Steps to Move eCommerce Store to New Domain Name

Before you move the store:

• Check that the cart will handle the change in domain names, nothing is hard coded to the current domain, no license restrictions, etc.
• Check your host allows parked domains.
• You will need to obtain a SSL certificate for the new store so your checkout continues to work.
• Does your site enforce one domain? If so can you change to the new domain name?
• Check none of the coded pages refers directly to the old domain name– the only time it should be hard coded is the jump to the secure checkout. If there are pages with the domain in them you will need to edit to remove the domain name or list them for change after the conversion.

The issue is the SSL certificate, a host will only respond to one at a time (a limitation of the HTTPS protocol means the certificate is attached to one IP address so two certificates would require two IP addresses) so when you decide to make the switch you will need to install the new SSL certificate and then make your store respond to the new address. Overall downtime should be minimal as both addresses will resolve but there is going to be some delay switching SSL certificates.

Rough list of steps involved in the move:

• Modify the DNS record for the new domain to point to the IP address of the current site
• You will need to park the new domain on top of the old domain. Usually your host control panel will allow you to set up the current hosting to respond to both domain names.
• Once both domains resolve you will be able to make the switch.
•  Change the store to respond to the new domain name
• Install the SSL certificate
• Modify any remaining on page mentions of the old domain name to the new domain name
• Test.

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1 Hour To Great Results with Sycara

The Sycara SEO tool is great for quick site audits and the results for the time invested are outstanding. The steps for a quick one hour audit are:

1. Login to your Sycara account.
2. Add your site to the Sycara system using the ‘Add Site’ menu option – supply the site name and site URL and hit save.
3. When the ‘Next Steps’ options appear click ‘Visit Site Dashboard’
4. Gather your list of top keywords and turn them in a CSV format on one line i.e. diamond watch, gold ring.
5. Under ‘Site Settings’ -> ‘Map Keywords’ click the down arrow on the blue bar and select ‘Add Keywords’ – cut and paste your CSV keyword string here.
6. To the left of each keyword click the down arrow and ‘Best Page’ option and select a URL to map this keyword to.
7. From the menu bar select ‘Reports’ -> ‘Report Scheduler’
8. Click the ‘Create Report’ button, select ‘Keyword Ranking’ and click the ‘Run’ button.
9. Click the ‘Create Report’ button, select ‘Site Audit’ and click the ‘Run’ button.
10. Click the ‘Create Report’ button, select ‘SEO Optimization’ and click the ‘Run’ button.

The reports will be complete in about 15 minutes… have a coffee while you wait…

Go to ‘Reports’ -> ‘Report History’

1. When the ranking report arrives check your site’s rankings – this is your baseline.
2. When the Site Audit Report is available, click the report and scan down it – any time you see any numbers in the ‘Alert’ or ‘High’ columns click the number and view the recommendations. Correct all the Alerts and as many highs as you can.
3. When the SEO Optimization Report is available, click the report and scan down it – any time you see any numbers in the ‘Alert’ or ‘High’ columns click the number and view the recommendations. Correct all the Alerts and as many highs as you can.
4. If you have time left from the one hour allocated correct as many normal issues as you can too.

If this is work destined for another person to implement:

1. Open up Word or the equivalent.
2. Screen capture the ranking report and paste into the Word Document.
   For each Keyword add a headline with the keyword – URL combination.
   For each issue in the site audit cut and paste the text into the word document.
   For each issue in the SEO optimization report cut and paste the text into the word document.
3. For non-keyword mapped URL issues shown in the site audit add these under a section called ‘Other Pages’

All completed in around 30 minutes.

It is recommended these reports are scheduled every two weeks to fully optimize your site in the organic search results.

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Who Can Benefit from SEO?

The information super highway. The World Wide Web. Cyberspace. While there are many different names, it all boils down to one thing — �the Internet. It is through all of these names that we begin to realize what a large part the Internet plays in our lives. Most of us in Western culture use it on a daily basis for correspondence, information, and entertainment. We would be disoriented and disconnected if the Internet were suddenly unavailable.

One of the key components of the Internet is search engines. Search engines can provide answers to nearly every question in a matter of seconds, from fashion and trivia to weather and services. An important part of what makes search engines effective is search engine optimization , or SEO. SEO is a process of understanding the ranking and visibility of a given webpage. Some companies and website administrators go to great lengths and use an SEO tool to help them monitor and assess their website’s position and ensure that they stay within a certain range. SEO is important to businesses and organizations because it allows them to be more accessible to current and potential clients. The more visible the site is, the more likely they are to receive visitors.

Businesses, however, are not the only ones to benefit from good SEO . As a Web surfer you want to be sure that when you search for something you are getting the most relevant results. The more websites that understand and utilize SEO, the more competitive the sites will be, and the more relevant the results will be.

The Internet is constantly growing and changing. What worked one day may not work the next day. When businesses stay on top of the changes, they not only receive the benefit of additional visitors but the customers receive the benefit of finding the website quickly and easily. It is a winning situation for everyone.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

Making a Career of Online Reputation Management

If you enjoy computers and want to be part of the fast-paced internet-based world, perhaps a career in online reputation management and SEO would be just the job for you. There are several benefits to starting out on your own. One, you can work from home and have complete flexibility of your time and hours. And two, there is no special degree or certification required. And for many who are facing uncertainty in the job area, they are benefits you may not want to pass on.
But before you go and quit your day job, be warned there are many challenges should you decide enter this field. With the internet taking up a larger and larger portion of our lives it is natural that it would provide many jobs as well. As a result, there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals claiming to do SEO. On the flip side there are many well established companies that control much of the market for online reputation management. Elixir Interactive is one such company. They offer many SEO and reputation management services and deliver what they promise.
Another important aspect in beginning such a career is experience. Understanding the way that search engines operate and the algorithms that they use is essential to any successful career. It is not something that you can just pick up over night. You must also stay on top of the constant updates and changes that the internet and search engines make. There is also the threat that SEO analyst could become obsolete as search engines become more refined and natural in their search patterns. Many companies, especially the larger ones, are deciding to move in-house for their marketing and SEO needs. Unfortunately there is not much room to move around, or up, with such a position.
Online reputation management and SEO is an important part of our internet based world; however, pursuing it as a career is not for the faint of heart.

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Page Load Speed Part of Google’s Algorithm

Following on from our post the other day (SwiftRank By Optimizing Page Speed) I was looking for more information on this. I found one post from Search Engine Land Site Speed, Google�s Next Ranking Factor which indicates that page load times will be a factor in the algorithm next year.

This makes sense from a user perspective. I have been advocating for a long time keeping the weight of your home page as low as possible, and have always recommended having less than 1MB in total downloads for the home page. This total number includes not only the page source, but also images, CSS, JS, and any other file that might be downloaded by the home page.

The problem is most web masters do not realize the size of their page as they’re on a fast T1, and they’ve got most of their site’s files in their browser cache. One of the most extreme examples I had of this was a client whose site would not download into our site analyzing tool because it was too big and the software refused to download any source code over 30 MB in size.

Another example was a client with a flash sidebar that was over 5MB to download.

To see how bad this is you can use a calculator such as this one to type in your page size and see how long it would take to download:

5MB at 56k would be 9 minutes, at 512k (DSL speed) it would be over 1 minute, and even on a T1 it would take over 30 seconds.

When was the last time you waited a minute or two for a site to download? If kept waiting most visitors would hit the back button and visit your competitor site listed next in the rankings.

So what about Google changing their mind on page download times? Myth busting: delays in page loading from Matt Cutts 2006 stated that download times were not a factor, and perhaps they still aren’t now, but in future, and from a usability point of view speed counts. Do your visitors a favor and optimize your pages now.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »

Search Engine Strategies in New York City

The next Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference to be held in New York City will occur on March 22 through 26 2010.� SES is one of the leading global conference and expositions educating in the fields of search engine optimization and search engine marketing.� �There will also be a series of SES Search Marketing Events which will provide instruction from some of the industry’s leading lights and search engine representatives.� When in New York stay at some of the best New York hotels including the Hotel Gansevoort in the Meat Packing district.

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IIS Problem with Google Base XML Feed

Just ran into a really odd problem with a client using Microsoft IIS to produce a Google Base XML feed. After a number of years with the feed working fine it seems that a little while back the feed stopped working for no obvious reason. The application was written in C# reading a SQL Server database and outputting a XML data stream that is then fetched by the Googlebase robot.

The problem symptoms were that the feed stopped outputting anything and the server closed the connection with the client.

I decided to update the application to use the XmlTextWriter class – perhaps IIS was changed to force the use of this new interface – but that didn’t help.

After much digging it turned out that adding attributes to the <rss> tag was causing the issue – remove the attributes and the application ran fine but then Google Base would not accept the feed as it didn’t declare the version or the namespaces required.

Some more digging and I found that the <rss> tag would allow attributes if the <channel> tag was missing.

Further digging showed that the <channel> tag would be acceptable if it had attributes. Now the Googlebase spec and the RSS 2.0 does not allow for the <channel> tag to have attributes. So to get around this I added a dummy attribute to the <channel> tag and that allowed the application to output the Googlebase feed without a hitch, would allow the feed to be rendered by Firefox. I have now resubmitted the feed to Googlebase and hopefully it will be accepted.

Posted in Pay Per Click / Paid Placement, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) | No Comments »

Issues Upgrading Google Adwords Editor

Adwords editor recently prompted me to upgrade so I did. Then the program stopped working and hasn’t worked in a week. I finally spent a few hours yesterday and today to troubleshoot the issue. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. I tried uninstalling, cleaning the registry, and then reinstalling. Still no dice.

Finally I uninstalled and looked in the Google directory on my c: drive� C:\Program Files\Google\ and sure enough there was a ‘Google AdWords Editor’ directory full of files. When I deleted this folder and reinstalled again the program started working.

Posted in Pay Per Click / Paid Placement | No Comments »

Robots.txt validator

Just added to our tools section the ability to validate your robots.txt file. There are tons of robots.txt validators available but this one is slightly different in that it looks at the file from an SEO perspective – looking to see if you’ve blocked too many pages from the spiders, whether there’a sn XML sitemap, etc. It validates not only the standard robots.txt syntax but also more modern additions that are not truely standardized yet, such as the commands ‘sitemap’, and ‘allow’.

Give it a try and let me know if the validator finds any errors in your robots.txt file.

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SEO Site Review – http://www.silvaheeren.com

Daniel Silva asked me to comment on the SEOing of his site http://www.silvaheeren.com.

First impressions:

• His home page is about his firm. Who cares? Remember the world’s favorite radio stations WII FM – what’s in it for me? I would totally swap the site around and put services first and foremost and the ‘about us’ page as a footer nav.
• Light gray text on white background is difficult to read, give that more contrast.
• Links into the content are grouped at the bottom and not in the text where you’d except.
• Terms and conditions looks to be a contract – I would remove this as its irrelevant to someone visiting your site.
• Your portfolio pages look nice, why not use Ajax to replace the screenshots instead of refreshing the screen? Shows you know how to do some of the more modern programming techniques.
• No Web 2.0 on this site – comments, blog, reviews, videos.

So far no SEO comments, and that’s deliberate. SEO is as much about usability of a site as about minor tweaks to rank it. If the site is unusable then even if you have people land on your site they will not convert, therefore your SEO effort is wasted.
So as for the SEO:

• Revisit your keyword research and found out what people are searching for. Your site links are ‘brochure’ which is vague and could mean anything. ‘Travel Brochure’ is more descriptive but probably not a good term either. How about ‘brochure design’.
• Your portfolio pages contain minimal text, as spiders do not read images you need to add text to tell them what is on the page.

I ran it through sitecara.com and got the following errors:

• Code:1265: Robots.txt – No XML sitemaps defined.
• Code:1831: Both www and non-www URLs returned http code 200 – page found. (http://www.silvaheeren.com/ — http://silvaheeren.com/).
• Code:1480: No H1 tag on home page
• Code:1501: Too little text on this page – below 300 words. (179).

In addition I ran it through CSE HTML Validator and it had a lot of HTML errors, none major but should be fixed anyway.

Next steps:

• Address usability
• Re do keyword research, pick 10 or 20 terms you want to rank for. Add a localization to it for now i.e. instead of ‘webdesign’ use ‘webdesign miami’, smaller set of searches but more chance to be #1.
• Re optimize your site.
• Download CSE HTML Validator trial edition and validate your HTML. http://www.htmlvalidator.com/
• Add your site to Site Cara and run the site audit, fix any issues found.
• Add your keywords to Site Cara see where you rank now.
• Go out and get some links (a whole article in itself). Most web designers gain links from their client sites in the footer, these can really help.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »