Web Merchant Resource Center

If you are one of our Web Merchant Services clients processing credit cards on the Elavon (was NOVA) network, you have just received a letter from Elavon informing you that you have until December 15, 2008 to document PCI DSS compliancy or Elavon will automatically enroll you with TrustKeeper at the rate of $135.00/yr.

We expect a lot of questions about this, so we are trying to answer them here, and will continually update this blog post over the next two weeks with current information that will help you understand what this is about and what to do about it.

IF YOU ARE NOT A WEB MERCHANT SERVICES CLIENT, Please take your issue up with your own provider. You will find usefull resources here, but this post is for our clients only. If you are not one of our clients, we cannot help you further than what we have posted here.

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(This is the first in a series on the core fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization)

I recently got an email, from a client that had been hosting with us for several years, requesting a quote to rebuild their website because they weren’t being found in the search engines for phrases like “personal injury.” It immediately struck me as an excellent example of the mysteriousness with which merchants and business owners approach what search engines do. . . . and honestly why they wouldn’t necessarily have to rebuild their site at all.

What they really needed to do was to at least provide content on “personal injury” on their website.
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Though rare, every now and again it is necessary to change the domain name of a site – say someone finally just got that domain name they’ve been after for years, for example.

However, how to change it without losing all of the search engine indexing that existed on the old site . . . especially if the URLs already indexed in search engines contained query strings?  If we just do a typical permanent / 301 domainn redirect, all of those pages that used query strings to provide content will simply redirect to the home page of the new domain, which would be dismal for Search Engine Optimization, affiliate links, back links, and other sources of traffic.
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Relatively recently we have had to go through another round of re-evaluating what “top shelf” shopping cart solution to recommend to our clients. This is never a fun task, as it takes a lot of very careful evaluation and research.

After doing all of that carefull evaluation and research, and after our experience with many other shopping carts, we got excited about the new AbleCommerce 7, ASP.NET shopping cart.

There are many “propeller head”/geek programmer reasons for our decission here, which we have started to detail here:
http://www.wmsmerchantservices.com/shopping-carts/AbleCommerce.asp

More importantly, though, for the topic of this post, we wanted to point out the what a fabulous community AbleCommerce has at http://forums.ablecommerce.com. AbleCommerce 7 is not only a very feature rich, robust shopping cart application, but it has a very vibrant community behind it.

NOTE: If you are interested in our contributions to this forum, search it for “author” Sean@WMS.

Pete Caputa of HubSpot discusses 13 ways to use your blog to improve sales for your business:

1. Subscribers Sell Themselves.
2. Answering Questions with Blog Posts.
3. Invite Prospects to Write Guest Blog Posts.
4. Highlight Your Client’s Success. They’ll Send It To Their Mom (and Everyone Else).
5. Ask Your Prospects for Feedback in the Comments.
6. Link to Your Prospect’s Blog. Send Them Some Readers.
7. Build a Community of Clients, Prospects and Partners On Your Blog.
8. Track What Prospects Read, What Comments They Leave, How Often They Visit.
9. Be a Resource. Link to Other Relevant Articles.
10. Promote Your Blog Via Email.
11. Promote Your Blog Via Social Media and Social Networking Sites.
12. Blogging Supports Search Engine Optimization.
13. Blogging Creates a Discussion and You’re the Host

Read the full article here:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4061/13-Ways-to-Use-Your-Blog-to-Improve-Your-Sales-Process/?source=email0908

Starting August 12 there’s a fairly new beta directory, AffSphere, that is going to be sharing their affiliate income with Contributing Authors.  This is the first syndication directory actually offering to share revenue their Contributing Authors!

This is an excellent Search Engine Marketing opportunity for all merchants motivated to write unique content to attract new customers. Simply write up a short article with your own unique content, submit it to AffSphere.com, and generate exposure for your business, traffic, AND eight possible ways to automattically produce residual income.

To learn more, start at AffSphere.com

For businesses that are truly local in focus, targetting local search ranking factors is a very effective SEO strategy if for no other reason than it enables you to weed out your global competitors and focus more on ranking tops for your locality.

For example, if you are a landscaper in Portland Oregon, why spend your SEO efforts and budgets to compete with other “Landscapers” – especially since that must always be a locally provided service — when you would be found by many more customers searching for landscapers in Porland Oregon.

Thanks to John Alexander for bringing to our attention a recent study by Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing compiling the responses of 20 experts active in the Local Search Marketing on 47 criteria with respect to their influence on ranking factors in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms.

See the results of this study here:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

On May 12, 2008 Google announced a preview release of a new free service, Friend Connect, that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.

Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites — Without requiring coding experience!
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Frankly, there are so many communities out there and so few of them are worth any mention let alone subscribing to  . . . and then there are those very few that are actually interesting.

The latest community that we have been excited about is the Website Development Community provided by the v7network.

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It’s official. WMS has relaunched its ExpressLane shopping cart as a free, downloadable shopping cart.

ExpressLane was developed to fit a particular niche of merchants who are small and need something more complex than our Quick Checkout Form, something more professional than PayPal, yet something less robust and expenssive than our “top shelf” shopping carts.

We have also found that merchants in this niche

• need a very simple, entry-level solution just as easy to integrate as PayPal “Buy Now” buttons on their site
• have websites already developed and don’t wan’t to have to “squeeze” their designs into a shopping cart template.
• need a shopping cart solution that can be easily custmized to their secific needs.

Read more about this FREE shopping cart here:

ExpressLane — the FREE ASP Shopping Cart