Wordpress4Dummies, wordpress blog ,SEO, Articles, Templates, Plugin, Skin, Download, pdf

eCommerce solution providers advertise optimised platforms and Clients demand search engine friendly sites; do both mean the same thing? Rarely. Client side eCommerce managers can confuse technical and content optimisation, leading to miss-matches between expectation and delivery. A technically optimised web platform does not necessarily mean that keyword planning and meta content optimisation have been carried out.

This blog provides a tick list of the core elements that you should specify in any RFP or ITT when scoping a new eCommerce platform. They act as a starting point for SEO dialogue, enabling you to push vendors on specific areas of optimisation expertise. Please note the list is not in any order of priority.

1. 301 redirects to preserve search engine rankings
2. Avoiding duplicate content and use of the canonical tag where relevant
3. Dynamically generate search engine friendly URLs for product and content pages e.g. www.yoursite.com/category-name/product-name instead ofwww.yoursite.com/productdetails.aspx?pid=037012&cid=144&language=en-GB
4. Ability to specify / edit URLs for individual pages via CMS – important for campaign landing pages and microsites
5. Support for linking of product pages and content pages to improve internal linking – should be delivered via the Catalogue Management tool or CMS
6. CSS absolute positioning for text links on product list pages to ensure the first link for each product is keyword rich
7. Dynamic XML sitemap that is submitted on a regular basis
8. HTML sitemap that is auto generated based on your catalogue and site structure
9. Support for rich snippets within platform – encoding of data in RDF format e.g. customer ratings & reviews
10. Custom 404 error page and automated report to flag error pages so your internal team can take action (you can achieve this through a separate monitoring tool such as Indiabook)
11. Robots.txt file is provided and you can access and edit when required
12. Core provision for meta content (title, description, keywords) that is auto generated when you load new products and content pages and can also be edited easily from within the CMS
13. Text links in navigation not images; if coders are using sIFR (flash replacements) push them for clarification on how this is being done to ensure it complies with accessibility standards
14. Keyword optimised H tags within html for headings – structure for use of H1 to H6 to provide a relevant hierarchy of content
15. Ensuring flash objects are search engine friendly
16. Ensuring pdf content is readable e.g. captions for images, document meta data
17. Graceful degradation – when elements like JavaScript are disabled in the browser, key content is still visible to search engine spiders/bots as well as to visitors
18. RSS feeds to support product and news announcements e.g. deal of the day
19. Page load time to meet agreed threshold but make sure you define how load speed is measured e.g. after all page elements have loaded – this factor will be included in Google’s algorithm in 2010
20. Social media content such as blogs are hosted on your primary website domain using an SEO friendly blog engine (e.g. Wordpress is better than Blogger) - blogs usually sit on a sub-domain such as blog.yoursite.com to ensure you benefit from the search engine juice.

It is essential that your site specific SEO requirements are accurately documented during your project scoping phase to ensure you evaluate the relative optimisation strengths of potential vendors.

Please note that this checklist does not attempt to tackle bespoke areas of website optimisation that relate to business specific commercial goals. You may have more detailed needs for elements such as Google Sitemap (e.g. separate news sitemap) that will need thorough mapping. My recommendation is to make sure you have the essentials covered and then work with an SEO specialist (in-house or outsourced) to overlay the detail.

I would welcome comments and recommendations based on your own experience. Is there anything you think missing from this list?

Drupal and Wordpress are two of the most popular, open source content management systems (CMS). Many websites and blogs run either Wordpress of Drupal chiefly because they are flexible platforms with large user support communities, and they’re free. I use both Drupal and Wordpress in my day-to-day activities: WordStream runs on Drupal, while my personal websites and blogs run on Wordpress. So I have a pretty good handle on the advantages and disadvantages of both CMS platforms.

In this post, I’m going to offer my opinions on Drupal VS Wordpress with respect to:

• Ease of use
• Custom templates and free themes
• SEO plugins or modules
• CMS performance

So let’s dive into the Drupal vs Wordpress debate and see which CMS emerges victorious.

Ease of Use

Out of the box, Wordpress has a cleaner, simpler user interface (UI) than Drupal. The Wordpress interface offers users fewer page formatting tools than Drupal, so it makes it pretty easy for the average Joe or Jane to dive right into blogging with little to no previous experience.

Drupal User Interface

Wordpress User Interface

Even though you’re given fewer formatting presets in Wordpress, you’re certainly not limited to those options. You can still expand the Wordpress UI to the “kitchen sink,” which features another row of formatting tools. But for the budding blogger, this extra row of tools is hidden so newbies aren’t overwhelmed initially. Now, I’m not saying that the Drupal user interface is complex by any means. It’s just that, relatively speaking, Drupal is not as user-friendly as Wordpress.

Note: One of my favorite Wordpress “kitchen sink” tools is the very basic “Paste as Plain Text,” which lets me copy content from a Word doc and strip out the Word formatting to paste cleanly into Wordpress.

Also, with respect to installation and modification, Wordpress is easier to set up and get running than Drupal and it’s easier to modify code on the backend, if you’re so inclined. If you don’t have background in PHP and/or programming, getting your Drupal system up and running effectively can be a slow slog. And the vast modular system can be complex for some.

Verdict: Wordpress offers better ease of use, with a more user-friendly UI. Also, it’s easier to install, especially for the novice.

Custom Templates and Free Themes

Both Drupal and Wordpress are supported by a ton of fantastic free themes and templates, from basic one-column skins to the more advanced, “newsy” themes with multiple dashboards for various content feeds. But which CMS offers the most choices for free themes and templates? Well, my gut told me that Wordpress had more overall theme support on the Web, but I wanted to run a quick test to see if my instincts were correct. So as is often the case, I turned to search for answers.

Here are the results from some quick and dirty Google searches for theme and template queries:

Template Search Results

• “Wordpress templates”: 275 million results
• “Drupal templates”: 1 million results

Free Theme Search Results

• “Free Wordpress themes”: 44 million results
• “Free Drupal themes”: 550K results

Verdict: Worpress is the winner here when it comes to the breadth, depth and popularity of free skins available for your site. Moral of the story, if you’re short on cash and looking for a free theme for your blog or website, you should have more options and better luck finding a CMS template that fits your style using Wordpress.

SEO Plugins or Modules

Both Drupal and Wordpress offer a product that’s very SEO-friendly right off-the-shelf. However, if you really want to enhance your SEO efforts, from writing “pretty” URLs to creating alternative page titles and title tags, you’ll need to install some dedicated plugins to soup-up your CMS.

So which community offers more SEO plugins or modules (Drupal calls them modules) for CMS users, Drupal or Wordpress? Once again, I went to the engines to run some queries and find a favorite.

SEO Plugin and Module Search Results

• Drupal SEO modules: 344K
• Wordpress SEO plugins: 7 million

BTW, if you’re looking for some extensive lists of SEO plugins for Wordpress and SEO modules for Drupal, here are two great resources:

• Drupal SEO Modules
• 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

Note: The Mashable list is awesome, but the writer did leave out one critical SEO plugin for Wordpress: Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. Point being, SEO without data analysis is basically useless.

Verdict: While search results aren’t a definitive gauge of the quality of plugins, Wordpress bests Drupal for the sheer number of community supported SEO plugin/module options.

CMS Performance

Now, I’m no developer, so I won’t embarrass myself and try to expound on backend PHP programming and SQL requests for Wordpress vs Drupal. But I can speak to the overarching capabilities of each CMS. Drupal is a far more robust CMS and better for running large sites that need more thrust and capacity to run dynamic forms, ecommerce shopping carts, and bolt on community functions like forums, chat, etc. Wordpress, however, is better suited for smaller sites or the casual blogger whose site doesn’t require a lot of horsepower and complex functionality.

For example, I host some of my modest affiliate sites and blogs on Wordpress while WordStream’s 1000+ pages of content, forms, info gathering tools and platform extensions needs to run on a powerful CMS like Drupal.

If you’re looking for more in-depth analysis of Drupal vs Wordpress for CMS performance, check out these articles:

• A Comparison of WordPress and Drupal
• Drupal vs. WordPress: Which is better for blogging?

Verdict: If you require a CMS powerhouse for your website and have a developer at your disposal or some inherent programming aptitude, then Drupal is the clear and only choice here. Wordpress simply can not handle full-featured sites effectively like Drupal can. However, if you’re a low-tech, one-man show with a smallish site or blog, go with Wordpress for greater simplicity.

My WordPress consulting side business has been getting a lot of attention lately. In fact, I’ve been struggling to keep up. (I do this, by the way, mainly on the weekends.) Over the last several projects, I’ve noticed a common trend of questions about WordPress and blogging. Here’s what everyone asks.

I already have a site. How can I add a WordPress blog to it?

Although it’s possible to customize a WordPress theme based on your existing site, you can buy a premium theme that probably looks better than your original site for about $100. You can then migrate the content from your original site to the WordPress blog, which will function as a micro-content management system.

When you install the blog, if you install it in your web’s root folder (not in a subdirectory), your blog will load as the default site — just remove the original site’s index file. Of course, no theme is perfect out of the box, so you’ll likely want to customize it a bit. But having one site for all your content will greatly simplify your life.

And some resources for free themes:

• Smashing Magazine (site search for WordPress themes)
• The WordPress Theme directory
• WordPress Hacks
• Weblog Tools Collection

I want to sell products from my site. How can I do that?

Paypal provides Buy Now or Add to Cart buttons that you can add to your site, along with the appropriate shopping cart code. If you sign up for a Paypal account, and then go to Merchant Services, you’ll see a wizard that will walk you through the creation of the buttons and code.

You can then lay out the buttons how you want them to appear on your site. I recently did this for a client here. In this example, I used div tags to push the Add to Cart buttons into a right column.

Paypal is free, but they charge 2% per transaction. You can also integrate shopping cart services that make Paypal easier to use. For example, E-junkie. Its interface is easier to manage and looks sharper. When users add a product to their cart, rather than being taken to a new page (as with Paypal), a pop-up window appears that allows users to remain on the same site. The downside is that E-junkie costs $5 per month to sell 5 products.

The following WordPress themes have e-commerce options built directly into them:

• iThemes ecommerce theme
• Market Theme

With the e-commerce shopping cart plugin, you can integrate a shopping cart with any theme you have. I find this plugin a little convoluted on the backend, but you can make it work.

What web host do you recommend?

There are scores of different web hosts, but some are more friendly than others with WordPress. I’ve seen hosts that require all kinds of permissions and privileges just to update your blog or install a plugin. It can be a pain. When you shop for web hosts, look for cPanel or auto-installers.

How do I adjust my site for search engine optimization (SEO)?

I recommend using the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin. With this plugin, you can configure two distinct titles for each of your posts: a title that Google sees, and a title that appears when your readers load the post. In SEO, three factors take precedence over anything else:

1. Backlinks to your site with the right keywords.
2. Keywords in your title and first paragraph.
3. Lots of content.

Don’t assume that just installing the plugin will put you at the top of Google. It’s a long, hard struggle to climb up the search results. Post a lot, use the right keywords, and create interesting content that invites others to link to you.

Can you recommend a theme for me?

I can no more recommend a theme for you than I can buy clothes for my wife. Look at the links I provided in my first section. Realize that every theme can be customized — font, widths, colors, layouts. If you find a theme that would be a good starting point, you can customize the rest. If you’re good with CSS, and you’re familiar with the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, you can tweak every aspect of your site.

When customizing your site, you don’t need to be a PHP programmer, but you do need to understand the WordPress template tags, which are written in PHP. Read the WordPress Codex to recognize these tags and what they do.

What plugins do you recommend?

You can see all the plugins I’m using here. I recommend starting with the basics: Akismet, Bad Behavior, Subscribe to Comments, All in One SEO, Google Analytics, and Feedburner.

Then gradually ramp up to Related Posts, Popularity Contest, WordPress Video Plugin, Flash Embed, Google Sitemap, WP Super Cache, Get Recent Comments, and Google Ajax Search.

You can view hundreds of plugins at the WordPress plugin directory. A plugin exists for almost everything you want to do. But be careful about adding too many plugins. In my experience, the more plugins you add, the slower WordPress moves on the backend.

Installing plugins is easier than it used to be. Previously, you had to download, unzip, and upload plugin files via FTP. Now you can install and update plugins directly from the admin panel in WordPress. So experiment with different plugins. Play around with them. It’s a fun thing to do on a Friday night while you’re watching movies.

Finally, although it sounds very snobby to say this, I’ll say it anyway. WordPress has a learning curve. If concepts like FTP, CSS, and RSS are totally unfamiliar to you, you’ll struggle a bit at first. But if you’re really cut out to use a self-hosted WordPress blog, you’ll figure it out. You’ll read the Codex, search the support forums, experiment and tinker until you get it to work right.

If you’re not this type, you might do better with a freely hosted WordPress blog at WordPress.com. With a WordPress.com blog, you won’t have to hassle with code, you can access free support when you need it, and you can focus on what you want to do: write.

If you ever want to upgrade from a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can export and import your content fairly easily using WordPress’ built-in tools.

WP e-Commerce plugin for Wordpress

Description: The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.
Note: This is by far and away the most complete and powerful Shopping Plugin you will find for Wordpress. The feature list goes on and on, have a look for yourself here: WP-Ecommerce Features.

Quick Shop plugin for Wordpress

Description: QuickShop supports any Wordpress that has the Sidebar Widgets installed, really. It adds a SideBar widget that shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items, not to mention a TinyMCE button to easily allow you to add products to your posts/pages.
Features: A TinyMCE button. This is practically a copy and changeover from the NextGen Gallery ; Full range of formatting for widget layout in Admin -> Options -> Quickshop ; Two widgets - one is Paypal, the other is set for your custom solution ; Now has both Paypal Subscription and Donation tags ; Ability to create different product options in a drop-down.

eShop plugin for Wordpress

Description: There is a fair few features for this powerful plugin, here are some: use Wordpress pages, or posts, to create products ; list multiple products, with add to cart form, on a single page ; products can have multiple options ; upload downloadable products ; basic Statistics ; download sales data ; 3 methods for calculating shipping charges, plus various zone settings via Country or US State… and a few more.

WP Live-Shopping plugin for Wordpress

Description: This widget enables you to display all relevant live shopping offers within your Wordpress blog in one single widget. You can add the widget to your sidebar and customize its appearance as you like inside the boundaries of LiveShoppingWidgets presentation options.

YAK Shopping Cart plugin for Wordpress

Description: YAK is a simple shopping cart plugin for WordPress, associating products with weblog entries — thus the post ID also becomes the product code.
An options screen is used to configure settings for the shopping cart. There are 3 pages in the WordPress Management screens; one for showing and fulfilling orders, another for product management, and basic sales reports.

Are PayPal plugin for Wordpress

Description: This plugin is used to monetize wordpress blog content using PayPal. It is designed to sell your knowledge.
Features: Post/Page can be set to contain hidden content ; Instead of the hidden text user is shown a message about the action he has to take to be able to see the content ; Content can be set as hidden for unregistered users and visible for registered ; Content can be set as hidden for unregistered-unpayed users and visible for registered-paid users ; Gogglebot can index hidden content so users can search for a hidden content but can not see it. Other search engines will see only visible content ; Administrator can grant users to access payed content ; All the features are configurable using administration screens ; Plugin uses PayPal IPN - Instant Payment Notification protocol so payment/content delivery process is fully automated.

Paypal Shortcodes plugin for Wordpress

Description: This plugin allow to insert Paypal buttons in your posts or pages, just using a shortcode. This plugin doesn’t have a management panel at this time, you will need to edit paypal-shortcodes.php and follow the comments.

EasyDonation plugin for Wordpress

Description: EasyDonation allows Wordpress users to easily embed a PayPal donation button with one tag.

WP Auctions plugin for Wordpress

Description: WP Auctions is a revolutionary plugin for WordPress which allows you to host auctions on your blog and to sell ANYTHING, completely fee-free!
You no longer need to worry about listing fees, seller fees, final value fees, gallery fees or any other type of fee for anything you want to sell online from this day on! Once you list your auctions, you can register your plugin with the WP Auctions Live page and generate some traffic for your website.
Features: Create and host as many auctions as you like ; Upload multiple images for each auction ; Sell items only on ‘Buy It Now’ basis ; Show 3rd party ads when there are no auctions *new ; Get payment via PayPal (PayPal account required) ; RSS feed for your auctions, and many more…

ArtPal plugin for Wordpress

Description: ArtPal is a free (GPL) Wordpress plugin, originally written for Artists, to seemlessly integrate PayPal with their Wordpress blogs so that they can sell their work online.
Features: Easy PayPal integration–all you need to supply is your PayPal email address ; Real-time sales updates–as soon as your item sells, ArtPal will disable it from being sold. You’ll never worry about your item selling twice ; Professionally supported–businesses mean business. Digital Sublimity provides commercial support, so you can be rest assured that your critical application will stay up and running when you need it.

Shopping Cart Lover

Categories:

Ecommerce ,

Properties:

2 columns , white , right sidebar , adsense ready , widget , fixed width ,

Description:

Premium Niche Girly Shopping wordpress theme.

License:

Free to use must keep footer intact AS IS

Report Theme
Version Compatability:
Last Updated: 2007
Views: 27

Ok, so I love WordPress, and I love Google; those I cannot deny. But eCommerce..? I find it a difficult platform to open my heart to.

I’ve played around in a fair few eCommerce “solutions” too, including X-Cart, Zen Cart, Cube Cart, Ubercart, Magento and more. But nothing really “solved” my problems. They were either too complicated, too painful or too expensive. And anyway, I love WordPress.

But regardless, if you’d said to me 4 weeks ago … “I need a eCommerce website built on a brand new domain, using WordPress, and I need it to rank number 1 on Google for my primary keywords within a month”, I’d say … “you’re a fool” and “do you have many THOUSANDS of dollars”..?

But who’s the fool now..? Enter www.aromata.com.au.

I’ve been building this website for a new online business, and I decided to use it as my own testing ground to combine some SEO techniques with some WordPress techniques with some custom coding techniques. The results, while making me look good, also makes me look stupid, because Aromata Online Shopping is already ranking number 1 on Google Australia for nearly every primary keyword (where Google have indexed the appropriate URL), and I said this was neigh impossible.

Let’s put this into perspective - this website that I’ve hand delivered to Aromata (which I now know is worth 10 times what I charged) has all the the following features …

• eCommerce (including a fancy ajax shopping cart)
• CMS (Content Management System)
• (obviously effective) SEO
• advanced security features
• no ongoing, expensive “website upate fees”

And that’s really only the beginning. I could list on and on about the pretty URLs, PayPal integration, Google sitemap, Google Analytics and Webmaster integration, but that list would never end. And this article is more about the result than the methods use to get there.

So … just how many number 1 Google rankings does this brand new website have..? Well considering that there’s only 20 products instore at the moment (the site’s not yet finished, and the cart not yet fully stocked), and I only cross-checked for 10 keywords, this list has an impressive strike rate.

1. handsaw keyring
2. hacksaw keyring
3. chakra locket
4. car diffuser refill
5. pliers keyring
6. cam keyring
7. throat locket
8. crown locket
9. drill keyring
10. saw keyring* (these 10 keywords are all ranking #1 on Google Australia as I write this review. We all know that Google rankings change with the breeze, so this won’t be the case for ever. We all also know that SEO is not a one off operation - so if you’re reading this Aromata, you have an incredible head start, so don’t deny your website the regular love it so rightly deserves).

This Google eCommerce WordPress success story would simply NOT BE POSSIBLE without the SIGNIFICANT contributions made by folk way smarter than me:

• WordPress eCommerce Theme: Market Theme - US$55
• WordPress SEO Advice: Joost de Valk - FREE
• WordPress SEO PlugIn: Semper Fi Web Design - FREE

nb. No doubt some SEO/WordPress Gurus will question/debate/refute points in this article. But hey, Aromata are happy, and why woudn’t they be. By using simple, sound & ethical website building practices, they’re laughing all the way Position #1. And is there any greater position for an eCommerce website than to be ranking #1 in Google for an exact match on your product keywords..?

ARTICLE FROM: http://www.dawnprofies.com/

Initially plan to Build an ecommerce store Website optimized for search engines friendliness with online Product shopping Cart

Number of things to be done to make a ecommerce website search engine friendly like using

(a)Unique title and meta tags
(b)Static store pages with file name as keywords avoid using query strings
(c)ALT tags with keywords 
(d)Fast Product Catalog Search
(e)H tags in product name
(f)Bread crumb, Text Header and footer navigation links
(g)Website sitemap
(h)Google sitemap
(i)Shopping Search Engine feeds
(j)Build links with quality websites
(k)Configuring froogle and add product pages in XMl or Text file
(l) Finally, Monitor site performance with efficient free SEO tools