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SEO firms are in the business of getting websites to the top of the search engines results pages. Countless SEO firms have sprung up in the last few years but choosing the right one for your e-commerce site is a big responsibility. You need to make sure you are getting the best business advice for your company and that you are spending your money wisely.
We’ve provided a list of SEO firms with expertise in optimizing e-commerce sites. We’ve provided some descriptions, listed some of their clients, and also provided a range of their monthly fees.
Be Advised: This is not a list of SEO’s that we are recommending that you use. You should carefully consider any SEO firm before hiring them. Certain SEO firms have given the entire SEO community somewhat of a bad reputation with their sleazy tactics. Admittedly, SEO’s in general have become known as the “new lawyers of the Web” – getting rich by collecting exorbitant fees regardless of any positive outcome.
But as website owners, we can’t let a few bad apples ruin it for everyone. Undoubtedly, there are a few very skilled and highly respected SEO companies out there that can help improve your search engine rankings over time but you have to do your research and your homework. Ask lots of questions and ask others for referrals. Regardless, any SEO firm that you consider should have specific expertise with respect to your category of business. There is not a one-size-fits-all SEO firm.
Remember, just because a firm is more expensive DOES NOT mean that they will provide a better service. (This list is provided in alphabetical order and is not ranked from best to worst.)
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A shopping cart for e-commerce websites is the functionality of a website where purchase activity and shopping transactions are processed. It can also refer to the content management system (CMS) that a site uses to catalog products, track sales, and provide content for web pages.
An e-commerce CMS is a vital part of any e-commerce business, but the best e-commerce CMS platforms need to have certain ‘must have’ features in order to be most effective.
Here are some of the vital features that an e-commerce CMS should have to be the most effective solution for your business as well as the customers it maintains:
Make It SEO Friendly
There are many creative things you can do as a site owner to optimize your site for search engines. Having a CMS that is SEO friendly is very important. You can generally tell how effective and friendly a CMS is by looking at the way URL’s are written. Any SEO friendly CMS should include an URL writing and editing feature as well as meta tag editing capabilities that allow for editing of the meta title, meta description and meta keywords tag for each page.
Make It Sell Across the Board
The term ‘cross-selling’ is what happens when a customer makes a purchase and is encouraged to purchase additional related products, increasing the revenue ‘upsell’ opportunity for each checkout. The ideal shopping cart CMS should automate cross-selling capabilities with your other similar products associated with the original purchase. Cross selling is an essential and very effective tool for increasing revenue. If a CMS does not have that capability, keep looking.
Make It Coupon-Friendly
Especially now in a time of economic turmoil, people love a deal. The prospect of saving money by using coupons can go a long way to help drive even more traffic and effectively increase sales. Your shopping cart should support coupon code capability and provide a flexible pricing mechanism to change discounts and promotional pricing on-the-fly as well.
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There are a lot of common mistakes e-commerce webmasters will make on their first website build. While we all must learn 
from the mistakes we make, chances are good that your visitors will not forget you’ve made them (by not returning). When creating a site for your business, there are several website design flaws that you need to avoid if you hope to earn your visitors loyalty, and hopefully, some return visits.
1. Don’t Require Registration
While it is sensible to build a mailing list of perspective customers for future advertising, don’t require your visitors to register on your site to make a purchase. Forcing people to register before they even get the opportunity to see what they are buying is one of the leading reasons that website visitors don’t buy, and worse yet, never return to your site..
2. Don’t Forget Search Capabilities
A simple concept but one that is most-often forgotten. Including internal search capabilities is a great way to assist your visitors in quickly finding what they’re looking for. There are many popular sites that lack the search capabilities and for those visitors who have come to rely on the convenience of internal site search capability, not having one can hurt you.
3. Don’t Be Unclear on Payment Methods
When you are offering a product for sale, the buyers that come looking around your site will certainly want to know two things: how much and how can they pay for it. Many times, if a visitor can not clearly understand the rules of payment, they will leave the site and go look for the product on another site. Visitors need to know right away how you accept payment, whether it’s by PayPal, credit card, checks, debit card or a combination of all of those methods, communicate it to them early in the sales process – don’t make them search too long to find out.
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Working in an office environment is an ideal place to get to know your team members and employees on a much more 
intimate level. Running an e-commerce business on the other hand will take your management skills to a new level. Many businesses that exist primarily on the internet will find that eventually help is needed. That help comes in the form of a virtual team that will communicate in mostly electronic and written form and work mainly out of their own homes. This virtual team management will require some new skills and leadership essentials that you, as the business owner, will need to adapt to in order to keep the business running smoothly when it is not totally under your own thumb. Virtual leadership requires a unique skill set, which is growing in demand. As businesses online grow, the need to quickly ramp up additional help can spring upon a growing business at any time.
For many people, the opportunity to work at home is highly appealing. There are few people who would decline working from their home office, or even their couch, on a full time basis but there are fewer people who can truly handle the conversion to virtual team member. As the leader of this virtual team, you need to be able to weed out the members who can do the job and do it well, with little to no supervision , and ultimately, focus on building your team around those than can produce solid results. Leaders and workers alike must conform to work practices yet remain flexible to keep the work “environment” productive and conducive to all members.
Learning how to lead a virtual team typically involves constant electronic communication via email and digital voice over-IP (VOIP). Other teams will require more extensive technology for communication, such as online meeting software and video conferencing. Telephone communication and conference calling may also be involved, depending on the nature of the business and the team members. Effective communication is essential to any business, but it’s one of the cornerstones of success for a business that uses a virtual office environment. Each party has to be able to communicate what they are doing to other team members in order for it to be a success. For teams that are built entirely virtual, there are some rules of the road that should be adhered to for all team members to help alleviate communication problems upfront:
Here is a list of proactive measures your virtual business should institute for all virtual team members:
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Driving traffic to your website is essential to getting your business off the ground and up and running. Successfully converting that traffic 
into sales, however, might just be the most critical element of success. Making your site convert better by analyzing user behavior, conversion data and bounce rates (among other things) can provide you with a huge competitive advantage. In this post, we’ve provided just a little bit of basic information and an introduction on a web analytics program that can help you do this – Google Analytics.
Setting up a Google Analytics account and installing the analytics code on each page of your website is actually much easier than it might sound. After setting up your account (which is free, by the way), you simply install the small piece of code at the foot of each page within closing body tag in the HTML source code on your site.
The information that you can gain access to by using a web analytics program will help you improve your understanding of your site’s users , identify what their most often looking for, and how you can deliver that in a more efficient, streamlined manner. Most importantly, you can figure out how to better convert those prospective customers into buyers of your products and services.
After signing up and installing the code, it might take some time to gather sufficient enough data that you canuse to improve your site. Depending on how much traffic your site gets, it could take several weeks to gather enough information that will be sufficient enough to actually act upon.
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When you are spending money on pay-per-click (PPC) accounts and relying on their profitability, you need to use every tool available to you to enhance and improve your (ROI) for each paid click. You should count on your competitors doing that.
When building and tweaking your keyword list for your PPC campaigns, your first impulse might be to think of any and all possibilities that people will be searching for your specific product or service. But if you’re running a paid search campaign, you’re interested in buyers or subscribers, you’re not 
interested in browsers or “tire kickers” – people who are only their to shop and aren’t really interested in actually buying or subscribing.
Undoubtedly, the most relevant keywords can attract the attention and the sales that you’re looking for, but if you really want to be effective, you need to start investing more time in building out your negative keyword list to filter out all those keywords and phrases so commonly used by those browsers and those tire kickers. Negative keywords built into your campaign will filter out and prevent your ads from displaying any time those particular terms are used in the query. Negative keywords have multiple benefits in a PPC campaign:
- Eliminating wasteful clicks, reducing your overall ad spend
- Increase the relevance of your existing ads
- Increasing your CTR
- Improving the quality score of your ads
- Lowering your CPC costs
Using a hypothetical, let’s say you’re in the business of selling lamps. You’ve run your campaign for a few weeks and you’ve seen that the broadly matched keyword lamp has been converting into sales but curiously has generated a negative ROI overall. A broadly matched keyword is a keyword with a “match type” that would display your ad as long as the word lamp was anywhere in the query, no matter what other keywords were in that particular search term.
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Tags: ad campaigns, Adwords, analytics, CPC, CTR, keywords, negative keywords, paid click, Paid Search, pay-per-click, PPC, quality score, ROI
Paid Search | trifecta | 
June 12, 2009 11:44 pm | 
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The topic of accounting or bookkeeping can strike fear into the hearts of many new business owners. While “doing the books” might sound unpleasant for some, nothing can provide the clarity and understanding that comes with proper accounting for any new business. Numbers simply don’t lie.
Making the accounting process a key strength in your business practice can be a valuable asset while trying to build and grow your company.
In our accounting and financial management guide, we’ve provided a guide for new business owners on how to understand the basics of the accounting and financial management processes. We’ve also provided some helpful accounting and financial management resources as well.
Definition of Accounting
Simply put, accounting is just the process of documenting all the financial transactions in your small business, tracking the money coming into your business and the money going out.
Basics of Accounting
Accounting is the method that you’ll use to measure the financial status of your business, including profitability, which is the most important measure of any for-profit business.
The small business owner will need to look at each source of income and expense, money coming in and money going out, and then make decisions based on that information. Using readily available accounting software, such as Quickbooks Pro, the business owner can generate reports for investors, loan officers, or just to get an overall picture of how the business is doing financially for any given period of time. The 4 basic financial statements include:
- Income Statement (or Profit & Loss)
- Balance Sheet
- Cash Flow Statement
- Statement of Retained Earnings
Each of these financial statements uses a specific interval or period of time for measurement. An income statement, also known as a profit and loss statement, simply shows the profitability of a business. A balance sheet reflects a company’s total assets and total liabilities. A cash flow statement indicates the movement or the flow cash in and out of a business, and a statement of retained earnings shows the fluctuations or changes in a company’s retained earnings.
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Now that you’ve built and optimized your web site, there are some additional advertising and marketing activities that you can do in the first 3-6 months of launching your new website to get your traffic and sales kick-started.
But before we get started, let’s run through a quick checklist to make sure that you’re on track with your website before we proceed:
- Is your website fully built out?
- Is it attractive and user-friendly?
- Have you done your keyword research and employed those keywords on your pages?
- Is the content or information on your site good quality and appropriate for your target audience?
- Have you employed the SEO basics that we previously discussed for optimizing your web site?
Assuming that you’ve accomplished these or are well on your way, we can move forward with some cost-effective marketing and advertising activities. The next thing that you’ll need to do after completing the list above is establish a marketing budget for the launch of your website. Some of the items outlined below are free but will require some time to implement. Other items will charge upfront fees as well as monthly ongoing fees. Regardless of the cost, we’re going to assume that your initial marketing budget will be modest so we’ll make recommendations that will help minimize your expenses for these items.
Install a Web Analytics Program on Your Website
The first thing you should do after getting your website built out is to install Google Analytics on your web site. You’ll need a way to track and analyze your website over time and Google Analytics will provide critical information about where your visitors are coming from, which keywords and pages are resulting in the most sales, and a ton of other information that can help you to improve the performance of your site over time.
Many first time website owners might be thinking: “Why do I need a fancy web analytics program if my site will only be a few pages?” Well, don’t kid yourself about the need for a web analytics program because it will be vital no matter what the size of your website will be. Valuable information can be gained even from the smallest websites by using information gained from analytics data. Many analytics programs will provide far more information than most small businesses will ever need, but Google Analytics is free to use. You simply register for a free account and then install a small piece of code at the bottom of your pages. For small business owners starting out with a limited budget, Google Analytics is the web metrics application of choice.
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Tags: advertising, analytics, article marketing, articles, blogging, directories, discussion boards, forums, local search, marketing, PPC, press release, wordpress
Advertising & Marketing | admin | 12:24 am | Comments (4)
When you want to publicize your overall business, a special event with your company, or just keep your business name in the news, a good, effective press release is one method to get such coverage. Press releases can be effectively used on the internet and in print. Press releases have specific guidelines and must fulfill certain purposes in order to accomplish what you want it to do. Our guide for writing an effective press release provides an outline and general rule set that you can use to write a great press release for your business.
Make It Newsworthy
The word “press” should be a tip off that the information you are about to release should be newsworthy. A press release should not be written to sell product or services but rather to inform the public about the purpose of your company and what accomplishments it is achieving. Do not write your press release as though you were creating a business advertisement. You need to take an unbiased look about what events happening in and to your business are really news. Sure, you can be excited about a lot of things that are happening to you and your company but it doesn’t mean that others will be excited – or even interested – in what story you want to tell.
Come Out Strong
When creating the first paragraph and title of your press release, you need to come out strong with your message. You want and need to hook people with the first couple of sentences to draw them in. Sum up your story in the first paragraph of your press release. Reader’s attention spans are not long and you need to pull them in right away.
Find An Angle
Keep your ears open for any news items that may relate to your business products or services. You can then work to tie in your company’s press release with a current event. A good news hook can help you get much more exposure about your company.
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So how can you optimize your website to get to the top of the search engines result pages?
It doesn’t take long for web site owners to figure out how incredibly valuable that high rankings in the search engines can be to the success of their businesses. High, long-term search engine rankings can literally mean the difference between enormous success and dismal failure for many small businesses online.
There’s a ton of free information available online about search engine optimization, also known as SEO. In this article, we provide some basic information and some simple tips and advice that new site owners can begin using right away to optimize their websites. The tips and advice that we’re offering below are just the basics of search engine optimization but are extremely important to get the best rankings possible.
Your ability to rank in the search engines will depend upon your ability to optimize your website but will also largely depend on how competitive the industry or market segment is that you’re competing in. A highly competitive market will require the same SEO principles but may also require a much longer timeline to see results from your efforts. So, if you’re competing in a competitive market, try to keep your short-term ranking expectations in-check. Ranking in a competitive market takes time, and in some cases, a very long time (years.)
Consider these guidelines as a starting point for your SEO efforts. After trying these tips and the advice outlined below, if you’re still not getting the results you want, you may want to look into getting help from a reputable SEO firm.
But before you do anything else, you should start with the SEO basics outlined below:
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Tags: accessibility, authoritative content, building links, clean markup, headings, inbound links, meta tags, rankings, results pages, search engine optimization, SERPS, title tags, Usability, web standards
Search Engine Optimization | admin | June 3, 2009 8:09 pm | Comments (1)
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