Shopping Carts

Aarghh! Decisions, decisions. Trying to advise clients on which shopping cart to use is like telling them what car to buy. Unless you know how much money they're willing to spend and what they expect from their cart (or car), you're shooting in the dark.

A few things to consider:

1. Will it work on your web host's server?

2. Does it offer the features you absolutely must have?

3. Does support cost money after the initial period? How much?

4. Does the company have a good track record, i.e. have they been in business for at least 2 years?

5. How often do they release updates? You don't want to be paying your webmaster to install updates once a week.

6. Are their updates usually security related, bug fixes or feature enhancements?

7. What's their upgrade policy?

8. How easy is it to transfer your site to a different web host if you use the cart?

The list goes on and so will I, but those are just a few of the things you need to think about.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you haven't started taking advantage of the Google Webmaster Tools, you should. Once you authenticate your site, you'll find lots of good information about how often Google crawls your site and what pages it has problems with, etc.

The Google Group for webmasters (about search engine ranking) is also good, but use it with caution. There are a lot of people out there who know just enough to be dangerous. Or they give anecdotal evidence of how to fix something, instead of ...hmm.. not sure what word I'm looking for... maybe factual or technical explanations of why something is wrong and how it should be fixed.

Kind of like saying, "If your foot hurts, you should do what I did to make my foot stop hurting..." As opposed to saying, "Here are the various reasons a foot might hurt and how to make the hurting stop for each reason."

Also, just because someone posting a message in a Google Group includes a link in their posting, doesn't mean you can safely click the link. There are bad people everywhere who use any means possible to get you to their site. Be cautious.

But I digress...

Visit the Google Webmaster Tools and take advantage.

And remember, content is king. Google loves real words on a page. Actual, useful information.

SEO vs. Goliath

Search engine optimization (SEO) is more art than science I think. I started learning about it before I even built my first website - because I knew the primary goal of the site was to get found. Only then could the primary goal of the business - to sell things - be accomplished.

For ten years that site has ranked in the top 5 for at least 20 terms that we considered important. The site went through numerous design changes, but we always stayed true to what search engines supposedly consider important, i.e. text links, good meta titles, and descriptive content about the products on each page.

This spring we learned that doing the right thing doesn't mean diddly squat if it doesn't work. For no reason that we can determine, Google suddenly started picking up the website's alias instead of its primary domain name.

Now, mind you, there was no duplicate site. In 2002, a magazine featuring one of the products gave the wrong URL, so we quickly bought that URL (very similar to the correct URL) and pointed it to our website.

Why, in March, Google started indexing the aliased site we don't know. But it seems that they dumped the "real" domain name from their database and started using the aliased one. And since almost no other websites link to the aliased domain, it doesn't have a good Popularity Ranking and, thus, those pages don't rank well.

Visitors from Google dropped half in March as compared to the previous 3 months. They dropped almost half again in April and have stayed at 25% of what's normal. Since the site sells high-end products, it takes a lot of visitors to generate sales.

We've done everything recommended by various experts to try to rectify the situation, but the end result is that Google has all the power and we have to wait until their bots crawl every page (which they're slowly doing finally) and our site should return to where it was in the next month or three.

The moral of the story is not that you shouldn't have aliases for your domain. Sometimes, as in this case, there is a valid reason for having more than one name for a website.

The moral is that no matter how hard you work at something, you can't always control the outcome. And businesses should be prepared for what, in this case, turned out to be a real "business interruption." Unfortunately, even if the company had business interruption insurance, I doubt there's a policy that would have covered this situation. Imagine trying to prove to an insurance company that the webmaster didn't do something to the site - however inadvertently - that caused the drop in ranking or exclusion from the database.

So, save your money for the hard times.