The journey continues as our film web site has launched its e-commerce web site for the film and with the configuration still a work in progress, we are starting to turn our focus to getting the site found. Specifically, the task of getting your e-commerce site found is similar in many ways as traditional web site SEO but in other aspects completely different.

During our implementation of an e-commerce site, we evaluated many different types of shopping carts, self-managed and installed, WordPress plugins and out-of-the-box hosted solutions. Initially we went with a Wordpress plugin because it was cheaper and we thought it would suit our basic needs. But that had technical issues and we decided to re-evaluate our needs. We ultimately chose the Network Solutions e-commerce package and we found it to be mature and extremely sophisticated yet easy to use for even the most basic of shopping carts. Now I am not here to pitch this solution, but I will say is you get what you pay for in many cases and if you are not a developer or have a development team I would stick with the mature hosted solutions that can probably do the job 99% of the time.

Once we got past the setup, which I will talk about that experience in a separate post, we had to start looking at the external factors of tuning the site for people to find the products and optimize it for search engines. Through this experience, I wanted to give a short list of powerful SEO tips for your e-commerce web site:

• Make sure your e-commerce package integrates with analytics tools – at the very basic level you should be able to hook up your e-commerce system to Google Analytics to track campaigns, traffic and all the other basics. If you use specific analytics packages, you will have to evaluate that to see if it fits your needs.
• Prioritize the best and active sellers on the home page – If you had a physical storefront, you would hide the hot stuff in the back of the store. It would be in the front window to draw people in.
• Create landing pages that have your product name in the URL – Having the product name in a specific URL makes search engines really happy instead of come older systems that have it as a mix of numbers and characters that have no meaning to a search engine. You can also run campaigns to that specific page and track them better with the analytic tools we mentioned earlier.
• Leverage Social Commerce Techniques – This is a fairly new concept, one that I am speaking about at Social Commerce Camp DC, and it revolves around employing collaborative social media tools to assist in online purchasing and selling. Social commerce can be correlated with Search Engine Optimization as a way to build inbound links and generate user content, all of which are tools to improve a website’s search results on a given search engine such as Google.
• Add related links – Got this from SearchEngineLand “SEO is really about leveraging large amounts of pages efficiently, and using that scale to advantage. Related linking accomplishes that very well, but can be an intensive feature to implement and manage (there are several third-party resources for this, including TextWise, SLI Systems, and others)”
• Complete this e-Commerce checklist – This e-Commerce SEO Checklist has great tweaks for on-site, on-page and off-page SEO basics for the e-commerce site. We are currently going through each one in the next two weeks.
• Avoid using “View” or “More” words as anchor text - This is most common mistake committed by most of the e-commerce websites. Many people put a brief description on the product category page about various products and use “View”, “more”, “click here to read more”, etc., beneath every brief description to direct the users to the product pages.
• Find and kill duplicate URLs – This is similar to having duplicate blog content or any other type of content page out there. It results in page dilution and page rank split. SearchEngineLand says “ecommerce sites are especially bad at having multiple versions of product pages. Normally we can find these with site: and inurl: search operators. Pay careful attention to the product level URLs, as this is usually the area duplicate content creeps in (through faceting and sorting of URLs, or through tracking or cookie information appended in the query string). It’s also an area that can cause major negative impact on search rankings. Each product page should have one single, authoritative URL.“

Some other great resources we leveraged for SEO help in our quest to tune the e-commerce site:

SEO Tips for New Web Shop Owners

E-Commerce SEO Checklist

9 Tasty Tips for e-Commerce SEO’s

Over these last two months I have gotten a real education in the construction of an e-commerce system. Beyond building the basic web site there are the five key components of an e-commerce site which include the secure certificate or SSL certificate. Now that we have the storefront software installed I am learning a whole new world of building the shopping cart, adding products, setting rates, etc. I figured for those that might have bought things online they know what a shopping cart is and what it does. What many have never seen is what is under the hood and what you have to do at the basic level from the full out-of-the box e-commerce storefront to the customized built from scratch version.

1.) Products Catalog

This is obviously the core of the storefront because it is the catalog of what you sell. You need to have good images and many storefronts allow for lots of options which you could go crazy with so be careful. Options are good with things like T-Shirts where you have a product and need specifications to fulfill the order.

2.) Categories

These go with the products catalog and helps you organize the products. It can get very cumbersome and if you will remember the earlier days of Amazon.com they had tabs for categories which worked well when they had just books, music and DVD’s. As they expanded their tab structure got out of control which you can see below:

It is a lesson in carefully structuring your catalog in a way that people can find things easily and quickly so they add it to their cart because you still to get them to put in their credit card.

3.) Promotions

The whole purpose of promotions is to draw customers back to your store and get them to buy. The concept of things going on sale is old as people have been selling things. We all love a sale and some of us even live for them which is why promotions are key in customer retention and acquisition. Many times customers will find your site and buy something but the big challenge is bringing them back and learning their behavior (personalization is for another post)

4.) Shipping and Taxes

This is probably the most boring and mundane but if you don’t do this right a few things will happen – you will get stuck with the shipping bill and lose money, you will estimate taxes wrong or not add them in and lose money. Are you getting the picture? You will need to get the right shipping partners that fit your products and deliver to where your customers are. You will also need to check if you have to pay taxes locally and also if you ship to certain states. It is a complicated subject and I would recommend this great article from Startup Nation on e-Commerce Sales Tax.

5.) Payments/Checkout

This is last step for buyers and for integrators and web site developers the most challenging. You are simultaneously dealing three separate parties – merchant account provider, secure certificate provider and shopping cart solution and if one thing does not work correctly the whole site is useless. You can also have fingers pointing at other providers when are trying to resolve an issue. You need to make sure you have the accounts tested and working and when testing turn on the logs and error tracking. The last thing you want if for errors in the checkout process for paying customer. If they get an error once they might re-try and check their stuff. If it happens the second time you will definitely lose them.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Network Solutions is a sponsor of the film, Browncoats: Redemption and has provided many of the services for us to use. I am just sharing this experience for all interested in learning how this stuff works.

If you’re a web designer or developer you are a creative person. You want to spend your time doing what you love! Many of you are self-employed & doing contract work and along with that comes the need for the paperwork. As a small business owner it’s a part of life.

Network Solutions® is unveiling our newest community, LinkTogether™, created specifically for Web designers and developers. Our goal is to create a place to grow business, leverage tools to increase productivity, and even save some money.

We got some great coverage here and here.

It’s free to join and there’s so much to take advantage of.  As a Web professional myself, I thought about the five (5) reasons web developers need a great community:

1.) Showcase your portfolio to peers and potential clients – LinkTogether™  allows you to create a profile and display a portfolio through the member directory.

2.) Central marketplace for apps and templates – LinkTogether™  offers the ability to download apps, Web site templates and fun stuff shared by members then post your own original content to be rated and reviewed.

3.) Ability to connect with your peers for help and networking – LinkTogether™  has a platform to connect with other developers and designers for discussions, advice and tips.

4.) Learn relevant best practices – LinkTogether™  increases your knowledge and ability to find answers with a variety of educational resources such as original whitepapers, and video tutorials.

5.) Understand how to manage your clients better – LinkTogether™  helps you improve client conversations using Smart Guides and educational videos.

So, what’s the catch? Nothing. It’s free to sign up and become a member and get started.

We have created LinkTogether™  to help you spend more time doing what you love to do. We are offering a community where you can network with others like you & share ideas about your business & make business connections. Rarely is someone an expert in everything. It’s easier to specialize in what you’re good at. So when a job requires expertise beyond your own, LinkTogether™ provides you an opportunity to connect with others seeking work.

Once you are a member, if you decide that you want to dive deeper and access additional resources, a Pro Membership is available for a monthly subscription of $19.99 where members can access over 7,000 Web site templates, over 40 customizable legal and business documents, and receive exclusive discounts on services from Network Solutions®.

This is just the beginning of LinkTogether™, so check it out and tell us what you think. We would love to know where you think we should take this site and other great ideas you might have.