There are a number of reasons pre-built eCommerce platform sounds more appealing as compared to hiring a web developer. One of the major factors is ease of use and ability to work closely with a community of several other store owners on the World Wide Web. eCommerce is a vast with literally many hundreds of options available, these days. Some of these may be simple while others might feel confused and cluttered yet provide cheaper rates. It is not uncommon to encounter difficulties initially while picking your first eCommerce platform. Considering the following factors will help you make a wise choice: Size of Stock It is crucial to take size of stock into consideration. Pay the smallest amount of money for services required. Most businesses also provide alternative payment methods for certain products. Physical or Digital This is definitely the most important question to ask. It depends on what you wish to sell. Are you selling digital or physical goods? You must consider this because it makes all the difference with shipping costs and a lot more. Always look for platforms that best suits your product requirements. Hosted / Self-Hosted In case, you wish to modify the overall look of your online store (on a regular basis), simply look for platforms that allows you to get a self-hosted store version. Regardless of what you choose, most eCommerce platforms ensure the ability to modify store within a live environment. Payment Method PayPal is the easiest and most popular payment processor. In case, you’ve got issues with using the same, try making arrangements because not all eCommerce platforms will favour 3rd party payment processors. Payment Plan Make sure you choose the platform that best suits your budget. It is important to have a close look at opportunities to pay monthly amounts. This is better than relying on giving away a very small percentage of a sale to company hosting your platform. ECommerce Platforms – The Choices Once you are aware of various factors to consider while choosing eCommerce platforms, all that is left to do is to pick the best out of one of the most popular ones. You need to start experimenting with one of these and check what works best for you. Here are some of the best options to consider: WooCommerce eCommerce The platform is perfect for the truly adventurous who are willing to take on a varied levels of challenge. Although free of charge, the plugin comes at a cost of learning the set up process, various methods of designing themes for a brand new store and various techniques for developing singular plugins to boost user's newly built store. Try-Shopify Are you planning to start an online store for selling clothes, digital books, furniture or clothes? If yes, then there should be no waiting. Pick Shopify for its extensive themes and addons directories which are just perfect and specifically targeted to those types of stores. And the best part is that many thousands of customers doing exactly the same thing. One of the major benefits of using this platform is the community support offered in the event any issues occur during the setup and post-setup process. Volusion eCommerce Platform As a rule, each eCommerce platform ensures ample support for varied areas of goods to sell. So with this eCommerce platform, those planning to open a store for selling food items, bikes, or modern home furniture can benefit a lot. The styles offered here by default are ideal for these stores. The shopping cart software comes equipped with features for the following:
Volusion offers other additional services such as credit card processing, domain names, fraud protection and many more. Home to over fifty thousand store owners and holding an impressive track record, Volusion offers an independent shopping cart software for all of their ambitious customers. Some of their notable clients include big names such as Motorola and Disney.
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The SEO industry has undergone a major transformation in the past some years. This has forced online marketers to make dramatic changes to their strategies. Everyone wants to rank very high in Google for their competitive keywords. Unfortunately, with the rules and regulations by Google, it is not as easy. Black hat SEO is tougher to execute and gives ZERO results. With all of the new things happening around, “negative SEO”, a new type of SEO has emerged. What is Negative SEO? Negative SEO is a practice involving use of black hat and unethical techniques with an aim to sabotage rankings of a competitor in search engines. The attack may take the following forms:
Negative SEO – The Real Threat Negative SEO is definitely the real threat and most websites are dealing with this problem. The best thing is that preventing the threat easier than fixing it. So you must focus on protecting the site against any negative SEO: Simple Ways to Prevent Negative SEO When it comes to avoiding negative SEO due to accidental, self-sabotage, competitor induced, and many more, simply follow some of the best practices listed below. This will minimize risk of website being attacked by negative SEO: 1. Keep Tabs on Backlink Profiles Spare ample time to monitor backlink profile of your website. Competitor sabotage is undoubtedly an affordable and highly effective way to to take down any competing website. Hence, it is crucial to check links on a regular basis to make sure you are not the target. Unfortunately, there is no way or tactic Google can make out if a competitor or any other website owner pointed spam links to a specific site. The best thing to do is check out the following types of backlinks:
2. Report All Suspected Negative SEO Tactics Without Delay You can use Disavow by Google for reporting negative SEO attacks. It is an effective tool that allows website owners to report all suspicious activities on their site immediately. The process is not complex and can be undertaken by novices. Reporting links will help Google eliminate negative SEO tactics during the assessment of the website. 3. Strong DA Build very strong DA to make sure your website gains popularity online for the right reasons. Powerful DA reduces risk of a website to be penalised by Google in the event it is attacked by bad links all of a sudden. 4. Check Content Have a routine check of your content. Make sure it is not being duplicated anywhere else on the web. Free tool by copyscape.com will help you discover if your content is getting published anywhere else on the web. Following the above listed procedures will help you when your website comes under attack from negative SEO. Also remember that creating a great website containing great content and obtaining high DA and PageRank will work as the best line of defence in the first place. A well built website is always rewarded with great SEO. Hence, there’s really less attackers can do about that. When in the process of building online reputation, just keep close tabs on inbound links and make sure you know exactly where they come from. Good Luck! Online marketing strategies when developed and implemented successfully will help your website attract more target audience. The strategies listed below will help your website become an instant success online: 1. Personal Branding Branding provides you with the opportunity to attract more reliable, dynamic personal image to promote your brand. It also ensures more power to meet and network with others. Since it is free to do, you save money! 2. Online Presence in Social Media Networks Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and Snapchat will help you reach out to your target market in the best way possible. These emphasise on specific user categories and demographics. Maximum exposure for your business will happen by developing a very strong social media presence across all social media networks. 3. Content Marketing There are several types of content marketing. It all depends on the way you form your strategy and goals, you wish to achieve. Some of the best ways include ebooks, white papers, long-form content, etc. These attract signups, downloads, and conversions. You may even use an on-site blog to attract more inbound traffic to your website. Content can also be used for help and troubleshooting material. The process is highly beneficial and versatile. 4. Develop and Share More Number of Pictures, Video Content, and Graphics With a new feature introduced by Facebook allowing Instagram videos, the social media site was bombarded with over 5 million video uploads in just 24 hours! Hence, it is crucial that you understand the power of video and various other visual elements. Also learn various ways to harness it well. Use elements that provide you with maximum exposure for your business. Look for features such as Twitter’s Vine, Snapchat, and Instagram's all new micro-video sharing feature. These are helpful in gaining more usage. Pinterest is also a great option. Some of the other social networks focussing on visual content include Path, Mobli, Slideshare and Tumblr. 5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) No online marketing strategy is complete without including SEO. The process boosts visibility of website in search engines. This helps you to attract more traffic from people looking for the products or services you offer. Most part of organic search position ranking originates from your website's technical structure combined with your current content development strategy. Hence, SEO will not come as an investment in case, you are already creating new content on a regular basis. 6. Optimization of Conversion Most online marketing strategies aim at getting more people to your website. However, the story does not end here. You must also focus on what visitors would do as soon as they reach the site. Conversion optimization allows you to get maximum value from each visitor by maximizing rate of conversion. The efforts should go in the direction of including more opportunities for conversion. Also improve the ones already in hand. 7. Social Media Marketing The process helps you with building and nurturing a powerful social media audience. Most of your success with social media will depend on the content. It should be relevant and impressive enough to attract your audience. With a huge number of people using social media these days, it is likely that your brand gains greater visibility and greater reputation. It will also attract more inbound traffic with syndicated links. 8. Email Marketing This technique possesses extraordinary potential for ROI owing to its zero cost to execute. All you require doing is collecting subscribers from existing customer base. You can also use your social media followers and various other new opportunities. Once you do so, it is time to create a relevant simple yet very impressive content newsletter. This helps you to attract and then repeat traffic to your website. Another benefit is that it facilitates more engagement with the brand. Effective email marketing also keeps your brand in priority among the audience. SEO may not seem to be very important for a website. However, it is crucial to know how your business deals with it, but you don’t want to be the one responsible for this task. In fact, most people assume it to be a very difficult, complex, and time consuming task. Surprisingly, good performance oriented SEO doesn't need to be any of those things! It is easier to learn and integrate SEO in your website with the following steps. 1. Know Your Keywords This is the first and most important things to do. Remember that knowing the keywords your target market uses to locate the products/services you sell is the best and only way to make sales. The process demands a little research. Think what your potential customer or a visitor to your website will use to search for your products. Type the keywords that comes into your mind and see the websites that pop up. Also have a close look at the words used in the snippets. 2. Website Audit With an existing site, you can perform a site audit for SEO. Before getting started, you need to understand that Google is becoming more stringent with its penalties and rules with each day that passes. So it is important to ensure that your website adheres to rules for performing a detailed site audit. Moz Site Audit Checklist is a helpful site audit tool you can use in this respect. The detailed checklist will assess content, site architecture, accessibility, internal linking and a lot more. A website audit is time, energy and consuming, but very important to SEO. Ignoring it can lead to penalties for preexisting violations. 3. High Quality Content Create engaging valuable content keeping your target market in mind. This should include content that answers questions your buyers may have in mind and provides them information. Appropriate keywords should be used naturally. 4. Page Titles are Important It is important to create highly engaging and impressive titles for web pages. Make sure these are impressive enough to grab attention of the target market. If they don't, people will not read all about great content you have integrated into the site. Your page titles should answer the following questions of your visitors:
Once you have created a title that answers these questions, shorten it, and include some strong words. You may even make it a little fun. The keyword should be in the headline (the H1) and/or the subhead (the H2). 5. Page Review Developing of high quality content should not be the last thing you should do as a part of your SEO strategy. Once the content is ready, it's time for you to review everything written. While reviewing, look for some additional places where relevant keywords can be placed naturally. For instance, you may switch a sentence around so that the keyword fits well. Another way is to create a keyword phrase. This can be done via adding a word in front of a keyword. It is important to do at least 2-3 review passes. You will be amazed to know opportunities you had missed initially or even the second time! 6. Boost User Experience Remember that the best user experience is one of the most crucial elements for decent SEO rankings. Google has evolved to give the major focus on websites build specifically for delivering high quality user experiences across various platforms and devices. It is true that ranking rules applied traditionally still work, but optimization for search engine has emerged with main focus on the optimization process. In short, your web developers must develop a user friendly website with intuitive navigation. Also, each link must work and take visitors to the information they're looking for. |