To avoid creating an unpleasant reading experience for your users, follow these simple do’s and don’ts:

Do:

• Use short concise paragraphs
• Use subheads
• Use bulleted lists
• Highlight your keywords
• Talk about benefits and end results to make the sale
• State your most important information in the first couple of paragraphs
• Keep it simple, and
• Avoid unnecessary jargon!

Don’t:

• Write copy that is long winded and laborious to read
• Use long sentences and large paragraphs creating a daunting wall of copy
• Write copy that will be out of date in a month – unless its for a date stamped blog
• Use sales language
• Use PDF’s for online presentation – users will print documents that are too long to easily read online.
• Make your copy all about you – your reader should always be the focus
• Forget who your target audience is

Searching ‘build an online shop‘ puts http://www.iwebshop.co.uk on the first page, for ‘build an online store‘ 2nd page out of 56million results.

Good results

Continuation of my 1st google keyword phrase test: Part 1 is here: Build an online shop

Its been 2 days and in that time i have made more than 20 backlinks to my website using the words ‘Build an online store’. I have yet to check how many have appeared, I will do that later today.

Search google for “build an online shop” shows my posts as follows (include quote marks):

My blog at ukbusinessforums appears on page 1 (6th on google).

My digg post appears on page 2 on google

iwebshop.co.uk appears on page 3 on google

Now, granted do people actually search using the quotation marks? Some do no doubt but most likely the majority dont. But its a good start.

So, I will continue the test to improve the above results but also to get rankings without quotes. Tonight ill try and double the number of backlinks.

UPDATE

iwebshop.co.uk ranked page 1 (majority 1 to 5 placed) for:

build an online shop with zen cart
build an online shop with oscommerce
build an online shop with cubecart
build an online shop with magento

even without the word ‘with’ still page 1:

build an online shop zen cart
build an online shop oscommerce
build an online shop cubecart
build an online shop magento

Lets take out the ‘an’ and still page 1:

build online shop zen cart
build online shop oscommerce
build online shop cubecart
build online shop magento (actually placed #1 out of 273k)

Now, obviously the word ’shop’ is an english term, the americans use ’store’. So for now to accomodate that I will add the keyphrase ‘build an online store’ to the title/keywords/description – I will do more about this later, but it is a good start.

Zen Cart Zen cart is my favourite shopping cart. The benefits to it make it perfect for an online shop. Here is a list of features, which is in no ways complete but gives you a good idea of how customisable the cart is. Benefits of using Zen Cart: 1. Highly Customisable The beaty of zen cart is that is has many customisable options, mainly done through the shop admin panel. Just about everything I have ever been asked to change a shop is covered in the shop admin. From removing certain text and attributes to addons easily implemented to enhance the site.

2. Numerous Templates

Installing a template is very easy, its just a question of uploading files. Then activating the template in the shop admin panel. There is many sites out there offering free and cheap templates. Templates are also very easy to customise, so even if the one you like ‘isnt perfect’ it can be adjusted easily to your taste.

3. Addons Galore

Over at the zen cart forums and Download Section is a whole host of addons you can use for zen cart. They are simple to implement, usually requiring no or very few file edits and by using the shop admin you can run an sql file to make any database changes to accomodate the addon. Obviously you have to ensure that a backup is taken before installing a new addon, but in the main its a pretty easy installation. Also make sure the addon is compatible with your version. You will find the developers will update an addon frequently, in line with new versions of zen cart.

4. Helpful community Forums

Over at zen cart is their community forums, heaving with developers and shop owners discussing any issues. Great place to get the answers for any tweaks you want to make but just dont know how to do it.

5. Compatible with lots of payment services

You will find that zen cart is compatible with most payment systems and should have no problems finding an addon to connect your shop to the appropriate payment system. Includes paypal, nocheck, Protx…the list goes on.

6. Search engine Friendly cart

In my experience I have found zen cart excellent for making sure my shopping sites appear in search engines such as Google. Very easy for google to deep index your site. There is even a module to enhance your search engine friendliness, giving you the ability to have SEO friendly URLS. Instead of having a url such as http://iwebshop.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=19 the SEO module will show the URL as http://iwebshop.co.uk/ecommerce-shops-c-19.html

Downside to using Zen Cart

To be perfectly honest I cant think of many reasons why you shouldnt use zen cart. Ive heard some people mention that they ‘dont like the look of zen cart’. But what they fail to see is that the cart is highly customisable and its up to the web designer to make it look good.

iwebshop specialises in setting up online shops. Whether you already have a high street shop or an ebay shop and want to venture into the online world of ecommerce then we can offer you the services to achieve just that.

I am currently working on my internet venture : iwebshop.co.uk. After spending a few years using the various free cart software I decided to take that knowledge and actually make a career out of it. The site will be properly launched on the 1st November so I am still putting in content / products etc. Alot of it at the moment is placeholder things.

My favourite cart software is Zencart. Ive found it ticks all the right boxes when your looking for shopping cart software. It is ideal for search engine optimisation, and have felt this is one of my strongest areas in web site development.

I have started to implement the tools needed to make my website noticed and ranked well with search engines such as google. Infact, I make the point of optimising my sites for google specifically and then adjust when required for other search engines (yahoo/msn (now live search)).

I decided to start some tests, to attempt to find the best ways of getting your site to the top of the search engines.

Day 1 (28th Sept 08):

Keyword phrase: Build an online shop

link to my site would then be : <a href=”http://iwebshop.co.uk”>Build an online shop</a>

The test is to get lots of link backs to my site using that keyword and see what effect it has with google. i have set a target of getting 20 links to my site per day. I have made sure my index page has the words ‘build an online shop’ in the title and also description/keywords and content of the page.

Google is visiting my site (deep searching) every day, and my domain was only registered on the 21st August 2008. I also submit my sitemap every few days, depending on how much it has changed.

I trawled the internet for ecommerce type blogs and added a comment to them, a suitable comment and not just some spam, something worth while posting and reading.

Alot of the blogs were ‘moderation comments’ so in the end, i posted 12 links that appeared immediatly and will be about 20 links that need moderator approval.

Part 2 is here: Build an online shop