The Ultimate Ecommerce Reference Guide
Part 1: Maximizing Your Store’s Usability
October 10th, 2008 by John Paul Narowski

Over the last decade, Ecommerce applications have evolved into a highly competitive art form - needing more than just a simple product listing to succeed. Thankfully, years of experimentation have allowed us to analyze and distinguish the successful Ecommerce techniques from the not-so-successful ones.

This article is the first of a three part series dedicated to helping you maximize return on your Ecommerce site. This post will focus on usability and how to provide your visitors with a smooth, positive shopping experience. Part 2 will focus on search engine optimization and traffic building techniques, and Part 3 will demonstrate how bringing all of these tips together can increase customer trust in your brand.

Site Navigation

Site navigation is key to a successful Ecommerce solution - you want your visitors to be able to find what they're looking for as quickly and easily as possible, otherwise they may lose interest and leave the site entirely. The following techniques will help to keep your visitors from getting lost in the product labyrinth.

Page Headings and Breadcrumb Navigation
Clearly identify where your visitors are on the site by providing easy to read headings and subheadings. Use navigation breadcrumbs to help your visitors visually understand how deep they are within the site structure. From a search engine standpoint it also provides additional keyword references, and allows search bots to more easily crawl your site.

Include Category Headings
Adding headings to your categories makes it easier to quickly scan through the menu without having to read each item.

Show the Search Bar Above the Fold
Having your search above the fold allows visitors to always have quick access to find what they want. If the search bar is on every page, your visitor can easily locate products, without having to browse to a separate dedicated search page. If you don’t have a search (and you have enough products to justify it), you should seriously consider adding one.

Browsing the Product Catalog

Like site navigation, the way in which you organize your product results will determine the ease with which users will be able to find what they want. A well structured product catalog can also lead to increased sales margins by pointing users toward other relevant alternatives or components.

Let Me Narrow Down My Results
Give your visitors multiple ways to narrow down their results. Ecommerce shoppers have a very short attention span, so it’s critical to provide a quick and direct path to the items they are looking for. This will help the users who know what they want find it quicker, and provide the users who don’t know what they want suggestions that might help them make a purchase.

Show All Products
Provide users with the option to see all products in a category. It can be frustrating to force users to page through results unnecessarily.

Product Recommendations
List products that are similar to the product being viewed. Frequently you will see product lists with headings similar to “Customers who bought this also purchased…”, “Recommended Products” etc. If you are a customer purchasing a microphone, it could be very helpful to know that your store also provides the cable, or a discounted bundle package if you purchase them together.

The Checkout Process

The checkout process may not seem like an important Ecommerce usability concern, but if a user begins to feel confused or overwhelmed with the process - they may leave the site out of frustration or fear that their private information isn't in the safest of hands.

Break it Up
This helps the user tackle one section at a time without being overwhelmed. Typically users must enter billing details, choose a shipping method and confirm their order. Having smaller steps ensures that there is less information to enter for each step.

Where am I in the Checkout Process?
Use well defined text and imagery to provide your visitors with a clear understanding of where they are, and how many steps remain before they complete their order.

Allow Shopping Cart to be Edited During Checkout
If a user is unable to make a change to their cart during checkout, you may risk shopping cart abandonment. If it is not clear how to change their order, the visitor might become frustrated and leave your site.

Don’t Wait Until the End to Calculate the Shipping Cost
Some stores wait until the end of the order to show you the shipping cost. Customers want to know what they are committing to before embarking on a lengthy checkout process. Trust and transparency throughout the checkout is critical to ensuring the order is completed.

A Few User Friendly Ecommerce Examples

Amazon.com

Amazon utilizes many of the above tactics to ensure a productive shopping experience. With their sophisticated product filtering and recommendation engine, you almost never have to leave the site to research a product. Once you are ready to purchase, the checkout process is simple and intuitive. It's no surprise that they are one of most popular internet retailers.


Shoes.com

Shoes.com provides an enjoyable and interactive shopping experience. A drop down navigation menu provides easy one click access to the stores categories. While browsing through products, you are provided many options to refine your results further. The product detail page is clean, and multiple perspectives of the product are available. The only downside we found was that the checkout process didn't identify how many steps were involved.


AE.com

Shopping for clothing online can be a frustrating and ineffective process. With AE.com, we were able to easily locating clothing that matched both our style and size preference. On the product details page, we were able to zoom into the product image to see fabric detail. AE often provided images of alternate colors to match your preference. The checkout process was clear, with progress indicated at the top of each page. I would certainly shop for clothing with them again!

Conclusion

While often overlooked, Ecommerce usability can certainly make or break a sale. With so many stores to choose from, the visitor has a very low tolerance for clunky navigation, or a confusing checkout process. The longer you keep your visitors comfortably browsing your store, the more likely they are to place an order.

In the next installment of our Ultimate Ecommerce Guide, we'll show you several techniques for optimizing search engine results and increasing traffic to your site. Check back soon for Part 2, or subscribe to our RSS Feed to receive instant updates.



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Getting Started With DoFollow Link Building
September 25th, 2008 by John Paul Narowski

Recently, there's been a movement amongst bloggers to remove the NoFollow tags from comments posted on their blogs (What is NoFollow?). Removing NoFollow tags allows link juice from the URL included in your comment to be passed on to your site, helping it move up in rankings.

This post will help explain how to locate these DoFollow blogs and how to contribute a meaningful and successful comment. Doing this properly can land you high quality backlinks, while contributing to quality of the conversations across the web.

How To Find DoFollow Blogs

Search Google – While there are a number of resources available to help you find DoFollow Blogs, we've found that conducting our own specific keyword searches usually render most accurate results. Searching allows you to seek out blogs directly relevant to your interests or targeted keywords. The following query examples assume you are searching Google for blogs related to the keyword design.
Search Examples

Text Search

design "Remember my personal information" "Notify me of follow-up comments"

The blogs that contain the above text in quotes typically have DoFollow enabled by default.

design "commentluv"

This returns blogs that have the commentluv wordpress extension installed. This extension removes the NoFollow attribute from the comments to encourage visitors to comment.

Image Search

“U Comment I Follow”

This searches blogs with the U Comment I Follow image. Many blogs that have joined the DoFollow movement show this image to show their support.

ifollowblue.gif, ifollowgreen.gif, ifollowltgreen.gif, ifollowpink.gif, ifollowpurple.gif, ifolloworange.gif, ifollowwhite.gif, ifollowmagenta.gif

As a variation, try keyword + any one of the above filenames.

How to Tell if a Blog is DoFollow

Inspect the HTML – You can either view the source of the blog page, or use a tool like firebug to view inspect the url within the comments.

Install a FireFox Extension

Search Status – This extension shows you a Google PageRank in the status bar. I also allows highlights links that have the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

NoDoFollow – A simple extension that highlights the links on a page that contain the NoFollow attribute.

How to Make an Impact

  • Find DoFollow Blogs that Interest You
    It is very important that you read and understand the post in order to contribute a meaningful comment. If you are interested in the post you are more likely to have something relevant to add to the conversation.
  • READ THE POST!
    For the love of GOD at least have the decency to read and comprehend what you are commenting about. All to often SEO’ers think they can get away with “Nice Post” or “Good Job” and leech the link juice from the page. Bloggers are not stupid and can spot this activity a million miles away.
  • Use Your Real Name or an Alias
    Doesn’t it just feel wrong when you are writing a meaningful comment, and then leave your name as “Canadian Medical Supplies”? I don’t know anyone named Canadian Medical Supplies, but if you do, let me know and I will repeal my rant. Blogging is about conversations between people, not a black hat tool to dump your targeted keywords into. If you comment with a name or alias, you will still get natural link juice to your targeted url.
  • Be the First to Comment
    Subscribe to RSS feeds of the blogs that you would like to contribute to. Once you receive notification that a new post has been added, try to be the first to leave a comment. You will not only receive your link juice, but you will get natural click throughs from the visitors reading your insightful comment. (Unless your comment is “Wow that was great. I disagree with some points, but others I agree with.”)
  • Build a Relationship
    Most bloggers that allow external links are very picky about the comments they accept. If you are serious about getting a link from a particular blog, then spend some time reading and commenting on other posts within the blog. Authors appreciate your feedback, and you just might form a longer lasting relationship out of it as well.

Conclusion

While these tactics don't work all the time, they are at least a step in the right direction. I hope you use this post to enhance the quality of commenting and conversations across the web - the last thing the blogosphere needs is an army of black hat cronies spamming every blog they can find. Hopefully these tips will add a little life to the drudgery of link building by allowing you to actually learn about the posts you comment on. Below are a few additional DoFollow resources, so happy DoFollow hunting!

List of 100 DoFollow Forums
DoFollow Blog Directory
DoFollow Search Engine
List of DoFollow Sites
250+ DoFollow Blogs
The Ultimate DoFollow Blog List

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Establishing Your Brand’s Legacy
August 27th, 2008 by Ian Wilson

When it’s your job to promote and nurture the brands of your clients, developing and promoting your own brand can often be an even tougher job. As people, we tend to define ourselves and those around us by what we do.  It’s only natural, but when you begin to define your brand around what you do rather than who you are, you will only end up selling yourself short.

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Change Is In The Air
August 15th, 2008 by Julie Cameron

Well, it’s been one very busy summer here, at MetaSpring! Unfortunately, we were forced to go on a bit of a blogging hiatus in order to keep up with everything, but we’re back now and we’re doing better than ever! These last few months have given us the opportunity to re-examine our goals as a company and re-assess the tools and methodologies that we employ - resulting in some very exciting changes for MetaSpring.

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Will You Follow the DoFollow Movement?
March 18th, 2008 by John Paul Narowski

What is Nofollow, Dofollow?

Nofollow is an attribute that can be added to a hyperlink preventing Google from passing link credit to that site rel=”nofollow”. Link credit is one of the major factors Google considers when determining how authoritative your site is. You will these tags on to blog comments, and on sites like Wikipedia. It was created to fight dirty spammers, spam bots, and anyone trying to get a free link without adding any value to the site.

Dofollow is the practice of removing the nofollow tag from your links. In certain circles it is becoming the “in thing” to spread the link love.

Example badge from U Comment I Follow wordpress plugin

Pros

Share the Link Love

If a webmaster posts a legitimate comment, then does it really hurt to share the link love? Everyone wants to build their link popularity, but if it can be done by helping to contribute to other’s thoughts and ideas then it seems natural.

Reward people for taking the time to write quality comments

You don’t need to accept every comment. One that is not legit usually screams spam.

Discount Canadian Pharmacy Says:
“Your post is good. I know many peoples who also have this problem”

It isn’t hard to filter out the blatant spam. If you get hundreds of comments to your blog, then you might want to consider the Link Love Plugin, which allows you to specify the number of comments required before the visitor gets a link credit.

If you are interested in dofollow plugins Andy Beard has The Ultimate List Here. He has become a dofollow evangelist, with a great amount of information about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the dofollow movement

Encourage cross linking across sites

Allowing link credit naturally encourages cross linking amongst similar sites. You say legitimate comments should come from the heart right? As an SEO, much of my time is spent link building as opposed to leisure blog reading. If I can provide a meaningful comment to a blog and gain a backlink as a result, I will read and contribute everywhere that I can.

Note: You have to actually READ the article, and write a comment that isn’t limited to “Nice”, or “Cool…”. You still have to read articles and posts that interest you, so you can provide a meaningful contribution.

Cons

May cause comments to be less genuine

If you advertise your dofollow blog, chances are you are going to get more spam. This is just a natural result of sticking your bleeding finger into an ocean of sharks. You may start to get comments from people who just breeze over the article, and post a comment. This amigos, is called manual comment spam.

Not to say that these comments aren’t genuine, but you just have to be a little more careful while accepting comments.

Too many external links

If you have a lot of comments for a particular post, you might end up with hundreds of external links. This has been known to dilute the sites page rank, and cause it to loose favor with Google.

Vandelay experienced a direct decrease in traffic after removing the nofollow link. Read the post here.

Bad Neighborhood

You might have people who write genuine comments, but link to a bad neighborhood… EG link farms, spam sites etc. If your site passes link credit, then you might get penalized.

Conclusion

I am all for giving back to contributing readers, but it requires a careful watch. Removing the nofollow attribute might be something to consider if you have time to ensure the commenting doesn’t get out of hand. Plugins like the Link Love plugin, allow you to give something back, while still maintaining the integrity of both your posts and your posts page rank.

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