Conference Buddies

David Hubbard’s Best of Miva Merchant – Miva Merchant 2009

Speaker: David Hubbard is the one of the owners of Hostasaurus and one of the foremost experts on using Miva Merchant and third party modules. David will walk you through his favorite modules, what they do and the impact they have on your online business. He’ll also show you pitfalls to avoid and provide you a list of things to do to make your store run great.

Conference Notes:

Emporium Plus – Tool Kit = Extends Miva Merchant with additional features/tools ($30).
Example:

show partial product description that links to the full description

LATU – Wow Wow Widgets = Define a widget (i.e. Daily special)
Example:

Category Mode in Template Mode you can insert widget code (to insert daily specials)
Site Seal Code since you might display it in the various places
You can easily activate/deactive in one place

Sebenza – Category Page Templates = Helps in page layout design

Power Search – Emporium Plus = Can allow to search manuf field

Mini Basket – Emporium Plus = Show basket contents

ADS – ImageXtra = Additional Image Features for Multiple Image Views

Sebenza – Ultimate Coupons = Coupon Module (add free product without others to see, free shipping, discount before checkout, etc.)

UltraBatch from TruXoft for better batch processing but not avaible for MM5

Misc:

Mail Manager to customize email

Note: Emporium Plus (if you have more than one of his modules you can skip re-installing same files i.e. logging module).

If you turn SEO friendly option on:

SEO friendly URL code
Change string in Templates: Category, Page, and Search Results Template
Must change in all places

Search Engine Optimization 201 – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Mark Simon, Miva Merchant

Where on miva to put SEO?

Overview:

• First complete your keyword research
• Identify page for each keyword
• Focus on one keyword phrase per page
• Where to put keyword on your page
• Domain considerations
• Adhering to standards
• Avoiding penalties

Keyword Placement:

• Meta tags – Title, Desc, Keywords
• Header tags – H1 to H6
• URLs & Filenames
• Content – Text on the page (CSS content before image. 400 words min.)
• Links to the page from other pages on your site
• Links to the page from other sites (deep linking)
• Links to other sites
• Alt tags (alt and title tag on images, title tag on links, used for accessibility)

YellowTee.com examples:

1. <title>&mvt:store:name:; &mvt:product:name;</title>
2. <title>&mvt:product:name; - &mvt:store:name;</title>
3. <title>&mvt:product:name; - Custom Catchy Title With Keywords</title>

Have product name first then catchy title with keywords.
Use Miva code to dynamically pull in category and product names for keywords
#3 will render the product name and keywords into the product page title.

Use hyphen, then underscore, bar/pipe, but avoid commas in title tag (harder to read and screws things up)

Similar code for H1 Tags too

Miva:

Product Code & Category Code = If possible (if it doesn’t break any of your business practices) put in keyword (i.e. corporate-golf-tees). 50 character limit.

In Miva Admin Interface:

To create SEO friendly links in Miva Merchant: Global Settings -> Domain Settings -> SEO settings

Domain Considerations:

• WHOIS information: Domain age, expiration (at least 2 to 3 years out), owner, IP
• Sitemap – HTML and XML sitemap
• Custom 404 page – Helps people robots find your site from bad links (link
• Who else is on your IP and IP block

Evaluating Your Site – Standards

• Is your site accessible & crawlable?
• Are you subject to duplicate content?
• Are you a good neighbor?

Avoiding the Penalty Box

• Nobody Likes Spam – Even the Search Engines
• Keyword Stuffing
• Multiple title tags, meta tags, h1 tags (use only 1 h1 tag)
• Hidden content & invisible text (don’t use invisible text)
• Cloaking, Redirection (don’t fool or spoof the user)
• Large spike in links

Resources:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer Tools
• Live Webmaster Tools
• Whois.DomainTools.com
• Sitemappro.com
• Ranksense.com
• SEOMoz.org
• MivaMerchant.com/blog
• W3c.org

301 Redirect long URLs to new URL
Change links in templates

Example:

Polyvore.com customer example site on fashion / user generated content (fashion collage)

<mvt:if expr="1.settings:product:code XYZ">
<title> XYZ </title>
<mvt:elseif >
<title> XYZ </title>
<mvt:else >


Keynote – Day 1 – Miva Merchant 2009

Speakers:
Russ = CEO, Miva Merchant
Jon Burchmore = CTO, Miva Merchant
Rick Wilson = EVP, Miva Merchant

Miva Merchant 5.5 launched May 2008
Over 10,000 merchants now on Miva Merchant 5.5

New features and fixes:

• Import/Export timeout fixed
• XML import functionality
• Streamlined User Interface
• Highly stable environment
• 100% control of shopping interface
• MySQL optimization
• CSS based skins

2 Miva stores grew into Internet Retailer top 500

Latest Credit Card Industry Regulations:

• PA-DSS/PCI-DSS Compliance mandatory for all online merchants as of July 1, 2010
• PA-DSS => Application
• PCI-DSS => Host
• Penalty = can’t accept credit cards (Visa/Mastercard)

If you are a small retailer then you may have to move to paypal, google checkout, checkout by amazon, etc.

All other online merchants will have to make sure that their shopping cart and hosting provider is PA/PCI compliant for credit card transaction security.

Keynote – Day 1 – Part 2 – Miva Merchant 2009

Speaker:
Dr. Larry Osborne
Pastor, North Coast Church
Founder & President, North Coast Training Network, Vista, California

Word of Mouth Promotion

Create advocates/promoters of your products.

Advocate/Promoters:

1. Satisfaction (both product and process)
2. Confidence (confident always excellent, consistent)
3. Trust (character and integrity)

Process = how it is delivered

If satisfied with product and mildly uncomfortable with process will come back but will not become an advocate and bring anyone to you. Referral chain disappears.

Consistency vs. Quality

Quote from Dr. Larry Osborne:

“We judge ourselves by our best moments. Customers will judge you by your worst moments”

Power of long term customer.

Are they satisfied with your product and process?

Keynote – Day 1 – Part 3 – Miva Merchant 2009

Speaker:
Trevor Claiborne

Google Analytics

1. Landing Pages / Finding pages where they leave (bounce rate on landing pages, split view)
2. Funnel Reports
3. Internal Site Search

Q: How do you know if it is the page or ad copy?
A: Look at bounce rates for NON-PAID keywords
A: Check bounce rate for PAID keywords

Google Website Optimizer

Oct 2006 limited beta, 2007 out of beta

A/B Testing
Multivariable Testing (Headline, Description, Call To Action, etc.)

Test age -> Conversion Page
Section Scripts (up to 8 sections per page)
Tracking Scripts
Conversion Scripts

Best Practices

• Start Now
• Test Often

NerdyShirts: 20 min setup, and in 1 week = 7% improvement in conversion

Google Analytics Resources:

The Techie Guide to Google Website optimizer
WebsiteOptimizer.blogspot.com
google.com/websiteoptimizer
GA or GWO Authorized Consultants (Get authorized)

100 conversions per version (rule of thumb)

tclaiborne on twitter
tclaiborne@google.com

Introduction to SEO – Miva Merchant 2009
Speaker: Mark Simon, Miva Merchant

Conference Notes/Descriptions:

I. How Search Engines Rank Pages

• Search Engine Rank Pages Not Websites
• What the Search Engines evaluate (Ranking Factors)
• Title
• Description (keyword and selling tool)
• Headline (Header tags, 6 tags, 1 to 6)
• Body Text (Write for your customers, write to convert, then plug in keywords later)
• Anchor Text (keyword vote for that page)
• Links
• File names
• Keyword

II. Keyword Research

• Target Markets & Demographics
• Customer lingo – may not be what you think
• Industry lingo – tribal speak
• Number of Searches
• Number of Competing Pages
• Competitor Strength
• Identifying Opportunity (lowest amount of competition for a keyword phrase vs. number of searches)
• Keyword Tools

III. Competitive Analysis (find keywords, find links, etc.)

• Getting into the Search Engines
• Measure Success
• SEO for the CEO

IV. Getting into the Search Engines

• Links from other websites
• Sitemaps – HTML and XML

V. Metrics – Measuring Success

• PageRank doesn’t matter

What does matter:

• Conversion Rates
• Average value of visitors
• Traffic Sources
• Ranking for highly converting keywords
• Inbounds links
• Bounce rate

Q&A:

What is the difference between Indexing and Caching:
Indexing (google bot) = spider your pages and stores the data in their database
Caching = last version that google has saved

If some of my page isn’t indexed how do I get them in there (site:website.com):

1. Sitemap
2. Interlinking top pages (link from top popular internal pages)
3. Social Bookmarking

Some tools and resources mentioned during the SEO session at Miva Merchant

• SitemapPro.com
• SEORecon.com
• Linkscape Tool from SEOMoz.org
• SEObook.com

Miva Merchant Conference 2009
February 26, 27, 28, and March 1st
San Diego, CA

Miva Merchant is one of the top small business E-Commerce shopping cart software on the market and the 2009 Miva Merchant Conference is the premiere event for anyone using or thinking of using Miva Merchant. The conference includes sessions such as SEO to increase the success of your business, as well as Miva Merchant development workshops.

To find more information about Miva Merchant go to MivaMerchant.com, or to find more information about their conference, visit:
http://www.mivamerchant.com/conference_2009/