Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

Does your website rely on cookies? Many shopping carts (Magento etc…) need cookies activated to work properly, however they are disabled on the latest Iphone.

Similar to both SEOmoz and Majestic SEO tools, here is a new tool I have stumbled across which seems to have tons of data coming out of it.

Want a discount on a listing in a directory? Visit this site where they have listed discounts codes for directories including BOTW and Ezilion.

This article answers all the common mishaps with duplicate content – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

I’ve always thought that not enough attention was paid to a well written meta description, those in PPC go into detail about their ad descriptions to make sure they have the best possible chance of a click through and always thought SEO’s should do this on meta descriptions, maybe this tool will help…

Finally, I’m still getting to grips with the new Google Analytics interface but seems you could add some pretty detailed dashboards.

Yahoo Site Explorer is no more! This is the tool which all SEO’s grew up using and was an excellent tool for those involved in link building. However, in recent years it has fell by the wayside with the introduction of tools such as Majestic SEO and SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer tool.

When I started in SEO 5 years ago I would have been lost doing off-page optimisation without Yahoo Site Explorer, even so much that I still recently recommend client’s to this tool if they want a basic view of the link profile of a website. Client’s don’t want to be confused with MozRank, MozTrust etc….

Anyway, great tool back in the day and considering I’ve not used it in over a year I won’t miss it in the immediate future.

There always seems to be a lot of content online based based around “a 100 ways to…”, especially in regards to SEO and online marketing. Think I have lost count of the number of times I have read something like, “101 ways to increase traffic to your site” or “100 ways to increase your Twitter followers” blah blah blah….. All the same crap with very few actionable and good points.

However, just seen this popup on my Google Reader from the SEOmoz blog, 99 ways to Build Links, it has the usual amount of crap points but I like the way it is split into sections and I will definitely be giving a read to “Hold Competitions Section” when I give away some goodies on Facebook & Twitter over Xmas and New Year…

Just a quick blog post about a few tools and products that are out there that would be very useful for most webmasters. Having not blogged for a while (holiday in Thailand & Bali) you may want to install or use a few of these tools or products on your website:

The first product is Codeguard. This is basically an easy method to backup your website, protects against malware and also offers version support for your website. There is a free version but the paid version is just $10 a month (£6.20 with current exchange rates). I’m definitely going to try it out! The make or break for me is if it backs up databases aswell!

Another product which I seen on Kirsty’s blog is Cloud Flare which promises to speed up the delivery of the pages of your website to your visitors and also protect against attackers. Cloud Flare works as a CDN (content delivery network) and if I can see if any problems using with a secure site (https) then I’ll definitely give it a whirl and report back on the progress.

Another important development from the search engines is that they have got together and decided to make use of a standard mark up language for rich snippets. It is called Schema and you can find out more details on the use with this article from SEOmoz.

Been using a lot of website speed analysis tools recently and really like this tool, which comes complete with optimisation checklist.

If anyone has used any of the products or tools mentioned, then comment with feedback which will help everyone else.

I have recently had a play around with the Magento multi store functionality and was really impressed. Plenty of e-commerce websites have multiple stores (often with the same catalogue) so they may target their pages at different search terms or have one at the high end of the price scale and use another as a stack them high and sell them cheap operation.

The Magento multi store functionality takes away a lot of the pain as the multi store runs from one backend, can share the product database and gives the owner the benefits of having 2 stores (more traffic, double brand etc…) whilst only having the admin of only one store.

Obviously there are things that the merchant needs to be careful of such as duplicate content, making sure category pages and product pages are aimed at different search terms then the other site, but overall I would recommend any merchants that run two sites independently outside of Magento, to consider switching over to Magento multi store setup, makes life easier!

It seems the Magento Multi Store functionality is working well for Super Size Guys.

Sage Pay is a payment processor (basically a company that take payments on an ecommerce website) which have approximately 30% of the payment processor market, by far the biggest player. However, their large market share is not due to Sage, they bought out Protx. Protx build a great reputation for reliability, secure systems and good customer service.

However, it seems the good work is being undone by Sage Pay as they have had numerous periods of live transactions being down, meaning if an ecommerce website relies on one payment method then they are screwed and none of their customers can buy anything on their website.

Sage Pay was down this morning resulting in numerous failed transactions, this is the 3rd period of being down since early December 2010. I’m now looking into other possibilities for a payment processor.

Have you been let down by SagePay? Join the Facebook Group!

Other alternatives are:

• Secure Trading
• PayPoint
• Iridium Corporation
• Total Web Solutions

Any other payment processor providers I have missed out? Any other Sage Pay customers with their experiences, leave a comment!

Never been that big on using templates for a website. Most the templates are quite poor visually and never seemed appropiate for a professional website. Always been a fan of using a pro graphic designer.

However been introduced to Studiopress templates for the WordPress CMS and I have to say I have been very impressed by them! The great thing about Studiopress is that it comes with a framework which makes the on-page SEO super easy. Quickly knocked together an example laser eye surgery website, not bad for a template, but would probably still have to use a graphic designer for parts of the design (custom logo etc…)

Would love to see some great templates produced for Magento!

Just seen a great article on SEOmoz about some SEO points that you should check on your ecommerce website.  Seen some awful ecommerce packages from an SEO perspective out of the box and even with large open source shopping carts like Magento, you will need the use of extensions for some parts.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tips-and-musthaves-for-your-ecommerce-platform

When I venture onto my Google reader to catch up on the industry gossip, developments (seo, ppc, affiliates etc…) I like to pay particular attention to the latest changes in SEO and although the main parts of SEO have not changed that much in recent years (onpage + links = good rankings). I keep seeing rumours that Google will soon take action against those keywords domains which rank so highly.

In terms of taking action that probably means devaluing keyword domains a bit. Whilst searching for products over Xmas there were tons of keyword domains that in my opinion were clogging up the search results. Basically doing poorly constructed best buy tables and passing you onto the merchant. Poorly constructed because the affiliate probably has tons of similar sites and rather than make one great resource puts their effort into tons of little sites which add little value to the search user.

Should be interesting times….