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Using JavaScript to Make Your Navigation Search Engine-Friendly

Stephanie A. — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:31:01 +0000

Historically the SEO industry has warned against using JavaScript menus, cautioning that bots (software applications used by search engines to run automated tasks over the Internet) cannot successfully crawl JavaScript. The result? Online retailers concerned their sites are unwelcoming to search engines. No traffic, no business.

It is correct to say that if poorly implemented, JavaScript can hide valuable content from search engines. The dangerous execution of incorrectly programmed JavaScript is ultimately destructive to a site’s traffic. However, search engines have come a long way. The idea that one cannot use JavaScript to create a feature-rich and interactive experience for customers without compromising a site’s SEO is simply dated. It can be done.

Many people are confused about JavaScript and SEO, and how to do things correctly. Whether you’re building a new site from the ground up or implementing new changes to optimize your existing site, implementing the following is sure to bring search engine success.

Create a Stable and Stylish Structure (with HTML)

Just as a department store uses mannequins and fixtures to display the latest styles in order to appease their shoppers and generate sales, your online store’s look and feel work the same way. If your website is appealing to your customer they are more likely to make a purchase. JavaScript enabled menus are found on just about every major online retail site. The beauty of this menu is not only the aesthetic appeal, but the ability to provided shoppers with a variety of choices while not feeling overwhelmed.

The successful implementation of JavaScript will be determined by how easy a customer can navigate through a site and at the same time achieve search engine victory. Search engine bots love HTML because it’s easy to crawl. Code should be very simple and very straightforward.

JavaScript should be written in such a way that the HTML holds all of the links and content on one layer so it can be easily crawled. Stores with several sub-categories that uses some JavaScript (external) coded directly into the HTML with text-based links are easily searched by bots to spider and index. Create your top navigation categories using plain text full of rich key words and then style them using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for the presentation layer. The CSS is SEO-neutral, so there should be no negative effect on how a page is indexed.

Best Practices for Best Success

Where Java Script is kept and placement is most important, this cannot be emphasized enough. The best practices for successful bot crawls is to have JavaScript placed in one of two places either (1) external load (as mentioned above) after the head on HTML or (2) at the very bottom of the body. It looks something like this.

Where external load would be placed (1)

GA Tracking Code (so Java Script loads last) (2)
)

A different file can be created to keep all the JavaScript codes separately. This file has an extension of .js. It is a simple file that can be created using notepad. It has nothing except the JavaScript code. You can place functions, code and style sheets into this external .js file and refer to the file with one line from each web page that wants to use the functions contained in it.

Using external JavaScript files saves bandwidth, which is achieved by caching any JavaScripts and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) these are often repeated in websites. Also, the length of the page reduces therefore creating a faster download. In addition, .js files allow search engines to crawl the site fast therefore receiving information quickly.

Test, Test, and Test Again
Testing a website for errors and search engine optimization issues will almost certainly result in success. If indeed there are some issues with the crawling of your site, you will be able to determine this by testing. A good way of testing to ensure your website is search engine friendly is to crawl it using a web crawler. We recommend using seo-browser.com. In addition set up Google Webmaster Tools and use “Fetch” as a Google Bot tool. Then you will be able to easily determine the crawl-ability of your site.

Ready, Set, Go
There are no set “rules” of where code can go, only “best practices”. The bottom line, JavaScript codes are not going to disrupt SEO Optimization. The point is WHERE to keep the codes. There is great confusion that has been created in regards to the use of JavaScript code and SEO optimization, which is unnecessary.

In addition, if a page is full of unique and valuable information then the JavaScript code can be a trivial matter. If your site is rich in worthy content you’re on the right track. Follow the best practices of coding JavaScript correctly, creating useful content and providing your shoppers with great customer service and they will become your customer for life.

Written by Stephanie A.

You’ve Got Google Apps – Now What?

Judson G. — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:51:11 +0000

There is so much more to Google Apps than a branded email solution. Once you start looking into everything the entire free suite can do, you will be just as amazed as I was.

Email

Google Apps gives you a stable and branded email solution that complements your website. It’s your own email, addressed to your domain, and stays with you for as long as you own your domain.

But what about my Outlook? Don’t worry, you can still use Outlook (and other email clients) on your desktop, and you can also access your email from anywhere using a web browser – on your laptop, home computer, and even handheld mobile devices.

Google Apps email is based on Google’s already popular Gmail, which gives you a scalable, world class email system without the need to invest in additional hardware, software, and technical support resources. Gmail couples the concept of labels with Google’s powerful search engine that makes creating folders and sorting through hundreds of emails a thing of the past. Google provides a massive, ever-increasing storage capacity (currently over 7400 MB), which makes saving and archiving all your critical email a goal you can reach.

And that’s just the email!

Google Apps also provides a suite of applications using the “software as a service” concept, which are designed to increase your productivity, mobility and ability to collaborate. Included in your Google Apps account is the Calendar, Google Docs, Google Groups, and Google Sites, each with your own domain branded web address, or URL.

Calendar

Google Calendar is competitive with Outlook and other group aware calendar packages. It is customizable, web and mobile accessible, and designed with collaboration and group sharing capabilities. Here are just some of the things you can do with Google Calendar:

Schedule and manage appointments
Overlay multiple calendars to see when people are available. Google Calendar can send invitations and manage RSVPs.
Google Calendar works with Gmail and can easily be integrated into most desktop email clients.
Share project calendars
Calendars can be shared company-wide or with select co-workers. A range of sharing permission controls help maintain security and privacy.
Access with your mobile device – View and edit event details, add new events, and invite guests on mobile devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone. Even receive calendar notifications via SMS.
Publish calendars – Publicize external company events by publishing a calendar to make it searchable in the Google Calendar gallery. Calendars are easily embedded into web pages.
Manage meetings online with Google Calendar

Google Groups

Google Groups allows you to create and manage multiple distribution lists for email, and also provides a way to organize sharing and permissions for access to calendars, Google Docs, and Google Sites. Here are some basic facts about Google Groups:

Groups are fast and easy to setup
Easily managed without the need for additional IT support
Easy for employees to share docs, calendars, sites, shared folders, and videos with groups instead of individual employees. You have complete control over access through managing the members of the group
Group discussions are archived by default and easily searched, allowing for retrieval and compliance with records policies
Groups act as a centralized communications point with the ability to receive and send replies on behalf a group

Google Docs

Google Docs are a web-based document collaboration application, combining documents, spreadsheets and presentations into shareable, group accessible locations that allow users to edit the same file, ensuring that you always have the latest version. You can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations right there online, or upload and edit documents. Here are some things you can do with Google Docs:

Upload and convert Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text (.txt), Open Office (.odt), and StarOffice Writer (.sxw) files (or create documents from scratch)
Easily format your documents, spell-check them, etc.
Invite others by email to edit or view your documents and edit documents online
View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version
Publish documents online to the world, as web pages or post documents to your blog or email your documents out as attachments
Download documents to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, HTML or zip

Google Docs gives you more functionality and flexibility with your spreadsheets and presentations, too. Here are some things you can do with spreadsheets:

Import and convert .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data
Export .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data and PDF and HTML files
Use formatting and formula editing so you can calculate results and make your data look the way you want it
Chat in real time with others who are editing your spreadsheet
Embed a spreadsheet, or individual sheets of your spreadsheet, in your blog or website

And your presentations:

Share and edit presentations with your friends and coworkers
Import and convert existing presentations in .ppt and .pps file types
Download your presentations as a PDF, a PPT, or a TXT file
Easily edit your presentations
Insert images and videos, and format your slides to fit your preferences
Allow real-time viewing of presentations, online, from separate remote locations
Publish and embed your presentations in a website, allowing access to a wide audience.

Google Sites

Google gives you an easy way to create a website. Do you need a company intranet page? How about setting a Team Project Portfolio? Have you thought about putting up employee profile pages, but didn’t think you could do it on your own. Google Sites can do all that and more. Here are some quick facts:

You can create a new page for your Google Site with just a single click
No HTML required – creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there’s no markup language or fancy code for you to learn
Get started quickly and easily with website templates. You can choose from an ever growing list of page types — web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list — to help you get started with your Google Sites pages
Use the file cabinet to upload files and documents up to 10MB in size. Each Google Apps Standard account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites
Google Sites are integrated with other Google products, so you can insert videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slide shows, and calendars directly onto your Google Sites pages
Collaboration allows you to set permissions and designate owners, viewers and collaborators (meaning they can edit pages) for your site. And you can make your Google Sites available to just a few people, only your company, or the entire world

Google Apps Mobile

Google Apps is not just for your desktop. You can setup and access all your Google Apps email, sites, groups and documents right from your Smartphone. Here are just some of the things you can do with Google Apps and your Smartphone:

Google Mobile App – download to your Smartphone to search fast
Mail – access to your email, calendar, sites and docs, no matter where you are
Use your Google Calendar with no syncing necessary. Set up mobile phone notifications
View your Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, from anywhere and at any time
Google Tasks keeps your to do list with you wherever you go

All of this and more come with the free Google Apps Standard account, proving that Google Apps is so much more than just “email”. For more information on how Google Apps can work for you, or to or have Vortx setup your own Google Apps migration, go here: http://www.vortx.com/p-58-google-apps-migration-service.aspx.

Written by Judson G.

Analytics: What’s the Deal With All These Numbers?

Craig H. — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:28:16 +0000

I know you’re excited. We just installed Google Analytics on your site and the dream of increased conversion rates glows brightly in your eyes. You login and… uh-whaaaaa? What is this jibber-jabber? All you see is squiggly lines and a page full of numbers and links to more pages full of even more squiggly lines and numbers.

This is a common reaction to the Google Analytics Dashboard. The numbers look intimidating but with a little help, they’ll soon be your best friend. The first step of being able to release the power of your site’s analytics is to understand the terms used. After we get you familiar with what the terms mean, we’ll move on to understanding the way they interact with each other. But that’s for another time.

So, put on a pot of coffee, grab your spectacles and settle in; I’m going to teach you some key definitions that will help you get the most out of Google Analytics.

Common Analytics Terms:

Visits: An interaction between a visitor’s browser and a particular website. A visit automatically ends if a user is inactive for longer than 30 minutes. Visits are also called sessions.

Visitor: An estimation of how many distinct peoples use a site over a given period. Google Analytics uses cookies to track how many times a distinct visitor has visited a site.

Pageview: Every time a page from your site is loaded in a browser, it’s counted as a pageview.

Pages/Visit: The average number of pageviews divided by the number of visits over a given period of time.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the same page they entered on.

Ave. Time on Site: The average duration of a visit over a period of time.

% New Visits: The number of visitors that are new to a site divided by the total number of visitors over a period of time. Google Analytics uses cookies to track return visitors, so even if someone has been to your site before, but they deleted their cookies, they’ll be counted as a new visitor.

Referring Sites: The URL of an HTML page that refers visitors to a site.

Conversion: A conversion happens whenever a goal page is loaded during a visit. A goal page can be anything from a purchase confirmation page, to a page that loads after a visitor enters their email address for your newsletter.

Conversion Rate: The number of visits to your site that load a goal page divided by the total number of visits.

After you’re familiar with the terms, start looking at the numbers that are being recorded. Do they seem high? Low? What would have to happen in the real world to create the numbers you’re looking at? Answering these kinds of questions will be the key to starting to increase your site’s conversion rate.

Written by Craig H.

How to Go Get Customers! Part 1 – Feeds

Megan M. — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:45:58 +0000

Want to deliver content directly to your shoppers instead of relying on them remembering to come back to your site?

That’s what this series article is all about. I’ll give an overview of seven different ways to deliver content to your users instead of waiting for them to visit your site.

In this part I’ll explain how to use RSS feeds and product feeds to attract customers.

RSS Feeds

What are They?

RSS Feeds for Content Delivery

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds allows content to be easily displayed in a variety of places. One of the most common pieces of content to be delivered by RSS are blog posts to feed readers.

RSS Feed Readers have become a popular way to read many different blogs without having to visit each blog to check for updates. Many separate blog rss feeds are delivered right to your feed reader instead.

RSS feeds can be used in many ways – and are actually the basis of some of the other content delivery systems that will be described later in this article. Some, like the example at right, are raw RSS feeds that are fed into feed readers. Other RSS feeds are product feeds that put your products into shopping comparison sites like Google Base and Shopzilla. Still others display specific information on a website, like the LiveWire Blog section of the Vortx.com homepage.

How Can They Help You?

If you have content that is updated frequently, like a blog, products, sales or promotions an RSS feed can effectively deliver your content to your subscribers without them ever having to visit your website or blog, and the easier it is for them to read your content, the more likely they will read it!

Product Feeds

What are They?

Product Feeds for Content Delivery

Product feeds are specially formatted feeds (some are RSS feeds!) that take a list of your eCommerce products and insert them into a comparison shopping site like Google Base or Shopzilla. When a shopper visits one of these comparison shopping sites, they search for a product and can narrow or sort the search results to find the ‘best deal’ from all eCommerce stores that have submitted their products.

How Can They Help You?

By inserting your products into a comparison shopping site via a product feed, you increase the visibility of your products, your store, and add links to your site from trusted sites.

Even if your product isn’t the ‘best deal’ in the search results, quality descriptions and product photos could bring that shopper into your store to look around. Inbound links are precious – product feeds provide that many more ways someone could find your products and your site.

Remember…

To take full advantage of these tools, consistency is key. It takes work to create and promote content, but that effort will pay off in dividends as you see your web presence improve.

All of these content delivery options can be used together to place your content (marketing!) into as many channels as possible, effectively increasing the number of people who are exposed to your business and your products or services.

Subscribe to our RSS feed or our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss Part 2: Email Marketing

Which of these tools have you used? What’s worked well for you? Any suggestions? Our current poll on the right is a quick and easy way to respond!

Written by Megan M.

AspDotNetStorefront’s Google Sitemap

Scott F. — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:11:32 +0000

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:

Submitting The Sitemap

To submit your sitemap to Google you first need to create a free account with Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you get your account setup correctly you’ll find all kinds good information that Google has about your website. You are looking for the “sitemaps” tab on the left hand side of the Webmaster Tools overview screen.

From here submitting a sitemap to Google is pretty easy. You just need to provide Google with the correct URL: YOURSITE.com/googleindex.aspx

Be aware – it’s common for some warnings to show up in the Google Webmaster Tools sitemap statistics when you submit this sitemap. This is usually because the priority level given to each page in the site map is the same since there is no way to flag different pages with a different priority level in the backend of AspDotNetStorefront. You do have the ability to set the priority per page type (Product, Entity, Topic) though.

Configuration

Login to the backend of your AspDotNetStorefront website and navigate to Configuration>Advanced>AppConfig Parameters. If you search for “googlesitemap” you will see all of the appconfigs that apply to the Google Sitemap.

These appconfigs allow you to adjust the change frequency and the priority level of entities, topics, and products.

For more information about Google sitemaps, take a look at this article.

Written by Scott

Coder’s Corner – Developer Tools You Can’t Live Without

Nicole S. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:30:51 +0000

In an earlier post, Ryan posted a few links to some tools to help you increase productivity. Here is a similar list of development related tools that I simply cannot live without.

In development, especially for AspDotNetStorefront, there are two tools which you absolutely must have in order to do any kind of extensive development in the .Net Framework.

Visual Studio Express Edition
Visual Studio is an editor that will help you make modifications to any pages throughout your site. Visual Studio Express is absolutely free, as it is a lightweight version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Visual Studio has many different Express options which are geared toward different types of development. Depending on what you’re familiar with, you may choose a different version. If you’re not sure, choose the Visual Web Developer Express edition.
SQL Server Express
SQL Server Express is also free, as it is a lightweight version of SQL Server. With SQL Server Express, you can set up a new database, perhaps a copy of your AspDotNetStorefront database, and configure your application to use the new database on your local machine. This way, you can make changes to your site using Visual Studio, and you can see the changes locally, instead of making changes directly to your live site.

Beyond those two must-haves, there are several other tools I use on a daily basis:

Firefox
Generally, I do all of my initial skinning and development in Mozilla Firefox. We always test in all the top browsers before releasing code into the wild, but Firefox is my favorite browser to work in because of all of the great tools available.
Firebug
Firebug is a Firefox extension that helps enormously with debugging Javascript, CSS, and HTML issues. Because this is an add to to Firefox, you can easily use this tool to check errors and issues directly on the site you’re browsing.
Web Developer Toolbar

This nifty Firefox add-on is something I end up using every day, on every project. Installing this will add a toolbar to Firefox that provides a multitude of options. It also comes with handy keyboard shortcuts to enable and disable certain features. One of my favorites is the CSS View Style Information feature. You can activate this by selecting it from your toolbar, or by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Y on your keyboard. When activated, a red border will appear around certain elements on the page, and the red border will follow your mouse movement. Once you’ve highlighted an area you want more detail on, clicking will open up a pane in the bottom of your browser window and give you all of the CSS styles that are associated with that element. Another great tool with this add-on is the resize window feature, which allows you to resize your browser window to different dimensions with a single click. You can set your own dimensions so you can always have the dimensions you like to test in readily available in a dropdown menu.

These tools allow efficient AspDotNetStorefront Development and Customization for your online store.

Written by Nicole

Work Faster, Work Better – Tips to Turbo Charge your Desktop

Ryan S. — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:37:45 +0000

Using your computer effectively takes some practice. These tips save me time and headaches each day and I’m sure they’ll do the same for you.

Read through and give these a try – you’ll be surprised at the great tools available and what you can do with them!

Get the Tools:

Desktop Search – Google or Microsoft, they’re both good. The second you don’t know where something is, search for it.
Application Launcher - Launchers allow you to get to the screen, folder, or application you want without taking your hands off of the keyboard.I use Slickrun. Another launcher that is used around the office is Launchy.There are lots of these applications available for free. Find one that works for you and set up your browsers, email, business applications, common folders paths and anything you use on a weekly basis. Get comfortable with this app and read the manual or help file. You should be using it all the time.
A New Text Editor – For me, Word is too slow to load and Notepad is too limited in options. I use Notepad2 and I am very happy with it. I use Textpad as well, but mostly for searching text within a bunch of files. If you need to search many files in a folder, Textpad is still the best I’ve found. Notepad++ is also a very good alternative to Notepad2.
Multiple Monitors - Ultramon gives you a taskbar on all monitors and helps you manage your windows on multiple screens.

My new favorite browser is Google Chrome. I like the way it uses space, the flexibility of the tabs, and plenty more. I also have the latest releases of Firefox and IE7 on my machine.

The Firebug add-on for Firefox is a must-have for anyone involved with website design or implementation. It lets you see into the HTML of a webpage to find problems while they are rendered. You can debug JavaScript, CSS, and HTML from this tool.

Use a RSS Feed reader. Don’t browse or search for the information you know you want. Find a feed that will deliver that content to you. (Power Users should try Yahoo Pipes.)

Organize
Your File Structure
Manage your file structure by starting with broad-themed folders and moving to very specific folders.

For example, when I organize my project folder structure I start with “C:/Clients/Client/Project/Files.” Yours would most likely be different.
I always have a shortcut in my launcher to get to “C:/Clients” folder and I have shortcuts to get to most client and project folders too.
Other folders I keep in the root of my drives are “Development,” “Sandbox,” and “General.”

I try to keep all my files out of the roots of my drives and in a folder that is descriptive to what it contains.

Your Desktop
Go through all the icons on your desktop and move the files and folders to the correct place in your file structure. Move all program shortcuts into your launcher application or into the Quick Launch bar.

During my workday:

I generally drop files and folders onto my desktop that are relevant to the projects I am working on. I use my desktop as a reminder that I need to do something with these files.
At the end of the day it’s a combination of Outlook, our task management program and my desktop where I look for any loose strings that I need to clean up before work is done for the day.

Your Start Menu
My launcher application has minimized my use of the start menu, but I still organize it so when I do need to use it the programs are where I can find them. Keep the initial menu short and use the flyouts to refine your programs.

Get Help
These handy apps help you remove temp files from your machine and help detect and remove spyware.

CCleaner: http://www.ccleaner.com/
Spybot Search and Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

What programs do you use that save time and manage your computer? Share your favorites below in the comments section.

Written by Ryan S.

The Best AspDotNetStorefront Feature You’re Not Using – GoogleBase

Craig H. — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:09:18 +0000

AspDotNetStorefront has a feature that will get your products in front of a whole new audience, and you’re probably not using it.

Setting up product feeds for GoogleBase lets you keep Google Shopping updated on your products automatically. Buried at the bottom of the “Products” section of the ASPDNSF Admin section, you’ll find an item called “feeds.” Then click “Create New Feed” and configure your XML file. After that, set up a GoogleBase account, submit the feed and you’re set.

But, that’s just the beginning. Getting your products placed highly is another story completely.

Optimizing your product feeds means modifying the XML template and making sure that the right product data maps to the correct XML tag.

Learn how Vortx can help you optimize your product feed…

Written by Craig H.