stock on hand and can turn it off in Catalog >> Product Types >> Edit Layout Button >> Show Quantity in Stock set to zero.

You also must be using the stock checking options in your cart. So in Configuration >> Stock

• Check stock level = True
• Mark product out of stock = Some helpful text for your shoppers

Now, understand that this is the preferred method for your SEO campaign, but may not be the best solution in every case for your shoppers. Shoppers are easily frustrated when they see a great deal of products out of stock in your shopping cart. Even if the item they want appears to be in stock, the red flag is up and they are concerned you will be out of it as well… Or take 4 weeks to ship it. This leads to checkout abandonment and loss of sales. So if you are looking at a bunch of products, you may consider hitting the green bubble and disabling them to remove them from the customer’s view.

What if the product is not coming back?

If the product is never coming back, you should seek to delete or disable it (turn it off). But, when doing so, requests for this product page will incur a very unhelpful, nearly blank page in which the ability to convert this shopper is nearly null.

The technical response of this page is a 404, page not found. Which tells the search engines that it’s gone and never to return. While this is accurate, we do not want to lose any authority and juice this page has… So we would seek to redirect it with a permanent redirect to the new product or logical location.

Note: ! If you have a replacement for this product and DO NOT rewrite your urls based on title then you can simply edit the existing product with the new product’s information and keep the page. This is absolutely ideal and one of the arguments for not using a SEO URL module in your Zen Cart.

Normally, I would suggest to a client that a 301 redirect to a new page be performed by way of adding a simple permanent redirect in your htaccess for the product. But, once again, those of you rewriting your urls with an SEO module will find this simple task nearly impossible, as the resulting url will want to be appended… Creating duplicate content.

So if you have just a few deleted products and want to use the htaccess redirect, it would go something like this:

redirect 301 /index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=38 http://www.domain.com/

This redirect simply sends requests for index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=38 to the site’s main page with a permanent redirect. This method retains most of the juice, links and authority associated with the product and gives you the opportunity to decide per product what page to send them to. Maybe the best page to redirect them to is your sitemap, or other relevant page to assist the shopper.

So note that while this method requires a little extra work and some thought, it is preferred for its control.

How about a more dynamic solution?

In the forum thread we noted earlier, Zenner 7thVeil suggested using a php redirect to move these pages to the category page for their original location. This is an excellent technique for a dynamic solution. The code change supplied by 7thVeil, was very smart, but incomplete as it was returning a 302 in the header. We definitely do not want to return a 302, as this is a temporary redirect, but a permanent headache for your SEO campaign.

So I tweaked his alteration for the following which will send disabled and deleted products to their category page with a permanent 301 redirect. If no category exists they are sent to the product not found page.

In /includes/modules/pages/product_info/main_template_vars.php around line 31 find:

if ( $res->fields['total'] < 1 ) {

Just below this you will see

$tpl_page_body = '/tpl_product_info_noproduct.php';

Replace this line with

    $requeststring = (isset($_GET['cPath']))?'&cPath='. (int)$_GET['cPath']:'';
        header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
        header('location:index.php?main_page=index'.$requeststring);

Remember this is really a very dynamic solution and you are giving up the ultimate control over where this product page url should be sent. There is also the possibility, if you are using a SEO rewrite module, that this tweak will result in a double redirect. This is not a good situation, so if you apply this and the header for the pages is sending a double redirect, or worse, a loop… then this solution is not for you.

Sitemaps 101

Call this an eye opener and perhaps myth buster for how you think about sitemaps. First and foremost we are not talking about your human/visitor HTML sitemap… But rather a sitemap specifically formatted for search engines to read.

My hope is that you will have a better understanding of the Sitemap Protocol and its intention. Because really, I have heard it all.

First a few myth busters!

1. You must have a search engine sitemap – FALSE
2. You must resubmit your sitemap when pages change – FALSE
3. The search engines will index your pages if they are in your sitemap – FALSE
4. In your sitemap you can tell the search engines how often to come back with the <changefreq> attribute – FALSE
5. The <priority> attribute forces the search engine to pay special attention to certain pages – FALSE
6. Altering your <lastmod> date will trick the search engines in to crawling more frequently – FALSE

Now that those are out of the way, why should you use a sitemap.xml?

Sites with dynamic content, complicated navigation, very deep directory structure and poorly internally linked websites are hard for search engines to crawl. So for these and most sites a sitemap provides a “road map” to help the search engines find and crawl your pages.

The Universal sitemap protocol, along with the Robots Exclusion Standard are quite complementary. The sitemap protocol is a universal tool to deliver pages to the search engines for crawling, while the Robots Exclusion Standard is a mostly universal protocol to prevent pages from being crawled.

So logically speaking, URLs which are blocked from crawl in robots.txt, cannot be in your sitemap. Additionally, pages blocked from indexing should not be in your sitemap either. There are some very few occasions when a page should be crawled, but in blocked from indexing. We are not going to get in to this as it is a situation you will probably never see. So rule #1, if the search engines cannot crawl or index a page, it cannot be in your sitemap.

The standard protocol for search engine sitemaps is XML. This is not mistake, and actually quite appropriate. The sheer simplicity and clear formatting of XML allows the search engines to crawl a great deal of data in a very short period of time. Bingo, we like this!

So I know there are quite a few sitemap modules out there for Zen Cart, and I am not beating anyone up here… But consider these facts.

1. A sitemap index is NOT required unless your sitemap contains more than 50,000 URLs. It is allowed, but why would we make our sitemap any more complicated or longer to crawl than necessary?
2. This is not a sitemap for humans, so why would we have our URLs displayed in tables and with styles to impede a speedy and efficient crawl?
3. Your sitemap is for your site’s URLs only, so why would we have resource and developer links in the footer of our sitemaps? Why would we even have a footer?
4. The links in your sitemap should be in their proper canonical format, not with session IDs and language parameters… Duplicate content.
5. Your URLs must be encoded properly in all ASCII characters. So you folks using URL rewrites need to be very careful not to use special characters in your product titles such as {} * & @ © etc…. or your sitemap will not be valid or accepted.
6. Unless you are selling images, image links do not belong in your sitemap.
7. If your site is www, then all URLs in your sitemap are www, no exceptions or mixtures of www and non… Again duplication.

Submit your new sitemap.xml to Google, Bing and Yahoo in their webmasters tools … Or don’t and just add it to your robots.txt. Either way is fine. You do not need to keep resubmitting your sitemap to the search engines, once submitted… They know where it is. If you choose to resubmit it for changes… Do not abuse the privilege.

When you have a proper sitemap, it will look something like this….

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
      http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/page.html</loc>
  <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.6</priority>
</url>

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
  <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

See, really not for humans… Your sitemap is a lean, mean search engine feeding machine!

Security

First and foremost make sure your Zen Cart is fully patched! No exceptions. Your Zen Cart you just downloaded and installed still needs these.

Now, do these items on Zen Cart’s recommended security list. On this list please ignore the following. If you choose to do these things, your robots.txt cannot be accessed and the php command will not work properly for you in most server environments.

#.htaccess to prevent unauthorized directory browsing or access to .php
files
IndexIgnore */*
<Files *.php>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
</Files>
#add the following to protect against people discovering what version your
spiders.txt file is
<Files *.txt>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
</Files>

Now, lets add some cool stuff to help you stay safe.

Tip #1: Use strong passwords for everything! Change them every 30 days.

Tip #2: When renaming your admin DO NOT use any admin or business related
term. Try banana for example, something like manage, control or anything XXadmin is a dead guess for most hackers to discover your admin directory.

Tip #3: Make sure all admins have their OWN accounts and install this module to track their access more conveniently.

Tip #4: Protect your admin directory with an additional auth when possible. Perhaps you can password protect the directory or allow access by IP address for example.

# password-protect the directory
AuthType basic
AuthName "This directory is protected"
AuthUserFile /home/path/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
Require valid-user

# deny all except
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.1.1
allow from .*domain\.com.*
</Limit>

Tip #5: Protect ALL directories from browsing with an index.html file. This file can be blank, it just prevents the directory from displaying in an index to browse. If a folder has an index.anything… It’s protected.

Tip #6: Protect your images directories (all) with the following .htaccess to prevent browsing, executing php files and more. These directories will also need an index file. When done, login to your hosting control panel and change the permissions on both the index.html and .htaccess files to 444 to prevent modification.

#PRO-Webs ver 1.8 1/2010
#Prevent directory viewing and the ability of any scripts to run.
#While a bit overkill this file prevents a wide array of access and executions
#of known exploits in your Zen Cart
#This file and a index.html should have the chmod 444
#This low setting allowance differs from server to server and should be set as
#low as possible and no higher that 644
#Permissions this low will likely need set in filemanager
#Place this in all images directories except BMZ_Cache
Options -ExecCGI -Indexes
IndexIgnore *
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]
<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>
<Files ~ "\.php$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>
chmod .htaccess files 444

Tip #7: If you have an SSL force all of your admin pages to load in only secured urls with the following htaccess code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /admin_dir/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/admin_dir/$1 [R,L]

Tip #8: Make sure your cache folder has the correct index.php and .htaccess. Download a fresh version of Zen Cart and upload them to be sure. Now CHMOD, change the permissions of these to 444.

I may be adding to this, as we are always testing… so stay tuned.

Let’s kick this off with polled data …

“How frequently do you use the following tools when shopping online?”

Note the green and red areas where I have noted what I believe to be expected growth/decline of these metrics in the coming year.

I think, and this is my own opinion (take it or leave it), that the areas noted will grow or decline for many reasons, not withstanding the new push among search engines for real time results and the weight they do and will carry in the future.

Coupon sites will continue to grow as they continue to gain authority and social media love from their users… As they rank better, they will be used more frequently. Look for many of these higher ranking sites to start offering “premium” paid types services and exposure.

Emails advertising I believe will decline for a good many reasons, mostly because people are generally irritated by spam mail. Shoppers are even afraid to create accounts on websites for “fear of spam”. Secondly, your email shoppers are far more likely to be a one hit wonder. They shop for price and have little or no loyalty…. IMPULSE

Product reviews is a tricky one…. and while they can be very effective, I believe they will soon be so abused that no one will trust them. Face it, how do you know a “real shopper” said that instead of a savvy marketer? You don’t, and just like many other diseases the web has caused, “fear of fake reviews” will in my opinion join the “fear of shipping” eBay disease in record time.

Shopping comparison sites and portals will continue to grow. Here shoppers can get what appears to be a fair representation of products to compare, see and get information about them in a comfortable… No pressure setting. Everyone will have a favorite, and we will see these continue to grow.

Social networking for ecommerce is still a baby, but expect its effectiveness to grow. Right now for **most ecommerce sites, this is just something you do. However, as we see the decline of reviews and other sharing platforms like gift tagging, this will become the safe way to ask a friend about a product they bought, or compare products for sharing. People on Facebook will seem more “real” and believable, thus more effective. Niche sites are already and will continue to kick ass here!

In the NCAA Division II girls softball playoffs, Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky, who had NEVER hit a home run before the second inning of the second double header against Central Washington popped one over the fence. Sara, who was incredibly excited to hit her first home run, in a playoff game no less, accidentally overran first base. She turned back to touch the bag and in doing so twisted her right knee and it gave out… Landing her on the ground at first base.

Wait for it…. This is amazing!

Sara was pretty severely injured and would be unable to continue her celebratory first time trip around the bases for a home run ever. Team coaches and trainers could not touch Sara or she would be out at first. If they brought in a pinch runner Sara’s home run would become as a two run single instead.

Opposing team Central Washington senior Mallory Holtman, realized the situation for senior Sara, and inquired to the umpires and coaches if they could carry her around the bases, having Sara touch each base. The umpires and coaches, while astounded, agreed that this would in fact be “legal”.

So Mallory and teammate Liz Wallace quickly picked Sara up, carefully touching her foot down on each bag, and carried her around the bases to get her home run counted as such.

Image from Values.com

While Central Washington lost the game, they had completed one of the most selfless acts of human kindness and sportsmanship I have ever hear of. So while off topic, from one veteran softball player to another… Hats off ladies, you are incredible people and you hold in your hearts the true spirit of the game…. Congratulations.