Advancing eCommerce

The whole story is told in this short HD video (please go full screen so you can see the fine details).

If you are seeing the small version of this video, the <a href=http://www.800cart.com/tutorials.htm>HD version of this 800Cart ecommerce tutorial is available at 800Cart.com</a>.

If you use 800Cart and have, say, 150 products, then more than 50,000 links back to your site is not going to be a problem.  And it’s all automatic – it does not take days or weeks of strategizing and labor.  (we did all that for you years ago – you just need to hook in to our success).

Certainly, it’s going going to advance you like 1 link from 50,000 separate web sites, but results speak volumes.  Several new 800Cart customers took #1, #2, #3 in just a few days (like 8)… others have dominated with 5-6 links in the top 10 for months (try “gourmet mushroom“).  It’s all done ‘legally’ in the fashion that Google asks you to do it.

Watch the video for details. Click in the lower right of the video to load the HQ version then go to full screen if you want to see the screenshot details we illustrate.

‘SEO & Suggestive Sell’ (main menu) must be turned on in your 800Cart COntrol Panel to put this to work for you!  By the end of your 30 Day Free Trial at 800Cart, you can be dominating the search engines.

Is it as good as having 1 link from each of 50,000 different sites? Certainly not. But most webmasters would kill for 50,000 links from 4 sites as described in the video. But it’s included in any $9.90/month shopping cart from 800Cart. And it works well enough to get most merchants 3-7 links in the top 10 in most search engines.

That’s good enough for most merchants!

It’s no joke.  We all know that SEO is serious business.

And it was a huge SEO company that should have known better.   They ignored Google’s widely published warnings of SEO behavior to avoid, and as a result got a US Senator’s site banned on Google:

Google Bans Senator Hutchison and BMW Germany Web Sites, 6 Internet Search Engine Showdowns.

<H/T: Drudge)

Effective Sales-Building in 800Cart is Easy to Manage, Overcomes Hard Times

Suffering through the current economic hard times is simply something your company�s sales do not have to endure. Online sales are actually up as folks hunt for more bargains and save on gasoline bills. The smart 800Cart merchants have placed themselves where the money is looking for them, and it does not take an extra penny for SEO optimization.

It only takes 15 minutes, 2 times per week, or a half an hour a week. The thing is that you have to set aside that time and just do it. The rewards, as many 800Cart merchants have demonstrated, are increased sales through increased exposure.

Then watch your sales, and market share, and �mind share� begin to climb online.

There is nothing technical to learn � our 800Cart handles if for you entirely automatically.

Step 1: (15 minutes) – Click �SEO/Suggestive Sell� in the main menu of your cart control panel. Place 3 to 6 of your best-selling, favorite, or overstocked SKUs in the �Always Suggest� blank and check off the �Show Suggestions on Shopping Pages� and �iMall� checkboxes and save. If you have time left over after doing this, upload pictures for these 3 SKUs to your WebShowCase if you have not already.

Step 2: (15 minutes) If the 3 to 6 SKUs you designated as �Aways Suggest� in Step 1 above are currently assigned to a �Department� or �Aisle� in their respective Edit Products page, then make new copies of these SKUs in �Add Products� (suggestion: SKU 123 becomes SKU 123A when you add it again) only this time the product should have NO department or aisle assigned � just leave the department and aisle blanks empty when you save the new (copy) product. Doing this will force the products to appear in Your WebShowcase when no department or aisle name is clicked � and these products will also be listed when someone clicks on �Featured� in the WebShowCase. Spend the remaing time you have left over updating 3 or 4 of your product descriptions.

This gets you started in building your sales! And it will be effective for you. Google and MSN and the other search engines will do the heavy lifting for you � and it will help build the page authority of your own home web site, which means it will climb in the search engine rankings, too.

We recommend that you make this 15 minutes, twice per week, a habit every week because we have seen the merchants who do this prosper accordingly.

For more tips on further enhancing the free SEO built-in to your 800Cart solution, visit our blog at 800Cart.blogspot.com and click on SEO in the left menu, or click on �Current 800Cart Headlines� in the upper right of your cart control panel for earlier articles on getting the SEO built-in to 800Cart to work for you and your business�s prosperity.

Ron Robinson is a senior executive at <a href=http://www.800cart.com>800Cart Secure eCommerce Shopping Cart/SEO</a>

Many folks feel that by participating in social networking they are enhancing the page rank of their own web site and getting some major SEO accomplished.

To a vanishingly small degree, they are, but much more often such activity can actually harm your site’s page rank and page authority if not done properly.

Everyone has seen those posts wishing you blessings and prosperity and promising a little more added success for you if you just click on this link.

Yet the entire idea of social networking is to contribute your ideas and make them available to the reader right here, right now (where they are reading your article now) instead of inducing them to follow a link to get to the meat your really great idea.

If you find yourself composing a nice article – especially a promotional article that tries to get folks to click to visit your site, you are making a couple of serious mistakes in the social networking world.

The first mistake is that you are not sharing the meat of your idea or thought right now where the reader is reading right now. That earns you ‘negative credits’ in ’search space’ and the collective ‘mind space’.

The second mistake this activity represents is that Google and many other search engines are becoming more and more successful at detecting ‘wall spam’ and discounting it for search results (page rank and page authority) accordingly.

If you are interested in SEO, then you must undertake SEO activities: develop content almost daily for your own web site; make sure you have a site map available in your site root; don’t put false tags in your pages; make tags relevant and different for every page.

Social Networking can successfully promote your business, but it isn’t SEO as many people have been discussing in these spaces.

Ron Robinson is a senior executive at <a href=http://www.800cart.com>800Cart Secure eCommerce Shopping Cart/SEO</a>

It’s simple, but many people have not thought of it yet. The SEO world is constantly changing.

If you see an article on SEO that you feel is helpful, check one more item. Look at the date that the article was published. If the date is older than 6 months, ignore the hint – the SEO world has changed greatly since then!

Many people think that setting up SEO is difficult and time-consuming – however that is definitely not the case if you are using the SEO Features built-in to 800Cart.  We have built-highly powerful SEO capabilities into your cart and we make them very easy for you to manage.

Imperfect, bet getting Better,  is Best!
You may think: “My store isn’t perfect yet – I still need to add longer product descriptions, product departments, aisles, and pictures and so forth” — but we will explain below, why it’s better for you to turn on SEO now, and then make marginal improvements after SEO is already working for you in your WebShowcase.  (If you are not familiar with the WebShowcase every 800Cart already has built-in, then click ‘My WebShowcase’ in the right of your cart control panel main menu.)

SEO is Easy and Highly Effective in 800Cart
Our merchants have proven it – turning on SEO in your 800Cart is easy and getting started – taking advantage of the most powerful features – takes only 10 minutes!  Before we tell you how to actually do it below, first we’re going to tell you what advantages you gain from spending those 10 minutes to turn on SEO.  As a matter of fact, you will get better results if you turn it on now, then make improvements to support SEO, than you will get if you wait until ‘everything is perfect’ before you turn on SEO.  We’ll review this too momentarily below.

How SEO Benefits You Immediately
There are many, many advantages that accrue to your marketing when you use SEO, but we’ll only explain the most important two here.

The first advantage that accrues to you when you turn on SEO is that your own website at www.yoursite.com rises in the search engines – both in page rank and page authority!  This means more people find your web store more easily.  Perhaps you would say, “But I am already #1 or #2 in the search pages”?  Well, how would it be for you if you had 6 out of 10 links on the first page?  Many 800Cart merchants are already doing it!  And that’s just for the search terms you are checking.  What about the search terms folks are using to try to find you?  What about your search terms concerning your products?

The second advantage that accrues to you when you turn on 800Cart SEO is that each one of your products becomes much easier to find when buyers are looking for… your products! (not your store, but your products)

Yes, You Heard Us Right…
Imperfect ‘now’ is indeed the best: here is why.  If you are holding off on pulling the trigger on SEO because your store is not quite ‘perfect’ yet – for instance you would like to take the time later to upload pictures or to give better product descriptions in your ‘Edit Product’ pages – then you are making a big mistake by not turning on SEO now.  You should  turn on SEO now!

Why?

Because over time, Google (and the other search engines) look for changes and improvements to your WebShowcase web pages.  If you have the same web pages over time that do not get changed, then you begin to lose page rank because Google figures you are not keeping your WebShowcase pages timely with updated information on your products.  Google awards higher page rank to pages that change and improve over time!

So even if you feel that your pictures and descriptions are not ‘perfect’ now, go ahead and turn on SEO now anyway.  Google will notice as you improve your WebShowcase product descriptions and add pictures, etc., and will award you improving page rank accordingly!

The headlines in times of crisis can be more than misleading. Witness Richard Waters’ headline at the Financial Times: “eCommerce on the ropes“.

Stop there and you may feel your small business is doomed.

But as those of us in the center of the business already know, Waters is talking about the big boys like eBay who have run into serious trouble. Sales are actually expanding for many smaller online merchants. Waters goes on to say that shoppers are searching out smaller e-merchants (like you) for better deals. They are searching a little deeper on search engines like Google and clicking on Adwords ads and on natural search engine results. The same revenue that used to go to eBay and the other big boys is coming looking for you.

As businesspeople, we often forget that one of the co-meanings of the word ‘crisis’ is the idea of ‘opportunity’. Indeed the chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ is composed of two symbols: the first, of course, danger, the second, oppportunity. There is wisdom in remebering this!

My dad always said that if it’s raining soup, you should take your soup bowl and go stand under the cloud.

Where is the cloud? Where should we go stand? Well, as noted above, shoppers are indeed digging a little deeper to find the deals – they are examining natural search results a little more closely and they are looking at adwords ads more closely – and they are clicking! This means they are coming to see you, if your link is there.

The pool of shopper funds available to you has not dimnished all that much, and the greatest news is that these funds have deserted the big guys and are coming looking for you!

Is your link there?

We have 2 strong suggestions for you to make sure it is! Suggestions that will make sure that you are standing under the cloud where it is raining soup. Actually, it’s a 1-2 knockout punch for web marketing and ensuring your online success during difficult times. And ensuring that you will prosper when the difficult times pass.

ONE: If you are not using Google Adwords, yet, then use it! Even if you set a low ad budget like $50/month, Google will honor your budget and will not go over the spending limit that you set. And you only pay for clicks to your web site, so every penny you pay for a click delivers a shopper to your web site. If you have never used Google’s Adwords before, now is the time to start – with any budget – no matter how small.

TWO: Start working to raise your natural page rank and search engine returns. If you are an 800Cart customer, you have one great tool available to you – one that you can set up in 10 minutes – that will do more to promote your page rank than any other single action you can take. This action will yield results better than anthing you can do with weeks of continuous effort! This is to set up SEO and Suggestive Sell on the ‘SEO/Suggestive Sell’ page of your cart control panel.

What challenges or tough decisions do you face in this 10 minute setup for SEO/Suggestive Sell in your cart control panel? We worked hard to make sure that the answer is NONE! Here’s why:

1. The SEO/Suggestive Sell page in your cart control panel allows you to turn images OFF in your WebShowCase, so even if you have not uploaded product images yet, your product information can display without broken image symbols.

2. You only need to provide the SKUs for 3 of your most popular or most profitable products which will always be offered to your customers when they are in their cart. This helps build sales for you and is one of the key aspects of the SEO strategy built-in to the 800cart.

3. The crucial part that makes all this work, a link from your web site to your WebShowcase, can be done as a tiny picture of a secure lock which is unlikely to be clicked – if it is clicked, it leads to the Security/Privacy page of your cart, reassuring your shopper that purchasing from you is not only secure, but is PCI compliant, safe and private. A win for you no matter what!

Is prospering during the crisis worth spending an extra 10 minutes in your cart control panel to set up SEO/Suggestive Sell? We think most 800Cart merchants will agree with us that it is.

Many 800Cart merchants don’t realize it, but their 800Cart contains an awesome, extremely powerful SEO optimization engine built right into your cart.  And it’s SEO automation that only takes 5-10 minutes – not hours.

Authority: starting 2 years ago, we started researching (and keeping up with) all the white papers, phD dissertations written by Google employees, and patent applications filed by Google.  What you read below makes used of what we learned.

You’re going to work hard today no matter what.  You’re going to be working hard today four months from now, no matter what.  So shouldn’t one of your 10 minute tasks in the next 4 months (sooner rather  than later) be to set up SEO/Suggestive Sell in your 800Cart?  You do this once, and you’re done.

When most web site owners think of SEO, they think of hours of painstaking work detailing different meta-tags for each page, and making alt and title tags for every one of their products.  Plus the most important search engine optimization task cannot be done on your web site: backlinks!  Backlinks are why so many folks write to you asking for reciprocal links between your site and theirs: nothing promotes your search engine page rank like backlinks pointing to your site from other web sites.

So what does this 10 minutes of work get for you in the way of SEO?  Lots!

• Backlinks: in 800Cart, every page on 4 different domains gives you four backlinks pointing back to your web site.  This is done from each of four different domains, so if you have 50 products you now have 200 backlinks from highly ranked sites (ours) pointing to your web site.  If you have those 50 products in 10 departments, then it’s now 2000 backlinks pointing to your web site.  If some of those 50 products are in 5 different aisles (we call ‘categories’ and ’sub-categories’ by the names ‘departments’ and ‘aisles’) you now have 10,000 backlinks to your web site.  It adds up fast! 10,000 backlinks to your web site with only 50 products!   Frequently, this is a lot more than you need to be #1 in Google – sometimes it’s enough to get you 7 of the first 10 search results.  Suggestive Sell just stirs another multiplier into this mix, so you have even more backlinks to your site.

• Meta-tags: you may put in painstaking work doing the meta-tags on your own web site, but you won’t have to in the cart: every product page in your cart generates meta-tags automatically from the product descriptions that you give us.  Google pays the least amount of attention to meta-tags (Google actually reads the whole page, but looks at the meta-tags only to decide if you are publishing misleading meta-tags so they can set you ‘honesty index’ – if your honesty index is not really high, you are penalized) because so many sites abuse meta-tags, but other search engines do pay some attention to meta-tags.

• Alt and Title tags: You see the results of Alt and Title tags when you hover over a picture and see text. Again, we put your product descriptions in images and links leading to your product pages, so even if Google does not follow the link to a given page, Google at least cataloged the full product description in the page before that linked to that product.
• Some Secret Stuff: our competitors pay attention to what we do too, so we won’t disclose all we do to raise your page rank and get more links and hits to your web site.  But what we do works!  

The most important consideration: don’t do anything ‘illegal’!    Most web site owners already know that Google will penalize you heavily if you publish misleading meta-tags or if you engage in other activities trying to ‘game’ the system into awarding you page rank that you don’t deserve.  800Cart, of course, keeps it all 100% legal at our end so you never risk a page rank penalty.