Ask Laura About WordPress Storefronts

Not Making Money Online – Ask Laura (06/06)

Gerry is asking about a WordPress script that I promoted a few months back over at Smartzville – see the free how-to set up an online store with WordPress and merchant datafeed videos here – although I’ve had decent success with my online stores, a few others have not. The clues to the differences lie below…

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Hi Laura

I’ve had some WordPress Datafeed stores set up for over 2 months now and they haven’t been indexed by any search engines (although they have been visited).

I thought these blogs were search engine friendly!!

Seriously, is there anything I can do or do I just wait.

Also have you any info on how to implement the Jerome keywords plug in, I can’t understand how to implement it.

I hope you can help me make some sales.

Gerry

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Hi Gerry:

Please excuse me, lots going on online and in my personal life – I’ve totally forgotten where your sites were, can you send me urls? I’ve got so many people I’m working with now, that if our past messages to each other aren’t in the return mail you send me I don’t know what I’ve already suggested, where your site is, or what you need to do next to take it up a notch.

My new stores are making decent sales with no promotion other than submitting my RSS Feed to the directories a few months back. I’ve just implemented the tag process into the store blogs so we’ll see how that goes. Using that method I instantly picked up and got PR2-5 backlinks and some foot traffic. We’ll see if it results in more sales. Have you heard about tagging? There’s a tag and ping course here, and a free download pdf of the basic tag and ping concept here.

The WordPress Datafeed stores are SE friendly. At last google update (about 2 months ago) I got two PR4s and lots of indexed pages on two brand new sites. I wonder what I’ve done that you haven’t? Send me your urls and any information on what you’ve done to optimize traffic. The other side of this is that google is due for an update soon – I’m waiting on it – and you may find better results at that time.

Also, when you say “haven’t been indexed – although have been visited” – please clarify…

- visited by whom? the bots and spiders or actual visitors?
- indexed by whom? all or just google?

If you’re having trouble with the Jerome plugin the best thing you can do is hit the plugin author’s site, read the comments from others and leave your questions there. Really, no one knows their code better than the author.

Looking forward to your answers.

Laura

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Hi Laura

I guess you’re the type of person who thrives on “lots going on”. Anyway you’re great for finding some time to help other people succeed.

I’d be proud to show you my sites – some of them are quite cool! I’ve got 8 stores but I’ve stopped doing them now until I figure how to make them work.

…list of sites edited…

I’ve got technorati tags on all posts – have done that from the beginning…and I’ve phased the posting so that new posts are continually added.

The sites have been visited by spiders and bots but none of the sites are indexed by google, msn, or yahoo. I’ve also got them on Traffic Swarm. The …url removed… has got a few clicks into the merchant, maybe about 50 since the beginning but no sales resulted, but I can’t see what’s different about that site (I think it’s the ugliest of the lot).

I shall follow your links to find out about tagging but in the meantime if you spot anything I’m not doing, I’d be really grateful for your advice, being a newbie, I’m not always sure where to turn.

Information is not hard to get – I’m constantly bombarded by it, but good, practical advice is a different thing altogether!

Gerry

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Hmmm…

Gerry, did you submit your rss feed to the rss directories?

On a side note – and not sure you did this, but you should never ad adsense ads to a site until a few weeks after google has indexed and included the site in their search results. Doing it before hand is a big red flag to google “this site exists only for the ad click income”.

I know that google, specifically, isn’t wild about sites that are 100% duplicated content. You might like to add a few articles into your blogs – keyword rich of course.

Another important thought – if your code doesn’t validate, you lose points in the search engines. Now this is a pain in the butt, and doesn’t have to be adherred to 100% but I’ve found that when I have more than 40 code errors on a page I lose rank – sometimes even being delisted.

If the code is sloppy and has lots of errors, this alone could be your trouble. Usually it’s in the php template. I’m not convinced this is why none of your sites are included in the SEs because you have a few different themes in your various sites.

But I do want you to consider changing or fixing your themes – for instance, go to this page:

…url removed…

If you were an online shopper, and perchance you landed here, would you want to buy any product from this page? Would you stay on the site and search for something you did want to buy?

I’m not trying to be mean to you, I just want you to think about this from a visitor’s perspective, as well as coding perspective, as well as the search engines. Search engines don’t like sending their searchers to pages with errors, pages that have little visitor value, etc.

Now when I checked that page on validator.w3.org it reported back 55 code errors.

Now, while I’m dumping all that on your lap, I also want you to consider that when the potential customers do come – it’s just too easy to lose them with all those technorati tags. If they decide they don’t like what you’re offering, they’re just goign to click a tag and be gone. And you don’t even make a cent off the transaction!

Anyway, just a few thoughts to consider…write me back if you have more questions – I realize I’ve gone off track here when you really wanted to know about search engine indexing.

Laura

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Laura:

Hmmm… (I like that – it’s the calm before the storm)

Thanks for all that advice – don’t mind criticism one bit.

Yes I submitted the rss feeds – it’s part of my procedure – (when these sites are profitable, I might publish it).

I’ll take out all advertising now (no point if there aren’t any visitors!!)

Keyword Rich Articles? I’ll try that. Do you mean extra posts or editing existing posts?

Can’t understand why I have so many code errors, could it be changes I’ve made or could it be the themes themselves are buggy? I think the furniture site theme is a bit ugly anyway, I think I’ll search for a brighter theme.

Technorati tags? Hmmm… When I bought the software, I remember reading “Never underestimate the power of technorati tags” Didn’t understand what it meant but I thought I was doing something clever by implementing them. Not sure what to do about them they’re in every post. Do I start again from scratch? hmmm… (I like that hmmm…)

I wasn’t just asking about se optimisation. I want to know anything and everything that will turn these into profitable sites.

I’ve shown you mine – how about showing me a good example of how it should be done!!

Thanks again for all your help and your precious time.

God bless (…I never say that!)

Gerry

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Gerry…

Code errors are likely the template stuff. Don’t stress about them too much, I’ve got a PR4 site here with 219 code errors – it’s a factor, but not the largest one – www.PrimitiveCountryDecor.com

Plus on that site you’ll see the most recent posts are keyword rich articles…most everything else is standard datafeed store.

Teli said “Never underestimate the power or Technorati tags” ! I guess we all, whomever is writing, needs to be really careful with our words. If you look at Teli’s blogs she’s got one or two highly targeted tags per post. Yes TTs are awesome, but (a) they need to be targeted and (b) used minimalisticly – that’s one of the things Sean teaches in that course.

As for all the existing tags you’ve got going on…do you own a laptop and watch television in the evenings? When I’ve gone and messed up I take my laptop upstairs and just pick away at the mundane tasks as I watch my favorite shows. (Sometimes I wish I had more shows I liked to watch just so I had more time to fix my mistakes!)

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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Some parts of this letter have been edited to protect the integrity and identity of the email author. Although I will not post last names (unless given express permission), I can prove the validity of each letter written including email addresses, dates, and headers to the authorites if need be. I suggest that everything you publish online, sell online, or reference online, have a similar back up system in place. The FTC is always watching…

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