MY SEO SECRETS

Source: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/wayfairs-road-1-billion-040000543.html

I’ll make this short.

2 guys + 200 niches + 5000 suppliers + 90% dropship = MEGA SUPER STORE = 1 BILLION IN SALES.

How did WayFair do it? After comparing the technology and the website of WayFair vs Shopping Cart Elite I found something critically important that many drop ship clients are missing. That is Live Inventory from the Drop Ship suppliers!

How are you suppose to succeed and streamline your operation if you are selling products that are out of stock. You can’t do anything, you can’t list on paid marketing channels such as eBay or Amazon. You can’t sell using Google Adwords or Shopping Comparison engines. Unless you know what is in stock the business simply can not scale. If you try to list something on eBay or Amazon that is out of stock you’ll shut down your account within a month, paying for traffic and not making sales due to no inventory will leave you bankrupt. YOU MUST KNOW YOUR INVENTORY LEVELS TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS.

So to counter this invisible roadblock that our clients were and are facing today, we have hired a new consultant to specifically to counter this problem. If you need live inventory from your supplier, and your supplier happens to have an online ordering system showing the live inventory, we have a solution on how to synchronize that inventory with your online store.

We will start in the auto parts industry. Look for an internal Shopping Cart Elite announcement for more information on this.

Tired of losing customers because you can’t arrange financing for them? How would you like to increase your monthly Wheel and Tire sales by 50% each month? 

MK Financial Services has partnered with Shopping Cart Elite to provide financing for Wheels & Tires and Auto Parts for your credit challenged customers with minimum credit scores of 600 and less.

Here are the Benefits:

• No Chargebacks

• Instant Approval

• No Monthly Or Hidden Fees

• Zero Down, On Approved Credit

• Quick Funding

• Terms Up To 24 Months

• Zero Interest If Paid Within 6 Months

• No Limit On Amount Financed

You can sign up to offer Financing by Filling out this Form

Release Notes – (November 1, 2011 Release)

Major Highlights in V 2.9 Release

• Inventory Module has been released
• New User Interface for Back office Menu
• Visitor Generated SEO for Websites (Enabled for all)
• Intelligent Search for Websites (Elite Package and up only)
• Custom Submenu for Header Buttons
• Dynamically watermark website images
• Add vehicles ACES database and Create custom Product Mapping Databases
• On Demand Search Engine Submitter (First submission free - $10/mo afterwards)
• Third Party: Subuno Fraud Prevention (First 10 requests free - $25/mo for 50 requests)
• Google Shopping API Enhancement with Categorization

What are we working on this month?

• Full Visitor Analytics
• Traffic ROI Calculator
• Recommended Products
• Multi Lingual Support
• Multi-Currency Support
• Australia Pre-Release
• Sweden Pre-Release

——————————————————————————-

Website

• Product Page: Hide “Get Quote” anchor link if quote is enabled on product page
• Checkout: Guest will not be able to save credit card for the future
• Applied canonical meta tag on dynamic similar URLs
• Header Buttons can have a Sub Menu with Custom Links
• Dynamically watermark product images
• Enhanced 404 pages when reaching wrong URLs
• Deleted Image will not be deleted for up to 60 days and if there was no impression made on it
• Blacklist users who are not allowed to hotlink to your images
• Upload your own Fav Icon
• Enhanced Shipping Calculator, you must select the state if you are in US
• Added US Military states
• If Vimeo video is on the homepage, play it once every 30 minutes. Record the enter time in the cookie
• Enabled Vehicle Search on all non aps vehicle related articles
• Tweaked Robots.txt file for Googlebot
• If regular price = sale price it will not display the sale price in checkout
• If you allow different shipping address step 2 should be default to new address
• It is now a radio between between Billing Address | New Shipping Address | Dropdown
• You can now hide the shipping estimator from the shopping cart

Website – Search Results

• TIRE: search now has 3 drop down to select a size on the side menu
• TIRE: Title now includes the speed rating and tire type and load range for tires
• TIRE: Fixed Load Range Sort Filter
• WHEELS: Fixed Diameter Sort Filter
• Warning notes now should in search results
• Product setup has a new rule to create a universal product to show up for vehicle specific applications has been created
• If you remove a car you searched for from the side menu it will redirect you to the homepage
• Visitor Generated SEO
• Intelligent Search
• Fixed search cache to synchronize faster when changes to a product is made
• If you have a wheel product and it doesn’t have the following words in its title “Wheels | Wheel | Rims | Rim | Rimz | Wheelz” … inject it on the website. If you have a tire product and it doesn’t have “Tire | Tires | Tyre | Tyres” inject it in the title on the website
• If you are mouse over anywhere in the whole single row with your mouse make the whole row flip thumbnails
• Made flipping images half a second faster

Website – User Interface

• Removed SCE Logo from Footer on all the websites to get a cleaner look
• Made the menu smoother during scrolling
• Fixed auto align when vehicle is selected
• Any title that has duplicate has a brand contained in it will have brand removed
• Changed add note to edit note in checkout
• Product Page: Wrapped tabs in JavaScript
• Homepage: Wrapped external links in JavaScript to avoid SEO PR Leak
• Redirect: default.aspx redirects to www.domainname.com without default.aspx
• Aligned the checkout steps

Email Server - IMAP

• Revamped the complete IMAP Exchange server for performance (Still in Beta)
• IMAP works on iPhone, Android and Blackberry

SEO

• On Demand Search Engine Submitter improves your web page indexing. If you check in Google Webmaster Tools that only half of your webpages are indexed, try using this tool.

Wholesale

• Added more options to synchronize discounts for dealers
• Product Setup Module
• Direct a user to a custom URL with either a Add to Cart or Get a Quote Button
• Add to ACES database and Create custom Product Mapping Databases
• Wheels: Added new bolt patterns 4x98, 4x101.6, 5x101.6, 8x210
• You are able to put cents in for the shipping flat rate amounts

Customers

• New button added to invoice order from order details and ship it
• You can delete CC even if it has history on it
• Passing Order Number to merchant processor to avoid duplicate charges
• Implemented a new weight formula if live shipping will not calculate shipment
• Improved taxation on discounted products
• Improved Legend on Order Search
• Process will be disabled if full amount is not selected
• Improved how deposits work
• Improved cash transactions
• Improved order sorting
• Improved the processing of abandon orders
• Revised the customer order screen and improved the user interface to easily process and track orders
• You can now enter Zipcode 5 + 4
• Improved the assignment of orders
• Wheels: Bolton pattern will show up when orders wheels
• If the invoice was paid via Credit Card on the bottom of the invoice it should say “Your credit card statement will show a charge from ~legalname or ~dbaname. Please note this for future references.”
• Improved user interface for automated UPS shipping
• Subscription orders do not require shipping address
• Created extra validation to trigger shipping on process order

Discounts

• Adds Coupon to All Products if it’s a site wide discount
• Adds Coupon Automatically on Checkout
• Adds Additional Product Title - “5% OFF COUPON - “couponname” – optional
• if you create a discount which will make the product less than cost … give them a warning

Effiliate Marketing

• Viglink Integration allows you to trigger a custom affiliate URL on add to cart
• If Viglink is enabled it will display a Viglink image disclaimer on the footer

Data Mapper

• You can now customize your spider URL
• When image can’t be retrieved a friendlier error message will be given
• Improved wheel data mapper validation

Data Audit

• Price sync will trigger the same formula as you had in the previous product and only use the new prices that do not contain a formula

Data Sharing

• If an item is set as quote in data share, it will be transferred as quote to the other store
• Improved Loading Speed

Settings

• Added Setting for Intelligent Search
• Added Setting for Analytics

General

• Made it easier to customize the submenu homepage buttons in general settings

Reports

• Added right click to jump to order in Money Transactions
• Themes
• a.sideMenuSubCat - text-transform: lowercase;
• Converted all .gifs images to .png

Link Exchanges

• You can bulk add, modify and delete
• Admin can recover deleted links

Inventory

• You can import inventory based on Supplier / Warehouse / Brand / Part # / Inventory Count
• You can set rules for Live Inventory –
• Hide if Inventory Not Available
• Quote if Inventory Not Available

Back office User Interface

• Revamped the locations of all the apps
• In Data Share Setting it is not clarified that you should only choose vehicles that you want restricted on the website
• Revamped the order assignment screen
• Improved Announcement screen

New Third Party App

• Viglink has been integrated in Shopping Cart Elite
• Enabled Amazon Search box if visitors searches for something and it’s not found. We defaulted this to on, you must enter your Affiliate ID in back office or sign up for Viglink

LIST OF BUGS THAT HAVE BEEN FIXED AND ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

Dashboard

• Enhanced Created a new filter to see “Yesterday” new orders
• Fixed PayPal incorrectly showing as enabled when it is really disabled

Customer

• Fixed the removal of hidden characters in copy and paste of emails
• Fixed If you have two items with different shipping amounts on the same order … in order search when you look at details the total shipping will show up for both. The invoice shows accurate number though
• Fixed the refresh when refunds are issued

Marketplace

• If you have flat rate - free = Amazon export puts weight 0 … since it takes flat rate 1lbs = $1. Fixed to take real weight if greater than 0, If weight is also 0 … put 1lbs.
• Completed FTP export app
• All images will end with .jpg when exported in marketplace
• TheFind submits once every 10 days
• Enhanced Google Shopping API

Website

• Fixed quick view to show up when you searched for a part number
• Fixed welcome email when guest checkout makes a purchase
• Fixed Quote only issue on search results
• Fixed issue where flat rate shipping would charge domestic, international rates
• Fixed Google Sitemap dates issue
• Fixed enter key when you typed something in search on the website
• Fixed descriptions no longer show up in horizontal view
• Fixed wrong make models vehicles getting pre-selected in sessions

Product Setup Module

• Revamped Application Synchronization option
• Fixed drag and drop from category to category
• Fixed Data mapper automotive rules not saving

Support Desk

• Fixed when Searching by specific employee would show all employees
• Fixed Order state was marked shipped incorrectly
• Fixed when a ticket is reported it says Service Task is required, it’s now optional. If I select it I still can’t close it without saving it first
• Fixed When Service Board is set to all, none of the tasks show up
• Fixed when deleted one of the task but it still show up in tickets

What was released today?

• ADD YOUR OWN FAV ICON
• WATERMARK YOUR IMAGES DYNAMICALLY JUST BY UPLOADING YOUR LOGO
• RESTRICT ACCESS TO YOUR IMAGES BY BLACKLISTING THIRD PARTY WEBSITES
• VIGLINK FULLY INTEGRATED
• FULL AJAX ONSITE INTELLIGENT SEARCH, with Special Algorithm to Tweak the results in the back office. This still in beta and will only be available for an upgrade. Ex: www.autoaccessorystore.com and www.wheelsnolimit.com - try to search for something and see how the top search works
• Amazon Search Results integration if nothing is found (set it up under Website Setting > Search)
• HOLIDAYS - Ability to create a special and inject it apart of the title. You can now add a SITE WIDE SPECIAL and it will be added on each product page, inserted into the cart automatically and “COUPON CODE” will be added to all the titles of all of your products on your website while the special is active.
• Ability to Customize your header menu to have a sub menu (check www.autoaccessorystore.com under Interior)

I will be posting full release notes soon.

Release Notes – (August 1, 2011 Release)

Major Highlights in V 2.63 Release

• 20+ new ways the search finds relevant results
• Social Media Marketing App
• Website Social Features Google +1, Facebook
• Revamped Login Page with Guest Checkout
• Added two more (very expensive) servers to our cloud cluster
• Affiliate/Effiliate Marketing Features (watch tutorials)
• Added “Search for Links” App in Link Exchange section (helps you find link partners)
• Added Woopra for better Live Analytics compared to Google Analytics (free to signup)
• Optimized APS for better ranking, and you can now add Vehicle Search to Articles
• Created the ability to export product data via XML – FTP for third parties
• Plus 6 more pages of enhancements…

What are we working on this month?

• Wrap up the IMAP Email Server
• Allow to Manage inventory via Backoffice / Website
• Allow to download inventory from a online spreadsheet (downloadable via Mozenda)
• Wrap up Customer Module (after 2 years)

——————————————————————————-

Website

• You can now hide header button from homepage only.
• You can align buttons to start from left to right instead of right to left
• Redirect Popup has a 5 second delay on Product Page - Fixed
• Product page - By mouse over on the thumbnails they will automatically be selected.
• The functionality of the header image to be clickable was improved. The Header image was enabled to be clickable back to the homepage for all websites
• The login and registration pages on all stores were completely revamped
• Fixed issues with forgot password taking too long to reset
• You can now mouseover on the small thumbnails and the images will show up enlarged without clicking if the Item has a minimum quantity then it will default to that quantity automatically.
• We created a Guest checkout and enabled it for everyone (you can disable it from settings)
• Added Open Ticket link to WEBSITE > MY ACCOUNT > DASHBOARD
• If minimum quantity is set, you won’t be allowed to change it in the cart
• If you delete an article, it will be permanently deleted with 410 header
• If you choose a Tire Bundle with Wheels, any tires that have a quote should be excluded from the tire bundle list - Fixed
• Product Page – Select an option to see the exact price was changed to Select an option to see price
• Turned on the feature for Google Images to spider images. Enhanced a script to disable the image during preview to get you more visitors to your website.
• If you have a coupon applied; The sub total price will be crossed out next to the item in the shopping cart if discount was applied to product
• If you have an active special with a coupon, it will automatically be applied to your customer in the cart
• Changed  “ANY BRAND” to read “Click Here for All Brands”
• If you have Wheel and Tire selected the pricing will show more clearer
• If you have minimum applied on the product, and you click on add to cart in application list, the minimum will be added to the cart
• You now disable the login feature on the website
• You can now control which links will show up in the footer
• Added special Facebook tags for the Like button
• If a tire is available in wheel and tire bundle, the first tire will be selected
• You can now have a side menu for searching tire sizes
• If you estimated shipping and change qty, the estimate will reset

Website – Search Results

• If a product in search results has more then 5 possible variations and your in vertical view it will show product with no options selected – Fixed
• When the search is triggered, you need to scroll to the top portion of the page to start where the filters starts
• If you click change vehicle from search it will take you to the homepage main banner vehicle search – Fixed
• 35 Items per page will be default
• If you search for specific tire size, it will display all the part numbers in the results
• If you click on a specific tire size in search results, that specific one will be pre-selected on the product page
• Improved the relevancy of correct tires showing up in the search results
• Fixed issues where certain keywords that would trigger the same product to show up twice
• Active Featured item / Active Sale item are triggered inside the search and get higher relevancy
• If item is on sale or featured it will have tags on the image
• Products that have 4 months of good sales record will get higher relevancy
• High CTR products will get higher relevancy
• Mouseover on image will flip through all images that are available for that product
• If a specific item exists when you search for a specific vehicle or part #, the specific image will show up
• Improved staggered fitment lookup
• Fixed Sort by Price to go against Web Price not MSRP
• Enhanced the indexing of Search Results
• If a vehicle matches a keyword you entered (Ex: Dodge neon neon kit) you should delete the dodge neon out of the keyword and clarify the result
• Filters will show up from left to right dynamically depending on the product on the page your are viewing. Once you select a main category, a sub category will be offered
• Only one diameter can be active in filters for wheels or tires
• Fixed issue with the price range filter
• New Filter for Tires: TIRE: Load Range, TIRE: Speed Rating
• Horizantal Search view now shows warning notes

Email Server - IMAP

• Completed IMAP server for incoming email (by end of the month SMTP will be out of production)

Keyword Rank Monitor

• Add multiple third party websites to track competition or your other websites
• Export all results via CSV

Dashboard

• Changed to 2 weeks
• Improved speed of the back office dashboard.

Product Setup Module

• Increased timeout during duplicating of products to avoid session timeout
• In price update we added cost > dollar above jobber and web price > dollar above jobber

Customer Module

• Revamped the User Interface for the Customer Module

Server Resources

• Installed a new dual Hexa-core xenon server to speed up website indexing and services
• Installed a Dell MD 3620f to speed up data sharing

Effiliate Marketing

• New module in product setup promoting you to participate in affiliate marketing with eBay and Amazon
• For eBay you can choose seller, category variables, If you have Effiliate enabled and Add to Cart enabled an image will show up as Compare Us to eBay or Amazon, If you have Effiliate enabled and Add to Cart or Quote disabled an image will show up as Inventory Moved to eBay or Amazon
• You can now define a custom URL to be triggered when you press ADD TO CART
•  

Article Marketing

• Improved APS articles to rank higher
• You can now turn on Vehicle Search inside the articles (attach products)
• You now have a select all / deselect all on the products
•  

Data Mapper

• Added new fields to allow shipping type for USPS/Fedex/UPS

Settings

• New warning message appears when saving that you accept cash
• You can now allow to hide product dimensions from product page

General

• Improved the screen that is used to report bugs - Help > Reports Error
• Changed meta tag for the spider to make less visits to the website

Reports

• New Report - Unpaid Balances - will track to see if you have any authorizations or shipped orders that were not settled
• Bandwidth Report - Separated Search Engine from Unique Visitors
• Statistics - Fixed the chart to avoid looking one month ahead and made two new charts one for “amount” and one for “orders”
• New Report - NET Balance shows all accounts that have past due net balance and amount

Supplier

• When you press save on supplier. A message saying “Successfully Saved” will now appear. When rejecting products from active, they will be prompted to be deleted from the store.

Themes

              o    Improved the functionality of saving themes

              o    Changed default font on the main banner

              o    Add new class for social bar, affiliate links and product page (If you have a custom theme, review your website to make sure it looks good)

Support Tickets

• Moved the feature “if you want a service board public or not” from website setting to support desk setting
• In settings there is an option that any new ticket that gets submitted to support desk an email will be sent to: Default: primary

Marketplace

• We removed CC Accepted which is no longer valid in Turbolister
• Enhanced the export of XML of your data to a third party website
• Integrated the automation of exporting your CSV product data via FTP to your dealers
• Optimized Google Shopping to perform faster

Link Exchanges

• Added a new button “Search for Links” which will help you find link partners on Google

Quote

• Quote request will include part # and URL to the product

Social Media Marketing

• New module to export your social media contacts and import then into Facebook, Google, Twitter - tutorials coming soon

New Third Party App

·        Woopra.com - Better than Google Analytics

LIST OF BUGS THAT HAVE BEEN FIXED AND ARE NOW OPERATIONAL

Settings

• Fixed issues with announcements coming up after it was read

Dashboard

• Abandon orders stopped working - fixed

Employee

• If employee is admin and you take away screen from the admin it removes it while it shouldn’t because admin has access to all screens - FIXED

Website

• Fixed URL Redirect Script
• When you press show all wheel and wheel specification duplicates and doubles – Fixed
• Application Highlight stopped working - fixed
• If you choose a car and the wheel doesn’t fit, the wheel it searched for would not fit either – fixed
• Fixed an issue with Paypal looping during step 2 of checkout on certain stores
• In search results When you click on the title or image the same results will show up as when you click on details - Fixed
• If you filter by 16” diameter tire you still have 15” showing up at the end – fixed

Product Setup Module

• Fixed ACES export for Amazon
• Fixed Export Binary Import Binary the shipping type would not save

Customer

• Subscription were not billing the setup fee

Data Sharing

• Vehicles restrictions still disables all wheels regardless if there is one that will work - Fixed

I pride myself to have gone through the extreme cases of Migrating an old eCommerce website to a new Shopping Cart (specifically Shopping Cart Elite). The results? You will want to read this post if you want to save A LOT OF TIME and MAKE A LOT OF EXTRA MONEY.

IN ADDITION WHILE WRITING THIS POST … (IRONIC) I DISCOVERED A WHOLE NEW BUSINESS MODEL THAT WILL MAKE YOU MONEY! … YOU’LL WANT TO READ THIS, BELIEVE ME!

Just so we are on the same page here is what my Shopping Cart Migration experience is:

• I’ve hard switched at least (5) of my own HIGH TRAFFIC website to a new Shopping Cart platform.
• I’ve hard switched at least a dozen Medium Traffic websites to a new Shopping Cart platform.
• I’ve helped at least a hundred clients Migrate to a new eCommerce platform successfully.
• I’ve created funnels from an old domain to a new domain while slowly migrating the website.
• I’ve created sub domains for new websites on existing old domains while keeping the old website.

So now that we are clear on my expertise, let’s talk about Pros, Cons, Nightmares, Tips, How Tos, etc.

WHAT KIND OF ADVICE CAN YOU GIVE ME IF I WANT TO MIGRATE MY OLD SHOPPING CART WEBSITE TO A NEW ONE?

If your current website makes you money (regardless of the amount)… you should consider the options in this post. Even if the website doesn’t make any money but has at least 1000 unique visitors per month you should also consider your options.

My first take is if the website makes money or has high traffic just leave it alone and make a new website on a new domain or a subdomain. You can also decide if you want to turn off the ADD TO CART on the old website and start funneling the traffic to the new website if their are no to little sales on the old one.

WHEN WOULD YOU CONSIDER KEEPING YOUR OLD AND NEW WEBSITE?

If you REALLY HATE your old website because you want to renew your brand, change the look and feel of your company, and you really care about taking the old website down then you should consider the Pros and Cons of it:

• PROS: Switch and your Done
• CONS: You Can Lose some Old Traffic
• CONS: Even if you don’t lose old traffic, you would not gain new traffic (I will explain later)

Having done all possible variations here is my experience and what I would have done differently.

FIRST EXPERIENCE - HARD SWITCH WITH NO 301 REDIRECTS

When I switched my first website (which you are probably planning to do) I literally killed it. It wasn’t a big deal because it was my personal Adsense website but still, I blame Google for misleading me. According to Google you can simply change your website address in webmaster tools and they will find all of your new content …. WRONG!

The only possible way they would migrate the old content with the new content is if only your domain name changed and not your complete URLs which typically do when you switch Shopping Carts. So I thought they would find the new URLs… and deindex the old URLs pretty quick.

Nope…. not only did it take 3 months for them to deindex the old URLs, which completely killed the traffic because the traffic would reach a 404 page not found.

But after the new URLs were found, all of the old rankings dropped and never came back. I had to start ranking it all over again even though the content was 100% the same from both websites… ANNOYING!

PROS: NONE! DO NOT DO THIS

CONS: KILL YOUR WEBSITE

SECOND EXPERIENCE - HARD SWITCH WITH 301 REDIRECTS

When we switched our first HIGH TRAFFIC website, we had developed a module called 301/404 REDIRECT in Shopping Cart Elite which would automatically funnel the traffic from the old URLs into the new URLs.

(Note: In addition if you ever change the product URL, or any URL in Shopping Cart Elite it automatically stores the old URLs and maps them to new ones to avoid Search Engine Traffic reaching error pages)

If your curious how that module in Shopping Cart Elite works here are two videos:

Risks you Face by Migrating Shopping Cart Website Video

How to Set up 301 Redirect App within Shopping Cart Elite

After this switch, what initially happened is the traffic actually grew in the first few months, we went from 1,500 daily unique visitors to 3,000 daily unique visitors. The problem was that whatever products we no longer carried, we mapped those URLs to the homepage. In the beginning those URLs would get traffic which would be funneled the homepage and it was great. But several months later Google deindexed those old urls that were mapped to the homepage and the traffic for those pages dropped off. Once everything was said and done, we were left with about 1,200 daily unique visitors due to the old URLs no longer indexing and since we removed products and didn’t add new products it is perfectly understandable why this happened. Still sucks though in my opinion since those visitors may have bought something else.

PROS: Having one New Website

PROS: Save your Old Traffic as long as every single URL is mapped

CONS: Takes forever to map the URLs properly

CONS: You may lose traffic if you dont map all the URLs to new URLs

CONS: If you have an old website, you lose years of work which otherwise could have been saved if you had kept both websites

THIRD EXPERIENCE - LEAVE THE OLD WEBSITE & START A NEW WEBSITE ON A BRAND NEW DOMAIN

A client of mine said he wants ZERO RISK when it comes to losing old traffic and current search engine ranking. Even though I knew the 301 Redirect is Safe, there is still risk involved if he doesnt map all of the old URLs to the new ones or the old web pages may have slightly more unique content than the new one and the rank drops.

In addition some clients told me that their visitors love their (bad looking) old website and they didn’t want to risk doing a hard switch to a new look and possibly losing business.

The first client we worked with that had this concern, I advised him to start a new website and funnel the old website traffic to the new website. Ultimately this worked very well for him and he was happy with the results. But there are Pros and Cons to this and I found an ever more ideal way to handle this.

Ex: thechromepros.com - OLD 

Ex: thechromeprosfitment.com - NEW

PROS: NO Risk that your Old Website will lose anything

CONS: The new website has no ranking and you don’t benefit from your SEO on the old domain

FOURTH EXPERIENCE - LEAVE THE OLD WEBSITE & START A NEW WEBSITE ON A SUBDOMAIN ** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ** 

Honestly I have no idea why I didn’t think of this before. IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE to simply start a sub domain on your existing HIGH TRAFFIC, OLD DOMAIN that has GOOGLE AUTHORITY and benefit from years of work plus the new content from the new website.

Think about it, you worked hard for years to build the new content, generate sales and generate traffic to your old domain name. Few years later your features and the look and feel of your website is outdated but you still have all this work that you completed. Why bother spending time thinking how to migrate, mapping URLs or risking losing all this work when you can keep it AND HAVE MORE NEW CONTENT on your HIGH TRAFFIC, HIGHLY SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED DOMAIN NAME?

If I was to take this approach in my second experience, I would have left everything as is and continued to get 1500 unique visitors. Then I would add all this new content, and instantly add another 500 - 1000 unique visitors JUST BECAUSE OF THE NEW CONTENT.

Then it would only grow from there… I would have risked nothing for losing old business or old traffic and I would only gain.

Since I did not want the ADD TO CART on my old domain, I would simply create links from the product pages to my new website and strictly use the old website as a content library to funnel visitors to my new website as well as selling Advertising through Adsense. (I am planning to go back and sync the old content)

Sure it doesn’t look as professional as it can be this way, but if you care less about your look and feel, and branding then do this option. If you rather make more money and get more traffic, this is an ideal solution. The best part is you can add a new store on a sub domain instantly and slowly work on funneling the traffic from your old website without affecting your daily operations.

THE MAIN BENEFIT YOU GET FROM ALL OF THIS IS ALL THE SEO WORK YOU’VE DONE ON YOUR OLD WEBSITE, IS NOW TRANSFERRED TO THE NEW SUB DOMAIN BECAUSE YOU ARE STILL USING THE SAME DOMAIN NAME.

Ex: diamondhotrimz.com - OLD 

Ex: store.diamondhotrimz.com - NEW

PROS: KEEP YOUR OLD TRAFFIC, AND YOUR OLD SALES

PROS: SUPER EASY, NO HASSLE, NO HEADACHE SWITCH

PROS: GAIN NEW SALES AND NEW VISITORS

CONS: HAVE TWO WEBSITES

CONS: Create banner advertisements or links to funnel traffic to your new domain

I JUST DISCOVERED A NEW BUSINESS MODEL (LITERALLY) WHILE WRITING THIS BLOG POST - (I amaze myself sometimes. This is why I love to write a blog… it opens my mind as I speak to myself :)…)

My partner Tom has many Nissan Vehicle related niches. I am going to advise him publicly on this blog to take the parent company domain name (www.customenterprise.com) and create subdomains for each vehicle

nissanmaxima.customenterprise.com 

or 

maxima.customenterprise.com (to avoid trademark infringemene)

altima.customenterprise.com

sentra.customenterprise.com

etc.

NOTE: The beauty behind about sub domains, is if Nissan decides to file a trademark infringement on a subdomain, you can easily change the subdomain and keep your SEO ranking that you built up on the main domain (We can also map the old subdomain to a new one). However if they file the infringement on your domain name (because you used Nissan in the name), you will lose that domain name along with all your work that you put into it. In addition if you decide to start another store on the subdomain, you are already ranked for “NISSAN” and “MAXIMA” so you benefit for the “NISSAN” term and you simply need to do a few backlinks for “ALTIMA”.

TIPS: Shopping Cart Elite has an app called Data Sharing allowing you to have a master database on one website and sync the product data to any other Shopping Cart Elite website. So you can have CustomMaxima.com as the master database and leave the operations of it as is, add maxina.customenterprise.com and this will only benefit you from the additionally ranking and sales that customenterprise.com will provide.

In addition Tom can concentrate on the ranking of CustomEnterprise.com and fund a full SEO effort to gain its authority which will automatically pass it down to all the sub domains.

We may even experiment doing something like maxima.autoaccessorystore.com (On the other high authority domain Tom operates) and syncing the CustomMaxima.com data to that store AS WELL (It will be interesting to see what kind of results can be achieved using this method). I will keep this blog post updated with the results.

How about starting a NICHE BRAND WEBSITE for AEM or INJEN

aem.autoaccessorystore.com

injen.autoaccessorystore.com

etc.

AND ONLY HAVING THOSE NICHES ON THOSE SUB DOMAINS!

Realize that it would take $150 (one month of SEO that we provide) to rank injen.autoaccessorystore.com for the term Injen because of the thousands of the authority backlinks that already exist on AutoAccessoryStore domain versus creating a brand new domain which would take 6-12 months to get the same results.

Tom can also consider licensing out the virtual real estate space of his subdomain on AutoAccessoryStore.com for others to run their niche stores and use his ranking to get fast results. Its like buying a land and building a community around it where everyone has a house in their land, while you keep maintaining the land (via SEO).

Genius or What? - I think if Zac (coopscustoms.com) is reading this right now and experiencing an extreme A.D.D - Overdose with potential ideas of how he will create his empire… and you should too.

Yes Shopping Cart Elite can handle the sub domain names for brand new standalone stores on your existing domain name and you can start your new store immediately with a discounted price if you already have one website with us.

MORE TIPS:  Tom can also start a whole new vertical business model, by starting new niches on a subdomain and give them out to his Affiliates to operate and create good unique onpage content (since they are standalone stores) and with no effort these stores will rank very well.

To make a long story SHORT… this is another GAME CHANGER by SHOPPING CART ELITE and about to change everything once again. It is time to join forces with someone who has a powerful, highly ranked domain name and really do some damage in Google.

IN CONCLUSION

If you have an opportunity like our Wheels clients do, to add another store on a sub domain of your website, you should do it RIGHT NOW! You risk nothing but you can benefit a whole lot. Since we start the website with full TURNKEY DATA, why would you not add all that additional content? Especially IF YOU ALREADY HAVE TRAFFIC and RANKING!

If you have any kind of opportunity to add a whole new store with data to your existing domain name, you should do it asap because you can only benefit from the increased traffic and sales.

If you want to learn more about Shopping Cart Elite visit our website.

UPDATES: 9/29/11

Found another way.

1. Leave your old web pages as is so they can still be located according to Google. Disable add to cart and direct people to the new sub domain store.
2. Add a sub domain for the new store 
3. Change the homepage completely to make it a portal for a social website like ning.com, blog, and the store on the sub domain

What you will achieve is

1. Your old pages are on still indexed and driving traffic
2. Your homepage is re-branded to point to the new store and make your website more social / branded
3. Your new store pages are online
4. You keep the branding and don’t lose the traffic. 

When you are done reading this post, you will fully understand what we do, and what you need to do when it comes to SEO. In addition I will share a secret algorithm that will get your website to the first page of Google.

When you hire Shopping Cart Elite to do your Search Engine Ranking / Optimization (SER/SEO) we only concentrate on backlinks. As you may or may not know, SEO has many different factors that you must execute in order for it to work to its fullest potential.

The 2 main important factors are

A) BACKLINKS

B) ON PAGE CONTENT (Title, Anchor Text, Meta Keywords, Meta Description, and Description itself)

Even though we do an amazing job with A (Backlinks), if you don’t execute B (ON PAGE CONTENT), you are losing money because you are not utilizing the ranking that you can have.

Let me metaphor this so you can better understand it.

METAPHOR 1

You need to build a house, a beautiful 4000 sq ft mansion. I will build you the hole, the framework for it, plumbing, electricity and road to get to this house. 

But if you dont finish building the house, or just set up a tiny one. Your not getting the full benefit of it.

METAPHOR 2 

You buy a 3D OLED 60” Flat Screen TV. I will connect DirectTV, Hulu, Cable, BluRay, Internet Video, Netflix, etc. to it.

Sure you can watch the TV with your regular antenna (1-13 channels), but you wont benefit from the HDTV and 3D that it offers.

THE POINT

I hope this is starting to make sense. When you start with Shopping Cart Elite, you are getting the framework (the frame of your HOUSE). When you get our SEO, you are getting the electricity and the plumbing.

But you still need to UPGRADE THE HOUSE (Set up the SCE store) and build it up to become a mansion (ON PAGE CONTENT).

REPEATING THE POINT

We don’t do the ON PAGE CONTENT FOR YOU, and UNLESS YOU ASK US TO HELP YOU OPTIMIZE THE LOOK OF YOUR ONLINE STORE (such as tweaking the buttons, etc.) WE DON’T DO IT EITHER.

You need to sit down and do it, and ask if you need help.

EXAMPLE OF HOW BACKLINKS AND ON PAGE CONTENT WORKS TOGETHER

Lets say you want us to rank for the term “Chrome Wheels” and we achieve the 1st page ranking for it.

Since you have the ranking for the word “Chrome” and “Wheels”… if you write article or a product description about any other keyword containing those keywords they will also rank.

So if you do nothing, you will get traffic for the word Chrome Wheels. But if you concentrate on the on page content, you can also rank for

• Brand A Chrome Wheels
• Brand B Chrome Wheels
• Custom Chrome Wheels
• Aftermarket Custom Chrome Wheels
• etc. 

This is how you get to thousand keyword. You have Shopping Cart Elite rank you for a set of keywords that is extremely competitive and can be combined with at least 100 more rich or long tail keywords.

SECRET ON PAGE CONTENT PATTERNS TO RANK FIRST PAGE IN LESS THEN A WEEK

Sam my co-worker  found a pattern that can rank any rich or long tail keyword article in Google in less then a week with little to no backlink help. He was nice enough to share his findings with the community.

This will be a private tutorial for Shopping Cart Elite clients only and it will be posted inside of Shopping Cart Elite Tutorials this week, it will be under Marketing > Ranking with Articles.

Here is Sam results, in only 2 months of using this strategy, he was able to go from 20 unique visitors to 100 unique visitors per day.

Keep in mind this took dedication. Not only did he create many articles, but he researched the keywords on each one and made sure they rank.

Here is REAL PROOF that the system works. Keep in mind there was NO BACKLINKS DONE during this period.

ARTICLES: http://www.bullydogperformancechip.com/Articles/Default.aspx

LET ME EMPHASIZE THIS 

Now 50% of you will not even watch this tutorial, I am pretty sure. 40% will watch it and do nothing about it. IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED IN YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS… YOU BETTER RECONSIDER THIS STATISTIC.

MAKE THIS YOUR GOAL TO CREATE AT LEAST ONE ARTICLE USING THE TUTORIAL EACH DAY. THERE  IS NO EXCUSE FOR NOT DOING IT!

I AM SERIOUS! … If you don’t want to do it or don’t have time, ask me I will give you a worker who will be responsible for one article per day.

• Building a Blog Overview
• Creating a new Tumblr Blog
• Adding a Tumblr Theme
• Integrating Facebook, Comments and Others
• Creating a Disqus Account
• Integrating Twitter