eComm Tips

For those of you that don’t know what open source is, it is basically where any programmer can have access to the program and as a community the program is developed and improved. These programs are also FREE which ads to their appeal. Again, in some situations I think you’re much better going with the proprietary program.

For the last couple days I’ve been having discussions with various people about different open source programs that are available to use for web design. My feeling on open source programs is that some of them are really good, but there are other ones that the proprietary version of the program is so much better (like DreamWeaver vs. Nvu). But when you’re just bootstrapping your online business, investing $300 in a good photo editor may not be an option. In situations like this you may just have to go with an open source program.

So here is a short list of some open source programs you can get for free that can help you improve your online business endeavor and my opinion on each.

FireFox – Internet Browser

FireFox is a web browser, like Internet Explorer, but in my opinion it is way better. FireFox is rapidly gaining more and more users, so if you haven’t used it you should. It’s also a good idea to make sure you website looks essentially the same in both FireFox and Internet Explorer. You can also customize a lot of things on it which makes it extra fun!

Nvu – HTML Editor

I stand by my belief that the best HTML editor out there is DreamWeaver. But if you need a program that can at least do the job, check out Nvu. You could very easily build a whole site using Nvu, and if you’re using some builder programs you can use it to spice up your site a little bit by learning HTML code.

GIMP – Image Software

Admittedly I’m not a big fan of GIMP, I find it a little clumsy to use. But if you don’t have a photo editor, you need to get something. So spend some time learning to use GIMP and you can get the hang of it. But once you have the funds I’d recommend you upgrade to Adobe FireWorks or Photoshop. I feel they give a much better atmosphere and usability.

FileZilla – FTP Client

I love FileZilla! This one is only for those of you that can upload and download from your site using FTP. FileZilla is a great free FTP client.

OpenOffice.org – Office Suite

If you don’t have an office suite, you need to get one. OpenOffice.org is a good alternative to the proprietary programs which include Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, etc.) and WordPerfect. And it’s free too!

You can also get open source programs that would be your whole shopping cart program, blogging software, etc. But those are out of the scope of this article.

There are many more open source programs that you can check out, but I hope this list is enough to help you out. Check these tools out and make use of them as you need to. Who knows, maybe you’ll like them just fine and never have to get the proprietary programs! Some people like these programs better than others, it’s really a matter of personal preference.

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For those of you that are just getting involved with HTML and CSS, or even for those of you that have been doing it for some time, here is a really cool little cheat sheet that you can use to remind you of the basic codes to use when setting up your CSS files.

Liquidicity CSS Help Sheet

I have this pinned on my wall and refer to it all the time when I need to remember the exact wording to use in my CSS files.  They also have an HTML sheet that you may find useful as well.  Here’s the link to it:

Liquidicity HTML Help Sheet

Check them out!

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I know that to a lot of you this is going to be something that you fully understand, but I’m noticing that a lot of people at first don’t understand the difference between Google AdSense and Google AdWords. Let’s take a minute and go over the differences so you can better understand it if you need to.

Here is a summary of the difference from Google’s website:

For Advertisers: Google AdWords

• Advertise to people searching on Google and our advertising network
• Reach people actively looking for information about your products and services online
• Easily control costs - pay only when people click on your ad

For Site Owners: Google AdSense

• Maximize your site’s revenue potential with contextually targeted ads
• Customize ads to complement the look and feel of your site
• Track the success of different formats and locations with online reports

So basically, AdWords is an advertising program to create more exposure for your site. AdSense is a monetization technique that you can use to help your site generate some extra money. In the end they both should help with an income, but you don’t have to pay anything to place AdSense ads on your site.

I hope that clarifies this for those of you that weren’t sure about the difference. If not, please let me know!

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From the looks of it, yes! Granted, they have been on the death bed for several months now, only showing keyword results from January. So in some senses this is probably a good thing.

Before you start worrying about what you’re going to do without the Overture tool, let me give you some other options. One that I use a lot is the WordTracker Free Keywords Tool. This tool gives you an average daily number rather than a monthly number, so make sure you take that into account.

You can also use the regular WordTracker tool, which will give you some other calculations. This tool is a subscription tool, but you can do free trials on it.

Rumor has it that Yahoo! is going to be introducing a new tool in the future but who knows when that will be. So don’t let this be your excuse to not do any keyword research. Find other tools and get it done!

PS. Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day!!!

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In part 5 of this Google Sitemaps Series, I’m going to show you how to get even more information from the Links section of Google Sitemaps. But, in order for you to be able to do this, you have to be using the Firefox browser. If you don’t have the Firefox internet browser, use this link to download it for free: Firefox.

Once you have the Firefox browser installed, we need to add a new plug-in to it and do a little set up. Specifically, we need to install the Greasemonkey plug-in, which you can get here: Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to customize the way a web page shows up by using a little javascript. There are a lot of little scripts that you can use with Greasemonkey, but to get more information from Google Sitemaps we need the following script added to Greasemonkey: External Links ++. Once you’re on this page, just click on “Install Script” and add it to your Greasemonkey. You might have to restart your browser at this point as well to make sure that everything has been installed properly.

If it isn’t already, go ahead and turn Greasemonkey on by clicking on the little monkey logo at the bottom right hand corner of your browser. Here’s an example of what it should look like when enabled:

Ok, now we’re ready to see what this baby can do for you. Go ahead and log in to your Google Sitemaps account, click on the site you want to look at, and then go to the Links area. The first thing you’ll see is the pages that Google has found links going to. Go ahead and click on one of these pages. If Greasemonkey is NOT enabled, here’s an example of what you’ll see:

If Greasemonkey IS enabled, you’ll see something like this:

See the additional information? Now, instead of just seeing where the link is located you can also see what the PR of the page is, and also what phrase was used for the anchor text on the page. If the information is in red then Greasemonkey wasn’t able to find the link on the page. Sometimes you’ll also see the extra info in an orange font with a strike-through. This means that the link was found with the anchor text, but the link has a no follow attribute to it (this means that the search engines won’t follow it to your page).

So how do we use this information? Well, now when you log into your Google Sitemaps account you can see what links are being recognized by Google, but you can also see which of these links are most valid, get an idea of what the PR of the pages linking to you is, and you can also make sure that most of your links are using good anchor text.

That concludes this series about Google Sitemaps. I really do hope that you find it useful! Until next time…

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google
Google Sitemaps Series Part 4 - What You Can Learn From Google Sitemaps Data

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On to Part 4 of this series about Google Sitemaps. Today I want to explore with you a little bit about what you can learn from the information provided by Google Sitemaps. Honestly, a lot of the stuff in this program is nice to know, but you don’t need to spend a lot of time with it. So we’re going to focus on the things that I feel are probably most important, as well as a few things that people are always asking me about.

So, go log into your Google Sitemaps account. Hopefully by this time your site has been verified. Unless your site is verified you won’t be able to see the additional information that we’ll be looking at today. So get that done first, then come back to this step.

When you first log in, you’ll be on the Dashboard. Click on the site that you’ve verified. By the way, you can have multiple sites in the same account.

We’ll go over the information in this post based on the tabs in Google Sitemaps. So here’s the first one:

Diagnostic

The first page you’ll see after clicking on your site name is the Summary. We can grab a few interesting bits of information from this. For example, it will tell you the last time that the Googlebot visited your page. Sometimes it’s nice to know how often your site is being re-indexed. There is a definite correlation between Page Rank and how often your site is crawled. So if you want to see this date become more frequent, you have to get your Page Rank up. It also helps if your site is always adding new content. A search engine has little reason to come back and keep crawling a static website.

Also on this page you’ll see information about Web crawl errors. This is one part that people ask me about all of the time. From time to time you’ll see pages showing up in the “Not Found” category. You can click on this link and see what pages weren’t found. The funny thing is that whenever I go to this page I’ll see pages they are listing that I know for a fact do not exist in my site. So, I’ve either incorrectly entered a URL somewhere on my site, or they have a glitch in their crawl. In my experience, it’s usually nothing to worry about and is a glitch with the crawler.

The rest of the information in this section I really don’t look at very often. It’s interesting and all, but let’s move on to some stuff that is a little more informative and helpful.

Statistics

The statistics section has several different sub-sections that give us some good information about our site and its performance on Google. At this point though I do need to mention something: it seems that Google doesn’t always keep this information up to date. Use it as an indicator to get an idea, but you probably shouldn’t swear by it 100%.

Anyway, the different sub-sections are Crawl Stats, Query Stats, Page Analysis, and Index Stats. Let’s go through these and talk about how they can be helpful.

Crawl Stats - No big thing here, it tells you the general PR of your pages.

Query Stats - This is the most useful sub-section. Query Stats will give you a 7 day average of some of your top phrases that are bringing your site up in the queries, plus the 7 day average ranking. It will also give you a second table that shows you the top query clicks over the last 7 days as well. If you’re really curious, you can also break this information down by different locations as well.

Page Analysis - This one is also no biggie, but it does show you what phrases Googlebot is finding as links out there. It also shows you what phrases Googlebot is picking up on your pages as well. You can reference this to your keyword density to make sure you’re using your phrases enough so that they’re getting picked up.

Index Stats - This gives you a list of things you can actually check on the Google search engine anyway. Its good to know the syntax for these.

Links

Now we’re getting to the good stuff, and in my opinion the biggest reason to even use Google Sitemaps in the first place! This is where you can see what links Google has picked up. If you remember what we did on Yahoo! a few posts ago, this is Google’s version. Here’s a link to that post just in case: How to Check Backlinks on Yahoo!

The cool thing about this part of Google Sitemaps is you can see where the links are coming from for individual pages, not just the whole site in general. Its important that you have links going to more than just the home page so that we’re developing link popularity for the whole site, not just the home page all of the time. In part 5 of this series I’ll show you how we can get even more out of the information in this section.

We’re not going to worry about the last tab, Sitemaps, because we already hit on this one in the previous post. This is where you submit and re-submit your sitemap.

Ok, so that does it for part 4 of this series. In part 5 I’ll show you a fun way that you can hack into this program and get even more information out of it. Until then, have fun!

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google
Google Sitemaps Series Part 5 - Getting More Information

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