Tag Archives: SEO

23Jul

CubeCart v4 E-Commerce Review

Recently I have been looking at setting up some e-commerce systems using an out of the box solution such as CubeCart, XCart, or OsCommerce. In the past I have always worked with bespoke applications, and my company still predominately does, however there is one huge problem with our bespoke applications, and that is the development time.

Unfortunately more development time = more cost, and my company is not one of the big names out there so the majority of the enquiries we receive are from individuals or SMEs. Individuals and SMEs also contribute to a decent percentage of the actual clients. Therefore most of our current clients do not have the budget for expensive bespoke applications and it can be extremely hard getting new clients if half the quotes they receive are considerably less than what we can do on the cheap!

So I finally decided to try an out of the box solution for a side project of mine, 1st4 GPS, it is not exactly a looker, but give me a break, I can’t design and we got the site + products up within a couple of days while I had to do my normal work.

I had a little experience with CubeCart V3 from an old client and I had read reasonably decent reviews of it. CubeCart version 3 is currently free to use if you leave the “powered by CubeCart” message. CubeCart v4 is the commercial version and costs $179.95 (£89.98) for the licence + copyright removal key. Considering we are setting up a e-commerce site that is designed to generate money you can’t really complain at that price.

CubeCart v4 has some excellent features that I required including:

  1. 100% Template Driven
  2. XHTML & CSS Valid
  3. Payment Modules
  4. Bulk Export CSV / Google base
  5. Search Engine Optimisation

It has many more features but the above are what caught my eye.

Firstly the whole system is template driven with valid XHTML & CSS. Basically all the HTML/Design elements are separate from the PHP code, this helps the design process considerably. I am not a design expert so I normally get someone else to do all that malarkey for me. It makes it a lot easier for both myself and the designer when everything is separate. CubeCart is basically split up into 3 main areas. The main index, the content for each page, and the boxes.

The boxes are sort of modules that are included into the navigation. These include the shop categories, shopping basket, search, popular products etc

The content is surprisingly the physical content for each page. The categories, viewing the product, the main index content etc

The index is obviously the thing that contains all the above. It is all nice and simple once you get used to it. My only gripe is that it can be quite easy to tell if a site is running CubeCart. It is mainly related to the boxes such as the session box, mailing list box, featured product etc. I suppose someone with a decent amount of experience in CubeCart could/would make it look exactly how you wanted.

The integration of the payment modules is a godsend to someone like me, we have clients that use half a dozen different payment systems, and I was also looking at increasing development time as much as possible. For my test website I used Nochex. It literally took me 30 seconds to implement it. Ok maybe 2 minutes if you include doing a test purchase.

Maximising the exposure of your products is obviously vital to the success of a e-commerce site. One of the easiest way to get some focused traffic is Google Base. We have integrated it into our own systems with reasonably decent results. For CubeCart I actually ended up paying for a 3rd party module that ran a cron job and allowed Google Base to update 100% automatically. We don’t get a huge amount of traffic for Google base, but it is noticeable, and it is quite focused as it tends to be a search for a specific product so the conversions should be good. The best thing about Google base is it is essentially free traffic.

Finally the last and probably most important thing that caught my eye with CubeCart V4 was the claimed SEo features. Now to be quite honest I always take this with a pinch of salt. SEO is a ubiquitous term when selling anything to do with a website. One mans SEO is another mans spam, so it is always wise to look into the SEO quite carefully.

Over the past year or so, EVERYONE has been banging on about Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. Yes they are great, and there is very rarely reason NOT to have them (unless you use ASP/IIS on a share host as you don’t get ISAPI_rewrite). CubeCart V4 is no exception, they have gone down the SEF route, which is good considering some of the CubeCart sites i see with session IDs in the URL. The general structure of the URLs is site.com/catagory/sub-cat/product-title/id.html. It is OK, I won’t say great, as I feel they look a little long and does it really need the HTML at the end of it? Also even though it maybe better SEO to have all the categories in the URL it would look nicer as a shorter URL. I am sure these are things that can be adjusted with a little more playing around.

The system also formats your titles to be more optimised, in my case I have product name, sub category, then category this is obviously good, though it does append the site title to the end giving you quite a long site title (121 character in this case).

Under each product or category you can create a custom SEO URL, browser Title, meta description, and meta keywords. If you leave the meta description / keywords blank the site uses the default meta. This is a little annoying as I am lazy and missed this off first time round, I then ended up with a site full of duplicate meta descriptions, and this is not really ideal It would be nice if the site auto generate the meta description from the actual description itself unless specifically defined by the user.

Once the site had been live for a little while, and some of the pages were indexed I noticed another annoying little thing. A large portion of the indexed pages were /tellafriend/tell_2.html or something similar. The page then leads to a form to contact your friend about the product. My site currently has 103 products, this therefore would mean that there are 103 pages like this. That is 103 identical pages! Google is not to fond of this.

Another buzz topic in the SEO industry is siphoning page rank and nofollowing internal links. Basically you want to avoid to much link juice passing to your crappy pages. So I decided to check out where else I may have a few issues and trying to fix them with a few nofollows.

Some of the potential problem areas included:

  1. Shopping basket
  2. Login
  3. Register
  4. Search/Advanced Search
  5. Write a review
  6. Be the first to write a review

Most of the problems seem fixable if you go through your template. It would be nice to see plug-in similar to wordpress that automatically help prevent leaking of page rank, and this is probably where I am wrong. I am expecting everyone else to do the work for me rather than pull me own finger out and do it myself. Though I guess an nice addiction would be for future versions of CubeCart to allow you to add your own custom meta into any of the pages on site. It would allow the user to manage Googlebot a lot easier.

Overall I am reasonably happy with CubeCart for now. It is not perfect, and I am sure a lot of SEOs will slate it for one reason or another. For the price, and the speed it took to set up it is a good choice, especially for the smaller company. If you have a little more time and money I am sure the flaws it does have can easily be ironed out.

My testing has not been the most thorough and we have thrown the site up so it would be interesting to see what SEOs with more extensive experience of the system think of it?

I may set up another store and try out one of CubeCarts competitors. I have not used XCart or Magento, both of which I have heard good things about. I am open to other suggestions too? Though no over priced applications, I would like to keep it under $200/£100 though will try more expensive products if they look good enough.

15Jul

Is article syndication worth it? And how to maximise its potential.

We all know that article syndication and directory submissions are the staple diet of some cheaper SEO companies, and most of us know that both techniques are somewhat outdated and devalued.

However a lot of people still do article syndication. In fact I do it myself. While they are not the best links for the time being it does not look like they will get me penalised unlike many other link building techniques. A lot of SEOs even recommend it still, I recently downloaded the link building 101 PDF from Prospectmx.com. It is quite a nice chart of the various link building techniques, it will make a handy reference for people learning the trade. In this PDF they say that while article syndication is not that effective it is still worth doing 5 – 10 articles a month submitted to several good article directories such as:

  • ArticleCity.com
  • Buzzle.com
  • EzineArticles com
  • Articlebiz.com
  • EasyArticles.com

Now even though I still do it to some extent the problem I have is that it is either done cheap and nastily or it really is not an efficient use of time.

The first option is to pay some foreigner to write the article for $5-$10 and then submit to the above sites. However this is the technique that most decent SEOs cringe at and it is really not recommended.

The correct way to approach this technique would be to write a decent quality article about the niche that you would like to link too. If it is for a client it is probably safe to say it is not a niche that you can just churn out interesting information from the top of your head. So therefore the will be at least a small amount of research required for this.

So lets say I produced 5 articles in 1 month for an interior design company I would estimate it would take at least 2 hours* for a 500+ word article if we included research. So that is 10 hours worth of work.

Then if we submit these articles to directories I would guess it is at least 2 mins per article per directory. It shouldn’t take long but you need to scan over the article and make sure everything is laid out properly, you also need to get the correct category, keywords, author box etc. Therefore 5 Articles * 5 Website’s * 2 mins = 50 minutes. Call it 1 hour.

That is 11 hours work so far. Now if we really want to make the most from our links ideally we really need to record each article per website so that each article is unique and not completely duplicate. Therefore I would estimate that reworking / rewording 1 article into 5 unique articles would take around an hour per article. This therefore you could add another 5 hours to the job.

In total (a very rough guess) I would guess that is 16 hours worth of work. Now if your an SEO company charging for your time that can be quite a lot of money to the client. 2 days worth of work (16 hours) can easily cost £600 – £1200 + worth of work, which I would say is a rip off if the SEO company had only syndicated 5 articles.

I personally think even a less experience SEO would achieve much better results spending that 16 hours of time on the site creating excellent content that generates links. It also can help improve the long tail rankings for your site if you have lots of relevant unique content on individual pages. If this content is added to a blog it is also very easy to syndicate this content via the RSS feed to build up your links this way. You can also easily syndicate this content on various hubs such as Squidoo or Hub Pages, though I am not sure how much value Google would give the links within this syndicated content.

If you still feel the need to syndicate articles then possibly the best option would be to reduce the number of articles, lets say to 1 or 2 but make them great. Then use these articles on your blog to create your great content. Let Google index it, maybe use social bookmarks and social media (though digging, or whatever, your own content is a bit lame) to drive some traffic and links. Then heavily rework the articles, maybe just re-write the whole article but on the same subject area so at least the research is already done, and finally submit to the quality directories. It may still be time intensive but it should provide better results than generic article syndication. I may also be inclined to only create a couple of versions of the article rather than 5 and submit them to 2 good directories. Then next month use 2 different directories, at least then you are getting links from separate domains.

*It could be less, but it could be a lot more, I am awful for not tracking time.

08Jul

Why outsourcing SEO sucks pt2

I posted previously about why I do not think an SEO company should outsource its SEO services.

If you are an SEO I am sure you will get dozens of offers per week to outsource link building or complete SEO services. I personally think this could be a disastrous mistake for an SEO to make.

I recently had a couple of domains penalised by Google and I did kind of deserve it, I knew I was pushing my luck and I guess it got to the point where I pushed too far. This was obviously a stupid mistake on my behalf, but I know what I did wrong, I will work hard and fix the problem. I was also (probably) not do the same mistake again.

The problem when you outsource your SEO work to cheaper / offshore companies is that you quickly lose control of what exactly is going on with your site. It maybe reasonably easy to police the work that is done on-site but when it comes to things like link building by the time you realise the techniques the company is using are dubious it maybe too late.

From my experience the sort of link building techniques these companies use include

  • Low quality directory submissions
  • Low quality mass article syndication
  • Blog spam
  • Forum spam
  • Buying up old domains and using them for link farms
  • Digital Point Co-op
  • Other cheap link sponsorship techniques

The problem with the above is that Google appear to becoming stricter and stricter with link building techniques. If you backlink profile increases dramatically and consists of low quality spammy links there is a serious risk of penalties being applied.

These companies often have little motivation to avoid these issues, if they get 500 clients they are not too bothered if 25% of these sites get penalised or dropped by Google, as long as they have a handful of successful clients for their testimonial then they are happy.

02Jul

Paranoid about Google tracking your search logs? Here are some tips to avoid detection Part 1.

Google recently announced that they use data from search logs to fight webspam

Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam).

Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.

Source: Google Blog Post via: Dave Naylor

In Dave Naylor’ post he pointed out some techniques to try and avoid detection these included

  1. Make sure you purge your cookie on closing your browse
  2. Install, foxy proxy or another firefox proxy plugin

The first part is quite easy you just need to go into the Firefox options – Privacy Tab – Then keep cookies until I close Firefox. Also I would recommend that your clear your private data when closing Firefox (this can include cookies as well). I typically clear my cache, cookies and authenticated sessions.

Dave also mentioned you can block Google altogether from Cookies but this prevents you using some of the Google services so I would not bother too much with it.

The next step is preventing Google from obtaining your IP freely. I am not a privacy expert and I am relatively new to the whole proxy / vpn game so the following information may be a little inaccurate or there are probably better services out there.

One of the services I have used over the past 12+ months is Xerobank. This is an encrypted virtual private network that is designed to completely hide your identity from the Internet. It basically works by you connecting to their network (via OpenVPN)and all the traffic is routed through them. Unlike proxies it actually routes all your data through their network rather than just your browser requests. It is not the cheapest option out there at $35 a month but I find it has excellent performance. I can enable the VPN and browse the Internet with little if any noticeable difference in speed. Apart from just using the OpenVPN software they also offer the xB Browser which is a free open-source anonymous web browser, that can be installed on your PC or run directly from a USB drive. I have not really used the xB Browser but if I remember correctly it is a modded version of Firefox that incorporates all the Xerobank privacy feature. I think it is also allows you to use Tor.

The next option is Tor (The onion router). This is typically implemented via plugins such as FoxyProxy and Torbutton. Tor seems to be quite a popular option, and I can see why it is free and very secure (depending on who’s viewpoint you believe). Tor basically operates by using each computer on the network to route encrypted traffic from the start node to the end node. The traffic takes a random route across the network and to any observer the traffic will appear to originate from the end node. I the problem I personally find with Tor is that it’s greatest strength is also is greatest weakness. The onion routers are operated by volunteers using their own bandwidth at their own cost and the performance of Tor is reliant on the routers your traffic is passed across. If any one of them routers is running very slowly then the performance will be greatly reduced. I am unsure how many routers the traffic passes across but it only takes one router to make browsing the net run very very very slow. Which it frequently does.

**Edit** I have just installed Tor and tried it out for the first time in ages. It is not exactly blazing fast but it appears to be running at an acceptable speed. FoxyProxy does warn that if the pages don’t load it will be the Tor network being slow/down so I expect it will still have issues.

Another option is to use a normal proxy server, these can be set up again with FoxyProxy, QuickProxy, SwitchProxy or you can input the settings directly into Firefox via Options – Advanced – Network – Connection Settings. There will be similar options for IE and Opera. If you are using Firefox I would recommend one of the plugins as it will allow you to switch the proxy on and off quickly and easily. Proxies work more or less the same as the above 2 techniques, though only your web traffic is routed through the proxy unlike the VPN option and it is normally only routed through one server/router unlike Tor.

There is a large number of proxies available to use, many/most of them being free. Proxies can provide different levels of anonymity with some being classed as transparent, anonymous, or high anonymity. Anonymous and High Anonymity should be the ones to chose if you are trying to hide your IP. As with Tor the large problem with Proxies is that the free ones are susceptible to run very slow, or go completely down. This is because they typically have a large volume of traffic passing through them while only having limited bandwidth. There are also paid for proxy services which should offer more reliable and faster performance however I have not tried any of these so can not recommend any specific ones.

There are some other issues that need you need to be aware of with all the above solutions. Your traffic is being routed via another machine so if you are based in the UK like myself then Google or whoever looks at your IP may perceived you as being located somewhere else. In the case of Xerobank I believe the IP address will be located in Germany. With Tor I think your IP could end up being located absolutely anywhere, and with the proxy the location is dependant on the proxy you choose. Then there is the issue of the actual security of the data. It is impossible to know if the proxy you are using is spying on your data themselves and for this reason I would only recommend using proxy services for normal browsing habits. Anything you log into I would recommend just going through your ISP. I believe Tor is a little safer as someone looking at the traffic does not actually know where the traffic originated from, however I would still not recommend logging onto your bank account while on Tor. Finally there is also the issue of Google tracking you via the proxy/vpn you are actually using. I am not 100% if Xerobank issues different IPs each time but if it is the same IP every time then there is only limited benefit to routing your traffic via the VPN. With a proxy I would recommend keeping a list of reliable proxies and using different ones on different days. FoxyProxy should allow you to use multiple proxies.

In my next post I will explain how to set Tor/Vidalia and setting up FoxyProxy

18Jun

9 Great Firefox Extensions

Ok sorry this post has been done a billion times before, though someone was asking me what extensions I have so I thought I’d do a quick post. Some of them are very obvious that I think most SEOs use.

  1. British English Dictionary – Not really a proper Extension I guess but my spelling is awful and I need all the help I can get and I am English and I hate American spelling.
  2. FlagFox – Not seen this one mentioned very much. It is a nice little tool showing the flag of the physical location of the server. It is useful for quickly identifying a problem when a client with a .com and US server moans about crap UK rankings.
  3. FoxMarks Synchronizer – Social bookmarking is ok for bookmarking some things, but I tend to bookmark all sorts of crap and I work on 3+ computers so having access to all my bookmarks on each computer is quite handy.
  4. GreaseMonkey – I don’t actually use this that much, I have some of Joost de Valk’s Scripts installed and that’s it. Still it is handy to have there. I just need to find some more useful scripts.
  5. NoScript Plus – This is more for security purposes though I find it quite useful for seeing what sites are un-usable without JavaScript, or what sites are using some naughty NoScripts. It is also useful to see just how many JavaScript applications/widgets etc people add to a site. It is not uncommon for me to have to enable 10+ URLs in NoScript for a website to work properly.
  6. SearchStatus – Nice little plugin that shows PageRank, Alexa and Compete info. I know they are all pretty useless but still, they are still nice to know. You can also use it to find incoming links etc
  7. SEO for Firefox – Everyone seems to love this one. I don’t personally use it that much as there too many things it displays. I tend to keep it down to Google Cache Date, Age, and Whois.
  8. SEOpen – I probably use this one the most. There is easy access to loads of functions via a right click. I am always using this to check backlinks, Whois, In Index, HTML Validation etc
  9. Web Developer – Don’t use it that often but it has loads of functions that are useful. Viewing Source, Validation, Outlining Headings etc