E-Commerce for All

Easy SEO, this is a term as similar as black and white.

Easy SEO?

More to the point, you saw this title and thought I was going to give you some easy trick to make your shop rank so you can be rich. Not so, this is rather a rant, some things that just need said. You can benefit from the content of this post if you are determined to succeed in your ecommerce business, and you have some common sense. If so, please read on…

First lets tackle something no one seems to know. What is SEO?

SEO is a very mechanical, analytical and hands on discipline. SEO is a part of marketing (SEM), but is not marketing, rather SEO is just as the acronym suggests… Search engine optimization.

SEO itself is a method/practice of making your website better accessible to the search engines, mechanically sound, optimizing page structure, content and elements, website architecture, flow and navigation and server side scripting as well.

Rank itself is the goal, but making both your content and website easily understood and navigated by the search engines is the process. The things we do are generally based on 3 things. Things we know. Things we see proper research to prove. And things we believe to be true and are testing.

None of these things we do is anything automated or really easy. This is definitely hard work. The hard work involved comes in a few forms. For example building great content regularly is hard work, building quality inbound links is hard work… But most of all, reading enough so that you have a clue and can participate in the decisions for your SEO campaign is also hard work.

So that leaves basically 2 sets of website owners… Those who do, and those who don’t.

Those who do seek to optimize their own websites are very vulnerable, for many reasons. They often set out and read on the internet about the SEO they need, implement it blindly as fact without support or merit and then fail to measure the results. These individuals then proceed to propagate this disease by sharing their ill founded and unsupported techniques with others just as vulnerable. For these folks I have some advise.

1. Know your sources. I could put up a website tomorrow offering a 5 minute solution to all of your SEO needs for $200 and sell these lies to the masses with ease. Just because I say something, does not make it true. I could get away with this because most have their heads wrapped around easy and fail to search out any supporting documentation or support for anything that looks to make SEO easy.
2. SEO cannot be automated. Even if every search algorithm factor was laid out for you in a to do list, you could not automate your SEO. Every website is different, the only way to properly succeed in your SEO campaign is to read, understand, test and measure the results. Anything less is just a reckless waste of time.
3. Common sense. If I tell you your website will rank if you make it all yellow, do you believe me? At the end of the day, your success will be determined on your ability to make good decisions. Now if you haven’t taken the time to seek out the reading and education you need for these decisions, then at least use common sense.

Those who do not, are equally at risk, just in a different manner. There are many reasons website owners seek out a professional to provide their SEO, unfortunately most of these reasons are what make them destined to fail. If you think that paying someone for SEO will answer all of your goals without you lifting a finger, you are mistaken. If you think you will require no knowledge of the techniques because you are paying someone, you are also mistaken.

Website owners blindly paying for SEO they do not understand are running around with a big bulls eye on their foreheads. You are not only vulnerable, but the cost can be both failure and cash! So I have some advise for those that do not as well…

1. Do not pay someone for SEO if you haven’t checked them out. Do they use a gmail email address? Do you think that is professional? Is their own site well constructed, easy to navigate and ranking? Can you call them on the phone and have a discussion?
2. Ask questions. If your paid SEO cannot/will not answer your questions regarding technique, services etc… Then they are likely jerking you around. Ask questions, do some reading and then ask better questions.
3. Why are you paying me? You may think this is in contrast to #2, but I assure you it is not. If your SEO tells you you need more content, you do some research and are still confused, then perhaps you should just do what they say. You are paying them for their professional services, correct?
4. Cost. If you are paying a low amount of money for an SEO who has said they will do everything and you need to do nothing, you are getting screwed. This type of service in my opinion is not only impossible, but would be very expensive (in the thousands of dollars a month). The reason this is veritably impossible is that this SEO person needs your input and niche specific expertise to create and execute a successful SEO campaign for you. No person, SEO or pretending professional can know every product, niche and service well enough to proceed without your involvement.
5. If they guarantee you rank, they are lying. SEOs do not work for Google, Bing or any other search engine. There is no way for any legitimate SEO to make you a guarantee of rank. It’s just frankly a snake oiled lie to get in your pockets.

Easy SEO Summary

• There is NO easy SEO.
• SEO cannot be automated.
• SEO is hard work.
• SEO requires common sense and research.
• There is no plugin, module or magic dust that will make you rank.
• If you make changes without analysis, you have failed.
• No one can provide comprehensive SEO services without your involvement.
• Rank guarantees are outright lies.
• Use your head, check people out.

So this means, those of you seeking out the quick get rich SEO trick are pissing up a rope… The very rope that will be used to hang your website out to dry.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO, Myths & Misconceptions

More and more we are seeing off the wall, non words become solidly branded domain/company names. Names like Hulu.com, which essentially meant nothing at its time of inception can be very successfully branded and promoted.

Aside from the obvious shortage of short and quality domain names, a movement to brand and market entirely new names and ideas is also clearly afoot. We know that keyword rich domain names can help your organic rank for the keywords, but have you considered the value of other, perhaps more effective metrics for choosing a domain name.

More often than not, and clearly demonstrated by our example above Hulu.com, short and memorable domain names can be far more effective for your business. Metrics such as length, phonic spelling and its ability to be remembered and shared are really collectively more important metrics for a successful domain name/website.

Let’s take a minute to examine a few effective traits that great domain names have/need.

1. Length: Clearly shorter is better, let’s face it, the Internet is about ease of use and convenience. Typing 18 character domain names is not very convenient.
2. Spelling: Try to choose domain names that are spelled phonically, this will help people who have heard (audio) or are trying to remember your domain name a fighting chance to find it.
3. Avoid substitutions: Do not register domain names with letter or number substitutes for words. If you register SEO4U.com for example, you have many opportunities for visitors to forget your substitution. This domain would be okay, IF you also have SEOforU.com, SEOforYou.com, SEO4You.com for example. People will inevitably forget the substitutions, and worse yet, others will register them and camp on your mistyped traffic.
4. Dashes: Avoid dashes and other separators. These are no only unnecessary, but just another hurdle for people to overcome in order to find you.
5. .COM: This is still the way to go, .com domains are still very much the status quo. If you have a .NET for example and not the .COM… Your visitors are going to the .COM most of the time, when they attempt to type the address in from memory.

Let’s look at this in a different perspective. Everyone has that childhood phone number they remember… a friend, pizza place or place you used to live. Say that phone number out loud right now. You probably heard yourself say the number in a pattern or rhythm that you have in fact locked on and been able to remember the number. This is no different then children singing the alphabet, just a routine that our brains are able to identify or associate with something that helps us remember it… Or rather, never forget it. This is the quality you really want for your domain name.

Whether you start with a new word, totally undiscovered and build the rhythm or association in to it or is just flows off of the tongue matters not. The important thing, above all is the visual and audio marketing ability in your domain name.

I have a friend, who has a domain name that contains, not only a couple of dashes, but has 5 and perhaps arguably 6 keywords in it. I will tell you that given all the time we spend working together, if my browser didn’t remember her domain name I’d have to Google it! Imagine now, since I work with domain names / web addresses all day long how this type of domain name affects a regular Internet user. Yeah, you got it now, don’t you?

Melanie E-Commerce SEO, Small Business

Free Shopping Feed Listings

**Updated 7/1/2009

There are many different shopping portals, comparison shopping sites and product listing sites you can submit your store catalog to for free or a fee. Certainly, the free places to submit your catalog feed for publishing are a no brainer… But what about PPC (Pay Per Click), Pay Per Lead, and Pay Per Impression listing opportunities?

To generalize the opportunity, these shopping listing sites will perform better than your average PPC Adwords or other campaign. This is also a no brainer…. The visitors to your shopping feed listings have generally already decided to shop, seen your product and price and have already decided they *may wish to buy the product by the time they click. By comparison a search marketing PPC campaign most of the same challenges as a normal search visitor, they may not have decided to shop, they may have found your on some obscure keyword not really what they wanted and they have little or no information about your product, much less an image when they visit.

So, for your average shop owner and *most product lines, shopping feeds are a more vertical and targeted opportunity to grab shoppers and sales for your store. This is especially true for normal high volume Internet product venues like electronics, pet supplies, clothing, gifts, footwear, toys and items for babies and children. The raw fact of this matter is simply that you must test your store on individual platforms to see what works for your store…. But before we do that, lets talk a bit about the platforms and how you are going to convert these shoppers.

The biggest struggle  in using these product listing opportunities for shop owners is integration. The shopping site will want you to update your feed frequently to keep it current and fresh… But clearly doing this by hand is a long and daunting process. Generally speaking they all use relative txt or xml formats, but with their own requirements and structure. So when you are looking at these opportunities, integration of the ability to generate these feeds is a definite consideration.

Shopping listing sites will by default have a better conversion rate than most other visit types and the clicks or leads will be generally cheaper than standard search engine PPC. They will click directly in to your product page and be ready to purchase… Right?

Yes, that is true, most times a click from a feed campaign is ready to purchase when they arrive at your store… But don’t worry you can still screw it up and send them packing! Here are some of the most common ways to screw up a sales lead.

1. The price on the product page is higher than listed on your shopping site listing, keep your feed current.
2. They cannot find the add to cart button, remember these leads already read most of what they will about the product.
3. You have misrepresented the product on the feed description and now they find information *other than what they expected… This is just throwing money away for you.
4. Your checkout process is too long, collects too much information, forces account creation…. Or on top of all shooting yourself in the foot, your checkout has a email verification or captcha on account creation. People shop on the Internet for convenience, not to jump through cyber hoops in order to give you money!
5. Lastly, and believe it or not we still see this one more than you think… The lead clicked to visit your product and cannot load the page. Its too slow, you haven’t done your browser compatibility and it looks like garbage or maybe you just have some dumb Java Script that’s not AOL compliant for example. Believe it or not, there are still folks on dial up and even more on AOL or some other pain in the butt proprietary browser.

I have a small list of some product listing opportunities, both free and paid are included. I have not used all of these feeds, but will give insight in to the ones I can. If you have an experience with one of these platforms, please feel free to share your experience for others to benefit from.

Free Product Listing Shopping Sites

1. Google Products – Base : Google’s shopping platform is free to use and you can upload your feed/products manually or by FTP.  Google displays product results for many different types of items including products, new and articles, services and more. Google displays relevant information regarding your products including images, descriptions, shipping, sales tax, payment options and more. Products are listed for maximum of 31 days and then expire and shoppers can find your products in an organic setting on Google search pages and directly from Google shopping. Google recently has offered some perks to help shop owners get on board with this by allowing the Google Checkout badge to be displayed on your products if you use Google Checkout.
2. Discontinued Read Information — Live Products : Live Products is free to use and you can also manually upload or FTP your feed/products. Live displays some, but not as many products as Google in search results. The products are not displayed in the same manner, they are more generalized information allowing shoppers to choose shopping opportunities by more vertical searches within Live Products… Vertical choices likes, price, brand and categories are served up to the shopper which click through to Live Products using those filtered terms. Products are listed in the index with an image, price and store name… Unfortunatly, shoppers get little information at the index level and must click to your store or the “details” link to get any description or further information. Live also has the “Cashback Program” to offer shoppers. Basically you sign up to offer them cash back from MSN/Live for shopping in your store… Check it out.
3. ShopWiki : ShopWiki is also free and quite easy to get going. There is no need to upload your products, just tell them where they are and ShopWiki will crawl and find them. However, this excludes category mapping and the ability to specifically exclude products. We have found this to be very convenient and effective for marketing your products in a categorized and search-able manner. Listings are offered with a product image, short description, price store name and direct click in to the product page.
4. The Find : The Find is another really simple crawler based product listing site. Fill out a small form to submit your store and they will start crawling. Again, no opportunity for category mapping, nor product selection. The Find has what I consider to be very nicely organized results, nicely sized product image, product price, store name/logo, visit store link and much product description on mouse over. Nicely done for you and shoppers are there are numerous vertical search opportunities for shoppers, including the opportunity to quickly display only sales items.
5. ShopMania : ShopMania accepts listings in a feed format and if you install their “ShopMania trusted store” validation code on your main page will offer you many options in a free status. Categorization and product mapping is available for free accounts. Listings are offered through search and normal vertical filtering opportunities. Listings contain product name, image, price, store name/logo and a short description.
6. Vast: Vast.com lists few categories, but is in fact free. You will have to create a feed for them to display product image, description and excellent geo product search. The majority of products are auto related, but they have a great pet category and also accept services too.
7. Yahoo SearchMonkey: You can now submit your Google Base product feed to Yahoo for display in enhanced search results. Directions for submitting your Google feed to Yahoo.
8. WillyFogg.com – Is an International shopping comparison site. Easy to setup and get it going. Support Google Base feed format & CSV/XML. Free with reciprocal banner on your homepage.

These shopping comparison and portal sites offer many different opportunities to market your online store. Many have wish lists, saved products and searches, reviews and more to assist shoppers in locating and hopefully purchasing your products. The performance of your products in these type of shopping venues is related as we spoke above to your ability to convert the click, the value or data submitted or on your pages, image quality and other basic organic ranking metrics. The fact is, your products will perform better on some than others… This is likely related to the shopping site’s customer reach and their general customer profile type. Do they attract women, men, techy types, older shoppers, younger shoppers and many other shopper profiles. This will have a great deal to do with how your products perform. Check them out, log and analyze your results and improve your performance.

Go Forth Shop Owner and Grow Your Sales!

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing

Welcome to PRO-Webs “So You Want to be a Shop Owner” Series conclusion # 5 Got My Store in Development, Now What? If you are just stopping by the first time today then you may want to catch up on the previous Shopping Cart Development Guide posts in this series. To sum it up, we have been stepping through the development decisions, processes and shopping cart software options involved in building an online store.

So you want to be a Shop Owner Series Conclusion

By this point your new ecommerce store is in the final development stages and you will soon be able to add products and begin to sell your products. No doubt this is an exciting prospect, but the final development stages and adding your products and categories is by far the most crucial piece of any e-commerce store’s development.  The decisions you make now regarding the category structure, navigation and layout tweaking for your online store can easily make or break any shopping cart project’s success.

Lets get started with adding products and categories.  Whether you or a store development company is adding your products and categories to your store matters little… There are some extremely important decisions to be made in categorization and product grouping.  The biggest problem with this organizational stage of development is the “lack of forgiveness” for mistakes.  You see, once your category structure in laid out and indexed by the search engines, you really do NOT want to change the structure.  Not only do changes of this magnitude cause “flux” for your site’s search rank in Google, but MANY times changing a product category, name or group will cause the page’s url to change.  This can be VERY bad, especially on a large scale and can cause your site to be temporarily pulled from Google’s index or sandboxed.  This sandboxing period in which Google attempts to digest your content and determine if it is trusted can last a very long time. The longest sandboxing I have seen was 90 days.

About the sandbox: While in the sandbox, all or some, of your store’s pages will be pulled from Google’s index.  This “Sandbox effect” seems to be occurring less and less, but for new and low authority site’s the danger still exists. They are not only not search-able, but not in the index at all.  Large scale content and page changes can easily cause this and there is no clear way to remedy it.  The length of time in the sandbox is directly related to many factors within Google’s ranking algorithm.  I believe the most weighted ranking conditions are related to the site’s index score and TrustRank.  In a nutshell, does Google trust your site?

If you happen to get yourself sandboxed, again little can be done but wait.  However, you might build some strong, organic, one way links to the sandboxed pages.  Build and submit a new sitemap to Google and check that you have good PCI compliance type metrics in place, such as privacy page and a proper SSL.  If you are not accepting credit cards, shame on you, but… You do not need an SSL.  However, IF you are going to use one, DO NOT use a crappy shared SSL… This only hurts you in the long run.  Many times, shoppers are presented with the broken lock or a pop up regarding your SSL, which genuinely disrupts that shopper’s desire to checkout… No SSL would be better, as at least they are not alerted to the site’s inadequacies.

So while naming your products, sorting the category structure and making url re-writing and dynamic content choices… Please make well thought out choices from the beginning to avoid headaches later.  Some quick notes to consider when setting up product page titles and navigation….

1. Do not include YOUR product number in your product titles and urls, as this is garbage content for the search engines and has ZERO search volume.
2. Do not include the price in your urls and product titles… While this may have its merits, the ability for it to bite you in the ass is far greater as search engines don’t update the search results as quickly as you would like and for many days/weeks searchers will get the wrong price in the search results.  Lets just say for example your distributor raised your prices 5% and you will have to obviously follow suit… Hopefully you have a nice administration tool like quick updates to make this change site wide, so you make the change easily…. But you have now changed every single product page title for your entire site!  See Google flux and sandbox above!
3. Try to keep your product purchase or add to cart page within 3 clicks of your main page.  Now, shopping cart software has really evolved in this area, and I will update this long time rule of thumb to say…. Keep your buy or add to cart page within 3 clicks of its landing page.  So what I mean is, gadget 3 shares many attributes and information in common with gadgets 1, 2, and 4, so they will ideally have a sub-category page which has great content to promote all 4 gadgets in the group.  Very likely, since this content is specifically targeted for gadgets 1-4, searches will be presented the sub-category page and are not likely to draw your main page as its content for gadgets 1-4, as it is far broader.
4. Kill the next button! This is really simple stupid, but shoppers are not going to click through a broad category page after page using the “Next” button.  If you CANNOT get the product for a category or sub-category on one presentation page, then break them in to subcategories as shoppers just DO NOT click through page after page of broad category content searching for their widget!
5. As we mentioned before use good, logical navigation to your products. This is often a big boo-boo area for new shop owners as well, they tend to either over categorize or use category and navigation language that only they understand. Unless you plan to do the shopping for your customers use language that is common, easy to understand and logical in your navigation.  Best practice here is, if a 12 year old can understand the navigation then you’re good… If not, back to the drawing board.
6. Take care not to disrupt your menu style with excessively long category names that cause the line to drop down or hang off the edge of the menu.  Remember… Confused, lost and frustrated shoppers do not buy things often.

While your new store may be small now, you must leave yourself room to grow and add additional products in your navigation and category structure now… or pay with a headache later. Just like any other business, to get big you must think big! Couple of notes below from my buddy Tim Nash after his read of this post….

1. Never use a “under construction” or “coming soon” page on a live site.  Just don’t.
2. A newsletter or email list on your site can help you promote your site better and Google likes the fact that you are providing an opportunity for users to interact.

Before you launch your new online store I want you to click through your product pages and checkout process quite a few times and get a feel for your site’s flow.  Ideally, you will either employ or invite some others to do so as well.  This is called usability testing and can open your eyes to issues and problems in your store, you would have never identified otherwise.  When choosing testers, try to pick a few different statistical groups to really get a full understanding.  A woman, a man, a 12 year old, another business owner, your buddy who just learned how to turn on his PC and an older adult is a nice combination for a test group. Assign them a product to buy and develop a list of questions to ask them AFTER their visit, things like…

1. How did you locate the product?
2. Did the pages load fast enough?
3. Do you like the colors?
4. Was there enough product information?
5. Did you find the add to cart button quickly and easily?
6. Was the checkout fast and easy?
7. Did you receive your order confirmation and receipt emails?

These things and more will really help you drill down in to your site’s usability and more importantly its ability to convert shoppers to sales.

When you are getting close to your launch date you must start thinking about how you will promote your new store initially.  Many avenues can be very effective and will not only help your store gain popularity, but help Google to find and index it as well.

1. If you have an email list of previous customers, send them an invitation with a coupon and solicit their feedback.
2. Have a marketing company or you yourself do a nice “Grand Opening” type press release.
3. Have a blogging friend or related company blog about your store opening.
4. List your store with the local directories for Google, MSN and Yahoo.
5. List your store with free business directories.
6. Write an article about one of your products or services and submit it to article directories with a link back to your store.
7. Submit your products to Google Shopping, which is free.
8. Submit a coupon to some free coupon portals.

Are you curious about where to find free product listing, coupon directories and local business listing opportunities? I will be sending our “start up” list of these promotional opportunities to all of our Zen Cart Tips & Tricks newsletter subscribers on Friday August 22cnd… So drop your email address in the newsletter box in the right column to get your free copy as well!

Good luck with your new store, and remember, any successful business requires hard work and dedication!

Melanie So you want to be a Shop Owner Series