Boxing Day

IS YOUR SHOPPING CART COSTING YOU MONEY?

They was a time when doing business on the internet simply meant hanging out your electronic shingle and raking in the profits. Then it became necessary to build your online credibility through reciprical linking and membership in organizations like http://i-Cop.org. Then organizations like http://www.paypal.com and http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?shannan0 became necessary to accept payments without waiting for the proverbial "check in the mail".

One of the latest innovations of internet marketing is the shopping cart program. Basically, this let's visitors to your site prepare an online order just like they would fill out an order form from a catalog and submit it directly to your business. Some programs are so advanced they also calculate payments, coupons, shipping, and inventory.

But are they a good thing?

Many online business people are finding that the fancy shopping cart program they have used to design or re-design their website is costing them business. Why?

Because these programs are not search engine friendly. They omit meta tags, they contain long and cumbersome universal resource locators (URLs), and they inhibit the attainment of high search engine rankings.

So what can the online business person do? Is there no way to have a friendly merchant environment? And stay visible in the search engines?

Yes, there is. And its relatively simple. Take for example, a generic gift site. You might have a front page with a link to main category pages that each flow down like a graph to specific products. But you cannot place each of these pages directly into your shopping cart program. Create a regular front page which sits right on your domain, www.mygifts.com. Create category headings for your main product groupings that also sit directly on your domain, www.mygifts.com/group1.html, www.mygifts.com/group2.html etc. Keep these pages off the secure shopping cart server and system. From the category heading pages, then move into the shopping cart system.

While your individual products may never see the light of day in search engine rankings - your front page and your category headings will. In this way, you have a site which is shopper and search engine friendly.

Shannan Hearne-Fortner is the president and wizard of http://www.SuccessPromotions.com, an internet marketing information and service company. Part author, poet, mother, WAHM, and wizard, Shannan is the marketing manifestation of Guerilla marketing techniques from Jay Conrad Levinson, One-to-One Marketing, grass roots campaign development and internet wizardry combined with the Eastern-Western philosophies of such gurus as Deepak Chopra, Shakti Gawain, and Alan Watts. Seasoned with the thoughts of theological greats like Billy Graham and WAHM oriented authors like Priscilla Huff. Her marketing experience contains over ten years of online and off-line campaign development for products and services ranging from alarms to pottery, software to hardware, jewelry to clothing, consulting to designing, and everything in between. Always insightful, often humorous, and occasionally downright delightful.

About the author: Shannan Hearne-Fortner, President and Wizard Success Promotions Marketing Your eBusiness Better http://www.successpromotions.com ICQ # 20240138