Become.com Optimization

With the Christmas shopping season just around the corner, we've examined become.com's performance. become.com is a new shopping portal we've just added to our marketing campaign so we are required to look at its performance. In September 2010, we received 1018 clicks from Become and had only 2 sales, resulting in about 0.2% conversion rate which is an extremely low conversion rate. We've contacted the become.com and received a free consultation from them on how we can improve our conversion. Here is the summary of the conference call.

CSE Feed Specifications and Taxonomy

One of the best ways to bring traffic to your e-commerce website is to add your website to the shopping comparison engines (CSE). CSEs index your product data and present them to Internet shoppers for price comparison. Online users browsing CSEs are generally in the market to purchase merchandise, traffic brought to you by CSEs is targeted traffic you may convert to "real" customers. There are more than a dozen CSEs, some FREE and most PAID engines, which will help you increase your sales volume.

How do I setup an ecommerce website?

Setting up an e-commerce website is a little more involved than setting up a personal homepage. The basic domain and web hosting setup are identical, but the e-commerce website requires a few additional components to offer credit card processing and a secure checkout process. You may also use a 3rd-party hosted e-commerce application, but this article discusses the procedure for creating a standalone website built from a shopping cart application.

How to create a 301 redirect?

As described on URL Canonicalization article we published in March, having a unique URL for each webpage is important in improving your "Pagerank". Canonicalization is accomplished by redirecting non-standard web pages to a preferred ("standard") webpage. There are a number of ways to redirect a webpage, but 301 (HTTP/1.1 Status Code, "Moved Permanently") redirect is the search engine-friendly method that passes the PageRank and search engine ranking status from the old to a new page. Here is an example of how 301 redirects can be implemented in a LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/PHP) environment.

URL Canonicalization

One of the first things discussed when beginning an SEO project is URL canonicalization. You may argue that the impact of having multiple URLs resolving to the same page may not have a huge effect on SEO (if you use it consistently internally), but it certainly doesn't hurt to normalize the URL so that only one URL serves a single webpage. Implementation is not too difficult for most webmasters, and there is a piece of evidence that URL canonicalization will have a positive effect on your SEO effort. You may use one form (www or non-www) of Url for all your internal linking, but you cannot guarantee that others will do the same on 3rd-party websites.