Increase ROI by selecting your Shopping Cart

Do you have a very well designer website designed and developed using all the latest tools and technologies. Also you hired a professional search engine optimization company and you are ranking in top results for majority of keywords. You may be also happy with the number of leads generated and number of sales. But let me ask you to once analyze your website traffic stats. Please check and answer the following questions:

• · Only 10% of your overall traffic gets converted to sales
• · Over 70% of your organic visitors leave your site with average 30 seconds spend at your website
• · Only 20% of people reaching your order now page are converted to sales.
• · You wish you could convert more visitors to sales.
• · Your goal conversion rated if below 10%

If you answer any of the three questions as yes then probability is that you need to check few basic points regarding your Shopping cart. Here are few points that if you consider for your website shopping cart then your sales can increase dramatically, even you would be wondered to notice your ROI. Also a vell chosen shopping cart can help you save valuable time and trackback your visitors through follow up etc. Let me elaborate:

Choosing an Shopping Cart for your website to increase Productivity, Sales, Save Time

1.       Make sure your shopping cart has an easy-to-follow ordering system. For example, people can order products and services directly from the shopping cart. If you have an easy way for people to order online, you can take orders 24X7X365. Trust me your website is your only employee that works whole life non stop for you.

2.
Shopping cart should have automated functions like receipts. Your customers most often can need a receipt for their taxes, accountants etc. Your shopping cart should automatically send receipt to the new client - and to you, so you have one for your files.

3.    Shopping cart with newsletter facility: If you send personalize messages to new clients, such as greetings, or training materials, you can automate this process with a good shopping cart.

4.    Good Sales reporting tool: Shopping cart must be able to create sales reports by any variable you can think of, such as total sales, daily sales, weekly sales, sales in a given period, as well as sales by product.

5.     Manage client communication: A good shopping cart does NOT just take orders. It can send newsletters and other types of information you’d like to broadcast - such as invitations to teleseminars or special events. A good shopping cart can manage most client communications, so you save time and money by dealing with one vendor instead of two or three

6.     NO SPAM: Make sure your shopping cart offers clients full control over their accounts. Say in case a client doesn’t want to get your newsletter any longer, they can unsubscribe at any point of time by clicking from there account or email .

Thus you can figure out how much a right shopping cart can do foe you by saving lots of your time money and of course increasing your sales.

Power of social media : Digg and be popular

This post is all about increasing craze of social bookmarking. Well there are lot of other social media marketing techniques that SEO people are using now a days to promote there websites like social network optimization, online video promotion, community marketing etc. Here a brief view about current trend of social bookmarking.

A thousand people jostle for space in the venue and scream and cheer as the event begins. The enthusiasm is infectious.

This is a live Diggnation, the weekly podcast hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. As Rose threw ‘Digg’ stickers into the cheering New York masses, he did not look like the so-called “poster boy of web 2.0”who,as the founder of dig.com, was on the cover of Business Week in 2006 under the strap line : “How the kid made $60 million in 18 months.”

The social bookmarking site began in 2004 and offers a way for users to contribute and share new stories and items of interest with others ;the most popular get the most ‘diggs’, highlighted on the front page. It now gets 26 million visitors a month, with 3 million registered editors.

Why it is so popular? “People want to have a voice and say in what in news,” Rose answers. “We’ve leveled the playing field by accepting all other forms of content , whether it’s sourced from CNN, the Guardian… it’s about seeing what the masses want to surface.” Is Digg his main source of news then? “It is the distinct flavor of the community that gets me excited about going back to the front page. I still go and surf my favorite tech blogs or salon.com or whatever.”
This was all about social bookmarking I will post about my review of Nokia 5310 express music in my next post most probably on weekend or sooner If i got time .  Also I am planning to write an article on cell phone addiction that what I feel I am.

My previous post abt noika found can be found here:

• Time to buy New Mobile phone

• Final decision Nokia 5310 express music is mine

Getting your articles in Google News – Myths and facts

The Google News team made an interesting post titled “Psst… secrets of Google News exposed!” at official Google blog. The post explained about various Myths and facts related with Google news. Posted by Andy Golding, Software Engineer at Google, Andy also shared about how Google include and publish (rank) articles in Google news.
Coming directly to Myths and facts explained.
1. Updating article once it’s included in Google news helps in higher rankings.
False, According to Google the current Google news crawler doesn’t revisit the articles. Every article/news in crawled only once so changing or updating the article will not help at all in fact any changes you make will not be shown at Google news website. I hope Google news crawler will soon have the functionality of revisiting the WebPages.
2. Placing image next to article improves the rankings.
False, Google do include images in news results and displays them next to your news item, but it cannot read the images and rankings purely depends upon text accompanied in your news item and not on having images in the news.
3. Articles with images and video are not included.
True, Google crawler cannot read flash, videos, images and other such type of multimedia content. Thus it’s a fact that if you new release or article doesn’t contain any text accompanying images or multimedia content then it will not be included at all in news results.
4. Time is a major factor for inclusion.
False, Google crawlers are frequently looking for content related to current event and top stories. There are lots of factors that Google algorithms take into consideration and choose the best articles from the cluster for ranking. Publishing articles prior, after or in midst of any event don’t improve any chances of rankings at all
5. Articles with Google adsense ads rank high in Google news.
False, well this is the most disputed topic among webmasters not only for Google news ranking but also for Google organic results also. Google had always denied this fact and according to goolge spokesman, “Using AdSense doesn’t have any impact upon our ability to crawl or rank your articles. We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn’t be very objective!”
6. Creating sitemap helps.
True, sitemaps may not help in achieving top rankings but they do definitely help in other way like meta data for our article, specifying category the news would be appear, specifying which articles should appear in google news etc.
7. Redesign or change in site structure may affect my coverage in news rankings.
True, any drastic change in website design or structure, layout etc may cause problems with crawling of your article and hence overall coverage over google new may be affected.

Related helpful links:
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/

Do you watch TV online?

Do you watch TV online? You must be wondering why I am asking this question? Well reason for asking this question is that recent studies revealed that with growing number on internet users people behavior for watching TV has also changed. People now prefer more to watch TV online i.e view there favorite TV shows, movies etc over internet. The growth of population who love to watch online TV is growing by 50% every year.

Look at the report below for more details.

A new report from the Convergence Consulting Group states, “We estimate online viewing of full-episode Broadcast/Cable Network TV as a percentage of the traditional TV base was 9% in 2007 (6% in 2006), and we forecast 14% for 2008, 19% for 2009, and 23% for 2010.”

This is also going to be one of the symptom of internet addiction also posted over WDC blog.

Busy with SEO reports hoping for rocking weekend

Well I had planned to write an article on Pay per click bid management today at this SEO Times blog and also at other blogs i used to publish but due to previous business commitments, meetings, and also due to the fact that it took me long time to prepare reports for all the clients to keep them updated on there search engine optimization and link building projects. Its around 15 minutes left for me to leave the office and start enjoying weekend so i cant stop myself from logging in to SEOTimes. I am not posting any article today but if you want to read some real interesting articles on internet marketing and SEO I would recommend you to visit squidoo lens by Search Engine Optimization company India.

Wish you happy reading and have a nice weekend.

Save your website from Bad SEO hands

As all of us know SEO community is divided into two groups nowadays viz white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

White hat SEO VS Black Hat SEO

White hat SEO believe in ethical optimization and following search engine guidelines and are not involved in the spam activities whereas the black hat SEO are the some notorious people who just love and have the habit of jumping red signal. They don’t care of being caught for jumping red signals and often risk the future of the website they are working upon.

Giving your website into the hand of such black hat SEOs can cause unrepairable damage to your website as they may get you website penalized by search engines. Once your website get penalized it will not appear in top SERPS and may take anywhere from few days to years ofr appearing again in search engine results pages once you remove the black hat seo work done. I also published one article on how to choose a right SEO company . Please click here to read that article also.

So always make sure that the Search Engine Optimization company you approach for any of your SEO requirements is not involved in any black hat SEO techniques and always ask them for there SEO portfolio & reference of previous clients. Remember giving you website to some unethical SEO company is like traveling in a cab with drunken driver, it may take you fast but who knows you never reach the destination :).

Signing off for today thanks for visiting SEO time !!!

Have a nice day ahead.

Holi - The festival of colors | Happy holi from SEOtimes

Hi all, Holi is one of the most popular festival in India and its known as festival of colors. Its celebrated in almost every part of India. Its also celebrated with same passion in the neighboring country Nepal. Holi is celebrated by lighting bonfire in the night and in day time people throw colored powder and water at each other.

As per the Hindu calendar that is basically lunar calendar, Holi falls on the Phalgun Purnima or puranmashi (Full moon). This year Holi is being celebrated on 22 March. Below are few picture and Holi wallpapers. Wish you all a very Happy and colorfull Holi from SEOtime.

Matt Cutts answers questions on SEO, Google and future of internet search

Wired recently posted there interview with Google Guy Matt Cutts. In the interview he answered questions on search engine optimization, Google, future of search, social media marketing and search engine optimization. Below it the complete interview:

WIRED NEWS: Does SEO (search engine optimization) work?
MATT CUTTS: It does to some degree. Think of it this way: When you put a resume forward, you want it to be as clean as possible. If the resume is sloppy, you’re not going to get interviewed for the job. SEO is sort of like tweaking your resume . . . It’s helpful if you just think about which words people would use to search for your content. If you’re writing something about Mount Everest, for example, people are probably going to look for ‘How high is Mount Everest?’ . . . If done responsibly, [SEO] can be a great thing.

WN: Where do you see search in two to five years?
MC: There will be a lot more people storing data in a cloud . . . My laptop, for example, has been shutting down randomly lately, so I don’t trust it with data. I don’t know what’s going on there. Storing your data in a cloud will be a big trend in the future.

[Cloud computing refers to shared computing resources, so data is stored on a virtual platform, rather than on an individual hard drive.]

Personalization is also really interesting to me. So if you search for ‘diamond,’ [the search engine will know] if you’re looking for jewelry or baseball.

WN: What about social search?
MC: Social search is interesting, but it would require so much work . . . With personalization, the user to give up some information, but then [the search engine] just sits back, watches you and helps. That’s pretty interesting.

WN: Will you ever roll out for-fee webmaster tools?
MC: I doubt it. I’m not going to preclude it, but the more information we give webmasters, the better it is for them, the better it is for Google.

WN: On video search, is there a bias toward YouTube videos?
MC: I’ve asked around about this issue and the people I’ve spoken with strongly deny it. We are actively trying to promote diversity and we take that as a high-order goal.

WN: If you were to start a web-based business tomorrow, what key things would you do?
MC: First, I would create great content. That’s a fantastic way to get a head start. Then you need to promote it — that can be done free using webmaster tools. Third, tweak snippets. [Snippets are brief descriptions of web pages that appear in certain search results.] Changing meta description tags can increase your traffic. Fourth, tweak your text. Look at existing search logs to see how people find you now. It’s the easiest way to increase your conversions.

WN: What’s going on with Google bombs — are you still seeing them?
MC: They’re relatively rare and don’t really do much harm. They’re more like pranks. Our main concern was that people might think [the link bombs] represent [Google's] opinions. I wouldn’t claim that our fix is 100 percent perfect, but we don’t see many.

Courtesy : Wired.com

Final decision Nokia 5310 express music is mine

Tomorrow it the salary day and I have made my final decision that I am going to buy Nokia 5310 despite mixed reviews by the friends, but it was love at first sight with that cell so no worries ;). Majority of the friends suggested N-series of Nokia but I didn’t liked any of the N-seres phone cause of there size this one is the slim and I love that. Will let you know + and - later when I use that.

Time to buy New Mobile phone

Yesterday  I went to local marker and did window shopping in the malls, I am planning to but new mobile phone, I am bored with the one I own currently. The one I am thinking to buy is Nokia 5310 express music.  What I loved about this mobile is it comes with 3 music buttons on the the left side of the screen and a 2Mega pixel camera. Two color combination are available for this phone red+black and blue + black, perhaps I would go for blue+black. Other features include:

TECH Screen Triband GSM. Card Slot microSD. Bluetooth Stereo A2DP. Music controls Yes. Camera 2MP. Battery up to 300h talk/up to 5h 20min standby. Size/weight 103.8×44.7×9.9 mm/71g, Solid music player interface. One thing I wonder is why the music stops when CAMERA is turned on. Phone also includes SMS, MMS, Email and internet access, Instant Messaging, Phonebook with 2000 entries, large display of Size 240 x 320 pixels and free mini memory card.

One more reason to make this post today is that its the Birthday of Alexander Graham Bell deaf, associated with the invention of thetelephone and also known as “the father of the”. Hids mother and wife both were deaf and this influenced him to his research on sound and hearin devices. Please also check the Google Logo on his B’day