Here are some useful tips from SEO gurus Macronimous. Here at Casualty of Design we use many resources to stay up on SEO tips and tricks and we’re not ashamed to admit it. We scour the web, bookstores and classes to get the best of the best so that we can deliver excellent service and great results! There are SEO experts and then there are Volusion SEO experts!

Off-the-self Shopping carts:

This drawback brings us to turn towards the second option: Choose a search engine friendly shopping cart system.

Finding a SEO-friendly shopping cart system is far easier said than done. There are many factors that have to be taken into account including the spider ability of the pages themselves, the customization capacity of the individual pages, the ease of adding products and changing the pages down the road, etc.

Electronic commerce over the Internet is predicted to grow at an ever-increasing rate over the next few years, with the on-line sales already heading towards several billion. Many companies are using this new sales channel, and a few retailers have now established major on-line sales sites. They have proved to be successful, particularly in technology, business-to-business

A typical e-commerce homepage has the company logo, some company specific information at the top, side bar navigation at the left, more prominent navigation in the middle of the page and featured products and sales on the right side of the page. To achieve the target of your online-business and ROI, search engine friendly Ecommerce sites should be developed.

The header, which is typically an include file on each page, contains the company logo and top bar navigation. The logo should be a link to your homepage, and contain an alt tag, and possibly a title attribute in the link tag. The remaining top navigation can be in neatly formatted text links. There is no real reason to make these top navigational links graphic buttons like many e-commerce sites currently do. Instead, use simple text links and format them with cascading style sheets to make them look nice. Another tip is to dynamically change the alternative text tag for the company logo for each page to represent the same text you have on the title of the page. This way, when you conduct a site: www.yourdomain.com lookup in Google, it will display all the pages of the site, and does not give you the annoying message of omitted results because they seemed to be duplicate. For usability and credibility reasons, always include the store’s phone number in a location that is clearly visible on each page. Henceforth, many sites include this information in the header file.

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For assistance with SEO marketing and Volusion template design contact Casualty of Design, your Volusion experts!

Casualty of Design
805-624-6460
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Maximize Product Page SEO for Volusion pt.2

1. Create “Alt Tags” your all your images Photo_AltText in Volusion.

Its important to cover all the bases within Volusion to maximize your search engine optimization profile. I’ve seen all to often people neglecting to fill in the section Photo_AltText field. The Photo_AltText field in Volusion translates to alt tags for search engines. Why are alt tags important you might be asking yourself?
The purpose of alt tags are to be an alternative text description for images. Alt tags displays before the image is loaded (if it’s loaded at all) in the major browsers. If for some reason your image doesn’t load the text will be displayed, in addition if the user hovers over the image the alt text will show to describe the image. Not only are alt tags very important for SEO and usability but they also help bring your website up to AMA (American Disabilities Act) standard. If a person who visits your website is sight impaired the alt tags are used by the computer to vocalize what is on the page.

2. Identify your top selling products.

Using the executive dashboard tools in the Volusion admin area you can identify the top selling categories and products. Once you have an idea of what your better selling products are you should take the initiative to promote them even further. There are methods you can use like special promotions, time limited coupons, a special newsletter and many other methods. One of the newest ideas Casualty of Design has been implementing for our Volusion customers is creating specialized product reviews or article pages that point back to the product in several ways within the store… this grabs the attention of search engines in a hurry!

3. Keeping track of results in Volusion and outside of Volusion.

Within Volusion there are a number of resources to track different parts of your store to assist you with maximizing SEO and sales. Firstly the REPORTS section in the admin area has a number of tools to use like ROI Tracking, Reporting, Affiliate Stats and much more. One of the other very useful tools in the Volusion admin area under the CUSTOMERS tab you can track and modify customer reviews. Customer reviews as we’ve mentioned before can be a great asset to your business and overall SEO performance.
Outside of Volusion you want to take advantage of the many resources available to you to track and monitor your stores progress. We obviously recommend Google Analytics and can create and implement the code for you if needed. There are other very useful tools we have found that over time will yield very helpful information like long-tail meta info, etc.

For assistance with SEO marketing and Volusion template design contact Casualty of Design, your Volusion experts!

Casualty of Design
805-624-6460
quote@casualtyofdesign.com

Maximize Product Page SEO for Volusion

So you want to know… “How can I maximize my SEO for my product pages in Volusion?” – It’s a good question that deserves an even better answer. The entire scope of SEO is ginormous and it gets even more complicated and complex when you tie that in with eCommerce, and yet more complicated when you’re working within Volusion. With all the many different facets of SEO we’ll take it one step at a time, today we’re going to talk about how to maximize you SEO for you product pages within Volusion. So to begin lets make this easier rather than harder we’ll take it step by step. Instead of blabbering on with formulas and complex solutions we’re going to break it down for you step by step, easy breezy 123!

1. Reduce the number of clicks to your products.

So you want to rank high among all the search engines right, well its time to whip your product pages into shape. If it takes several different clicks to get to any given product then we’ll want to rethink how these products are structured. Of course you know your products better than the next guy so you know your hot sellers from the cold ones. What is important here is that you get as many products as possible on one category page as possible without overcrowding, its a delicate balance. Basically the less 4,5,6,7,8 category pages there are to click to get to a product the better.

2. Create a unique “Page Title” in Volusion with “Meta Tag Title”.

It is extremely important that each and every one of your products have a unique page title, in Volusion the field is known as the “Meta Tag Title”. This field controls the text that appears on the Title Bar of a browser window.  It should be a short word or phrase that aptly titles the product.
The first thing that search engines look at in your Volusion store is the page title. The search engines are trying to determine what search terms your Volusion store should show up for in search results. How do they do this? They look at your “Meta Tag Title”. Of course they use a whole range of other factors to determine your search engine rankings, but first and foremost, it’s the page title a.k.a. “Meta Tag Title” they are examining.
Note:  In Volusion in order for the “Meta Tag Title”  field to be used, the other two Meta Tag fields (Meta Tag Description and Meta Tag Keywords) must be populated as well.

3. Create an SEO friendly product description.

It seems like these days a lot of eCommerce stores tend to use cookie cutter product descriptions that are short and sweet but don’t have any substance. If you want to keep you customer interested and more importantly informed we recommend taking the time to write informative professional product descriptions for ALL of your products. If you don’t have the time to research and write SEO friendly product descriptions then its time to hire a professional like Casualty of Design.
When it comes to actually writing the product descriptions you want to have done your research so that you can implement meta info into the descriptions. You’ll want to be careful not to make it sound like your a robot, keep it fresh and personable and above all informative.

4. Meta info in Volusion, long-tail and beyond.

In the Volusion administration area in each product page you’ll find that there is a section entitled “Search Engine Optimization”. You would be surprised how many people have Volusion stores and they don’t fill out this information. We’ve even heard people saying oh the meta info doesn’t matter, that’s old school nobody uses that anymore and search engines don’t look for that info. We have one question for those people… Are you crazy?
All of the fields in the search engine optimization are must be filled out and not with any old information, you have to take the time to research your products. Over time and using certain tools you can gather key “long-tail” meta info that will get your products to the top of the search results.

5. Display your product reviews in Volusion for great SEO.

So you want to know how a customer review can be good for the SEO of your store well here the truth of the matter. Basically you’ll find that your customers will come up with all kinds of new ways to describe your products, ways you’ve never thought of. The great thing about all this is, its like candy for search engines. Not only is this new fresh updated content but its unique and new not copied and pasted and found on other products within your website or others. One of the best things you can do for you store is continually update it with new fresh content and customers reviews are an awesome way to go about it.

For assistance with SEO marketing and Volusion template design contact Casualty of Design, your Volusion experts!

Casualty of Design
805-624-6460
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Stary tuned for part 2 of this post.

How to Get Volusion Customers to Buy More!

With 700 billion dollar bailouts, foreclosures on every block and a economic scene that doesn’t look like its going to get better anytime soon consumers are spending less and saving more. The time for Volusion store owners to start thinking differently has arrived.

So here we are, in the middle of this funky economy with no end in sight, what to do? Well being that people are starting to spend less and save more… you’re probably no exception. You might not have the money you anticipated to put into your marketing budget so the next best thing to do is work with what you’ve got. Volusion store owners will need to shift their marketing focus and put on their game faces. While this isn’t the time to go bananas with your marketing budget, you can still get back revenue losses by increasing the average size of orders that come through your Volusion store. This creative retention strategy leverages the loyalty of your existing customers to pad their shopping carts—and your bottom line.

Bundles of Joy

What do you have in your Volusion store that you can bundle or package together? Think about it this way if you are shopping on your website for a particular item, what would go good with it. It can be something as simple as giving the customer the option to add batteries to the product to increase the sell. Imagine what else you can do, for example your selling baby clothes. If one of your top selling items is a set of baby pajamas why not create an option to buy the pj’s alone or buy as a bundle. The bundle for example might come with the pj’s, a bedtime story book and a children’s night light. In the bundle show how much it would cost separately but if you buy it in the bundle you save 10%.

Related Items

I can’t tell you how many Volusion stores I see that don’t take full advantage of the features offered. One of the coolest features in the Volusion software is the related products feature. You can enables the display of Related Products on the “ProductDetails.asp” page. Related Products are any products in the same sub-category as the product being viewed. For more information on related products within Volusion you can follow this link to the Volusion manual.

Survey Your Customers

Another great idea is to follow up your Volusion sales with a follow up email. What I would recommend you do with the follow up email is add a note thanking the customer and offer them a coupon for lets say 10% if they come back within a month. This is also a good time to get some questioned answered if you have information you need from your customers. If you have a 5 to 10 question survey that you would like to present to your customers to gather important information e.g. how did you hear about us, etc. this is a perfect time to ask them to fill it out. A good way to sweeten the deal is tell them if they fill out the survey they’ll get and additional 5% off or perhaps free ground shipping on their next order.

In these tight times, it’s much easier for customers to justify a purchase if they feel like they’re saving. Whether you’re offering free shipping, was/now pricing, or a site-wide percentage discount, be sure to give prominent placement to all promotional offers. Increase the sense of urgency by assigning offers an expiration date and labeling them as “limited-time” events. Volume discounts (“buy two or more solar lights, save 20%”) are another great way to encourage the purchase of multiple units and boost order value.

Customer Service

Since we are in some tight times then you need to go the extra mile with customer service. If you have employees working for you taking phone calls, etc. then now would be a good time to pull a meeting together. In the meeting stress how important it is for everyone to go the extra mile for customers. If you don’t already have the FREE live chat software offered by Volusion then its time to add that to your website. Live chat is a great feature for your customers to ask questions or report problems or concerns. The other great thing about live chat is sometimes its much easier for customers to say what they want and it gives you more time to respond with a well thought out reply.

For assistance with SEO marketing and Volusion template design contact Casualty of Design, your Volusion experts!

Casualty of Design
805-624-6460
quote@casualtyofdesign.com

The Importance of the “Page Title” for Search Engine Optimization in Volusion

In the wonderful world of book writing and publishing, a title can make or break a book and more importantly it can make or break the author. Just think about this, when you visit Barnes & Nobles or Borders Books what gets you to pick up a given book? If you’re in the same group as 99% of us you would agree its the artwork on the cover and of course the title.

Page titles are just as important if not more so for websites. A well balanced system for creating innovative and unique page titles is key for the success of your Volusion stores SEO and page ranking. In order to come up with page titles that work you’ll need to set yourself apart from your competitors.

In order to get the ball rolling you should focus on your page title competition rather than web page competition. Google the mother of all search engines and by far the end all say all, puts a lot of attention into their algorithms on page titles.

In order to gauge where you and your Volusion store are at, it makes perfect sense to see what keywords and title information your competitors are using.

Checking Page Titles of Your Competition
Let’s look at a fictitious example. You’re a Volusion store owner who sells pet supplies and you’ve recently found out that the key phrase “doggy shirt” should be a good page title plus your store is selling them like crazy. Lets do a regular Google search to see what the results are for “doggy shirt”.

Here are the results:

The search result ended up with over 3 million results! I don’t care how good your SEO is with numbers like that you’ve got a better chance selling doggy shirts at the local farmers market.

What if you could refine your Volusion store to get better results? Well you can simply by taking advantage of page titles. Lets see what happens when we do a Google search but this time we’ll search for just page titles with “doggy shirt”. Most people don’t know it but there is a way to search Google to return just page title results, simply enter the following:

In Google enter, allintitle:your keyword phrase here

Here are the results after searching just for the page titles with “doggy shirt”

Wow, can you believe that all the way from 3 million results to 2800! What this means is, along with your carefully crafted product information, product description and page title you’re going to move right up in the search results. While nothing is guaranteed in the world of search engine optimization, your page has a much better chance of surpassing your competition and ranking well for the term “doggy shirt”. Since you already know this is a hot search term and this is one of your best selling products… why not get the most out of it?

Get Creative with Your Page Titles
Researching and writing creative page titles for your Volusion store that get results can be fun and satisfying. There is nothing like out ranking the next guy by using your wit and the resources available to you. To start your research on phrases and words you can use unique to your industry Casualty of Design suggest you use Google’s FREE keyword tool. Once you’ve found the words and or phrases that are useful to you then the fun begins. Now you can find a new way of sorting or placing the words together to come up with a powerful page title that gets results.

But back to the previous example of a pet supply shopping cart:

<title> Dog Accessories – Doggy Shirt </title>

Search engines will ignore the dash, so it will see dog accessories doggy shirt and also doggy shirt. In addition you still have more room for another key word or phrase. Search engines and search engine optimization for Volusion are continually evolving, you have to evolve too. Be creative, do your research and above all have fun with it!

For personalized assistance with Volusion search engine optimization contact Casualty of Design, we are the Volusion SEO experts!

Casualty of Design
805-624-6460
quote@casualtyofdesign.com