AspDotNetStorefront has a built-in Google sitemap that not many people know about.

Google allows website owners to submit sitemaps via Google Webmaster Tools. Submitting a sitemap to Google helps ensure that Google knows about all the pages on your site.

The built-in AspDotNetStorefront Google sitemap is dynamic; it changes as you add new categories, topics, and products to your site.

To get to the Google sitemap, type “googleindex.aspx” onto the end of your URL: www.YOURSITE.com/googleindex.aspx

You should see a page that looks something like this: (more…)

Landing Page Optimization is the process of improving a visitor’s perception of your site so that they’re more likely to complete a goal or convert to a sale.

Landing pages target a specific audience or support a certain advertising campaign. If a landing page is well-optimized it will lead to higher conversion rates.

If your store sells audio equipment and is running advertisements about Logitech speakers, you would create a Logitech speaker landing page for customers that come to your site from that ad campaign.

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Inbound links are possibly the most important part of SEO. In this article I’ll define what a good inbound link is and what it takes to get them.

A lot of people focus on metadata when they’re talking about SEO. But metadata is only part of a successful SEO strategy. In fact, I’ve heard stories of horribly optimized sites ranking well for popular keywords solely because they had a lot of inbound links from popular sites.

The right inbound links will make the difference between whether customers will find your site or not.

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Canonical Issues occur when a website has the same content appearing on multiple URLs.

Duplicate content can negatively impact your search engine performance. Some search engines consider it a form of keyword stuffing; others have difficulty prioritizing multiple pages with the same content. Either way, both results lower your position in search results.

By designating one piece of content canonical you tell search engines to ignore other versions of the same content.

How Can I Test for Canonical Issues?

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Why did the use of video to promote online products skyrocket by 20% last year? Because it works.

Video is educational, entertaining, and enables consumers to have a better visual understanding of the product they are purchasing, which serves to increase sales.  Video also has a far greater chance of being spread via word of mouth and attracting a much larger audience to your website.

“Will it Blend?” and a 5x Sales Increase
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Keeping up with accessibility standards makes your website usable by a much larger audience. It also allows the search engines to accurately assess your site’s content.

There are many steps to maintaining maximum website accessibility, some of which we’ll cover in future posts, but for now let’s start with arguably the most important one: Image ALT Text.

Image ALT text, contained in the ALT attribute of an image, is a written explanation of the image’s message. The text appears when that image cannot be displayed. In some browsers the text also appears as the tooltip. The HTML looks like this:

<img src=”images/vortxlogo.gif” alt=”Vortx” />

Why is ALT text important?

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Focus your site copy on your customers, and Google will notice too.

Many of our clients are concerned with SEO and hire us to help.  We work hard to make sure their metadata is perfect.  We analyze their keyword conversion rates. We compare search volumes and competition to find the perfect keywords for them.

Then we get cracking on the metadata. Title tags, keywords, descriptions, image names and alt-tags. Traffic will go up, which is great. But, sometimes I’ll notice bottle necks and notice customers are abandoning the path to sale.

I’ll check the page and it’s got problems. It’s poorly written, has a couple of crucial spelling errors, or doesn’t tell the customers exactly what to do.

All of these problems are easy to fix, and even easier to avoid. (more…)

The first and most important step in optimizing a website is to compile a list of keywords and phrases. It’s the foundation your SEO plan should be based on. Too often, businesses invest resources in optimizing for search terms that do not serve them well.

Determining the specific key words and phrases that are most likely to bring profitable traffic to your site ensures that the time and financial resources invested in search engine optimization efforts will pay off.

When developing a keyword list, it is important to pay attention to the following:

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So you have a website and you are getting visitors. But do they make it to your products, the real meat and potatoes, or are they simply seeing the home page and little else?

Knowing which pages your visitors are seeing, and more importantly where they are leaving from, is key to any site’s success.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. A small bit of code will give you access to a wealth of information to help you pinpoint your site’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
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