E-Commerce for All

Online Retail

When you get right down to it the fusion of the web and business is a bold lesson in abstract thought.

Think about your grandparents and the work they did. Their job could have been on the farm, in the factory, in a store or in the work of their hands.

If your grandparents were business owners most of their customers were met face to face. Customers may have gone to church with your grandparents or attended high school sports events and concerts. They knew each other and that made marketing much less taxing and far more trusting.

Advertising was often in the form of an print ad in a school program or a booster club for the airing of the local high school football games. The advertising wasn’t always essential to the success they had in their business, it was often used as a way to support the local reputation associated with their business.

Your grandparents knew the other business owners in town and often worked together to keep the local spirit of a town alive.

As larger retail businesses began to paint the landscape these small businesses (like your grandparents) often died when no one was really paying any attention. The vast number of empty storefronts in rural America pay tribute to the radical change in the 21st century retail market.

Why has online business created the need for abstract thinking?

Internet stores are composed of graphics and text… Not friends and family. These shopping carts are developed with software and not brick, mortar, glass and wood. These online businesses can operate 24 hours a day including holidays and the owner does not have to be present for a customer to make a purchase.

The business owner cannot see the site’s visitors or customers, they can simply track the number of visitors and some analytical data.

It is this uncommon sense of intangibility that may makes online stores seem more like some elaborate computer game and far less like traditional business.

In order for some businesses to move in to the Internet marketplace there was a need to hire younger more computer savvy employees who were schooled with an insatiable appetite to learn and utilize the skills associated with online marketing and business.

Early on many business owners did not believe the web was even worth their while and ecommerce was never going to be successful. Many of those business owners sat back as time passed, the Internet grew and online sales improved, equaled and then surpassed what the business had previously been able to do with a local brick and mortar shop.

Many brave businessmen were early pioneers in ecommerce, and while they may not have understood everything there was to know about ecommerce, the results were crystal clear – ecommerce was a force much more powerful than they would have ever thought and was the road to continued success and the future of business. Many business owners who could not break out of their brick and mortar box have since had to sell that brick and mortar business.

As time passes more and more online business owners have accepted their new role as Internet marketer, dream maker and web design professional. They have grown accustom to this brave new world where faces are not associated with the sale, where customers probably aren’t your neighbor down the street and where the online store doors are always open.

Online business defies the notion of a simple local marketplace by tapping into something more global and more deliverable. Many small shops around the world have become staging areas for a worldwide customer base. Niche products once lost in a sea of big retail shops can now be the primary thrust of a successful online company instead of just one of many diversified products one might have found in an old general store.

Online business has challenged our way of thinking and changed the way the world does business.

Melanie Small Business

Study Young Jedi

At the end of the day, the only way that an Internet based business is going to thrive  or even survive, is through ever increasing targeted traffic to their products. Targeted traffic to your website is the key to the success of Internet business. One of the most successful and cost effective methods of increasing relevant traffic to a business website is through search engine optimization or SEO for short.

In this age if digital integration, a great many people continue to find out information about businesses that are operating on the Internet through search engine queries… Lets face it, we’re lazy. Additionally, for the most part, people tend to visit only those websites that are presented in a search engine results page, listed towards the top of the search results. Therefore, if you want to have people visit your business after a search engine search, you will want to work to get your business website ranked high on the search engine result page (SERP).

Through search engine optimization, or SEO, an Internet based business can achieve the goal of ranking their pages higher and higher, with better and better results. This, however, is no walk in the park or quick pill you can take… It’s never ending hard work and dedication.

There are qualified professionals that specialize in SEO. As a result, if you are new to the world of Internet business, you will want to consider hiring or at least consulting a professional. While SEO truly is something that a business owner of operator can master and learn in the long run, if you are new to the world of Internet business, you will likely want to take the time to consider engaging the services of a SEO professionals at least to start you out on the right foot. You can avoid the trials and perils of the substantial learning curve — and get your Internet based business up and running faster and with a better foot forward by engaging the services of a qualified SEO professional.

In conclusion you also need to consider that SEO  is only one of the many Internet marketing tools that you should use to promote and expand your web based business adventure. SEO alone and without any other marketing techniques is not likely to be enough to ensure business growth and success in the long run. The Internet arena is very competitive and you will want to include search engine optimization as one of the marketing tools that you rely upon to promote your business to a successful level.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

At PRO-Webs we complete a great deal of site reports, and this gives us a unique advantage for research, testing and identifying common mistakes. Today, we are going to let shop owners in on the biggest cause of content duplication we have seen to date… But first lets get in to some background and information about the less than stellar results of content duplication.

What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.

So duplicate content very simply put, is any content which is too similar to another page’s (any page’s) content indexed in Google. Duplicate content can cause a host of headaches and is certainly not a concrete foundation for a top performing online store. Why should shop owners care about duplicate content?… Simple Google and other search engines care a great deal.

This is really one of those times when you as a business owner needs to walk a mile in Google’s shoes. Google aims to deliver the best UNIQUE content for every search… This is what Google, the business, does for their customers. As I am sure you as a shop owner want the best for your customers, you can clearly understand why Google would not want the same content in 5 different results to deliver their users. So if there is duplicate content… What does Google do about it?

In theory, when Google is presented to 2 pages which are not unique enough to rank independently, they make a decision as to which page to rank for the terms. There is very certainly a very complicated algorithmic computation Google does to determine which page to rank… But that really matters little. Generally speaking, the site which has the greatest authority for the content will rank and the other is shunned from the main search-able index. There is likely a ton of metrics used to determine authority for this purpose, but the largest factors are likely to be PageRank, relevant links, traffic and the age of the page. Seriously though… The simple truth is if you stole it and published it, you are not going to be able to rank it properly.

So back to the purpose of this post…

What is the #1 cause of content duplication in shopping carts?

Many shop owners are distributing or drop shipping the product base from their online store. The drop shipper or main distribution source will nearly always provide product information and descriptions for the products they wish you to sell. In our hast and waste to launch our new store or new product, many shop owners will use all or some large blocks of the distributors or manufacturers product information… UHOH

There are really only 2 factors of concern with regard to this type of content duplication.

1. Overall duplication percentage of the page
2. Large blocks or shingles of text containing keywords

The overall duplication percentage of the page is not nearly the biggest issue, but it can and will cause Google to frown on your pages. Again, there is much debate as the what a tolerable level of duplication is… But Google’s not saying (for obvious reasons). My best estimation is at or around 25 to 30% duplicate a page will begin to fail you.

The next and really more serious duplication factor in my estimation is large blocks of text containing keywords which are 100% duplicate. Whether is be theory or fact, we know Google is capable of identifying search terms in a page and presenting a snippet for a organic search result description… Therefore, in like function, large blocks of text containing important text and keywords which are duplicate will be easily identified. This is very specifically a debilitating issue when the block of duplicated content is at the top of a container, like a paragraph or div for example.

When content is at the top of a page, paragraph, div or table… Google considers it to be of larger importance that the text in the same container below it. Duplicate content is a position of power such as this is the quickest way for a page to fail at the hands of Google’s duplication filters.

So whats the answer here…

How do I fix the duplicate content on my site?

Well, the simplest answer is not probably what most shop owners will want to hear (at least in my experience), but create great descriptive and unique content for your shops… Every page! At least any you want to perform well =-P!

So maybe you don’t have the time or skill to write such killer content? You can take a great deal less time and “shingle” the content provided to you from the manufacturers. This is really not a complicated process at all, Google reads text in blocks or shingles… I think about 10 word shingles to narrow it down. So if you take the text provided by the manufacturer and change or add a word every 5 words… then it is no longer duplicate =-). Please notice I DID NOT say delete a word, as this does nothing much at all, you must add or change a word. I tell shop owners every 5 word shingles, simply to be on the safe side and ideally have even better content when they are done.

It can be very disheartening to hear shop owners say “I don’t have time for that”… I just generally respond, you will have plenty of time when your online shop has no sales… Just do it then =-)

Melanie E-Commerce SEO