Monthly archives: February 2007
Entries found: 4
VirtueMart Authorize.net Code Changes
VirtueMart does not automate Authorize.net test mode. It doesn’t read classes/payment/ps_authorize.cfg.php AN_TEST_REQUEST to see if it should send test mode to Authorize.Net. A quick fix, alter
FILE CHANGE classes/ps_checkout.php lines 24, 159, 484
line 24:
define (TESTMODE,true);
Lines 159, 484, call validate with TESTMODE rather than hard-coded “false.”
159:
if ( !$this->validate_payment_method( $d, TESTMODE )) {
484:
if (!$this->validate_payment_method($d, TESTMODE)) { //Change false to true to Let the user play with the VISA Testnumber
Animal Shelter Marketing Letter
More info for animal shelters needing web sites or web marketing……..
… I’ve been building/rebuilding web sites for animal rescue groups. It’s my way of giving as I don’t deal with the shelter that well. I do two basic things: 1) build the site, 2) market the organization on the web.
The web sites I build are usually built on free software called Joomla. Instead of upload stories or changing HTML directly you would login to the administrator and publish your stories from there. If I do help out we don’t have to use that system, but I do recommend it because 1) multiple people can update the site; 2) you can easily grab email addresses from people interested in your org; 3) we can often add new features really fast. For instance I can add an online store in an hour or two; it uses a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor so you don’t need to know any html — really a whole lot more.
Here are all the add ons to the base product:
http://extensions.joomla.org/
The main issue, though, is marketing. I assume that you want your web site to be found when someone types in
nh shelter
dogs for adoption
Or the like.
The business of making that happen is called SEO or search engine optimization. SEO used to be mechanical and very easy to do. Now the mechanical part is just the pre-requisite to the real work of web marketing. It’s very labor intensive (takes a lot of time, though the tasks themselves are not that hard).
Successful SEO is mostly about writing, writing, writing. There are tons of ways to get the word out about your web site, some of them really help you in the search engines, some less so.
I’ll help with either of these, my standing offer is here
A few things you might want to know about me:
I’m a low stress person, I don’t want to be a CARRIER either!
I’m just here to help, if this causes problems in the org don’t ever feel like you owe me anything, it’s your organization
Really good SEO skills are marketable. If you want training to market arnne it’s a great opportunity to learn for the doggies and then use it in your career.
I’m available when you need me, please don’t stress on my account.
Best,
Caroline
Joomla 1.5.0 Beta Installation: Two Tricks
Joomla 1.5.0 Beta Installation: Two Tricks
1. Do NOT enter FTP information during the installation. Whatever bad falls out of that will be dealt with later. Or, enter it but if you’re site’s slowed to nothing you’ll have to find the “off” switch
2. During database creation just go and create the database and assign a user to it first, then fill in the info on the database installation settings page. It’ll save you the hassle of finding out that you can’t programmatically create a database.
Did I say two? Here’s a third.
Get the Joomla 1.5 beta here
But then upgrade from the Joomla 1.5 nightly build here
Before debugging anything always get the latest build.
The domain name for local listings
Phone Book Directories
If the phone book directories were the only source of qualified site traffic you would do well to compete for aaa- and aardvark- prefixed names. The local online directories do have some of the market. Verizon Super Pages gives customers a choice to sort listings alphabetically. Its default listing, though, is not alphabetical. The initial sort is “Standard,” i.e., the most relevant according to MSN’s algorithm.Â
The customer has to scroll to the bottom and choose “A-Z” to see an alphabetical listing. She can also choose “Distance” (from the customer-entered-location), which to me is the most logical sort for a list of kitchen designers.
Yahoo Local sorts by “Top Results,” listing those results that have keywords and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) web site features closest to the terms the customer input.
Search Engines
Super Pages and Yahoo Local are just a small potential source of your qualified web site traffic. The Big 3 search engines will drive most of the real kitchen buyers to your site. Optimizing – and marketing – your site for the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, while keeping the local directories in mind, will cover 99.9% of your web site traffic universe planning. Since the local directories are showing the listing results in the same order as the search engines (most “relevant” first), the first letter of the domain name is not an important factor in getting good results. Neither the local directories nor the search engines display the listing results in alphabetical order by default.
Hyphenating the Domain Name
So now the question is: What is a good domain name? Some evidence exists that hyphenating a domain name yields greater results because there’s no question about the individual words. For instance, new-hampshire-kitchen-design.com might be better than newhampshirekitchendesign.com. The hyphens are harder for humans to remember (we expect the “all one word” type of domain name).
Search engines do examine the domain name and do give it some weight. They also examine the web site’s content, title and headline tags, incoming links from other sites and quite a bit more. The domain name’s keywords can affect search engine ranking, but if those domain name keywords carried a lot of weight sites like IBM.com would be penalized for not mentioning “computer” in the name.
So we can conclude that domain names do not need to be alphabetical or contain keywords of your business in order to achieve a higher ranking. Companies that sell domains often advocate keyword-seo-friendly domain names. Search engine expert Quadszilla (despite the anonymity truly a savvy SEO) advocates using keyword-hyphenated-domain-names for better search engine result pages. Yet his domain – seoblackhat.com – is not hyphenated. SEO guru Rand Fishkin gives the keyword-domain-name (with or without hyphens) a 1/5th of 1/3rd weighting, i.e., keywords in the domain are one of five factors that in total make up 30% importance in Google ranking.
So the keywords in the domain name have some weight, and the value of a hyphenated keyword domain is debatable.
Keywords in Domain Names
One place that domain keywords do make a difference is when the keywords the user enters are an exact match to your domain. Type in a dream kitchen to see what I mean. But I checked Google and Yahoo keyword tools for nh kitchen designer, and they report that no one is searching for exactly that phrase. So the domain nhkitchendesigner.com will not be of much use in obtaining higher search engine results.Â
Branding Your Domain Name
Last we have the issue of branding. Do you search for books at books.com or amazon.com? The use of descriptive phrases in your company name or domain becomes irrelevant in the face of good branding. Good branding raises positive awareness of your business in the hearts and minds of your public. When you create an image of your business as the resource for your target market the name of that business is part of the image. Prior to the success of Amazon.com, the word “Amazon” did not create an association to buying books. So if you will use excellent branding techniques for your business and your web site the business name will fuse with your popularity, but it will not create your popularity.
What Works on Google
Fishkin summarizes good Google search engine marketing. Yahoo and MSN are pretty easy by comparison. But Google drives as much traffic as Yahoo and MSN combined, so it can’t be ignored. The Google methods are, in essence, good branding. So if you want good search engine results in Google you will have to make your web site an authority site that has great content and that other, highly qualified sites link to. The name of your company / domain name becomes so small in this mix that the answer boils down to this:
- name your company and your domain according to what works in the offline world
- identify your target market
- write both offline and online magazine articles
- write a very focused blog
- answer very focused questions on forums
- employ the mechanical methods of SEO on your web site
Conclusion
In the end, your name will not drive traffic because of the name. It will drive traffic because your business and your name fuse to represent the logical place to go for the best answers to the problems you solve.
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