E-Commerce for All

Below you will find what Matt Cutts had to say regarding this algorithmic update which has been dubbed Mayday, but I hope to provide some resources and insight in to the conditions and solutions if you lost a great deal of Google organic traffic as a result of the Mayday update.

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.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

We have been looking hard at speed optimization lately, and I am testing, analyzing and segmenting the results for the sites we super optimized. One of them is this very website.

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?

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

This is a very serious issue that shop owners have little or no knowledge or concern for. Imagine that many/all of your shoppers are not receiving that new customer coupon, receipts and shipment communications…. Scary huh?

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.

Melanie Zen Cart

The new release of Zen Cart (1.3.9b) has many customers asking about upgrading their carts. While I have decidedly positioned myself on the side of “safe” and we are not currently doing upgrades to 1.3.9b, we are looking to announce our new store development package for Zen Cart 1.3.9b in the next few days (stay posted with FaceBook).

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

Melanie Zen Cart