Local Netrepreneur Competes With Central MallWritten by William Caleb Rodgers
Local Port Arthur,Tx resident has grown fed up with what he describes as "shortcomings of our Central Mall". "There isn't any variety,"says Caleb. Local Port Arthur resident William Caleb Rodgers has grown fed up with what he describes as "shortcomings of Central Mall". "There isn't any variety,"says Caleb. "People find out what latest products,merchandise,and fashion trends are,then drive as far as Houston just to get it because nine times out of ten local mall just doesn't have it.""And even if local mall did have what we want -because inventory is so scarce- we'd end up paying far more than what we'd pay in Houston or other areas." Caleb's solution: open a more efficient mall. A mall that consistently stays on top of most current products,merchandise, and fashions. A mall that keeps you up to date on what's going on globally with most current World News headlines and info-products available. A mall with affordable pricing,vast employment and money-making opportunities, and stays open 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Last,but not least,a mall that you DON'T ever have to drive to.
| | How to get customers for freeWritten by Mark Baartse
There's no shortage of ways to spend money promoting your online shop - and certainly no shortage of people willing to take your money! However, search engines can be sending you qualified customers all day every day. How do you get a piece of this traffic? It's estimated that 70% of people stop at first 10 results in most search engines and over 90% don't go beyond first 30. If your shop isn't in top of search results, you're missing out. We'll go through five steps to getting you higher in search engine rankings.Choose right keywords You need to decide which search term(s) you want to be top for. This might not be as obvious as you think. Firstly, you need to know what people are (and aren't) searching for. Being number 1 result for a search term no one uses is no good. The Overture keyword selector tool can show you what people are searching for. Take some guesses as to what people are looking for, try them out and see what tool says - you might be surprised! Do a Google search for a possible keyword. If, for example, you see 5,000,000 results returned you have to consider: can you beat 4,999,990 of them? You might be better off getting a number 1 position for a lesser keyword than a number 200 for a big one. Be careful not to be too ambitious - that keyword with most traffic might be highly competitive in search engines. If you are competing against a multi-million dollar online shop you're unlikely to win.Make sure your site is search engine friendly The goal here is to make sure search engines like your shopping cart site. You might need some help from your techies with this. - Create a sitemap pointing to all your pages, or all your key pages. This helps search engines find all your pages.
- Include your keywords in your HTML <title> tags in all your key shopping cart pages.
- Include your keywords in a <h1> tag.
- If your shopping cart or CMS uses session IDs in URL, turn this off, or change to a different tool. You can usually tell if you have this turned on if you URL looks like http://www.widgets.com/products/page.php?product=2329&session=29dha9198yfka8129fnv0. The big long session number is dangerous part.
- Make your HTML code clean & validated - most search engines prefer this.
- Make sure your keywords are included in copy on your site.
Some shopping carts such as Erol or osCommerce (with an add on module) provide excellent search engine optimization tools.
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