This is my journey as an E-commerce Consultant
Posts tagged Search Engine Optimisation
Email about E-commerce Platforms – GoECart.com
1742 days
As I don’t have my comments on as default I occasionally get emails!
One such email in response to : What functionality to make sure you have when investing in an e-commerce platform…
was:
Hi Liz,
I really enjoy your blog.
I read your post today on e commerce platforms and I wondered if you knew
anything about goecart.com? Is it a worthwhile option?Thanks for taking the time to read this
Dave
and i said….
I have not heard of them but as there were a codie finalist they can’t be
half bad! It includes a one page shopping cart (marvellous, better for
reducing cart abandonment) and also CRM tools, which is a nice added
feature for customer support and after sales marketing. It all depends
whether you need all these nifty features for your business and whether it
justifies the price. As it has a 30 day trial you have nothing to loose
trying it out.
I took a look at http://www.bridestuff.com/ and they have SEF URLs (text
urls) and I had no loading problems either whilst accessing the site.
So what has http://goecart.com/ got that stands out to me?
- One page checkout ( the holy grail of all checkout formats, why would you want anything less?)
- CRM tools – The CRM tool Salesforce tracks everything in my work life, so it would be great for an e-commerce set up to track customer questions, website support and also drive marketing campaigns and track their success.
- They are thinking about SEO, with the text urls and the site mapping for Google and Yahoo.
- The ability to automate shopping comparison feeds and also set up your own affiliate schemes.
- Many payment integrations ( but no mention of paypal pro in the website? Surely not?)
- Using excel to manage your inventory
and many more features. They seem to be dotting every I an crossing every T with and ERP like coverage with regards to e-commerce. They also have a free trial available.
But go on…how much does all this cost?
$1799 (£906 at time of publishing) a year for the basic subscription of up to 1000 items, but bear in mind that does include the hosting, disk space,emails and support.
…..so for what £75.50 a month. Not a bad deal really. I would recommend this for existing businesses thinking of going global with e-commerce from about £2Kto £30K GMS (Gross Monthly Sales)
Now, onto the Design….
Design is extra, their design services are an extra $1250 (£630). They boast the system is fully customisable so design is what I would shop around for. You could probably save on the design element, or find a design team that suits your tastes more as everyone is different. No point putting all your eggs in one basket when the market is so large and fruitful!
E-commerce forces shops to shut – what can a business do now?
1758 days
Walking around the rag market in Birmingham this weekend, I spotted a familiar face on one of the stalls. Internet trading has taken her out of her shop and studio (she make alternative fashion) and she is now back on the market where she started 10 years ago. She has decided to go internet ready as her last attempts at a website failed. I suggested Shopify which would be a very simple system to use and design, but she has already brought a template which uses a frame to hold the site it seems. I do wish I had seen her earlier as I would have advised against it.
This is what Google says about frames:
Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user’s query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user’s query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame — because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page.
This site : http://www.webmarketingplus.co.uk/ has some useful information about optimsation of a site with frames, but looking at the source code of her website, all you see the the frame. Sticking a load of keywords in that frame (providing I can get access to that section) won’t do any good and probably harm her website ranking. It is going to be a tough one cracking a very template based system ( like cracking the Channeladvisor and Marketworks storefronts I imagine, and I can bet they have more flexibility and options) but I will chart my progress as always!
This ones open for comments in case any one has any bright ideas on SEO for frames!
eBay Design Keyword Experiment Over!
1770 days
Well the conclusion was that the URL with /ebaydesign did a lot better than the rest! It is hard to quality such results, but the url /ebaydesign/ was constantly higher in the rankings with 60 hits over the period 18th June to 18th July compared to the other formats /ebay-design/ at 28 hits and /ebay_design/ at only 18 hits. So the ‘winning page’ will stay up and I shall add more content on ebay design services available in the uk.
Battling the Beast – Can it be that simple?
1770 days
I was reminded today of how Google Bots really work. They are not human, and they can only see what we want them to see!
Top tips from a European Expert:
1. Make sure you change the meta title of each page according to that pages content and don’t make it to long and fluffy! Google likes relevant content. We know this but sometimes we forget!
2. Check out : webconfs.com and check your keyword density. Apparently Google will allow up to a 12% density on a particular keyword before you get killed for spam! Hairfreax has all its keywords at below 3% density. Phew….You can over SEO!
3. Google Reads h1 tags and likes them! Again with the relevance, apparently it checks the h1 tags with respect to the meta data.
4. One I always miss – tags for your images. I probably do it for 50% of the time but I have conditioned myself to make sure its done!
5. Make sure your meta description is dynamic, keyword rich and make sense to your customers. I think the meta description for hairfreax of ‘Synthetic Hair Extensions and Falls since 2000′ seriously needs some work! Its so poop google by passes it and used the page text!
Keyword Ranking Results Update
1773 days
Google UK: 4th, 7th and 10th with hairfreax.co.uk, gallery.hairfreax.co.uk and blog.hairfreax.co.uk
Google com : 9th with Google com
Still decent ranking for cybergoth
Google uk: 3rd with hairfreax.co.uk – up 27 places!
Google.com : 11th place, from 100th from June 7th
So the rankings are getting better or remaining consistent. Great stuff.
