Category: Managed Services

With the use of an analytics program like Google Analytics, you can review visitor statistics to determine a great deal of how your site is being accessed and review entry and exit points. In many cases, you would be surprised to find out how one little issue in the buying cycle can me significant loss in potential buyers.  It could be that the checkout process is difficult to complete or the price point is too high or the offer/incentive lacks…well a true incentive.  The following are aspects of an E-Commerce site that should be tested on a regular basis.

Checkout Process

When a user is ready to buy, the last thing you want to do is put up a road block and make it difficult to checkout. The hard part is getting them to buy, checking out should be a walk in the park.  Keep the buying cycle as easy as possible by keeping the steps to a minimum.

Checkout Process Quick Tips:

• Give multiple payments options
• Do not require the user to sign-in to purchase
• Do not try to add additional fees at the end of the purchase
• Give access to return policies, contact information, shipping tracking #s, privacy policies, support
• Only require information that is necessary to complete the purchase
• Send a confirmation email after purchase
  

One of the most important aspects of the checkout process is to track the abandonment rate using an analytics program like Google Analytics.  If your checkout process is flawed it will not matter what the user has done prior to checking out, they will not buy.  If you have multiple steps in the checkout process, make sure you setup your analytics to track every step.  If you have 3 steps in your process, there may be a reason why 65% of users are abandoning their cart at step 2.  Try an A/B or multivariate test to see if you can increase the percentage of checkout completions.

Timely Offers/Incentives

You would be surprised how far an offer as simple as “Free Shipping” can go.  Even if you are not giving a discount on the product itself, you can give the impression to the user that they are getting a great deal!

Timely offers can act as a great reason to speed up the buyers decision.  If you are offering a special 3 day sale, with 20% off everything in the store a user will feel the sense of urgency to purchase before the sale ends.

Cheaptickets.com does a great job of creating a sense of urgency in their buying cycle.  When you go to purchase a plane ticket, they will show “3 Seats Left” at that discounted price.  This will help the user want to buy sooner than later, to take advantage of the lower rates.

Seasonal Product Offerings

Take advantage of users searching for seasonal products, by tailoring your messaging for that holiday.

For Example:

1. Christmas: Circuit City, 12/25 — Merry Christmas! Find Santa-sized savings on TVs, cameras, GPS & more
2. Halloween: Dell, 10/27 — Un-Boolievable Savings – Up to $345 off Select Systems
3. Mothers Day: Lands’ End, 4/19 — Mother’s Day is May 11 – consider us “landsend.mom”
4. Easter: Finish Line, 3/21 — The Easter Bunny Wears Chucks—-Do You?

Seasonal Products Quick Tips:

• Bundle similar seasonal products
• Tailor the offer to a specific gender/demographic (mom, dad, children)
• Offering FREE gift wrapping
• Offer a customized message
• Offer customized engraving
• Guarantee delivery before the date of the holiday
• Have multiple timely promotions that end the day before the holiday
• Give extra savings after the holiday has past

<< Guide To E-Commerce: Part II

Once a potential customer has reached your eCommerce website, the way you display your products and information can help increase your conversions.  Your end goal should be first and foremost for your visitor to purchase a product, but also provide options to upgrade their order by purchasing a product that costs more or add-on by purchasing an accessory or complimentary product.

Here are some helpful tips to entice visitors to want to spend more at your online store.

Sell-ups

When a online customer is looking to purchase a product, they usually have a price range in mind.  One way you can squeeze as much out of that customer as possible is to sell them up into a more expensive product.  The best way to do that is to provide product recommendations when that user has reached a product page.  You will need more than just putting a few products next to the one they are looking to purchase.  It is important to have research and data that shows why these products are superior to the current product they are viewing.  If you can show value for a product over another, it may change the buyer’s decision.  Here are just a few ways you can increase the chance of a user switching and upgrading to a more expensive product.

• New Model
• Top Rated Items
• Better Specs/Performance
• Improved Features
• Incentives/Deals
• Positive Reviews
• Bundled Products

Cross-sells

During the checkout process when purchasing an iPod Touch, Apple gives you additional product recommendations that would compliment the product you are purchasing. In this example they give you the option to add a protection plan to your new iPod Touch, along with accessories that would go perfect with the product. When a user is in the checkout process, it is a great time to try and add complimentary products to the sale. The logic here is they are already making an investment, why not protect the investment or have it perform better with optional accessories.

Product Comparisons

Apple does a great job of showing a side-by-side comparison of their iPod product line.  By comparing Price, Capacity, Battery Life, Colors, Display and Capabilities the user can make an educated decision on which product suits their needs.

Customer Reviews/Ratings

Reviews that are given by customers who have actually used the product can be extremely powerful.  Especially for higher dollar items, many users will want to read reviews and testimonials to see if there is any negative feedback before making a decision.  For example, someone who is looking to purchase chicken egg rolls, may read a review that talks about how there is a certain spice added that makes them extremely spicy.  If the product description never mentions this, the consumer would have no idea that it is spicy.  If the consumer does not care for spicy food, they may choose a product that better caters to their needs.

Reviews not only help give the consumer better product knowledge, but gives the product more credibility when positive reviews are coming from someone other than the business.

<< Guide To E-Commerce: Part I

When a user gets to your site, they want the ability to find exactly what they are looking for in seconds.  If the user is just browsing, it is important to have your products categorized in a well, thought-out manner.  If you make it difficult for a user to navigate your site, you can almost guarantee that you will lose that potential customer.

Part one of the guide to eCommerce, talks about factors of how to present and organize your products to gain the highest results.

Product Categories

The way that you categorize your products has a major impact as to how well a user will understand your product offerings and know where to find what they are looking for.  Something to think about when categorizing your products is to remember that everyone searches differently.  Having multiple ways to navigate to the same product is important. This is known as “redundant navigation.”

For example, someone looking for an office desk may search by “Office Desk”, “Office Furniture”, “Cherry Desk”, or “Glass Desk”.  No matter how that user searches, you want the ability for that user to find what they are looking for within your site navigation.  The example shown illustrates how you can access the same product or group of products either “By Design”, “By Style”, or “By Finish”.

By using multiple navigation points, sites that do not offer many products, can seem more comprehensive.

Search/Sort Functionality

For ready-to-buy shoppers, there is a good possibility that they already know which product or model they want to buy.  For these buyers, it may be easier to enter the model # or product name into a search box that will check the entire site.  For example, if a user wants to purchase a Sony Cybershot camera, they may enter “Cybershot” or even “Cybershot DSC-W220” to quickly find what they are looking for.

So what about the user that knows they want a camera, however they are not sure exactly what brand or type of camera they want?  That user will either search the broad term “camera” or “digital camera” or they will search using your navigation.  For this type of search, it is important to have multiple ways to sort the results of that broad category.  For example, some users may have a certain price range they are looking to stay in, some may be looking for a specific brand, or others may be looking for product capabilities.  Using a “Sort By” function, will help the user further refine their search quickly and determine which product is right for them.

Product Photos

Because users cannot physically touch the product when purchasing online, it is essential you give them the tools they need to picture what it would be like to have the product in their hands.

The most important aspect to displaying products on your site is to have high-quality photos.  Especially for luxury products or products that have a lot of detail, high-quality jpegs will help a user visualize what the product would look like.

A zoom in feature is another easy way for a user to see greater detail of the product.

Not only will professional product photos help increase sales, but if you decide to create a printable catalog, you can reuse the same photos.

Photo enhancements and zoom in photo features can go beyond just products. The same enhancements can be applied to multiple industries and product types. For example, in the real estate market a great tool for showcasing homes are 360 views and virtual tours. If the product you are selling is too big for a photo or could be better explained using 360 views or video, this can be a great way to tell the story of your product…whatever that may be.

Product Descriptions

Having a good product description can make or break a sale.  Most websites will just cut and paste the product description from the manufacturer.  However there are a number of reasons why you should have a unique product description.

• SEO Benefits:  Search engines love unique content, so it makes sense that if every other website uses the same content to describe a product, that the one that is unique, will stand out.  If you take the time to write a description that varies from the manufacturers, search engines can see that and will reward you for it.
• Conversion Benefits:  If the end-user reads a description that is well thought-out and highlights the benefits of the product, a user is more inclined to purchase the product.

jQuery has quickly become one of the defacto JavaScript libraries for web developers. Its popularity has increased for many reasons including its ease of use, its built-in methods that aid in basic tasks, and its multitude of plug-ins that can be found to enhance its capabilities.

However, when I was writing a function the other day, I came across a minor stumbling block in jQuery. I was trying to create universal “continue” buttons throughout some user-interface tabs and I realized I needed a specific method that isn’t part of the jQuery library; some way to determine the current index of the element I was on.

Having been to jQuery Docs several times, I didn’t recall ever seeing what I needed, but I was hoping I’d be lucky. Unfortunately, after a visit to the documentation, I found that I was right. There was no such method. Of course, the eq() method does exist, but that’s the direct opposite of what I was looking for—to move to a specific index position of the matched elements. Moreover, in using the eq() method you’d need to know which index you’d like to select!

The eq() selection concept is much like the built-in “select” parameter that you can pass through the UI Tabs method I was hoping to use. For instance:

$tabs.tabs(‘select’, 1);

This will select the first tab in the set. So, if I had a continue button at the bottom of each tab panel how would I know how to select the very next tab? I could, of course, make a special case for every instance of a panel’s continue button, but that poses a problem with extensibility. What if we added more tabs? Plus, it’s just ugly code. The fault here is that you’d have to know what each tab is named and how they relate to one another—creating a problem if the tabs were ever re-organized.

Instead I’d need something a little more universal. I’d need a single function that would encompass all of the continue buttons and switch to the next tab based on its current index. But, as I discovered in the documentation, you can’t locate the current index with a simple method like eq().

With all of my struggles aside, the good news is that the round-about way of getting the current index position is really not all that difficult. After a few minutes of thought and some idea bouncing (off of the smarter programmers here in the office) we came to the conclusion that I could simply count how many elements there are before the tab I’m on using the prevAll() and length methods built-in to jQuery. Thus, if there were 2 previous elements, I must be at the third item. The selection looks something like:

var $tabs = $(‘#tabs-area ul.ui-tabs-nav’).tabs({ fx: { opacity: ‘toggle’ } }); $(‘#tabs-area a.tab-link’).click(function () { currentIndex = $(this).parent().prevAll().length; alert(currentIndex); return false; });

Here I’m selecting the anchor elements with classes of “tab-link” which is what I called each “continue” button. When they’re clicked, I store the number of “ui-tabs-panels” before the current tab. Please note, that the parent() method is being used to traverse backwards to these “ui-tabs-panels.” You’re path may vary depending on your HTML markup.

Using “currentIndex” I can check if it is larger than the length of the tabs array (meaning I’m not on the last tab yet) to prevent any possible tab selection errors by trying to move past the last tab. Then I can use currentIndex to select the next tab. This would make our little function look like this now:

var $tabs = $(‘#tabs-area ul.ui-tabs-nav’).tabs({ fx: { opacity: ‘toggle’ } }); $(‘#tabs-area a.tab-link’).click(function () { currentIndex = $(this).parent().prevAll().length; if (currentIndex < $tabs.tabs(‘length’)) { $tabs.tabs(‘select’, currentIndex); } return false; });

I also must mention that in this function I’m selecting currentIndex in the statement $tabs.tabs(‘select’, currentIndex);. This may be confusing since the way the array indices and the “select” parameter work are based on a zero beginning index. But, when length is calculated it starts with 1. So, there’s a bit of an “off-by-one-bug.” I can, of course, trim the length by 1 and adjust the if statement to be <=, but that would be equally confusing. Either way, rest assured that the currentIndex in the “select” statement will select the very next tab.

In closing, it is quite easy to determine the current index position of an element in jQuery without using any built-in methods. All you need to do is count:

currentIndex = $(this).parent().prevAll().length;

This assignment is very easy to build upon (or adjust the index by subtracting 1—if you’re picky).

Sitemaps are created to for web usability purposes and to notify search engines about a site’s page index.  Most people are familiar with HTML and XML sitemaps, however there are multiple types of sitemaps that can provide benefits for your website.  Here is a complete guide of sitemap types, sitemap resources, and how each of these sitemaps can benefit your site.

HTML Sitemap
A HTML sitemap is simply a hierarchical list of links on a web page that helps web visitors review in a quick glance a site’s index of pages, which helps promote site usability.  A well built HTML sitemap will highlight pages of a site with great importance and diminish 2nd or 3rd tier pages, making it easy to search an entire website from one web page.

Resource: HTML Sitemaps Guide

XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps are created for search engines to inform them about URLs that are available on a website to be crawled.  For large sites or sites that have accessibility issues, can make it difficult for search engines to index all of its pages.  By submitting a XML sitemap, it will help search engines find all of those pages that can be nested a few directories deep.  See an example of a XML sitemap.

Resource: SEOmoz – XML Sitemaps: Guideline on their Use

ROR Sitemap
A XML variant, ROR sitemaps are used to describe any object on a website.  They are much more robust than XML because it supports multiple formats including URLs, products, articles, company bios, events, etc.

To create a ROR sitemap try ROR Sitemap Generator or Cumbrowski’s Free ROR Sitemap Generator.

Video Sitemap
A Video sitemap contains links to a videos landing page, along with information that is essential for indexing the video to make it searchable for sites like Google Video. To submit a video sitemap to Google there are certain fields that are required including the video url, the video and video player location, a video thumbnail, and a video title and description.  Google can crawl the following formats; .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv.

Geo Sitemap
Google recognizes Geo Sitemaps that enable you to publish geo-content that can be searchable in Google Maps and Google Earth.  Geo-content can be in KML or GeoRSS format.  Be sure to add the attribution tag which appears in the Google search results for your content.

News Sitemap
News sitemaps allow webmasters to have more control over their content that gets submitted to Google News.   You can also add additional information about your news, like article title, publication date, and keywords.  Using a news sitemap is perfect for websites that are new, have dynamic content, or large sites that can be hard to find content.  Keep in mind that Google only allows you to submit content from the last three days.

Mobile Sitemap
Mobile sitemaps allow you to submit a list of URLs with content specifically designed for mobile devices and is used in the search engine’s mobile index.  Searching the mobile web is different than the regular web, for instance it only displays sites that are “mobile friendly.”  Using well-formed markup like WML, cHTML, XHTML Basic or XHTML MP formats will ensure your content gets crawled.  See an example of a Mobile Sitemap.

Recommended Sitemap Resources

Google Sitemap Generator
Allows you to create XML, News, Mobile, Geo, HTML, Text, ROR, and Video sitemaps. Unlike 3rd party sitemap generators, the Google Sitemap Generator will monitor your website content and update automatically.

AuditMyPC – XML Sitemap Generator
Create unlimited XML and HTML sitemaps.  You must have Sun’s Java Runtime installed in order to create a sitemap.

XML Sitemaps.com
Allows you to create XML, ROR, Text and HTML sitemaps, up to 500 pages (Free Version) or Unlimited pages for the paid version.  Paid version cost $19.99.

Google XML  Sitemaps for WordPress
This wordpress plug-in is by far the best sitemap generator.  Nathan Rice has a great post on the Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO that goes into great detail of the plugin and the process.

Do you have a website that used to rank on the 1^st page of Google for all of your primary keywords, then it suddenly vanishes out of the SERPs?  It could be that Google has penalized your site.  So you are probably wondering how can you tell if your site has been penalized, and why did it get penalized?  There are a number of off-site and on-site factors that could be the reason.  Unfortunately there is no easy way to tell if Google has penalized your site.  However, there are indications you can look at to assume it has be penalized.

Before you start to try and diagnose your site, it is best to understand the difference between Google penalizing your site and Google banning your site.  When Google penalizes a website, they will decrease your site’s visibility by bumping your organic ranking down in the search engine results.  Google has different levels of penalties based on the severity of what they feel is “unethical” or “malicious” SEO practices.

When a site gets banned by Google, this means that your website is completely removed from their index.  This happens only in extreme cases, when Google feels you are trying to deceive the search engines by tricking them into giving your site better search rankings without merit.  Usually if your site gets banned, it can take anywhere from 6-12 months to get your site re-indexed (assuming you remove the problem).  You can try re-submitting your url to Google once the issues have been fixed.

Have you been Penalized? Use this checklist to find out!

PageRank: The first thing you will want to do is check your PageRank and see if the bar is grayed out.  That is the  easiest way to know if your site is penalized.  Unless your website is brand new, it will usually have at least a PR of 0.

Search Query: Do a Google search for your company name.  Does it show up?  If you do not even come up for your company name, that is a sure sign that Google has penalized you.

Check Your Server: It is possible that if your website was offline the last time a GoogleBot crawled your site, that it removed it from the search results because it thought the site was no longer available.  You can use some site monitoring software to make sure that your site is online.

Hosting: If you are using a shared hosting account, you could indirectly be penalized from Google. There could be other sites that share the same IP that are doing malicious or blackhat SEO tactics that could potentially penalize all of the other sites on that hosting account.  Try doing a Reverse IP Lookup to see what other domains are sharing hosting.  YouGetSignal will highlight sites in red that pose a problem.

Content: If you have lots of duplicate content that is scraped from other sources on the web, Google may penalize you for that too.  Run your site link through a duplicate content checker like Copyscape, Virante, or Plagium.  If you only have a few paragraphs that are duplicated, that will not be enough to get you penalized.  Usually if an entire site is bootlegged content, that is when Google will take action.

Links: If you are getting a lot of paid links or acquiring a lot of inbound links from “bad neighborhoods” that can also hurt your rankings.  Try putting your site through Majestic’s Bad Neighborhood Checker to see if any of your links are coming from sites that may be  link farms.  You can also use any backlink analyzing tool to see all of the backlinks coming to your site.

Blackhat SEO: If you are practicing any blackhat SEO tactics like cloaking links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc…you can be penalized by Google.

Google does have a page called Safe Browsing Digosntic that allows you to enter your url and Google will give you some useful feedback on if they can detact any malicious activity.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com

Make sure you add your website url to the end of this url where it says =mysite.com.

There is also another Spam Decector tool that will analyze a website and point out any characteristics of a site that a search engine could consider spam.

Related Posts:

How Many Google Penalties Are There?

How To Handle a Google Penality

SEO 101: Google Penalities