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Open Source Shopping Carts – What to Look Out For

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:44:36 +0000

Though open source software has been mostly associated with web applications, operating systems and multimedia functions, it is also being increasingly used in e-commerce. This post offers some insight into open source shopping carts.

Open source software is a great option for anyone who wants to add a shopping cart to their site. Open source offers several advantages. First, it is very cost-effective, and in many cases absolutely free. Secondly, it is very flexible. Open source will enable you to create your shopping cart according to your specific requirements. There are find numerous modules and templates which you can use to design your cart according to your business needs.

Before choosing open source software, you need to carry out some research. You need to make sure that the open source shopping cart fulfills all your needs. The following are some things to look out for.

Compatibility with payment gateway

Your...

Blogging Etiquette Rules To Improve Bounce Rate

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:16:06 +0000

Internet users are notorious for their short attention spans, so as a blog owner, you need to grab their attention within the first few seconds. Blog readers are not very forgiving when a site owner breaks some unwritten, important rules of blogging. If you unintentionally break these rules, you'll lose your reader in mere seconds. Your readers have a choice of hundreds, or even thousands, of blogs within a certain niche. You don't want to lose a potential reader by turning them off in the first few seconds of landing on your site, so follow these straightforward blog etiquette rules.

If you use statistics or Google Analytics to analyse traffic data, pay attention to your bounce rate. This tells you how long readers stay on your site. If your bounce rate shows that readers are leaving your site soon after arriving, you will need to make some changes. Take an objective look at your site to get an...

History and Impact of Social Media

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:57:09 +0000

Social media has transformed modern life in numerous ways. In some ways it is simply a digital extension of natural human behavior. People have always enjoyed exchanging information and rumors. However, the impact of social media goes way beyond just extending this human behavior into the digital world. It has tied the world and human thoughts together in ways that have never been possible before.

History of Social Media

Any medium which encourages or facilitates human communication can be referred to as a social medium. In that sense, the internet itself could be considered social media. In the context of this examination, however, the social media with the most significant recent impact has been certain websites and programs found on the web.

In the 1990s, when the Internet was still new to the world and most American households did not have access to the World Wide Web, blogging constituted the first...

Guide to Free Social Media Analytics

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:58:49 +0000

Social media analytics can give new direction to ineffective brand management and poor customer relationship practices, not to mention its potential to leverage overall marketing and advertising effectiveness through integration of social media and business intelligence. The good news is that many great analytical tools are free. Though they have limitations, these five online tools can provide meaningful insights on your social media influence while providing you with valuable competitor data.

1. HowSociable

The site measures the Social Media Brand Magnitude, which ranges from 0 to 10.

The magnitude is based on weekly social media activities which reference a brand.

HowSociable regularly tracks data from 36 social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Instagram, Digg and Foursquare. Compared with Amplicate, HowSociable offers a more reliable algorithm for...

5 Ways to Help Get Your Images Ranked Higher in Google Images

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:09:15 +0000

Aside from the more modern approaches taken to increase the traffic of a website, images are one which hasn’t attracted the attention it deserves. Using Google Images is a powerful means of attracting new visitors. You see, more and more people on the web today are entertaining themselves via visual content.

There is a huge market for utilising these techniques and you can really benefit from them if performed correctly. In this article, we are going to teach you how to optimise your images so that they are ranked higher in image search engines such as Google Images.

Optimising Your Image

Image optimisation is something which doesn’t require a lot of skill. However, depending on the workload, it can take up a lot of time. What this technique essentially does is allow your image to be ranked higher in the image search results. This means that you have the potential to receive much more traffic. This concept holds even more merit if you also...

Understanding the Features of a Search Engine Friendly CMS

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:19:12 +0000

There's a huge number of aspects to evaluate while you are deciding on the options for which CMS to build on for your new site or site redesign. Ready-made or bespoke built? Free or paid for? Ruby or Java? Linux server or Windows server?

If your website is on the large side, you are likely to have a large number of aspects to plan when assessing Content Management System functions. When it comes to websites for small businesses you might have different priorities but you will still want to make sure you're making the correct decision.

One question you shouldn't put off until the last second to evaluate is the Google friendliness or search engine optimisation (SEO) functions of the sites CMS. After all a site which cannot be understood by Google could be severing a huge source of future website visitors.

Here we look at a few of the key functions to request in your...

PPC Advertising vs Social Media Advertising for Small Businesses

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:45:39 +0000

Wondering whether PPC advertising or social media advertising is best for your small business? The truth is that a combination of the two is usually the best marketing bet for businesses. However, it's important that you understand the differences between PPC advertising and social media advertising before you set up a marketing campaign for your small business.

Cost

Here's the basic difference: PPC advertising will definitely cost you, but social media advertising probably won't.

With PPC – or Pay Per Click – advertising, you're essentially paying for your traffic. Most campaigns are set up so that you put your advertisement on web sites that are likely to drive traffic to your own (the popular Google AdSense, for instance, puts your advertisements on pages that have similar keywords to your own). Each time a user clicks on the ad to get to your site, you're charged a certain amount of money. Higher quality PPC...

The Importance of Social Media for Photography Businesses

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:06:02 +0000

Social networks have become increasingly popular tools for business in the past few years. Photographers who make use of platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook to promote their work have a significant advantage over those who don’t.

Therefore, it is important to have an account with every major social media site which is a good match for your business. Add social media share buttons on all your pages to encourage visitors to share your posts and images. In addition, make sure every page and image in your site or blog is accompanied by a Facebook ‘like’ button. Those running WordPress blogs can find numerous plugins which make it easy to generate and insert these buttons in your blog.

So, how is social media beneficial for any photography business?

1. Managing relationships

Social media offers you the opportunity of interacting with your colleagues, partners and clients through multiple platforms at their...

5 Link Building Takeaways for 2012

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:44:53 +0000

Some people say that a month in the digital marketing world is comparable to over a year in traditional, and if this is true it is important to keep up to date with the world of digital. Search marketing is no different and SEO has well and truly become part of the ‘mix’ of a robust and diverse marketing campaign.

What did 2011 teach us? What takeaways are there from Google updates and trends? Well in our opinion there are 5 major ones which will influence how we go about building links in 2012. We have to remember that link building still plays a crucial role in ranking a site (especially deeper pages) when it comes to asserting relevance to a page’s content. Here are 5 tips for your link building in 2012:

Use partial anchor text match

Overcooking the same anchor texts for the page can result in a narrow and ‘obvious’ backlink profile....

How to View Traffic from SEO Keywords in Google Analytics

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:55:25 +0000

An important part of any SEO strategy is determining where the traffic comes. Without this knowledge, you don't know which strategies are working and which aren't. Using this knowledge, you can optimise your work in order to get the most benefits with the least amount of work. Here's how to successfully analyse your traffic with Google Analytics.

1. Set up a Google Account

If you don't already have a Google Account, you'll need one. It's not difficult to set one up, but the process has changed now that Google+ has been launched. You'll need to start by setting up a Google+ account. When you visit Google.com, a black bar lies along the top of the page. At the top left, you'll click on +You. The instructions for setting up a Google+ account are self-explanatory.

The next time you visit Google.com, you'll click on "sign in" on the top right. It will ask you for your email and password.