Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.
Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.
So, the next time we get the question, "I'm new to SEO, how do I improve my site?", we can say, "Well, here's a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out."
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Google's SEO Starter Guide
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
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www.tkage.com
#2
Apr 5th 2008, 6:39 am
soniqhost.com
Recent Blog: Where to Host Multiple Domains
Wind Rider
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: [WTS] Rapidshare Network of Sites @ Sig
Posts: 4,697
Thanks for the list, much be a lot of dwi in austin tx
__________________
Free Xbox 360|Rapidshare Network 4 Sale
Buy This Link for $125 /Yr
#3
Apr 5th 2008, 9:03 am
izali
Peon
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Malaysia
Posts: 11
but high keyword mean high competitions ...what should i do?? (
#4
Apr 5th 2008, 9:21 am
tendulkar2
Recent Blog: Google updated the Pageranks, check out your Pagerank now!
Spirit Walker
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: on Earth
Posts: 1,740
Thanks for the list.
But,I think there are no keywords related to celebrity/entertainment related niche....I have celeb site...
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Cheap And Nice Mobile Phones Project Directory
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#5
Apr 5th 2008, 9:23 am
zorah
Tauren
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Philippines
Posts: 517
Thanks for the list!
greatly appreciated
__________________
Senior Web Developer
PR2 Online Shopping Directory
#6
Apr 5th 2008, 9:28 am
digitalspace
Banned
Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 341
thanks for the list.
#7
Apr 5th 2008, 9:32 am
digitalspace
Banned
Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 341
reallly useful list, tks.
#8
Apr 5th 2008, 10:41 am
searchmaster
Berserker
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Wondering Where
Posts: 186
some addition to the list
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Monday, September 22, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Google Map Maker
Google Map Maker lets people add details to maps in some countries.
(Credit: Google)Thursday, August 21, 2008
Free Google Adwords Vouchers
If you live in Australia, France, Sweden, Italy, Japan, United States of America or Singapore you can get a FREE Google Adwords voucher in your currency by following the relevant link below:
- Sign up for AdWords.
- Free $50 dollar Google Adwords voucher (Australia)
- Free Unknown amount of € (Euro’s) Google Adwords voucher (France)
- Free 500 Kronor Google Adwords voucher (Sweden)
- Free € 50 Euros free voucher Google Adwords voucher (Italy)
- Free ¥ 4,000 Yen Google Adwords voucher (Japan)
- Free $25 Google Adwords voucher (Singapore)
- Free Unspecified amount $US of Google Adwords vouchers from iTunes/Google (United States)
Google AdWords is a fast, measurable and cost-effective way to advertise. Using Google’s online tools, you simply write a brief description of your product and service, select a few keywords and indicate how much you’re willing to pay per click.
AdWords is a fast, measurable and cost-effective way to advertise. Using Google’s online tools, you simply write a brief description of your product and service, select a few keywords and indicate how much you’re willingto pay per click. Next thing, your ad is live on www.google.com,and you’re seeing results!
Benefits:
- Reach people actively seeking information on your products and services.
- Target prospects on Google, AOL and other top online destinations.
- It’s fast to arrange and simple to implement. Start getting new customers in minutes.
- It’s cost-effective. Pay only when people click on your ad.
- Maintain total control of your budget. And it’s 100% measurable.
I signed up for AdWords and learn how to use it with the free AUS $50 Google Adwords voucher I received so it was quite useful.
Note: You are not guaranteed to receive a voucher, and if you do get one they are:
Valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed accounts. One promotional credit per customer, and it must be used within 30 days of opening the account.
Note: The above promotional offer may have already expired
Credit : http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/free-google-adwords-voucher/
Friday, July 11, 2008
Ecommerce - Boost Your Business ROI
Did you know that over 90% of all online orders are processed by credit cards and that web sites that offer customers the ability to pay with credit cards can achieve up to 300% more sales than those that do not?
It's a fact. Not only do more customers buy, statistics prove that customers actually buy more when given the option to pay with their credit card. Here are some recent trends that will reinforce the need to sell your product or service on the internet- if your business is not yet doing so:
?At the end of 2000, over 400 million people- world-wide- had
Internet access. That number is expected to reach over 1 billion by the end of 2005!
?Almost 100 million people in the U.S. are now making a purchase after using the internet to conduct their research.
?U.S. Consumers spent a record $13.7 billion in online purchases during the 2003 holiday season. A follow-up study conducted jointly by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen/Net Ratings pegged sales during the 2004 holiday season at $23.2 billion, up 25% from the previous year. This comes at a time when traditional retail sales are growing in the low single digits.
?Forrester projects that total e-commerce sales in the U.S. will increase by approximately 20% per year, growing to $229 billion in 2008, making online retail transactions 10% of total U.S. retail sales by 2008.
In addition, in a survey conducted among more than 500 small business owners, the overwhelming majority indicated that they were either very satisfied or at least somewhat satisfied with their company's e-commerce return on investment (ROI).
It's no wonder- when compared to traditional forms of direct marketing such as mail order catalogs, the cost of establishing and maintaining an e-commerce website is minimal. Additionally, new affordable, user-friendly storefront applications simplify the task of establishing and maintaining a professional e-commerce website. It is now affordable and doable- even for the novice small business owner- to convert their brick-and-mortar operation into a click-and-mortar operation and triple their revenues in a very short period of time!
What's more, if your company sells products to consumers or businesses and you don't have a fully automated e-commerce website, your business is simply not operating at its full potential and you're sending customers to your competition!
It is no longer a luxury for the small to mid-sized retailer to have an e-commerce enabled site-but a necessity to stay competitive in the marketplace.
10 Second Internet Person, sound familiar?
Some people do not understand the Internet idea of online commerce, but then again some people do not understand themselves either. To fully understand Internet Commerce you really only need to monitor your "clicking habits" for a few days to see where you are going and what if anything you are buying. The modern Internet Consumer is there and gone, in a click of any eye, if you do not grab us with good stuff, SEE YA, we are out of here and the speed of light. However you can also make money on that fact and Google AdSense is just one way. Before you go hog wild on the Internet concept of making money in a virtual world you need to educate yourself a little; one of the books I recommend is:
"The 10 Second Internet Man@ger, Survive, thrive & drive your company in the information age" By Mark Breier.
Mark is one of the key people behind Amazon.com, an early .com that won. Why because of their team and there relentlessness. Armin A. Brott was a co-author and former Marine, Commodities Trader and MBA. He is also insane, just like the modern day Internet Person. It appears that is what it takes, these guys are as crazy as the Blitz Marketing Team at The Car Wash Guys in the deployment of their market dominating campaigns.
The book dives into instant information, use of inter-office e-mail, dealing with high-strung individuals all kicking butt. It talks of balance, fun on the team and winning. He sights the venture capital game, investment banker crowd and all the people it takes to please the crowd. They go into an in-depth evaluation of customer feedback and sales in the e-commerce world. If every .COM CEO would have read this book fewer would be gone today. The book is about a five hour read but worth it.
It goes into everything from the tricks of the trade, strategies to beat the competition to tactics that are necessary to move mountains. Some of these strategies have changed but the concept behind them remains the same.
I recommend the book to everyone, but feel that some companies are even more dedicated to winning than they were at Amazon.com. I thought that some of the hard work complaints were invalid because that is what it takes and that is life. If you cannot cope get out of the fire, strong survive. I got the feeling that some of these guys at Amazon were yuppy pricks and whimps on the fire line; but their way worked for them, so hats off to their team. We work that hard everyday at my company and you probably do to; they did it using other peoples money, big deal. But no matter what you think they did do it indeed. If it is really that tough on them then do not take the money in the first place. They asked for it and they got it. At least they were willing to pull though on their commitments to the shareholders and drive hard at the market.
All in all this book was good and had some great advice for managing e-mail, electronic communication, when not to have a meeting, when to get a life, when to ask for more, when and how far to push the troops, what to say to the media, investors, VC, and investment bankers. How investment bankers use your information on other projects and why it is important to make deals fast and why loose lips sink ships. I could not agree more with 80% of this book. The other 20% was information only important to a .COM or to Amazon itself. Some of the stories to illustrate points in this book were great and pointed to the real life inside of this fast passed company. Next on the reading list is Amazon.com, the story of the bookseller itself.
I recommend this book to anyone sitting on their butt and wondering what it takes to survive and to win in the age of the Internet. It is fun to win but the stakes are high and only a few can actually do it. So buy it, read it and think on it, thanks, click out to your right on one of the side bar items. SEE YA
eCommerce Software Solutions
All of the long, grueling nights and an unknown number of working weekends spent converting your dream into reality finally paid off-in a big way! Affiliates are signing up every single day and the clicks have really turned into cash. Your success is not limited to a lonely website but several and all of them are helping you move very diverse product lines. The effort has really paid off and you are milking this Internet cash cow for all its worth but there is one little problem, isn't there? You have reached a point where growing your business even more is almost impossible because instead of developing or acquiring new products like you know you should, you are spending all of your time maintaining and servicing the sites you already have. By the time you get finished signing up and communicating with the affiliates, processing the orders and payment information, and handling the logistics of delivery-the day is gone and you are out of time!
Now don't get me wrong, this is a terrific problem to have but the fact remains that if you are not growing your business then that business is dying! Besides, none of us started these websites just to be bogged down in the trenches, did we? It was the creativity and that rush from seeing the business grow from a single seed of an idea into the multi-domain, multi-product beauty it is now, right?
There is a way to free yourself from the day-to-day operations of your e-business-automation! That is absolutely correct because there are programs out there that can automate your multiple domains, divergent product lines, and multiple affiliate programs! What you desperately need is an Autoresponder Management solution that will automatically handle your affiliate sign-up and the terribly time-consuming task of payment processing and delivery! Such a system would allow you to streamline all of your varied websites and help you to generate the detailed reports you need to better analyze your results in a cost-effective and efficient manner!
In fact, virtually all of the tasks that have prevented you from developing new products and acquiring others can in fact be fully automated in such a way as to leave control where it should be-in your hands-while completely freeing you to expand your initial vision even further! If a program can effectively manage all of the routines currently eating so much of your time in a more efficient manner, why even consider continuing to manage all of these tasks yourself? Isn't working smarter and not harder what got you here in the first place?
Monday, June 16, 2008
Google Adwords Coupon Link
Follow the following steps to acquire a $50 coupon:
- You will need a new Adwords account (as the coupon only applies for accounts no older than 14 days). Sign up for AdWords.
- Go to the link below, and register your information according to the account information that you have provided in the step above.
- Allow up to 7 working days for Google to contact you via email. The email will contain a $50 promo code.
This method has been tested, and it works everytime. If you want more than one coupon, you can follow the steps above, and provide a different/unique email, name, address & credit card for each accounts.
Note that Google may require a deposit (for pre-paid billing), OR that you run advertising campaigns for at least US$5 (for post-pay billing). The exact amount depends on your billing currency.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Hostmonster Reviewed
Host monster, started all the way back in 1996, currently supports over 175,000 domains with their high quality hosting. That's why they're the next on our list in the top ten webhosting providers.
Another master of the single deal, Host monster offers a high class shared hosting deal for just $5.95 a month. They offer a generous 300GB of storage space and 3 Terrabytes of bandwidth per month, backed up with an unlimited number of POP3 and webmail email accounts. In addition to this they offer 100 MySQL and postgre SQL databases for every customer, with additional support for PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby on Rails. In terms of free software they offer the normal range of forum, chat and blog software, but also a lot of open source software that doesn't come as default with many other packages. Coppermine, Moodle and Joomla are very popular applications, and it's reassuring to see them being promoted to customers.
Two unusual features of the Host monster package are unlimited domain hosting and SSH access. With unlimited domain hosting, any number of domains can be set to point to the single hosting account, meaning that you can host as many sites as you want on a single $5.95 package. SSH, or secure shell, access means that you can remotely access the server from anywhere in the world using a telenet client like PuTTY. This gives you precise control over your account in the exact same manner of an account on a local Linux machine. It might not be useful for everyone, but for expert users it'll almost certainly come in quite handy.
Host monster are currently using cPanel 11 software for their website backend, a popular choice for most webhosts. It gives quick and easy access to most of the utilities you could want for your site, including backups, email and database administration. They offer a demonstration of the cPanel software directly from their site, so you can easily check it over before you have to give them any money.
When it comes to handling customer enquiries, Host monster uses a three-pronged strategy of live telephone support, online chat and an e-mail based ticket system. This should give any potential customers reassurance that any queries are going to be answered quickly and efficiently. This is backed up by the several awards that they've won over the years, including one for the best customer service in 2006.
Essentially, Host monster are offering a good support system and some very interesting technical specs, combining a large offering of webspace and bandwidth with some unusual technical features that are not often seen for a hosting package of this price. Worth consideration when you're looking for a new host.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Save $100 in 5 Minutes Backing Up Your Web Site?
Here's an easy way to backup your web site's files and
database (worth thousands of dollars, no doubt) that costs
$0 to learn and perform. It only takes seven easy steps.
You don't need to know a lot about how to use Unix or how to
use databases like mySQL. The only real tool you need is a
telnet client. Also, you need to know a few commands which
I'll show you now. (You could even write the commands I'm
about to give you on a cheatsheet.)
STEP 1: CONNECT & GET IN THE RIGHT FOLDER
The web host you're trying to back up needs to allow shell
access (most do these days).
If you have a Windows computer, download a program called
"PuTTY" which you can use to login in your web host's shell.
Search for "putty ssh" on Google or get it here:
http:/ he.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe
Open up PuTTY and at the top type in your hostname (your web
site address without the http or www, just "yourname.com").
Your web host either uses SSH or telnet, first try logging
in using SSH and if it won't connect try it using Telnet.
Click the "Open" button at the bottom to connect.
When it connects you will be asked for your account's
username, and after you enter that, it will ask for your
password. If these both take, you'll see a command prompt
of sorts. What you have to do is browse to the document
root, depending on your host it's usually a folder like
"public_html" or "wwwroot".
If the wwwroot or public_html folder has more folders inside
of it, in the form of yourdomain.com, don't browse into them
yet, just stay in the folder you're in.
Browsing in the Unix command prompt is just like DOS, to
view a folder type "dir" or "ls", and to go into a certain
folder type "cd foldername". If you messed up you can type
"cd .." to move up one level.
STEP 2: BACK-UP THE DATABASE
The first step if you're backing up a site is to dump your
mySQL database. To do this obviously you need the mySQL
username and password you want to back up. If your mySQL
username is "myuser" and the mySQL password is "mypassword",
you'd type:
mysqldump -umyuser -pmypassword -A > dump.sql
mysqldump is the program we run to dump the database into a
file, then we type "-u" followed by the username (no spaces)
and "-p" followed by the password (also no spaces). The
uppercase "-A" tells the program we want to dump every
database this user has access to. It MUST be an uppercase
A.
The ">" afterwards says we want to put this program's output
into a file (otherwise it would show up on the screen) and
"dump.sql" is the name of the file we're going to dump to.
This may take a while depending on the size of your
database. Be patient. Once you have a command prompt
again, it's done.
If you don't have root on your server, it may show databases you don't have access to. What you'll have to do here is "force" mysqldump to keep doing the backups even if it gets error messages. The flag for "force" is "-f".
mysqldump -umyuser -pmypassword -Af > dump.sql
STEP 3: BACK-UP YOUR FILES
Now you can put everything into one big file, which you can
easily move over to the new host in one go, instead of one
at a time. Unix doesn't let you create Zip files, but you
can create a TAR (Tape Archive) which just rolls a bunch of
files together without any sort of compression.
To create your TAR archive, type:
tar -cvf dump.tar *
The "-c" tells the program to create a new TAR archive, the
"v" following right after says to be verbose, in other
words, give us the name of every file that's being added to
the archive. "f: means we're saving this to a file, as
opposed to showing it on the screen (you'd just see junk).
"dump.tar" is the name of the file we want to save into, and
the "*" means we want to put everything into this TAR
archive -- files, folders, everything.
You may get some sort of warning about not adding dump.tar
to the archive, that's no big deal because we don't want
this file to add itself.
Your files are backed up. At this point it's time to move
things over to the next host. There's a way we can do this
without you having to download the whole thing, and
re-upload it.
STEP 4: ARRANGE YOUR FILE FOR PICKUP
Remember how I said when you were in "wwwroot" or
"public_html" not to browse into the folder containing a
domain name? Well now it's time to move that dump over into
one of them so it can be picked up.
If one of your folders is, say, yourdomain.com, type:
mv dump.tar yourdomain.com
This moves "dump.tar" into the folder "yourdomain.com".
STEP 5: MOVE THE NEW FILE OVER
Login to your new host. Browse to its "wwwroot" or
"public_html" folder.
Most hosts include a program called "wget" which works sort
of like a browser in that you give it a URL to pick-up that
it loads. Only this browser also saves the file you want to
load.
If your old host was at yourdomain.com, you'd just type:
wget http://www.yourdomain.com/dump.tar
This will load that URL and save it as "dump.tar". You'll
probably see some sort of progress indicator as it goes.
STEP 6: DECOMPRESSING THE FILE
Once you have the file, you use that same TAR program to
decompress it. Type:
tar -xvf test.tar
The "v" and "f" are still there, but instead of "c" (create)
we use "x" (extract). This will unpack each file and let us
know which one it's working on.
STEP 7: RESTORING THE MYSQL DATABASE
Before you can put the mySQL dump back into the database,
you have to go into this new web host's control panel and
create blank databases with the same names as you had
before.
You also have to create a mySQL user and make sure that user
has access to all those databases you've created.
Once that's done find the dump.sql that was unpacked with
all of the other files.
Instead of using the program "mysqldump" to dump the files,
we use the program "mysql" which let's us put commands into
the database. That's basically what a dump is, a file full
of commands that, when run, will recreate the old database
exactly.
This time we don't type in the database name right away. To
get into mySQL from the command prompt, type:
mysql -umyuser -pmypassword
Where "myuser" and "mypassword" are your mySQL username and
password. Once you're in you'll get kind of a weird looking
prompt. All you have to do at this point is type:
source dump.sql
This says, open up the file dump.sql, read through it and do
whatever it says to do in that file. You will see a bunch
of lines telling you a command has been entered (0 Rows
Affected, 1 Rows Affected, something like that).
If everything goes smoothly, type "quit" and you will be
back in the shell.
You've just moved one site (or a bunch of sites) over from
one host to another in about 5 minutes.
About the Author
Article by Robert Plank
Want to pick up more useful PHP and programming skills,
even if you aren't "the programming type"?
Subscribe here -- http://jumpx.com/newsletter
Thursday, April 10, 2008
How To Accept Credit Cards Online
Anyone with an online business, whether for auctions,
services, or virtually any type of product, has asked the
same question at some time during their quest to create
the ultimate online business - "How do I accept credit
cards?"
Since over 90% of all transactions on the Internet
involve customers paying by credit card, accepting
plastic money rates a must for almost any business.
The problem for most small online business owners
involves the high cost of setting up and maintaining a
credit card merchant account.
With startup fees ranging from $200 to $500, minimum
monthly fees of at least $40 to $50, plus per transaction
fees and a percentage of sales, most people who want to
supplement their income online or test an idea can't risk
that kind of money.
Add in credit checks, 48-month service contracts,
expensive equipment purchases or leasing, financial
statements, and last 3 years' tax returns and most people
throw up their hands and give up before they even get
started.
Fortunately several companies responded to this problem
with unique solutions that enable smaller online
merchants to accept credit cards at a fraction of those
high startup costs with no long-term commitment, no
equipment purchases, and zero minimum monthly fees.
~ PayPal.com ~
PayPal has gotten some negative press over the last
couple of years, but that press has been mostly
undeserved.
PayPal makes it easy for you to collect money for your
online sales, send money to merchants, bill people
monthly, collect dues and donations and integrate a free
shopping cart into your site.
Of all the payment and money transfer services online,
PayPal ranks as the absolute lowest in cost and the
easiest to set up.
PayPal allows merchants to sell physical and downloadable
products along with personal services.
~ ClickBank.com ~
For a $50 one-time fee ClickBank enables online ebook,
software and other electronic information sellers to not
only accept credit cards, but provide instant delivery of
their products to online purchasers.
ClickBank allows any merchant to accept virtually every
major credit card on the planet.
The online merchant simply adds a purchase link to their
site, the customer clicks the link, fills in their
payment information and the credit card gets authorized
on the spot.
Once the card gets approved ClickBank redirects the buyer
to a page that enables them to download the ebook,
software, or other product they have just purchased.
ClickBank also operates a fully integrated affiliate
program that automatically pays affiliates who sell your
products for you.
ClickBank heavily restricts what merchants may sell
through the service and does not allow the sale of
physical goods.
~ PaySystems.com ~
Of the three, Paysystems behaves most like a traditional
credit card merchant account.
The service allows the merchant to integrate with a
number of third-party shopping carts as well as use the
PaySystems shopping cart system.
Merchants pay a small transaction fee and a percentage of
the sale, but don't sign up for any long-term service
contracts or equipment leases.
(c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved
http://www.thenetreporter.com
Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the
co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how
to use free articles to quickly drive thousands of
targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links...
Simple "Traffic Machine" brings Thousands of NEW visitors to
your website for weeks, even months... without spending a
dime on advertising!"Turn Words Into
Traffic"
Credit Card Merchant Account Basics
Knowing which credit card merchant account to get can be very confusing. There are thousands and thousands of banks, merchant account providers and third party sales teams that can offer you all kinds of incentives. Billions of dollars are transacted online every year and you want your share. Where do you turn? What do you look for? Read on to find out...
Third party payment processors
The easiest way to accept credit cards online is through a third party payment processor. Companies like Paypal and 2Checkout.com allow you to offer your customers the option of paying by credit card while not having to go through rigorous credit checks or putting down big deposits. Both of these companies include the option of putting a short business name alongside their name of your customers' credit card bill.
Out of the two, Paypal has no up front setup fee while 2Checkout asks for a one-time $49 USD setup fee. Paypal is also cheaper per transaction. 2Checkout works differently than Paypal does when processing orders.
2Checkout is considered to have purchased your product or service and is simply reselling it to your customer at a profit to them. They will handle the initial customer concerns with regards to the transaction but will refer the product or service specific questions back to you.
Paypal on the other hand, simply processes the initial transaction in their name once you've upgraded your account to a Premium or Business account. Your customer doesn't have to register for a Paypal account if you live in certain countries like the US and Canada so it is very simple to use.
Invoicing your customer
Paypal allows invoicing but doesn't allow you to send a money request to someone without requiring your customer to open a Paypal account. On top of that, most new Paypal accounts are subject to a send limit restricting the amount of money you send. Now in most markets that Paypal operates in this send limit is up to $1000 but it is still a limit.
Because 2Checkout is purchasing the product or service from you, they don't have an account creation requirement that they impose on your customer. They have an invoicing function and as long as you have shown to 2Checkout that you process reliable transactions through their system, the process is hassle free for your customers.
Which is right for you?
I use both processors. I tend to process initial transactions through Paypal and regular invoicing through 2Checkout. Either way though, you can't go wrong with either option if you choose to have only one credit card merchant account.
Joe Duchesne is the webmaster for TurboMerchant.com a website dedicated to helping people with their credit card merchant account needs. Reprint freely as long as you keep this resource box intact and provide a keyword rich link back to Turbomerchant.com
Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1
You want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very big family. Right off, let's be clear - there are lots of ways to do business on the internet. And lots of ways to both make and lose money. Successful eCommerce websites come in all shapes, kinds and colors and while I can't cover every type of site in this series, I will present the basics you need to consider and apply for an eCommerce web site to be successful.
Let's begin by assuming you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I'm not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We're beyond those basics. The basics here are the factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success your eCommerce web site experiences.
First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn't make a high value web site. Sure you might make some money. Once. And you'll end up with a high refund rate - and an unhappy credit card processor. That path means you're taking advantage of inexperienced customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. This isn't the way to a long-term business with steady repeat customers.
Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales -- a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you've created in your buyers. Hyped junk just doesn't cut it.
Next, you've got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.
If you do decide to use call-in or live chat, it's imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and be customer friendly. This can be a problem if you outsource. The less expensive out-source call centers can turn out to be very expensive in terms of lost sales and customers who never come back.
You'll need to check very carefully and be 100 per cent certain the operators actually speak and understand the primary language(s) of your targeted customer group. You'll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts.
You should collect your own customer evaluations - separately. Don't rely exclusively on any monitoring or customer satisfaction surveys provided by the call center. Track your ROI to be sure it's money well-spent. Don't stop monitoring just because the results looked good for the first two or three months. Things change. Make sure you're tracking desired actions linked to the call center separately from those NOT related to call-in or live chat. Mixing outcomes leaves you in the dark about what's really happening.
You probably should have an attractive website. An ugly site can work, but to do that you need to absolutely know exactly what you're doing and why it should work. And you'll have to test like crazy to optimize (of course, you should be doing that anyway). The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced. Very few individuals really have the grasp of marketing, market and customer psychology that makes for a successful "ugly" site.
To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use - colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn't mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option. Look for the highest ranked, busiest sites in your business area and study the layouts they use. Extract the common features that you see on those sites. While other factors heavily influence traffic and ranking, appearance has a strong effect on visitors and sites that do testing evolve toward optimizing visitor behavior.
Keep in mind that a site's desired actions affect the design and layout. You'll want to study sites where those actions are most similar to the desired actions you target on your web site. If your goal is direct product sales, there's not much point in emulating a site that's optimized for newsletter sign-ups or AdSense.
If your main goal is direct sales (and if it is, then you need backend products too), provide incentives for customers to buy AND to return. The return factor is critical to a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. Since they've shown enough faith in you to buy, do your utmost to never damage that faith. Treat them like the priceless resource they are. Think long-term: successful eCommerce websites are all about value and customer service.
Copyright 2005 Richard Keir
Richard teaches, trains and consults, on and off-line, on business and professional presentations, eCommerce, site building and programming. And writes a lot. Visit http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites.com for articles, information, resources and links and check our blog at http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites/blog for opinion and ideas.
