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Essentials to E-Commerce: 5 Ways to Earn More

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

5 Ways that you can increase your revenue:

1) Increase your web traffic

The best way to increase your revenue is to increase your customer traffic. Now your thinking to yourself “Ok, I already knew that. But How?”. When we are looking to increase traffic for our website we don’t look at the main keywords that are targeted by our competitors. Instead we look at variations of the keyword or even product specific keywords which will bring in more customers.

For example say we sell Band T-Shirts which is currently searched over 165,000 times per month. If we were number one for that keyword you would be getting the quality traffic we needed. Not everyone though can afford to compete with the companies that show up on the first page. Instead of spending your entire internet marketing budget going after a keyword that you will show up on page 2-3 for why not target a product specific keyword that you offer or what is called a keyword phrase. For example say you sold the band name “XYZ” on your site. Why not target “XYZ Band Shirts”, or “XYZ T-Shirts”. The traffic may be less for this term but you will be able to compete and at the same time convert more traffic.

2) Install tacking mechanisms

If you don’t know why customers aren’t committing on a sale how can you convert the valuable traffic. Google offers a free tool called Google Analytics that can track very detailed information about your visitors. This will help you to see if there are any dead ends or confusion with your shopping cart. We found by using this tracking device that some of our customers would bounce off (Bounce Rate) of a specific page at almost 89%. After further research we found that the products on that page were showing as out of stock when they shouldn’t have been.

3) Test Test Test

One major issue we see with most E-Commerce websites is that the webmaster, owner, or company is so familiar with the website that they become blind to the process. Have fresh eyes make a purchase from your website and ask them afterwards:

What was confusing?
Did you have trouble finding a product?
If you needed to contact us would you know how?

This will help your end users with their overall shopping experience which in turn will increase your sales.

4) Include Mod Rewrite/PHP Meta Tags

What??? Seriously! Have you ever wondered how some E-commerce sites especially the large ones include their product names in the Title tags, keywords and descriptions of every page on their website. They use a Mod Rewrite or PHP script to auto generate this data. If you were to do this by hand it would take you months. The benefit is to generate even more traffic, and will help you with your internet marketing campaign. If you searched for XYZ Band Shirts and the following results cam up which one would you choose?

Company Name Band Shirts or XYZ Band Shirts

5) Blog about your industry

Everyone has a blog discussing anything and everything. Why not discuss what is going on in your industry? There are many free blogging programs out there that can get you started. The reason many companies have blogs isn’t only to get their amazing ideas out onto the internet :) But to increase the amount of pages on their website, generate traffic, and develop a community that can respond back to the author.

Additionally you can include coupons for new members, discuss how a sale you are having next week relates to the current industry struggle, or just keep the customers on your site longer.

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Dance Google Dance!

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

There are all kinds of dances out there, but one dance that relates to the SEO world which can make you happy in the morning and make you pull your hair out by night is the Google Dance.

What is the Google Dance?

When SEO companies start a new campaign on a relatively new website Google has trouble placing the website among the current positions. This placement issue causes the site to “dance” around various positions leading to confusion and frustration if you aren’t aware of it. Google also has multiple data centers across the country which can lead to a “dance” effect where different results are displayed depending on which data center you hit.

This can be a frustrating time in the SEO campaign. This also leads some SEO’s to question their practices leading to impulsive decisions. Don’t stray from what you know for the “Google Dance” typically lasts for 2-3 weeks for all data centers to sync.

Examples of Google Dance:
Site ranked for a targeted keyword within the first three pages early one morning. Later that same day the site was nowhere to be found within the top 100 sites.

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Arizona Printing

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Barlam Enterprises has teamed up with a number of Phoenix Screen Printing to offer discounts on business cards, letterhead and envelopes. The Arizona Printing industry has been hit hard during these tough economic times like many other industries. To help small businesses during these tough times we have decided to offer free business cards for any client who has a 5 page web site developed by Barlam Enterprises up until January 1st.

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Political Candidates Utilizing SEO Finally!

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

A year ago today the political candidates Search Engine Optimization campaigns were nonexistent. When searching for the keyword “John McCain” his campaign site ranked #68 on the search engines. If you were a company listed on the 7th page of Google you were in serious trouble not to mention the Presidential Candidate for the upcoming election.
Within the last 12 months searching for “John McCain” now in fact pulls up his campaign site as #1. How was this done? A significant amount of back links played a very important role in his high rankings and SEO campaign. When looking on Google his site currently shows 5,390 back links. Wouldn’t that be nice?
With the younger generation of computer savvy users SEO plays an important role in all aspects of Internet Marketing. Glad to see someone told the candidates just how important Search Engine Optimization was!

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Are all Flash Websites Bad?

Monday, September 15th, 2008

When Macromedia acquired FutureSplash’s vector based animation software and released as what we know as flash in 1996 to the world a whole new form of web development was unleashed.

This software originally focused on animation to progress the vigorous frame-by-frame animation that was hand drawn. It wasn’t until ActionScript a scripting language that can be easily mistaken for JavaScript was introduced that it was even thought of to develop websites.

With the fine-tuning of the scripting capabilities the software now allowed for animators to quickly script their movements rather than animate their movements one frame at a time.

Newer versions keep making animation even easier, and allowing more activity on web applications, such as flash navigation or the ever popular animated intro to a website. But with the algorithms introduced by the industries leading search engines, what will this bring to flash based websites?

Why is Flash a Problem with Search Engine Optimization?

Since flash is an image based animation program, all text, images, and navigation features are converted into images. This means that a search engine will see the flash websites as nothing more than an image. Think of it this way as the search bot is searching through your website which just happens to be flash based (all aspects of the site are included in the flash including text and navigation) it will see nothing. Therefore the bot returns to the search engine that nothing of relevance can be found on your page. This is bad news, especially since search engines drive 80% of traffic to your site.

Since text based navigation seems to be of high importance for these algorithms your site will be excluded from the search engines.

So how do I Incorporate Flash with the search engines in mind?

Moderation is always best when considering to use flash. But this really depends on your companies target market. If you are trying to get the attention of 13-18 year old kids then more animation and movement on your site may be crucial to sales.

As a developer try to stay away from flash navigation. Navigation is a great source for bots to index your site, so use it wisely. If you have to use flash navigation because you need the button to flip 360 degrees when a user rolls over it, then include a text based linking system at the bottom of your site.

Another thing to keep out of your animations would be crucial searchable text that is essential to your product, or company. Keep your text coded in html, you don’t need everything in flash to have an enticing website.

Ask your Web Desigers how they plan on incorporating your Flash animation into your website. If you are planning on running a SEO campaign tell them this ahead of time so they can take that into consideration when developing your website.

Is Flash Dead?

Flash is a great way of grabbing your customer’s attention, and is great for implementing videos, mp3’s or explaining a diagram or business process that couldn’t be illustrated with simple words. Flash wont ever go away, but developers need to use caution of what they want to include in their flash files. Who knows maybe the next generation of Flash developers will make a searchable flash file.

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Posted in SEO, Web Design | No Comments »

Template or Custom Website?

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

What is a web template you may ask? A web template is a pre-designed website that is built by a web designer and sold for a fraction of the price of a web design company.

So it’s obvious that a web template is a great idea? Well there are always two sides to every story. Although the template is cheap, it lacks the tailored design that a company needs. Suppose your company decides to buy a web template, you buy it download it, and then you have this file saved onto your computer. Now what?

If you have ever looked at a web template it is somewhat confusing. Every web developer has there own methods to create a functional website. So your sitting there reading the directions of where the folder is to place your main text, you then locate the file and realize that you don’t have the software capable of editing this code. If you do have the software and you can locate the file now you have to invest your time trying to decode someone else’s thought process.

So now you need to make a decision to either hire a web development company to help you implement your text, navigation and logo, or to scrap the template and take a loss on your investment.

Templates can be good however if you are on a strict time constraint to launch a new product line. They are generally cheaper than having a web design company create your company’s site for you assuming you know what you are doing when it comes to web development. One thing that they lack though is customization.

Say you purchase a template spend the money for someone to “brand it” to your companies needs, and then the company that sold you the template sells another 20 of the same template that you bought.

How will that look if your customers come across a competitor’s site that looks exactly the same as yours? Would you trust the company, or would you think it was a scam?

I Really Don’t Have the Budget Though!

One acceptable reason to use a template is if you are on a strict budget. Do some research, and be sure you ask what files are contained in the template. Make sure you have all the software needed to customize the template. Most templates that we have seen have html, .swf, .psd, and php files.

So what software will you need? For the html and php files a simple notepad in Windows will work assuming you have html coding knowledge. Or you can purchase editing software such as Dreamweaver, or FrontPage.

The .swf file won’t do you any good. If the template contains flash make sure it includes a .fla file otherwise you won’t be able to edit it. Also note the version since not all versions of flash are compatible.

The .psd file will only work with Adobe Photoshop, so make sure you have that program if you would like to edit any layouts or photos that may be included in the template.

Software isn’t cheap so do your homework before you invest in a template, and contact a local web design company for a quote for the same project, it may end up being cheaper in the end. [digg=http://digg.com/design/Web_Template_Or_Custom_Website]

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