I really enjoy writing here to help and empower shop owners. Nothing about this business is more disappointing than the helplessness that many feel with their new Zen Cart software. From the beginning my main goal has been to provide information and services designed to allow these small business owners the skills, tools and support to be successful and not so dependent.
So to that end I would like to share with you the top 10 posts that users have found the most helpful to them. May you find them helpful and continue to prosper in 2010!
- Free Shopping Feed Marketing for Online Stores – This post is about marketing your products using shopping feeds and contains a frequently updated list of portals and venues which are free to submit your feed to.
- Color Psychology for Ecommerce Design – Here is one of my favorite marketing subjects! The use and psychology behind web design. What emotions and actions do colors invoke and how can we use this to our advantage.
- Zen Cart SEO – 12 Steps to Success – This post was written specifically with all of the Zen Cart forum posts I answer in mind. It is rather a discipline than a tutorial, a list of the things you need to do to successfully run your online store.
- Ecommerce Checkout Suicide – This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items? How to identify and fix the most common and dreadful cause of checkout abandonment!
- 5 Easy Things to Make Zen Cart Cook – 5 easy modifications that will make your Zen Cart faster and perform better!
- Yahoo Search Supports Google Base Formatting – How to use your Google Shopping/Base feed to submit your products to Yahoo Search Monkey enhanced shopping results… for free!
- Beating Your Links Down? – Working hard on link building? Here is a comprehensive tutorial detailing the counter productive things you should avoid to make your links count the best!
- In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries – How to identify, repair and prevent duplication content in your shop. There are in fact many different ways to end up with duplicate content… Here are some common ones we see in ecommerce.
- Where is My Site? Google Sandbox Filter – The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site.
- Shared Hosting & Bad Neighbors – Hosting is a very challenging subject for most shop owners. Sadly many attain less that acceptable hosting to run their businesses. This post covers the notable pitfalls of shared hosting from less than professional web hosts and the implications for your business.
There is one more post, this one actually finished 11th, but is a VERY common question and great information as well.
- Keywords in your URLs? Matt Says Yes – SEO urls, which is a misnomer for spam now is a pretty complicated subject that many shop owners do not understand and can be taken advantage of with. I also suggest you read this post, on our marketing blog regarding the weight given to keywords in different parts of your urls. Also, this post reveals what you may be missing by rewriting your urls =-(
For those that are interested here are some stats for PRO-Webs in 2009:
- 36 New Zen Cart stores were built
- 89 Zen Cart site reports were completed
- 37 SEO My Zen Cart packages completed
- 106 Zen Carts hosted
- 154,319 unique visits including 18,598 to this blog
- I have answered 1,802 posts on the Zen Cart forum and averaging 2.3 per day!
We enjoy what we do for shop owners and look forward to serving you in 2010!
Here’s wishing all of you a successful and prosperous new year!