The Ecommerce Blog

According to Matt Cutts, there are over 100 factors that affect search engine ranking. For those of you who don’t know, Matt is a Google guy guru, he is employed by Google but writes an independent blog and shares information related to Google and search engine optimization. Unfortunately, of those 100 items that account for search engine ranking, there are only a few that webmasters can actually control.

Unless you are a interested in an exercise of futility, it is important to only focus on those ranking factors that you, as a webmaster, can control and influence.

What are Search Engine factors do webmasters control?

Outside of the obvious (webpage title and description) those items which the webmaster has the most control are: PageRank, TrustRank, Anchor Text, Keyword Density, Domain Age, URL, and Relevant Links.

How can a webmaster use these items to help ranking?

First off–the obvious, each and every web page should have a descriptive page specific title and description. The title, description, and header tags are channels to communicate the most important details of a specific webpage. They should be used effectively, but not be abused. The web page should make use of h1 and h2 tags (header tags) to emphasize pertinent keywords and phrases.

Particular attention should be paid when formatting urls. Keywords related to the webpage can and should be used in the webpage urls. Use hyphens rather than underscores between the keywords. Search engines are designed by developers and programming languages will recognize a hyphen and distinguish separate words, while an underscore blends the words. Keywords in the URL should not be abused, as search engines do not appreciate excessively long urls. Avoid using characters like ID= in the URL as many search engines will see it as a unique session ID and not spider the contents of the webpage.

The website’s navigation depth should not exceed 3-4 levels. The shallow website depth will make a search engines deep crawl easier, ensuring that will be able to spider the entire contents of your website. If you add a new page and wish for it to be spidered quickly add a link to it from an existing spidered web page.

Domain hosting and location do matter! A .uk domain and a webhost located in the UK will increase the domains search engine position in any .uk search engine. If you are targeting a specific region or market consider purchasing a local domain.

Obviously you control the websites content;bad content or no content means no incoming links. Good content has the potential to attract good quality unsolicited links.

What kinds of content generally attract quality links?

The idea is develop quality content that will result in incoming links. Think of JibJab, http://www.jibjab.com they portrayed a controversial subject in a humorous way without alienating their audience. While JibJab was able to garner a lot of attention, its a tricky tight-rope to walk. Consider adding tutorials that explain a specific technology, create a niche directory or a topic specific glossary, post industry news, maintain a blog with fresh content, or write how to articles.

Take advantage of your content. If you write a press release don’t just send it to the editors, add it to your website in a press center. Submit the press release to public relations websites. There area a number of press related websites like PRWeb that are really good and all will result in good quality incoming links back to your website. Also add your press release(s) to an RSS feed, not only with this communicate with your customers that new products or updates are available but you will also benefit from links from RSS search engines and directories.

When you post a release or content that has genuine value, use social bookmarking tools (like digg, del.icio.us, furl) to bookmark the contents. These social bookmarking sites are becoming increasingly important in weighing the value of a site. The large search engines do not yet use social bookmarking in their algorithms, but it is quite possible and highly likely that they will in the future. If the webpage/content has genuine value others will social bookmark it as well. The bookmarks are viral and with increasing popularity there is more emphasis placed on the content. Additionally, bloggers notoriously skim social bookmarking sites for content to write about which will result in additional links. Keep in mind that in order to bookmark a webpage, it really must have genuine value.

Before we talk more about links, there are a few warnings worth mentioning.

What are the link warnings?

The first is to attain links gradually, search engines prefer links obtained over time rather than links achieved all at once. Avoid link schemes, link farms, or overt reciprocal links, they can be time consuming and have very little benefit. Avoid links on the C block. If you own multiple domains, be sure not to triangulate links. Search engines have become wise to this and they prefer a linking scheme that is more like a star (or web).

What keywords should you optimize for?

When determining what keywords to optimize a website for, there are a number of tools that will assess the number of times that a keyword or phrase is searched on, the number of websites/webpages competing for that keyword or phrase, and rate the phrase. Obviously, the terms that have more searches and less competition are the best to optimize for–if, and only if, they relate to your product or service. If you optimize for terms that are either too broad, you will likely increase traffic but decrease your conversions. It is really a balancing act. Two of the more popular tools available are Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker. Also, talk to friends or family members and ask what phrases they would use to describe your product or service. You might be surprised with the terms they use. Consider optimizing for regional variations, look at the variety of terms used to describe soda - tonic, pop, soda, soda pop, or cola all are relevant and popular but only within a specific region. Examine web logs to determine what your users are using, look at the language used in emails and forum posts and consider optimizing specific pages for popular descriptive terms.

And finally, use competitive intelligence to locate links and keywords. What are your competitors using? Analyze the adwords they bid on, look at their meta tags, look at their anchor links.

There is a wealth of information out there, no real mystery to it, so use it to your advantage.

About the Author
About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net a wireless text messaging software company.

Web directories are an important component to search engine positioning. Directories come in all shapes and sizes, some are generic, while others are highly specialized. Directories, are defined as categorized topics or collections of information organized into a tree like structure where categories are used to define each groups association.

Large directories like Yahoo tend to have general themes and may charge for listings. While smaller niche directories like http://www.finance-investing.com offer free listings and profit from advertising revenue or pay per click models like Google AdSense.

Being listed in a directory not only brings in targeted traffic, it provides a one-way link from a website with similar content. Directories are generally highly ranked in search engines, and are considered well respected resources, two traits that are desirable in link partners.

While smaller directories that focus on a specific niche might generate less traffic, the quality of the traffic from a niche site is usually highly targeted and will be superior to that generated from general search engines.

If you are selling fire alarms, traffic from yahoo will be less qualified than traffic from Alarm Tools, http://www.alarm-tools.net. Most visitors to Alarm Tools will have a genuine interest in alarms and alerting systems. The nature of highly specialized directories result in visitors who have a serious interest in the directories theme, or a at the very least an interest in a theme related to the directory.

As a result, web publishers need to make a conscience effort not to ignore the value of directory listings. Regardless of their size, a related niche directory listing can be extremely valuable.

Many directories offer sponsorship opportunities. Vendors can optionally purchase sponsorship to increased their exposure with a bold listing or top category listings.

Determining a Directories Value It is difficult to assess the value of directory listing, as there is an obvious advantage to a listing of a closely related theme directory that is difficult to measure and quantify. In general, webmasters can use common web guidelines to determine the popularity of a directory and assess the directory link’s value.

To assess the value of a web directory, consider the PageRank of the webpage where the link placement of your site will occur. The PageRank is indicative of how important Google may find a specific page. Another reliable third party measuring tool is Alexa. The Alexa ranking provides insight into how popular a website is. In general, a link from a web page containing a PageRank of 5 or higher is considered very good. A link from a site in Alexa’s top 100,000 is also generally very desirable.

Compare the following two directories’ Monitoring Tools http://www.monitoring-tools.net and RSS Specifications http://www.rss-specifications.com. Monitoring Tools’ main page has a PageRank of 5 but most internal pages that contain links have low page ranks and the overall Alexa ranking of the site is over 650,000. While RSS Specification’s claims a main Google PageRank of 6 and subpages all contain a minimum of a 5 for PageRank, the overall site is ranked 32,000. Clearly if you are in the syndication business, RSS Specification’s would be a very desirable link partner, while you would have to weigh the cost benefit and position of a link from Monitoring Tools.

To determine a sites PageRank without downloading the Google Toolbar, use the following online tool from RustyBrick http://www.rustybrick.com/pagerank-prediction.php. A website’s Alexa ranking can be found by entering the URL into Alexa http://www.alexa.com.

It is recommended that PageRank and Alexa ranking be only used as a guide when determining a directories reputation. It is important not to get too caught up in either Google PageRank or Alexa Ranking as webmasters can use “tricks” to artificially inflate their numbers.

The bottom line, links from directories that are small but niche, can provide quality web traffic.

About the Author
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for FeedForDev http://www.feedfordev.com an RSS component for developers.

Many small business owners will find the need to accept credit card payments for products and services offered on their website.

When I set up my first ecommerce website I found the information surrounding online credit card purchases to be more confusing than any other aspect of marketing on the Internet.

The reason as it turns out is that the various organizations offering to advise you on how to set online payment systems up have conflicting interests and, in some cases, no idea how the systems work together.

The other potentially confusing aspect of online payments is that the entire system involves a number of service suppliers each providing one element of the entire chain. The real trick is getting them all working together.

So let me outline the parts and then give you a couple of suggestions for how you might approach an ecommerce system for your business. (There are dozens of ways to get the same thing done!)

Internet Merchant Account - In order to take online payments, when you don’t physically swipe a credit card, you need an Internet merchant account. This account can be issued by your bank or by a host of companies, such as Merchant Warehouse, that offer Internet merchant accounts. It’s important to note that if you already have a merchant account for your store or business, you will need to get an Internet account as they are different. This account will include a set-up fee and some % per transaction fee.

Most banks only provide merchant accounts for Visa and MasterCard. It is a very good idea to offer American Express and Discover card payment options. In order to do this you need to contact American Express and Discover and activate accounts. Once you have this information you can provide it to your merchant account provider’s payment processor to process all four cards in the same account.

Virtual Terminal - A virtual terminal is an add-on service that comes with your Internet merchant account. This allows you to take phone orders or in-person workshop orders and then go to a secure Internet based site and process the orders into your account.

Secure Payment Gateway - Since Internet traffic is susceptible to eavesdropping you will need a secure payment gateway that allows your customer’s credit card data to be secure as they place orders. This is yet another service provider that specializes in secure transaction and takes the secure data and passes it through a secure gateway to your payment processor. You want to make sure that this part of the process works with your merchant account and your shopping cart. I would stick with one of the leading gateway providers. This would include Authorize.net, VeriSign and SkipJack There is a fee for this service as well. It is important that you communicate who your gateway provider is to your merchant account provider.

If you are selling goods that are available to download immediately you will also need what is known as real time processing from your secure processor. This is simply a connection that gets a credit card transaction approved or declined in real time as a customer places an order. There is an additional charge for this service.

Shopping Cart - shopping carts come in software and hosted service based versions that allow your customers to shop for multiple items and then pass the order to your payment system by way of checkout. This service is very important if you have multiple products available on your web site. There are some very stable, fully functioning shopping carts that are free or very low cost. Some leading cart systems include osCommerce, zencart, and 1ShoppingCart. I must repeat that you need to make sure that your shopping cart is supported by your payment gateway and vice versa - just ask.

Third Party Processing - There is an alternative solution to the entire puzzle known as a third party processor. In this approach, the third party provider may offer all of the processing and no merchant account is required. The drawback to this approach is that you generally pay a higher overall fee per transaction and have limited ability to customize your customer’s check out experience to match your website. PayPal, an eBay company, is the largest provider of this approach and is a very acceptable option.

A Few Words of Advice

Each piece of the ecommerce puzzle comes with a fee, either as a monthly set price or on a per transaction basis. Make sure that you understand what the fees are. Online merchant account providers are notorious for charging very high application and set-up fees. Start with your bank, but shop this aspect around. Most small business owners should be able to set-up a fully functioning, real time processed site with a shopping cart for less that $150/mo (not including per transaction fees)

Make sure that you find out which parts work well with each other. In other words, when you are looking for a shopping cart or payment processors make sure that they integrate with your real time payment gateway and vice versa. If you stick with the big names in each category you shouldn’t have any problems.

About the Author
John Jantsch is a marketing coach, author and creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System. You can get more information about the Duct Tape System and download your free copy of How To Grow Your Small Business Like Crazy by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com