| LED Digest 1798: Ecommerce Package Foibles & Delights |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ May 6, 2004 Issue #1798 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Demise of Email? ==-- ~ Adam Boettiger "...all we need for sp*m to stop is for the buyers to stop buying." --== Ecommerce Packages [was: Changing URL] ==-- ~ Rick Gortatowsky "...over the years we have tried many a commerce solution and all have some foibles and feature delights." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Webalizer for Site Stats ==-- ~ Sandra Sims --== Internal Links ==-- ~ Michael Martinez ~ Erik Perkkins ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Adam Boettiger Subject: Email demise > This thread interests me simply because I'm suffering from > the problem from both ends. When I send outgoing email, > I use the "return receipt" function... this annoys many people... - Mike Banks Valentine, LED 1797 This is, at best, an unreliable way of determining whether email arrived because it relies completely on the recipient to take action. An interesting (and IMHO better) solution is ReadNotify http://www.readnotify.com/. It allows you to send email through virtually any email client and then either log in to a Web account to view when it arrived, how many times it was opened, how long it was read, whether it was forwarded to someone else, etc. Or you can set it to send you an email with this information. Spooky I know, but it is more reliable / useful than the Return Receipt Requested feature of Outlook because this solution does not rely on the recipient. > Meanwhile, my incoming mail has reached about 4000 daily... > Who opens that [spam] stuff anyway? We all know that the > sp*mmers are getting rich... Who is buying those things!? I keep telling people, all we need for sp*m to stop is for the buyers to stop buying. I wonder how long it would take to see a decrease in sp*m if a site was created that revealed the identities of the people who were buying those products? My sense is that that alone would be more of a deterrent than any legislature. Of course I won't even get into the legal and privacy issues with such an idea, but it's fun to dream isn't it? <G> > I routinely miss things from clients that they must > send repeatedly... Sometimes I don't receive things > I send to MYSELF via email... You need to do two things: 1. For moving email and files from PC to Mac and back or laptop to PC, go to http://www.iomega.com/ and look at their USB Mini-Drives. They are flash drives that are drag and drop and work on both a Mac and a PC. You can drag an individual email message, file, whatever you want onto the drive and plug the drive into another computer to use. If you do a lot with email you may want to look at a program called Pocomail, which is a tiny app that actually resides ON the flash drive itself, allowing you to take your email with you, use a public terminal without leaving any traces behind, check email from a friend's computer etc. 2. For your missing real email issue, your problem is that you are filtering sp*m. If you are in business online, you really can't afford to. It takes just as much time to go into your junk mail folder and review all of them for "real" email as it would to delete the junk email. The solution is to use more than one POP account and use a whitelisting or c/r (challenge / response) solution like SpamArrest http://www.spamarrest.com/. Create one POP account (private) that you have never used before on your domain: ' This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '. Then create an email address that you will use as an alias that forwards to that POP: ' This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '. This allows you to change aliases if mike@ becomes compromised, and to redirect mike@ if you want to filter it. Create a second POP account (public) that you have never used before on your domain: ' This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '. Then create an alias 'newsletters@' that you use to sub to professional reading materials. This way when you're traveling out of country you can check for "real" email on your pay-by-the-minute dialup in India without getting 1,000 newsletters, simply by checking only one POP account and not the other. Finally, create a third pop account (filtered) that you have never used before: ' This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '. Then open up an account at http://www.spamarrest.com/ and use that account to check your filtered@ POP. If your own email address becomes too cluttered with junk, just go in and redirect the alias to point to your filtered POP account, then import your email address book from Outlook into SpamArrest to white list all current senders that you communicate with. That way they will never get issued a challenge, their email is sure to get through to you, but you will get zero junk mail. If you own multiple domains, be sure to set the catchall of the domain to direct to your filtered pop account. If you don't you'll continue to be the target of dictionary attacks and get a ton of spam as they send to ' This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '. This strategy really works. Over the past year spamarrest has filtered over 97,000 junk mail messages with zero false positives for me. It's not filtering. It's blocking. Hope this helps, Adam Boettiger, Chief Idea Architect I-Advertising http://www.i-advertising.com ab, i-advertising.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Rick Gortatowsky Subject: Ecommerce packages [was: Changing URL] > ...when you type my URL (ie. www.mystore.com), > it goes to "store.mystore.com" on Yahoo. Does > this "re-direct" effect my search engine rankings? - Allen Chou, LED 1796 Hi Allen, Its been a few years since we tried Yahoo Stores but I can tell you back then it was not very search engine friendly not due to the redirect but do to it being a database driven eCommerce solution. The advantage to Yahoo stores is the Yahoo Marketplace and most certainly (at least back then) Yahoo was gearing the stores around Yahoo, not Google, etc. In general any eCommerce solution that wants generate product SKU's via a database and then generate the web page via a template (sometimes called a Fly Page) are not real search engine "nice". Search engines like static pages. Why? Well, dynamic content generated from databases and similar online structures can result in mechinisms that end up sending the search spider into bogus content. For example, someone could simply obtain a huge database of lets say music UPC's or Book ISBN's w/ titles and such. A dynamic content site could then just generate oodles and oodles of pages and dynamically alter search criteria. So a Beatles book might end up with 150 indexed SKU's all rather different but in reality all the same SKU. With all that said, over the years we have tried many a commerce solution and all have some foibles and feature delights. Some are just quite scary. One of my best friends used to be a Nortel Nets guru in security. Some commerce solutions are a hackers dream. eCommerce solutions can be broken into three groups basically. 1. Custom solutions like the big guys usually use such as Amazon. The benefit, they enjoy control and the ability to engineer their solution to suit needs such as new features, adding external vendors, XML interfaces so sites can utilize content etc. 2. Commerce solutions administrated online. Things like PDG cart, Yahoo stores, Miva Merchant and countless others. Many of these are quite good, Miva is astonishing in capabilities and learning curve. Some are a hackers dream (wont mention names). 3. Commerce solutions that are administrated on your local PC(s). These include things like Storefront and numerous others. The foibles of complete online solutions are working on the sites as its all "online" and of course when things go badly you end up stuck. For example, Yahoo raises fee's, you want host elsewhere whatall... Moving Miva to a new host is no fun for example. With solutions such as Storefront the balance of your store is on your local PC's so whether your host provider server dies w/o a decent backup or you decide to switch hosting you just point them where they need go, upload and your done. I could write a book on eCommerce shop carts who all claim to be the cats meow. Reality is a handful are the cats meow and of that handful only a few are really really super deals. We recommend to all eCommerce entrepeneurs small and large alike Actinic Catalog or Actinic Business or Enterprise. Your paying every month for your Yahoo solution for example. We paid once for Actinic. $500 and thats it. That was several years back now. Yes, we pay for hosting. We pay no commissions, we can move the site to any host provider we like. It enjoys exceptional security and its all Windows PC administrated. We add products hit one button and it does the rest. We hit one button to grab our orders, it does the rest. We can make the site look however we choose, we make static pages for products so everything indexes well in search engines etc. We have set up sales businesses sites with Actinic and have yet to have a single entity complain. Its easy to use, works wonderful, enjoys fantastic support and is extremely powerful and capable. Rick Gortatowsky Software Society ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Sandra Sims Subject: Website stats > I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with Webalizer... - Joanne Cannell, LED 1794 I have also used Webalyzer and it seems a little clunky. I just started using Clickalyzer about 3 weeks ago, and it is much more user friendly. There are 8 different reports and multiple search and filter functions. This online program is especially useful for multiple domains and AdWords campaigns. You can view more info at http://www.clickalyzer.com Sandra Sims Step By Step Fundraising http://www.stepbystepfundraising.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Internal links > ... when I did a backward [link check at Google], I noticed > that on some websites, their [sub-pages] show up as > a link to their homepage, while mine don't show up. - Joanne Cannell, LED 1796 Google is more interested on what you provide to YOUR visitors about YOUR site than it is in what other sites provide to their visitors about your site. Your internal linkage is critical to demonstrating to Google that you have a robust, well-designed site. If you distribute your content across sub-directory structures and/or use sub-domain names, you can and SHOULD have your pages cross-link to each other to make it easy for your visitors to navigate across your content. It is customary to provide left-margin or right-margin navigation tables. These tables should have hard-coded, absolute URLs in them (http://somedomain.name.here/) and they should NOT be displayed via Javascript, flash, or any other gizmo. Google will follow those links and it will count the number of times your pages link to each other. You can boost your Google rankings much faster and more easily by providing a good H1 header tag on every page (UNIQUE to each page) which matches the TITLE tag for that page exactly and which replicates a phrase or word from the page's content. But you must also provide solid, consistent internal linkage to show your pages aren't simply one-stop spam pages -- you need to show that they are part of a larger, useful site. If you have a LOT of secondary pages (dozens, hundreds, or even thousands) then you have to set up tiers, both physically and logically. That is, you need to select some pages to be more important than others. This is the natural way good sites are designed. Those more important pages will rank better than others in Google. How do you make them more important? You have them link back to each page in their sub-group, but have each page in the sub-group only link to them (and not to each other). Michael Martinez, Author Understanding Middle-earth, Parma Endorion, and Visualizing Middle-earth http://www.xenite.org/ ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Erik Perkkins Subject: Internal links > To find out which pages are indexed enter > site:http://kitchendesignbyjoanne.com on Google. - Vishal Verma, LED 1797 I just wanted to add that you can put a key word or phrase before the site command: "words phrases site:http://www.domain.dom" (no quotes) This is a very useful tool for examining the nature of your Google presence. On a bit of a tangent, I also use google in this manner to search other sites such as wikipedia. I find that google provides results much faster than their internal engine. Erik Perkkins Liberty Graphics, Inc, http://www.lgtees.com web, lgtees.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." - Buddha |
