E-Commerce Chatter from Rob Poitras http://www.robpoitras.com Thoughts on succesful fashion & lifestyle e-commerce sites Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:04:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 5 Changes Needed For All New Volusion Stores http://www.robpoitras.com/5-changes-needed-for-all-new-volusion-stores/ http://www.robpoitras.com/5-changes-needed-for-all-new-volusion-stores/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:04:04 +0000 Rob http://www.robpoitras.com/?p=11 1.Change to SEO friendly URLs. Then first focus on setting the SEO information for your categories since those are more important over your products for getting indexed on Google.
2.Verify your site with Google webmaster tools & add the Google analytics tracking code to your template. If you change templates make sure you move the code over to the new template. Also make sure you use the analytics modified code that is provided by Volusion.
3.Configure the robots.txt file to include your sitemap. This will help Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines find your sitemap easier so they can index your site easier.
It should read something very basic like:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/google_sitemap.asp
4.Once you have added your products, set the Google product type and submit your products to google base. This needs to be done once a month.
5.Write unique category descriptions. The site has to have unique content. When you add new products you also need to write unique product descriptions as well. Yes it is a pain to write descriptions for each of your products. If you want to sell more than your competition then you have to out work them.

Bonus points. Add the canonical tag to your template for the home page. In your footer make sure you have links to the product (“pindex.asp”) & category (“cindex.asp”) index pages.

]]> http://www.robpoitras.com/5-changes-needed-for-all-new-volusion-stores/feed/ 0 Patience & the long tail http://www.robpoitras.com/patience-the-long-tail/ http://www.robpoitras.com/patience-the-long-tail/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:07:28 +0000 Rob http://www.robpoitras.com/?p=3 These are the stats from my flickr account for the last 30 days. I have been adding photos since the first of the year. Usually get around 500 hits a day and it has slowly been rising. Just recently 3 different unrelated photos are now indexed on some search engines and are getting a lot of traffic.

The main lesson here is that it just takes time for content to take off. Somtimes people get lucky and their content site takes off within a month or two, for others it could be a year the site to hit full stride. It appears my flickr is now in full stride and doing well :)

flickr2

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