Guest victoria16 Posted August 7, 2007 Share Posted August 7, 2007 I have been fiddling around with my site now for the last couple of years and trying to learn as much as i can with the little time i have. I have only been using cubcart for the past several months or so and quite like it as i used to use net objects fusion which didn't give me the look that i was after. Any way i have put some coding into my site to count the hits i get the source the time they were on what they looked at etc but i am only getting around 20 hits a day on average. I have looked into seo optimization and its just so complicated. I have had the seo mod installed on my cubcart and hopefully this will improve things fingers crossed. How many hits should a good optimized site be achieving if that is possible to answer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vokf Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 Hi Victoria, you probably won't find many people admitting to their traffic publicly. One analogy I offer clients, is that of opening a small unit on a big industrial estate, trying to sell things with no advertising. Obviously, your neighbours and friends will be aware of your presence, but most people will not have heard of you, and you won't get any visitors... 20 hits (I assume you mean visitors, hits are slightly different), are not too bad for a site that isn't really promoted. Obviously, you need to get more, but more visitors won't help if your site has problems. My 4 bits of immediate advice: -Place the URL of your store as your signature in these forums, this is an established forum and Google will pick up on the link and it will help. -Ask for comments on your store, its easy to ignore the obvious. (there is a section for this- you'll see that people offer constructive comments) -Read up on "Google Products", and submit a feed every few weeks. -If your product is "niche", get active into various discussion forums, and if possible add your link as a signature (observing forums rules). Hanging out with potential customers is a good thing. I hope this is of some encouragement. Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest victoria16 Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 Well my site is actually a lingerie site and would think it is against forum policies to add my url as it would be classed as adult in nature. I have submitted my site to several free directories and i do get some visitor traffic from these as this shows up on my counter statistics. I have thought about paying to get a better placement in the lingerie directories as the saying goes you only get what you pay for but i dint want to throw money away if its not going to work. If i was going to pay for this service i would also use a directory that had a good page rank, Which reminds me as i wanted to ask which site could anyone recommend for checking page rank, i used http://rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php?url. When you say submit a feed to google products can you explain a Little more on this please sorry dint want to sound naive but i am still learning and guess i always will be. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vokf Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 Hi Victoria, I've replied via PM if you'd prefer not to post your URL publicly. Google Base/Products: When you search for a product on Google, is will often show about 3 links directly to suppliers where you can buy the listed product. It will show the price, and so its very handy if you're looking to buy something specific. If you buy things online, you've probably used it. This is a free service to Retailers from Google. Essentially, you need to create an account with Google, and then sign up for Google Base. Once you have that, you need to tell Google about your store and the format of the data you'll be sending. Then.. using CubeCart, you download a file from your store. This file will contain 1 line per product, with a list of product name, price, description, link to product page and link to product image. Save this file on your PC, then log-in to Google Base, upload the file. Google will check the file, and if all is ok, all your products will be searchable. Google changed the specification of the file a while back, and the current (and older) versions of CubeCart will not generate a valid file. There is an update at cubecartforums.org Getting it right may take a while, but obviously, once you are generating a valid file, subsequent submissions are quick. Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest victoria16 Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 Thank you Jason for your help really appreciate it. I know i have a lot of work to do on my site and any help and advise from people is really appreciated. Just checking my stats right now and i have had 40 unique visits today with 271 page views. The seo mod has only been on for a little over a week i am guessing that it will take time for the search engines to index more of my site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vokf Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 No worries. Most changes take a while to take effect. If you check your stats, you should find a "robots" section, this should list Google/MSN/Yahoo and a few others, and when they last visited, and possibly how many pages they spidered. As a guide, my Gear4mobiles store has been spidered by all the major search engines today, not sure how many files they've pulled, but AWStats is showing 1000+ for Google and 1400+ for Yahoo ( I have about 1500 product pages). I'm 1 of those unique visitors :-) This is pretty good compared to what you were saying on your first post. Google Analytics will allow you to find common routes through your site, and set-up "goals". I've set my goals to be the checkout stages, so can measure these things easier. Ideally, it should be a straight line with all visitors viewing cart and purchasing my goods, but not everyone purchases, and those that decide, decide against it at various times. Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest victoria16 Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 I use statcounter but i cant see any info for the robots file so I'm not sure if i have the facility to check this. I used Alexia to see what pages have been indexed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vokf Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 Ok, I can see you're hosting by 1&1 - I've never used them, but I know they have their own control panel with basic stats. The best advice I can offer, is to install Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/ Sign-up and you'll need to install some code into a few files in your store skin file. /skins/yourskin/styletemplates/global/index.tpl and cart.tpl If you search these forums, adding Google Analytics has been discussed previously. Alexia is a different engine to Google, and not commonly used from all the result I've ever seen. Basically, concentrate on the big 3 - Google, Yahoo and MSN, most of the UK ISPs use content from one of these as their search supplier. Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest victoria16 Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 Hi Victoria, I've replied via PM if you'd prefer not to post your URL publicly. Google Base/Products: When you search for a product on Google, is will often show about 3 links directly to suppliers where you can buy the listed product. It will show the price, and so its very handy if you're looking to buy something specific. If you buy things online, you've probably used it. This is a free service to Retailers from Google. Essentially, you need to create an account with Google, and then sign up for Google Base. Once you have that, you need to tell Google about your store and the format of the data you'll be sending. Then.. using CubeCart, you download a file from your store. This file will contain 1 line per product, with a list of product name, price, description, link to product page and link to product image. Save this file on your PC, then log-in to Google Base, upload the file. Google will check the file, and if all is ok, all your products will be searchable. Google changed the specification of the file a while back, and the current (and older) versions of CubeCart will not generate a valid file. There is an update at cubecartforums.org Getting it right may take a while, but obviously, once you are generating a valid file, subsequent submissions are quick. Jason Hi again Regarding google base products whch file do i download from my cubecart or will i need to do the mod first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vokf Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 Hi, Log in to your CubeCard admin area, then click View Products. At the top-right you'll see a "Google" image, click that. You'll then be prompted to save the file to your local PC. You can try to upload to Google (I assume you've signed up), and see if you get any errors. I must admit, I havn't tried the latest 3.0.17 or .16 release. Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest victoria16 Posted August 10, 2007 Share Posted August 10, 2007 Hi, Log in to your CubeCard admin area, then click View Products. At the top-right you'll see a "Google" image, click that. You'll then be prompted to save the file to your local PC. You can try to upload to Google (I assume you've signed up), and see if you get any errors. I must admit, I haven't tried the latest 3.0.17 or .16 release. Jason I haven't done the mod but found it looks a little complicated so i will have to look at it over the weekend and give it a go when i have more time. Victoria Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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