Traditionally in order to set up an ecommerce website you needed to be a webmaster guru, or you needed to pay someone to do it all for you, which could often turn out to be a costly exercise.

There are a number of very good free ecommerce solutions available on the internet, but in order to customise these to suit the look and feel of your business you need to have a good working knowledge of website programming languages. And trying to add these to your blog or facebook page was usually not worth the hassle.

Well, the good news is there is a simple and effective way to now add ecommerce facilities to almost any kind of website without needing a comprehensive knowledge of website programming. Over the last week I have had the opportunity to review Wazala. Wazala really changes the face of ecommerce and makes it accessible to all website owners. In a similar way to what sites like Blogger and Squidoo allow almost anyone to create a website, now Wazala allows almost anyone to add ecommerce facilities to their website.

Wazala will easily integrate into your existing website by pasting small snippets of HTML code into your website. This takes away a lot of the hassle of having to customise an existing ecommerce cart template to match your website. It also allows you to add the code onto any website that will allow you to add HTML code including your blog or even your Facebook page.

Wazala also allows you to tailor the size of your ecommerce site to meet your needs, and will cater for both physical and downloadable electronic products. One of the biggest challenges I have found with ecommerce shopping carts is that some only allow you to sell physical products and some only allow you to sell electronic products, but very few of them allow you to do both. Wazala allows you to manage your monthly spend based on the number of products that you are selling and the types of features that you require, again allowing you to tailor the product to suit your individual needs.

A few years ago, in order to have a website on the internet you really needed to be a web designer or you needed to pay someone to create it for you. Now, with platforms like Blogger, Squidoo, Hub Pages and others anyone can have a website. Add some content and some images and some styling and in almost no time and for no cost you can have a website.

Unfortunately adding ecommerce facilities or creating an ecommerce website up until now has required that you pay someone or have a good knowledge of programming languages like PHP and javascript. The good news is I think that over the next couple of years, websites like Wazala are going to make ecommerce accessible to everyone. More and more people are buying more and more products over the internet, and there is now no reason at all for you to miss out on the opportunity of selling products over the internet.

It could be as simple as 1-2-3.

1. Create a blog
2. Create of find a product
3. Add Wazala

And then you too are an online business owner.

Check out Wazala now and see how easy it is to add e-commerce facilities to your website.

                          

Are you confused about SEO? Not sure who or what to believe? Can’t afford to spend a fortune and you just want to know how to get the best results for your website? When I started working with improving my search engine rankings for my websites a few years ago now they were exactly the issues I faced. Thankfully one of the first guys I came across in the industry that I related to was Justin Brooke. Justin is a no BS kind of guy. And he shares actionable content. There is a lot of SEO mumbo jumbo out there. And a lot of stuff that people say is important, but is it really that important?

I would like to alert you to an opportunity to get inside Justin’s head, and learn the real truth about SEO from someone with the runs on the board. I have been working with SEO now for a few years and have lots of PRO level tools, but I find that it really still comes back to the absolute truths that I learnt from Justin when I first started.

Now, every now and then Justin does something a little crazy!! Why? Not to sure. This guy makes a lot of money on the internet, and he can charge a lot of money for his services. I know that he has worked with and for some on the biggest companies involved in search marketing. And now he is basically giving away his book ‘SEO Lies’. He is not quite giving it away. It will cost you $1. And there is a no strings guarantee, so if you don’t like it you can get your $1 back.

If you are even remotely serious about improving your search rankings then you need to grab a copy of Justin’s book. My guess is that if your website is not currently on the first page of search results, you are getting little to no free traffic to your website. Research says that the number one search listing gets 40-45% of the traffic for that search term. How much would that be worth to you right now?

So, now you have a choice. You can spend $1 and risk it, or you can not. The choice is entirely yours. At least head on over to SEO Lies and check it out.

                          

For most things that I do in life, I like to have a few hard and fast rules, some things I am careful off, and I like to keep things pretty simple and not over complicate them too much. I treat link building in the same fashion, and so there are a few things that I try and avoid and a couple of rules that I follow. The first and only major thing to avoid is to SPAM. And the major rule I try to follow is to be natural.

Obviously there are a lot of spammers out there on the internet. They might be black hat SEO’s or they might just have too much time on their hands, or they might be link builders. What is a spammer? For me, a spammer is someone whose sole aim is to build a link, without adding any value to the other website. A blog comment like ‘great post’ with a link, or maybe a forum signature that has lots of links in it without adding any value to the forum itself.

If this is your link building strategy then you may have some initial success. But be prepared that many of your links will be deleted. Forum and blog owners usually take some pride in their websites and resent people using their website for personal gain without giving anything back.

Don’t get me wrong, forums and blogs can be a great source of links and a useful part of a link building strategy. But don’t deface someone else’s website with your link. Add value to their website and I am sure they will be more than happy for you to add a link.

The second rule I follow after DON’T SPAM, is be natural. What is natural? Now, just suppose for a minute that I am a search engine. And I see a website that has lots of links. And for a minute I think that this site might be important. Then I see that the site has all of the links with optimised anchor text. These are the words that form your link – like ‘Click here’. Then I see that all of the links point at the home page of the website. And then I see that all of the links are ‘do follow’ links. Maybe, just maybe by now I am starting to get a little bit suspicious.

Is it possible to over optimise your website? Ask someone that has had their website removed from the search engines all together and they will probably say yes. Search engines don’t want you to manipulate their results, and they exact severe punishment for people that are seen trying to manipulate their results. And for most people, if your site is removed from the results, the best thing to do is to start again. Sure you can apply to be re-instated, and plead your case, but if the big G decides you have been doing the wrong thing then you might just have to start again.

So, when you are looking at a link and it is ‘no follow’ – take it. And if a webmaster won’t give you the anchor text you want – no problem. And where is the line when it comes to link bulding? Well you won’t really know until you are on the wrong side of it – and then it is too late.

That’s it. My two rules for link building. Where you looking for something more complicated than that? Sorry about that. In the words of Zig Ziglar the famous American motivational speaker – ‘If you give enough other people what they want, you will get what you want.’ Website owners want quality content to add to their sites and members that will create intelligent informed discussion. And link builders want links. If the link builders meet the website owners somewhere in the middle then everyone is happy.

Remember Rule number one is Don’t Spam. And rule number two is be natural.

                          

There are some important factors to consider when planning a link building strategy for your website. And there are some other factors that are thrown around the internet as being really important, that seem to have little or no importance at all. So, I am going to talk about the factors that I have found to be most important, and some of the other factors that are talked about as being very important but don’t really seem to be that important.

If you are considering link building for your website, then the questions that you are probably asking yourself are how many links do I need to build to get the coveted number one position on Google, and how long is it going to take to get there? The short answer to that is ‘it depends’. It depends on the strength of your competition, and it depends on how long it will take for Google to find your links. Obviously in very competitive environments it takes more work and a longer time to improve search engine rankings. And, maybe just maybe your competitor’s are also doing some SEO work to their websites as well.

One of the first things I look at for a website’s backlink profile is the number of websites that are linking to them, not the number of links. Your website might have 500 links all from the same website. As opposed to another site that has 500 links from 500 different sites. Which is the stronger backlink profile? I would much rather have 500 links from 500 sites, than all from the same site. That doesn’t mean that if I can get 500 links from one website that I won’t take them, but I count it more like 1 link than 500.

I am going to talk a little bit about PageRank, but not because it has anything to do with search engine rankings. PageRank (PR) is an indication of how important Google sees a website, or how much authority it has. I take a site with a high PageRank as having more importance in Google’s eyes, than a site with a low PR. So, I count a link from a site with a high PR as being more important than a link from a low PR site. That does not mean that I only look for links from sites with a high PR, as they are often much harder to get.

The final thing I am concerned about is ‘Does the link stick?’. If I build this link now is it going to be there in 12 months time? Often times, forum links or blog comments will have their links deleted because the blog owner or moderator sees it as spam. It is very easy to post a whole lot of links across different forums and blogs, but do the links stick? Do they get past moderation?

Forum links and blog comments are often seen as an easy way to build links to a website, but they can often involve a lot of work for not much return if all of your links get deleted as spam. Effective forum and blog linking will often involve building a relationship, by demonstrating that you are a valuable member of the community first, and then you will get your links to stick.

There are a couple of things that seem to float around the internet as being really important when it comes to link building, but are they really that important? The first of these is the ‘no follow’ link. Whilst each of the search engines treat ‘no follow’ tags a little differently, it is basically supposed to mean that the robots will not follow the link, and the link does not pass any value to your site. Firstly not all of the links to your website will be ‘do follow’ links no matter how hard you try. And secondly personal experience tells me that these links do seem to count as I have had websites move rankings when the only links that have been added to the profile have been ‘no follow’ and nothing else has changed. If you can have a no follow link or no link at all I would take the link every day of the week.

Relevance is another factor that is given great importance but is it really that important. Common sense tells me that it could be somewhat difficult for a search engine robot to determine relevance to any great degree. For example, what is a site like Wikipedia or CNN relevant to? I would take a link from Wikipedia every day of the week even though it might be from a page that has no relevance to my website at all. Relevance is great for building relationships with people in your industry, or related industries, and if this helps you build more links to your website then that is great. But don’t focus too much on relevance as a criteria for link building or you will be missing many great link building opportunities.

Later in the week I am going to deal with things to avoid with link building, and also where you can find great links for your website. Link building can be a tedious exercise, but it is an exercise that is critical for your search engine rankings, and something you must give due consideration to.

Happy Link Building

                          

And as far as the mythical Google Algorithm goes, I don’t know what it is, and I probably never will.

Is SEO just supposition and hypothesis?

Much of what is surmised as being important about search engine rankings is hypothesis and supposition and experience. Test, Analyse, Repeat. Test, Analayse, Repeat.

And that is what makes it hard if you are new to SEO, or you are responsible for your company website and you don’t know anything about SEO.

So what I would like to do is break it down into simple terms and apply a dose of common sense and help you come up with an action plan to improve your Search Engine rankings and maybe even get you to that magical number one ranking.

What factors really matter in SEO?

It is my experience that there are really only 2 factors that matter when it comes to rankings – RELEVANCE and AUTHORITY.

Now the trick really is, is how do the search engines decide what is relevant and how do they decide what has authority?

STEP 1: SEO is about having relevant content

Content that is relevant to what?

Keywords

Content that is relevant to what your likely customers would type into the search box when they are looking for you or your product. In SEO terms these are keywords. Alot of my clients that have had existing websites have suffered in their search engine rankings because their content is only vaguely relevant to what searchers are looking for.

The biggest hurdle to overcome with content is to take the content that is relevant to your business or product, and make it relevant to what searchers are looking for?

Where do you put the Content?

Lets just say for a moment that I am a search engine robot and I am crawling your page to find out what search terms it might be relevant for?

The first thing I might look at is the url (page address). And I find that this is www.yoursite.com/07908699070.html. ‘yoursite’ might give me a clue as to what is relevant, but all those numbers don’t really relate to anything that a searcher types into a search box. However if I was to find www.yoursite.com/thebestwidgetsintheworld.html, now I might have a better idea what your site is about.

Now (in my robot role) I am going to scan through the content on your page. Oops, I can’t read any of it. It is all images and javascript and flash and I can’t see any of that. Sorry but I can’t really help you with that. And I have lots of other sites to visit so I’ll come back later.

Oh, hang on there is text and html code here and I can read that. So in terms of important things, page headings are pretty important, bold text is pretty important, text that links out to other pages is important, and finally general content is important. These are the places that you want your keywords.

STEP 2 : AUTHORITY

OK, so there are lots of theories as to how a website gets authority, but let me ask you another question.

In real life, how do you decide if someone has some authority?

If you knew they had a large amount of knowledge in a particular area that would give them authority.
If you knew they had a large amount of general knowledge that would give them authority.
If they were wearing a uniform that would give them authority.
If they were recommended by a large number of other people.
If they were recommended by someone you thought was important.
If they had lots of experience (age) in a particular area that would give them authority.

In my experience it is not much different as to how a search engines decides which sites have the most authority.

Does this site have a lot of relevant content that relates to this search?
Does this site have a lot of content, some of which relates to this search?
Is this site recommended (linked to) by alot of other websites?
Is this site recommended by anyone important?
Is this site older? (more experienced)

So, in terms of authority the best ways to make your site more authoritative in the search engines eyes are to get more links to it (expecially from important websites) and to create more content for your site.

Action Plan for Search Engine Rankings

Here is my action plan for dummies to improve your search engine rankings -

1. Research what is relevant to searchers and decide on your keywords.
2. Create content around these keywords
3. Incorporate the keywords and content into the important parts of your website
4. Make sure the robots can read your content
5. Get more links to your website
6. Create more content around your keywords.
7. Rinse and repeat.

                          

If you have an online business that relies on search engine traffic, then I am sure there has been more than once that you might have cursed Google for a change in your rankings for no apparent reason.

Many businesses and internet marketers spend a large proportion of their day trying to ‘beat’ Google. Is this you? If only you could get to the top of the rankings then all of your problems would be solved!!

Well, unless you know someone that works at Google, then what you know about Google is probably the summation of what you have read from others and your own personal experience. Anyone out there with any inside information?? lol

This is one of the best visual representations I have found as to the mechanics of what Google does. Maybe this just might help you to take your online business efforts up a notch or two.

Infographic by PPC Blog

                          

And that is absolutely true. You need to base your website on great content.

But what do you base your great content on?

KEYWORDS.

Keywords are what your customers are typing into the Google search box when they are looking to buy your products or services.

And you should know that not all keywords are created equal.

Some keywords will bring you alot of traffic, but not many sales.

Some keywords will bring you sales but not much traffic.

And some keywords are just too plain competitive to worry about, unless you have got a bottomless budget.

The Foundation of Great Keywords

There are a number of factors that you should consider when you think about selecting the keywords to base your content and website around.

1. Search Volume – if there is no search volume then there is no point. That said, alot of web searches involve long tail keywords (4 to 10 word search phrases). However if you target the three and four word search terms with good traffic volume you will find that you pick up long tail searches as a result.

I often use the Google Search Keyword Tool to get a measure of search volume for a group of keywords. I also use a commercial software program called Market Samurai which measures search volume and other important keyword benchmarks.

2. Commercial Intent – is your traffic going to buy? Are you bringing a bunch of tyre kickers to your website, or are people coming to buy? It is important that your keywords will bring you traffic, and it is vital that your visitors have some intention of buying something.

Microsoft have a very useful tool for measuring Online Commercial Intention.

One of the other ways that you can get a measure of commercial intention is to type your keywords into Google. Now look at the right hand side of the page to see how many Google Adwords ads there are. If there are no ads then the commercial value of the search term will be low. If there are at least a page of ads then the search term has a much higher commercial value. (or there are alot of mugs that are buying ads and not making any money.!!)

3. Competition. The final factor I take into account when I assess a group of keywords is the competitiveness of each phrase. You can do a quick assessment of this by typing each term into Google and seeing how many results are returned. Are you competing with a few thousand websites or are you competing with millions of websites.

You can then use a tool like Site Explorer to examine the top ranking websites for your search terms to see how strong the competition is.

The 3 Factors that determine Great Keywords

So, the three basic factors that I measure to determine what keywords to target are Search Volume, Commercial Intent and Competition.

From there, you can then make a decision about what keywords you are going to base your great content around.

                          

So, as a website owner what does that mean to you? My thought is that it means a lot of competition. Hence the growth in niche marketing.

So you have a website and now you need to find a way to get people to it. I remember talking to a client a few months ago and he sais ‘I have this great looking website, but nobody is finding it.’ You can have the best looking website in the world, but if it doesn’t get any visitors the chances of it being profitable are ZERO.

So, how can you get traffic to your website?

When I work with clients there are 4 ways I look to build traffic to their sites -

1. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. In a nutshell this basically involves trying to get your website on the first page of Google and even to the Number One position. How hard this will be depends on your competition. The results will be governed by how big your market is (i.e. how many searches), and the quality of this traffic.

Alot of businesses and internet marketers spend alot of their time trying to get on the front page of Google, and I would certainly never discourage that. However Google can be a fickle mistress and depending on the quality of your work you might find yourself in the penthouse one day and the outhouse the next.

My only advice is ‘Don’t put all your eggs into this basket.’

2. YouTube – this can give you a double whammy. Create a quality video and put it on YouTube and you will bring visitors to your site. A ‘How To’ video or a promotional video can bring targetted traffic to your website. The other great thing about this is that your video might rank better in the search engines than your website. Google loves YouTube and you will see video results returned in most internet searches.

3. Social Media – Twitter, FaceBook, BeBo, Myspace etc etc.  Done in the correct way you can build a community around your business and bring people to your website without the help of Google. You can use Social Media as a way to build a list of followers for your business and products. Just remember it is called Social Media and not S.PAM media.

4. Paid Traffic – if you are having trouble getting free traffic, then maybe you can look at paying for traffic. If you have a profitable business model then this is just an advertising expense. This may involve banner advertising, adwords, text ads or other paid advertising. My advice to you here is that you should target your advertising to maximise your return on investment. Where do your potential customers hang out when they are on the internet?

If you are using paid advertising make sure that you can accurately track the return on each branch of your advertising. You must know how many visitors and sales are being generated from each form of paid advertising. Test and optimise is the best strategy for paid advertising.

So, how many of these avenues are you using to drive traffic to your website?

ONE?

Two?

THREE?

If you are using all four, congratulations.

If not, how many potential sales are you missing out on?

                          

In order to get the most from your Wordpress blog there are some plugins that I would suggest that you install. These plugins will help you to maximise your blog for search engine optimisation, security, and user experience.

I do sometimes use other plugins with my blogs, but I install these 16 plugins on all of the Wordpress blogs that I manage.

Blog Management Plugins

1. Akismet – this will be installed by default but you will need to activate it. This is your comment spam filter to stop you from getting spammed by people that are just looking for unprotected blogs to post alot of pharmacy or sex links to. This will save you a lot of time and heartache.

2. WP DB Optimiser – this plugin keeps your database in top shape so that your blog loads and runs quickly.

3. Wordpress Related Posts – this provides your readers with a list of posts that are related to the one that they are currently reading. This helps to keep your visitors engaged by providing them with other relevant content.

4. FD Feedburner Plugin – create your feedburner feed for your blog and then make it easy for your readers to stay informed whenever you make a new post to your blog. Feedburner will also give you stats about how many subscribers you have and what they click on so you know what your readers are finding interesting about your blog. Then keep giving them more of that.

Security Plugins

1. Wordpress Database Backup – at some point in time during your blogging career, there is a good chance that your blog will get hacked. The quickest way to fix this is to restore a proper working copy of your blog. In order to do this you need a recent backup. I schedule this plugin to run daily on all of my blogs and I have the backup emailed to me. This will safe you a lot of heartache if your blog gets hacked.

2. Wordpress Firewall – this plugin will reduce the likelihood of your blog fropm getting hacked in the first place. This stops people from writing unauthorised scripts to your blog which allow them access to your blog.

3. Login Lockdown – this plugin stops hackers from trying to uncover your username and password by ‘brute force’. After a set number of incorrect login attempts (I usually allow 3) they will be shut out for a set period of time.

SEO Plugins

1. Google XML Sitemaps – this plugin will automatically create a sitemap for your blog and resubmit it to Google whenever you update your blog. This will ensure that the search engines are aware that there is new content on your blog and will ensure that their robots will visit often and find your new content.

2. Headspace 2 – this allows you to set your title tags and descriptions for your posts and pages. Sometimes with a blog it can be difficult to manage your meta data. The Headspace 2 plugin allows you to manage all of your meta data in one place to ensure your get the best onsite optimisation for your blog.

3. SEO Smart Links – create internal links within your blog automatically to help the crawlers find your content.

4. SEO Slugs – this removes obsolete words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ from your post titles so that you get maximum benefit for the keywords in your titles.

User Experience

1. Subscribe to Comments – This plugin will help you to create a community around your business blog and keep your users engaged in your blog. As it says it allows a user to be notified of future comments that are made on a post that they have commented on. This helps to promote future discussion on your blog and brings your users back to your blog.

2. Thank Me Later – this sends a thankyou message from you to any user that posts a comment on your blog. Again this helps to create a community feel about your blog and helps to keep your readers engaged. It costs nothing to say ‘thanks’.

3. WP Super Cache – this plugin allows your pages to be served more quickly to your readers. As we are all time poor in this day and age you need to serve your content quickly otherwise your reader will be gone to the next website.

4. Light Social – make it easy for your readers to share your post with their friends and expand your social network with this plugin.

5. No Follow Case by Case – this plugin allows you to decide which links on your blog will be follow and which will be no follow. If you have people that are just link commenting you can no follow their links and quickly discourage this practice on your blog. At the same time you can reward people that leave meaningful comments by making their links follow links.

Got any other Wordpress Plugins that you love and just can’t do without? Put them in the comments below.

Got questions? Ask them in the comments below.

Like this. Tell your friends below using Light Social.