I am sure I do not know why, but putting my Magento shopping cart in a directory rather than having it at the root of my web address seems to have been my answer to get my web pages indexed by Google. It is great to see another 200 every week listed by Google. I have gone from a miserable 75 pages to a high of 747. I originally thought it was because I did not know Magento could be complied, but I was getting results before I compiled my Magento. I was going to convert back to Zen Cart but was hoping I would not have to as this would have been more months of redoing a website and starting over. I am glad I seem to have something working now, but in reflection if I had to do it over I would have stuck with Zen Cart. Magento has some nice features but it cost me a lot in the long run to get the items I was attracted to. Being able to track vendors and cost mean nothing if you are not selling anything. It is far too late to backtrack and I am in a position now if I don’t start getting results from all new visitors soon I will be out of business. I was doing OK with Zen Cart then I changed to Magento and I figure I cost me a year of trying to get things right again. As it turns out I would have been better off to hire someone to add the features I wanted to Zen Cart as I ended up having to hire someone to fix my Magento. I keep looking for a magic bullet but there is not one to be found. One investment I would now recommend is to set up a local server and get everything working the way you want it before publishing to the web. I did this for my New Joomla home page and it is the way to go. You can test changes and updates before presenting a mistake on the Internet. The only other mistake was signing up to be on a shared server, while the claim is to be “unlimited”, my site is throttled and runs slow. I believe this is some of the issues with getting indexed. I found a great site to critique my site found here MetaFever and the best part is it is free!
I switched to Magento but all is not well in paradise
I made a switch from Zen Cart shopping cart to Magento but all is not well in paradise. I am not being sarcastic I have had problems with the not yet ready for prime time program (OK this time I am be sarcastic). I changed over because it was more feature rich and allowed me to track more information. But everything is not not great. From what I can gather Magento dose not have tight control over the database. At this point I have two problems. If I try to re-index the “Indexed category/products association” it has a problem and gets suck on PROCESSING and never completes the re-indexing. At this point I can’t get my products to display when this happens. I tried to fix it with the Magento database repair tool (Hm…) but it won’t fix it. I have fixed as much as I can understand which lead me to edit 17,000 products. This was a major pain in the ass. Now the only thing left for me to do is hire someone who knows MySQL and Magento. I now very little about MySQL. It is not like the Microsoft Access I use to do very long ago and I am not sure I could still do that.
The other problem I have is my links for my store do not work. I don’t know if this is database related or not. the address http://nilandsplace.com/camping_eng/ will not work but the other 2 stores I have do and they are basically the same but the work camping is replaced with hunting and radio. Camping and radio use the same template from Template Master. The templates are used almost identical so I doubt it is a problem with the theme.
I do no one mistake I made was to do a Zen Cart to Magento import with the MagneticOne company. I paid 69 dollars and it left my database almost double in size. Instead of 324 tables I had 680. This was the first thing I had to fix on my own. They would not claim any responsibility and just told me they have done it before without problems. They would not even look at the database to see what had happen. As far as I know my database my still be a mess from them. I have to say using MagneticOne is a definite no no, don’t let them near your database. It took me longer to fix it then it would have to enter the products one by one. I ended up not only fixing what I could on the database, but I had to edit each record one by one. They did not tell me the data really dose not match up. I still have more tables then I should have but I am not sure if I can delete them.
If anyone knows how to fix these problems you can read about them on the Magento forum, thread http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/217012/ and thread http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/215527/
Later the Owner
Pepper Bottle Technologies
Pepper Bottle Technologies is an SEO firm I signed up for this month. I thought it was time to let someone else help me with getting natural search exposure. I have made some terrible mistakes with my website. I did not worry about using the meta tags function in my Zen Cart shopping cart solution. I was worried about getting inventory in my site I did not pay attention to the meta tags. I am fixing this now but it would have been better to have done it for each item input. I discovered this week the Google has 97% of my pages in supplemental index.
I decided to get help with Pepper Bottle Technologies, as I need to get better search results. As far as I can tell my Alexa rating stopped back sliding and I Google d a SnugPak rocketpack backpack and hit page 4 instead of page ten like before. I run into some medical problems this next month. They have been gracious enough to let me skip billing for a month. Plus they gave my a great deal to start with. I really like that they work with me. They have a money back guaranty too. I don’t exactly what or how they do it, I just want it to work.
Do not sell to Singapore
I have suffered a big setback in my business finances. I got an order from Aldino Gear in Singapore for $4,744.47 and thought I had hit the big time. I called PayPal and asked if I should except the order and I was told everything was fine, just that is was more then my usual amount of a sale. I shipped all the product as quickly as I could. A month after shipping all the items I got a charge-back on the sale. I almost passed out when I got the news. I did what was asked by PayPal to prove the items had shipped and they declared they were fighting it for me. As another 100 days went by I got final notice from PayPal I had lost my case and now they wanted me to fund the account for the sale. I had a balance of $1087.00 from my risk account from other sales and lost that money too. I thought I was protected under the PayPal seller protection, but that did not happen. Now I owe a great amount to PayPal and can no longer use them. Too late I got this email from Joey Baker that I would like to share with you. I quote:
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Tried Goggle and Yahoo pay/click again
As the story continues I gave both Goggle and Yahoo pay/click another try for three months. I was very disappointed in the results. It cost me several hundred dollars for just a few sales. I got more traffic but only 1 out of ten would buy anything and with a competitive market there is better than a 20% loss over retail. I have hired a marketing company for the same amount this time. The claim is to put me on first page of the search engines or their guaranty is a refund of the fees. I contacted Pepper Bottle Technologies for an update a few days ago but have not heard back from Clayton. I did a search for a rocket-pak backpack and came up on page 4. This used to be page ten or more. I hope this works as I seem to have entered a slow time for camping equipment and am only getting a few sales a month. Hardly worth the effort for now. Maybe I should be selling sex as people never seem to get enough of this on the Internet. Follow up later!
Home brew SEO
For the past week I have been up late filling out forms, submitting links and sending emails. The sale of Camping gear has dropped tremendously this December. I sure hope it wasn’t something I did wrong? Not too many people do winter camping is what I figure. So camping gear is not on the Christmas list. I have however got more interest from international customers were they are having their summer. This has prompted me to seek out my own search engine optimisation. I have been very busy requesting reciprocal links to my website http://directory.nilandspalce.com/camping/. The directory is something new I came up with as a plan to capture more attention from search engines and people browsing. There is no money to be made with it yet, but if I succeed in making it popular I could sell some advertisements. My blog effort has worked out better than I expected it to. I am using a link to webconfs.com they call a back link builder. the address is http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php. So far it has worked well for finding other sites to do the back Links as long a I use the right keyword or phrase. I have sent out hundreds of emails and filled in just as may forms. But my real point is I just getting started on this project so it should prove interesting how it all turns out. After a week of this I am understanding why many SEO companies are making money. It hard too figure out what will work in business with out learning from someone else. When I was running My bioengineering company I had to ask others in business how to do things. It seems you have to dig around on the Internet to find useful tips and how to’s. A month ago I had no idea what an article submission was and how it can work for you. I really started the reciprocal link stuff after getting request from other website owners and realised I had done nothing about it. I would really like to here what others are doing about their SEO. How will it all turn out?
James the admin guy
Are you wasting your money?
Portions of this article is By Ivana Katz in Writing. http://www.sitepronews.com/category/articles/writing/. this is the abridged version of his article with my own slant on the topic.
“Having worked with a large number of small business owners, one common mistake I see over and over again is the obscene amounts of money they throw away on advertising. Many of them believe the more money they spend, the more business it will bring.”
WRONG!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!!
I know I tried it and there was no profit from it. I also in the beginning gave $59 a month to Discover SEO with nothing to show for it
“The main reason traditional marketing doesn’t work is the small business owner doesn’t really know much about marketing,” trusting the salesman, you give your money away as they promise the traffic will come rolling in.
“Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. Getting an article published is free and some publications even pay for your contributions.The publicity you receive by having your article published” …”website can be worth thousands of dollars in equivalent advertising space. Well written articles yield better results than advertisements and earn you respect from customers, who see you as an expert in your field.”
“An article is a short piece of information that aims to educate and inform people about something, which they may be interested in. They are usually between 500 and 3,500 words long”…
I have been busy doing this, but I find most places so far are a minimum of 250 words. You can usually find a clever what to put your website URL in the article, and all the better. At a minimum if you can’t do the URL you can at least do some name dropping. The way I went about it is to use webconfs.com’s back link builder. Do your key word and hundreds of sites get listed. The word count on this article is 343 so I am going to publish it else were, and boost my website at http://shop. nilandsplace.com/camp/index.php, How is that for slipping it in?
eBay has been a curse and a fortune
eBay has been a curse and a fortune. I maintain a website and an eBay store. While it certainly brings in some mush needed income, the time spent on it has kept me from taking the time to find out why my on-line store is not doing as well. Over the pass two days I have sent hundreds of emails asking for a link exchange. I have open a directory about camping as of two days ago. It is my own form of SEO and back links. Currently I have 19 back links if you don’t include eBay, were I have hundreds. As far as I know I am within eBay policy as the have brought me from poor compliance to good compliance in the last couple of days. eBay can run there website any way they see fit, but I have no complaints. The idea of the directory was ill conceived as a way to get a higher rating with the major four search engines. I say ill conceived as I soon discovered it is a lot of work to maintain a directory. I now understand it can have a life of it’s own, and grow to new values. I am happy to do the work as I think it can do something good. I feel one must always find a way to better ones self and give something back.
More every day the INTERNET is the accepted form of information. Them that did not, do. And it is really up to the search engines to make this a possibility. My message seems to be if you want the results, you need to put in the time.
So I want to let you know you can watch this thing grow or die: http://directory.nilandsplace.com. I don’t use the www address so make sure to leave it out. At this point I am only interested in camping material so please don’t ask for a link back if you have nothing to offer on this subject. You can however write your favorite story about camping and plug your website there.
We have had to institute “CAPTCHA†on this blog as some spam’ers never give up. Sorry if this is a pain in the ass, but we had to to it.
Selling proscription medication over the INTERNET is not only illegal, but it is not wise to use such services, Gambling can be a social ill so we think you have better things to do on the Internet (go to Vegas or Reno and have real fun). Porn my be the number one thing on the Internet, but we do not allow it, especially when it promotes exploitation in any form.
Tell us about your happy camper or “I will never do it again†story and I will promote it with your website address intact.
All most forgot! Check out these two links: http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php from Webconfs.com. It prompted me to start the directory. Also a really cool tool, Backlink Checker from iwebtools at http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker/ to see how you rate.
I have been at the computer very steady of late, My wife is going to kill me when she finds out I have gone through a carton of cigarettes in one week. Next week I am going to share something I am very proud of (it will totally be blowing my own smoke), but many enjoy Detroit art.
It is Christmas, so I don’t give a rat’s ass if it politically correct. Merry Christmas and happy New year, may both find you in health.
James the ADMIN guy
1on40 SEO promise?
I signed up for this 1on40 to get more results, but my process may have got me in trouble. I have multiple email accounts and can create them at wish via my website host. I thought since they have never got me to number one I would apply many times. I discovered they go by emails to prevent signing up more than once. This last time my have backfired on me as suddenly my rating has slipped some 300,000 plus points in 5 days according to Alexa. I hope I am not heading to Google hell (supplemental results) because I used them to improve my standing. I have heard about some SEO companies getting you banned. I hope it is not happening to me. I closed my last client account I did with 1on40 to see if this helps. 10n40 has had a year to get me to # uno, but have not yet. Now I am looking for a way of checking with Google about this, but I can’t even contact them to fix my e-mailbox. I am sure Google is not going to share their algorithms they use to search. If they did I could start my own Google type search website. This Makes me wonder about SEO companies claiming to get you a higher standing for the search page. Are they Google insiders? So how do they know? I have only glanced over Google published info, so I may need to spend some time reading to figure it out. Testing with a web-based analyser I found from SEO Chat â„¢, I have allot of keyword work to do. Maybe all the SEO’s do is get you to clean up and organise your website? Maybe it is information you can buy somewhere or just learn from the search engines? I need to find out! This dose not mean I want every SEO company contacting me! But I would like to here from clients of these companies. I have more time than money as it is juxtaposed (they always seam like the are Inversely proportional, the more money the less time), so I am doing my own optimisation starting with key words.
Some have been asking were I get my info? I do a great amount of reading on line. I try not to copy someone else’s information, but try to write it out in my own words. So there may be similarities. Most of it is what I am thinking about and roles out of my head.
Some want to know if I can supply references? NO, this would imply that my blog is more than an opinion. I do no warrant anything on this blog for legal reasons.
Home Brew SEO
Today I am going to keep it short. Since I can’t find a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)I can afford, I have found some links to help. One I like is misspelled word generator , Keyword Typo Generator, It includes many words you might get by hitting the wrong key. I do this all the time, thank God for spell checkers in my Firefox. Here is a link were I found a bunch of tools to use, SEO Chat â„¢. I like what I have found so far (Keyword Typo Generator and META Analyzer), but I need to do more to tell if it is good as I hope it will be.
Note about publishing: I actually read everything posted, Including comments, so please be patient while I trudge on through each one. Please don’t repost comments as I approve each and every one, so you might not see them right away. I have allot of content to cover. I have as of today a 178 pages of comments to get through. I am looking for some people I can trust to make administrators to help out. If you want to do this email me at blogers@nilandsplace.com. Thanks
Thanks James
