There are in fact two different versions of the Transfirst gateway for Zencart.  They’re both writted by a developer at Transfirst.   The most current one is called “Transaction Central”.  The older oneis called Merchant Anywhere.

Yes, we still use it here www.gracedigitalaudio.com.  I’d guess that the person you spoke to didn’t know about it.   The module is called “transaction central”  and there’s an older one called “merchant anywhere”
Here’s the contact information for the group in charge of it.  …This comes directly from the module.

E-mail: tcintegration@transfirst.com
Phone: 1.888.835.1777 ex 6991

..Here’s a screen capture of what the installed module looks like in zencart.

———-My Response———

Sure, no problem.

First of all, this email was, most likely, not written by hand and it was not created after someone reviewed our site manually. It’s just specific enough to be personal and seem relevant. This is really good spam. I assume you already know this. ….My partner firm uses this tactic and it works well for them.

Point 2: One question… relevant to what? This depends on the search term, the content of the page and of course, the actual page they’re referring to. A page about green widgets with a title of “green widgets model number WIDG-1000 for use with blue diamonds” contains some non “relevant” information. Only the green widget part is “relevant”… Though, the market for green widgets may deem the other information important. These guys may see your add for green widgets and tell you the title is only 20% relevant.

Point 3: They’re referring to dmoz.org. It’s a huge listing of sites that’s used by search engines and even people to find sites that are relevant to almost any topic. It used to be a potent inbound link and was worth the wait and time it takes to submit. It’s free to get listed but it can take weeks, months and even years to get in. The effectiveness of these listings is questionable these days.

-JB

—–Original Message—–
From: <CUSTOMER>
To: Jeremy Brooks
Subject: Fwd: Message from <CUSTOMER>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:47:01 -0400

I would like to undersatnd what thoer points 2 and 3 are just for my education.

Sent from my phone
Begin forwarded message:

From: Sales Team
> Date: June 30, 2009 3:40:43 AM PDT
> To: Sales
> Subject: Message from <CUSTOMER>

> Reply-To: Sales Team
>
>
>
From: Sales Team
> Email: sales@auroin.com
>
> ——————————————————
>
> Subject: SEO – <CUSTOMER’S SITE>
> Dear Head of Business Development at <CUSTOMER’S SITE>,
>
> Were you aware that you are paying every time your online marketing
> advertisement is clicked? It hurts! I know, as many of our clients have
> shared this frustration when I first talked to them about how to drive more
> quality prospects to their sites - without having to constantly pay for
> every click.
>
> We thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not yet
> getting more organic (free) search engine traffic for <CUSTOMER’S SITE>
>
> 1. Your home page rank is 5, this can be improved further.
>
> 2. Your title is 85% relevant. This can be improved for higher Google
> ranking
>
> 3. Open directory listing is not available.
>
>
> If you can stomach more bad news about what your site needs, and are curious
> to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to
> provide you with further detailed analysis in the form of a SEO SITE REPORT
> - FREE OF CHARGE. I would first need to know that you are serious about
> using our services, as the report would involve several hours of our
> research.
>
> To brief you about the company, we are an ISO 9001:2000 certified team of
> over 530 SEO specialists in the USA, UK, Australia and India and would like
> to talk with you about how you should be winning new business from the
> search engines, without paying advertisers over and over again for it.
>
> SEO is not instantaneous, it is not free, but it is the only sensible
> internet marketing choice. Your return on investment (ROI) after 6 months of
> SEO will be at least 3 times that of paid advertisements, and many times
> greater than our cost. In fact, we guarantee that in the first month of our
> work you will see an improvement in ranking, link popularity and traffic or
> we’ll work for free until you do! Our clients’ consistently tell us that
> their customers find them because they are at the top of Google. Being on
> the top left of Google (#1- #5 Organic positions) is the best thing you can
> do for your company’s website traffic and online reputation.
>
> Ironically, It’s very likely that had you spent your last 6 months of online
> marketing dollars on SEO instead of paid advertising that you would have 3
> times or greater the traffic today and not need the paid advertising at all.
>
>
> Fortunately you can still start today and begin getting that traffic in just
> a few weeks. We look forward to discussing our SEO plans with you. Please
> email or call us today +1 202.657.5242 or +1 202.657.5242 or +61 28.011.3995
> or +44 207.193. 0857
>
>
> Best Regards
> Sales Team

I want to make sure you understand that this technique is considered “black hat” by some and Google too.  If Google were to actually recognize and take the time to investigate the site using it then it’s likely that the site would incur a penalty and possibly loose search results in Google’s listings or be banned outright.   Though, Google (Matt Cutts) also states that there’s “almost” nothing that someone can do to harm a sites ranking.   Well, if I can link to a site using a link building system without the site owner knowing and Google will punish sites for using such a system…   You’re seeing contradiction right?  I could also report the site to Google for buying links.

The problem for entrepreneurs and business owners is…

Unless you have someone actively writing articles and content, doing PR work and communicating online and on the phone consistently you have no other way to climb to the top of the pile in a large competitive market.   At least not while maintaining reasonable cost and time investment, in my opinion.  All your link building really *should* be natural coming from other people writing and talking about you.  However, unless you have a small PR team/person or plenty of extra time, I don’t see that happening.  And, if those others don’t talk, Google would assume you just go out of business.  …After all, to them you don’t appear to provide any value.  Be cognizant of the fact that the Google search index is owned by Google and they can do whatever they want with it.  They DO decide what is good and “evil” (their words not mine) based on their own needs and desires.   For an entrepreneur and business owner, the priority is growing and thriving in business.  It is certainly not to maintain Google’s pristine search listing and to keep the Internet as they wish it to be.   So, to compete, the option is do what it takes and possibly pay the piper for being naughty or follow the Google rules, pay the piper, hope and simply fail if you don’t get to the top.  It’s a scary choice.

His site had been indexed using http and https urls at some point in the past.  He had duplicate content problems there, but that is not is main issue. When he took over the site he moved it to the Network Solution E-commerce platform. Network Solutions uses 302 temporary redirects to to divert content from https URLs to the non-secure version of the page.  While redirecting https URLs to http URLs is a good idea, it’s a really bad idea to tell the search engines that it’s only temporary.   Basically, what NS is doing to say “hey G, Y, M, et al. I don’t want you to index this page.  In fact it’s probably going to go away.  For now, use this page (http version), but only temporarily.”   In essense they’re saying that both pages are in flux and niether is the page that you really want to put forth for the world.

He struggled to get NS to actually understand the problem until speaking with the, apparently, the king stud of SEO at Network Solutions.  He acknoledged the problem but gave no solution and no ETA.  He just said, they’d find a solution.  That was over 2 weeks ago.  As I write this, the problem still exists.   I hope, for his sake and the good of all the Network Solutions E-commerce customers they fix the problem and stop using the 302 for this.

The question was:

“What about the number of back links some of these sites have?   That’s helpful no?”.

I answered in a way that would break up the concrete impression that had started to set.

“yes and no.  Back link count and it’s relationship to rank is not as empirical as they make it out to be.  The value a link carries for a specific term varies.   There are many factors involved.  A simple count of the back links will give you an abstract impression of the stability of that sites  position in general.  I’d even say a wrong impression.  You have to examine the actual back links (the actual pages and the site content overall) to get a clearer picture of how influential they are for a particular term or niche or at all, for that matter. Even still, if a domain in general has a tremendous number of quality links from similar and quality sites and the search engine really trusts the site you’re trying to out rank then you’ll have a harder time surpassing them due to the overall trust and power of the domain.  iLounge.com, for instance, ranks for many search queries that they only have one page of unique content for and few if any totally relevant backlinks to.   Yet, because they carry so much trust, unique content and massive quantities of good backlinks in general, they will rank very quickly for any new content they create.   It’s simply a good site that people like.  Google knows to do this because the people tell them without specifically saying it about specific search terms.  Does that make sense?”

The report from this company also included information about keyword density.  This was valuable information. Though again, it paints a picture that is misleading and confusing.

I can’t imagine any of my clients writing thier content then running a keyword density analyzer on that content, then adjusting it, then running it again until they get 10% of this term and 5% of that term.   It’s ridiculous how geeky geeks can be even when dealing with something that supposed be [and actually is] about people.

Do you know WHY keyword density is actually measured and WHY it’s considered when indexing content and adjusting the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)?

…Ready, for the answer?   BECAUSE IT’S SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT WHAT GOOD WRITING WILL NATURALLY CONTAIN!    …go ahead, smack yourself on the forehead.

I tell all my clients to write intelligently and naturally for the people they provide the content for.   The result is ,almost invariably, content with “correct” keyword density.  What’s more important is that it’s going to be interesting to the appropriate reader and will actually engage them.

Forget the search engine and forget keyword density measurements as a measure of how relevant your content is.   Use it only to detect when you’re going overboard or using too many pronouns or non-specific descriptors.   Most adults have the inate ability to write with the correct use of nouns, pro-nouns and descriptors for their topic.  You wouldn’t repeat Abraham Lincoln every time you were writing a sentence about him would you?  No, you’d use ‘he’ and ‘his’ or ‘the presidents’ or maybe ‘the Union leader’.

Piwik is a tag oriented system that links to your pages with embedded image and js. At this point I have it installed on Drupal, Word Press, Zen Cart and a one-off site Zen Cart hybrid. So far I’m impressed with the interface. The clarity and efficiency of use are excellent.

The install is designed to be simple and as web centric as possible. It’s a simple install and so much better than the systems of old with cumbersome config files and cronjobs. However, There was a problem that will probably trip some folks up. Even with the problems I had, the system was installed and integrated in less than 5 minutes without reading a bunch of documentation! Here’s what I did to get it running.

1. download the code
2. unzip the source to the directory I wanted it in.
3. I used existing databases and usernames. Thus, creation of a new user and database was not needed.
4. READ THE README FILE
5. At this point there were permissions problems. Even though I had 777 set on the piwik directory. The reason was, piwik created it’s tmp directory with permissions that prevented it from writing to tmp. I though that was odd and it’s probably a system quirk not a real problem with Piwik. The fix was to set the permissions on tmp. I reloaded the page that showed the error and it presented another and different error regarding permissions again. …OK. So, I set permissions on tmp and it’s contents again. That fixed it.
6. After tagging the site I went to piwik and received and error regarding the ALTER command. Piwik needs ALTER permissions on it’s tables in order to install plugins. So, I whipped out the MySQL Administrator GUI and gave it ALTER. Unfortunately, the install was screwed up even after installing the plugin and giving it ALTER. So, I reinstalled it all. That part took about 2 minutes. ..no big whoop.
7. I logged in to Piwik and created a user for my client and couple of sites.

All in all I’m quite satisfied with Piwik. I especially like the dynamic nature of the interface. It does what I want and I can develop on it for my own purposes! …ssssswwwweeeeeet

Good work Piwik folks!

-Jeremy Brooks

I chose a lesser known php framework called Zoop. Zoop provides a lot that the others didn’t and it was really easy to learn. Something I really liked was the zoop zone development methodology. The code just flowed once I learned the basics. Everything I needed, including javascript effects and ajax controls provided by Scriptaculous and Prototype, respectively, was there without me having to mess around with installing other libraries. The next step was to find a CMS (content management system) that would play nice with a frame work like Zoop.

The goal was to do as little access control and front end development as possible. That way I could build the site fast and keep it focused on it’s real purpose. That is, to save time and make money by allowing me continue to use the marketing components on my own sites and by providing a subscription based system for others.

I went with Drupal 5 for the CMS. After poking around in Drupal and sorting through various Drupal support posts and how-to pages. I figured out how I could integrate Drupal with Zoop. It’s a relatively simple way to make Zoop use Drupal sessions and access management instead of it’s own.

The result was a real development framework with the power of Drupal and all it’s modules hooks, etc.  No drupal modules were developed and no Drupal core hacking is involved.

In this case, the basic trick is to swap out the session class used in Zoop with that of Drupal. Then in your Zoop zone file you’ll magically have access to the many Drupal objects. Such as that containing session and user info and more.  Obviously it’s a little more involved then that and I’ll get into it later.

After I stuck my Drupal in my Zoop…

I created a content page in Drupal that loads pages from my Zoop app. Those pages are actually javascript files that trigger ajax actions once the page is loaded. Depending on the drupal user permissions Zoop will grant or deny access to the requested component. That’s a simple but oh-so-helpful thing for a developer that doesn’t care to learn how do complicated application development in a Drupal module.  Now my app is loosely coupled with Drupal and I can upgrade and extend Drupal all I want with little effect on my core application written in Zoop.

You can even embed flash over ajax and anything else you can image with Drupal controlling the gates with the freedom of a framework and brass tacks php development.

I’m in the process of doing the same thing for a client and will be documenting the process in detail this time. For now you can read more on the Zoop site.

I hope someone finds this useful.