A few hours ago one of my zencart e-commerce websites was hacked and a new re-directing virus code was added to the website. After a bit of research I found out that this little redirecting malicious code has been causing problems on numerous other websites around the internet, mainly e-commerce websites.

So I thought I would do a post to help out other webmasters that might be dealing with this little piece of annoying code. Read more

I am a business consultant for e-commerce websites for over 7 years now. I can tell you with certainty that obtaining traffic to your website is easy to do, the hard part is converting that traffic into customers and clients. I would like to share some unique tips that can improve your website's conversion rate.

1. This first tip is often overlooked and goes unnoticed. The tip is quite simple. If you do not offer any discount codes or coupon codes or vouchers do not display the box for possible customers to input these codes in your cart or checkout area.

   I have seen time and time again, customers, leaving the checkout area to go surf the Internet for coupon codes. Some of the more aggressive shoppers have even contacted the website owner for coupon codes, going as far as to cancel their order and wait until there are coupon codes available before purchasing. Read more

This is a list of things to do to cover your own professional interests whilst ensuring smooth business operation with customers. I wish someone had given me these bullet points when I was starting out, it would have saved me a lot of time, frustration and money.

1. Have a detailed contract, with all the work outlined in a bullet point format and make sure it's agreed upon by both parties and signed and dated.

2. In the contract between the yourself and the customer, always put a note that copyrights will be transferred upon full payment of services rendered.

3. Always take a deposit – 50% is a good figure, it commits the client to finishing the job with you and working through any fixes required rather than just bailing on you because they change their mind, and trust me…they can! When you have spent countless hours working on a project only to find they change their mind continuously till your quality race horse has been turned into a camel and then they decide they won’t go ahead with the project it is exasperating at best, and money and time lost at worst – not to mention the frustration involved. Read more

1. Don't buy large backlink packages, it is best to do backlink building in a steady manner. If a search engine sees 5000 or more new backlinks coming to a website, they will know these are unnatural backlink growth and will not give you a boost in ranking. Slow and steady link building and growth is considered by search engines to be the normal / natural way a website should grow on the internet. I recommend doing at least 100 solid backlinks but no more than 500 backlinks per month.

2. If you are hiring someone to do backlinks for you, ALWAYS ask them to show examples of the backlinks and make sure they are not submitting to directories. Directory backlinks are all but worthless. It sounds nice to have 200+ new backlinks coming to your website, but if these are directory backlinks they are worthless – 100 backlinks from directories is equal to about 1 good link from a relevant website that is linking back to your website. So avoid directories for backlink building.

   If you still feel like you want to get your website into as many directories as you can, just make an account with submitterbot.com and do the directory submissions yourself. It's easy to do and you just need to sit at your computer and select categories and submit. Read more

This is a very easy to do tip for getting a decent speed boost from windows 7 and to increase it's stability. In fact, if you keep getting random crashes it most likely a result of this service eating up memory and conflicting with everything else.

The end result of this guide will turn off the "Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service" which is constantly running in the background and from what I can tell it does absolutely nothing but slow down your computer and cause random Windows 7 crashes. Read more

Problem:

DDE Server Window: Entry Point Not Found Read more

It is well known in the seo world that if you change your meta tags two things can happen. Number 1, It can takes weeks for Google and other search engines to update your new titles and descriptions and during that time. Number 2, it is possible to lose all ranking until search engines update their website information (Note: this only occurs if search engines think the website is a new website with different content).

Through a lot of years of doing Search engine optimization I have learned the fastest way to get Google to update your websites information with the shortest possible wait time. The trick is very easy to do, you just resubmit your sitemaps(or submit your sitemap for the first time.. for people who have not made a sitemap) in Google webmaster and Bing Webmaster.

If you do not already have a webmaster account, then go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and create an account. Once you create an account and login and then go through the website verification processes, you will see a list of websites you have added to the webmaster website. Read more

Thought I would share this email communication I had with one of my clients. 

It is an indicator of how confusing it is for people to understand exactly what social networking is, how it can perform for them and what it can do for them, in conjunction with other web marketing tools available today and the escalating curve of what can be done in the future.

But is social networking or link building viable and is it necessary for every website after traffic and ultimately customers?

Client:

“We still haven’t received the check we need to pay for link building and I’m still not convinced it’s doing much good.  The numbers / graphs I run don’t show its effectiveness and last year the backlink building ranking position was guaranteed but this year they don’t. I’ve been interviewing social marketers to see if there is a better way to spend our money. We’ll see”

My Response:

I was hoping to get some time to go over this with you and explain how things work with social networking. I am going to save you a lot of brain damage and money which is a result of talking and working with social marketers.

I have interviewed over a hundred or more social networking “gurus” and builders in the last 6 months, trying to find one that actually had an idea of what social networking is and one that didn't charge huge fees for little return. Read more

In the next coming weeks and months I will be writing up an article series called

“How to Convert Web Traffic to Customers”.

The main theme of the article series will focus on how to change web traffic into customers. I have learned it's easy to get traffic, but it's a whole different ball game when it comes to converting the traffic into customers, readers and followers.

This article is the beginning of the “How to Convert Web Traffic to Customers” series, I plan to go over simple tips that make a big difference in converting traffic to customers. This will be a straight list and notes on why the tip matters when running a Website.

So in true “Howbits” fashion, time to get into the Simple Blogging & Website Tips:-

Read more

Just a brief run down on how attributes work in Zencart.

Note: I am going to be using a website that has multiple option name and values for the following examples. The website is Tastycravings.net which sales Gourmet Chocolates.