Search Optimisation Archives - xEcommerce

Duplicate content can be a problem for many business websites. For example the xEcommerce.com.au website sells shopping cart solutions. We have three different products; Budget Shopping Cart - uses an existing design template Professional Shopping Cart - fully customised solution Catalogue only solution - no cart or on-line payments The problem is that all three packages services share many of the same features, which are listed in point form. For example they all have inventory control,...

Most business websites have Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy pages which seem superfluous considering users hardly ever read these things. Nevertheless they are needed for legal reasons. In addition to the legal reasons, it appears there might be another reason to have them - Google. It has been suggested by some SEO/SEM professionals that Google may penalise websites without these documents. Maybe it's true, maybe not. It's understandable that a small business might not want to pay a lawyer...

In an previous article titled "Your eBusiness Must Write to Survive" I suggested that including a customer reviews & comments system in your shopping cart website will allow your customers to help you build content. In yet another article titled "SEO Speak – The Way Your Customers – SEO Search" I wrote that business website owners need to carefully research customer search phrases, and included those phrases in their content - because business websites should endeavour to speak the language...

Is it possible that Google is now recording the duration a user stays on a website after a click from the Search Engines Results page? When we do a search for "business website design" we see the following link in Google; You will notice that the URL is reported as: www.xecommerce.com.au/professional-ecommerce-websites.php However the actual URL is: http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=business%20website%20designs%20link%3Axecommerce.com.au &source=web&cd=14&ved=0CFsQFjADOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2F www.xecommerce.com.au%2Fprofessional-ecommerce-websites.php&ei=wIzcTovrEIaeiAfs2tHjDQ& usg=AFQjCNFyR_2M7_nxN_vMDbqk9PDzy8FW0g This...

When creating content for a business webpage be sure to consider the terms customers might be using when conducting a search. It's not enough to simply start writing a product description with no thought given to the words you use in the article. Keep in mind that Search Engines are going to crawl the content of the page and then index only the words it found on the page. If those words do not reflect the words your customers use when doing a Search in Google, your page will never be visited. There...

Search Engines & Directories still offering free submissions are getting harder to find. Following are many of the Search engines & directories we use in our website promotion campaigns. Australian Search Engines & Directories dmoz - www.dmoz.com  - [ submit url ]  Global search engine and directory - regional search. Google pagerank: 9. Alexa: 5,000. Make sure to select the correct category before submitting. This is a VERY important directory, and is checked by human...

Small business owners can spend countless hours and enormous sums on Search Engine Optimisation in an effort to drive organic Search Engine Traffic to their sites. The problem is that even the experts can’t agree on how exactly the Search Engines rank individual pages. To add to the problem Search Engines are constantly changing their algorithms to produce better results and to weed out any spamming. Furthermore the Internet landscape and user search habits are changing, and the Engines are adapting...

Website performance has always been important to users, and slow page load times have never been popular! Who wants to wait around for a page to load when it takes only seconds to hit the back button and move to the next site. Users make very quick judgements about websites. If they are slow, difficult to navigate, or visually un-engaging, they are quickly disregarded. What's worse is that a website is often the first point of contact customers have with an organisation. Poor opinion of the website...

Canonicals are a way of publicly specifying a preferred URL in situations where you may have duplicate content on more than one page, or have multiple URL's that lead to an identical (or almost identical) page. Example URL's that lead to the same page: All of the URL's below load exactly the same content. However to Google and the other search engines they may appear to be different pages with duplicate content, and as a result your page rank is spread across all URL's and you may be penalised...

In order for your website to rank well for local searches, Google needs to know the geographical location of your business. To determine your location, Google will typically probe two pieces of available data. 1. The Top-Level-Domain name (that's the .au extension you see in most Australian websites) 2. The geographical location of your hosting company's servers. The problem with this method is that your Australian website might be hosted in the USA, and you domain name might end with .com...