Help with marketing our site

[sellfones]

Hi we have a site http://www.sellfones.net

can you give me your opinion on the site? Also we need some tips on marketing. We already advertise with goggle, overture and espotting but we are looking for other more cost effective ways to do it

thanks for your help

[Itchy]

Originally Posted by sellfones Hi we have a site http://www.sellfones.net can you give me your opinion on the site? Also we need some tips on marketing. We already advertise with goggle, overture and espotting but we are looking for other more cost effective ways to do it thanks for your help

A good start is to always make sure your links work!! :eek:

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[eliteshops]

Originally Posted by sellfones Hi we have a site http://www.sellfones.net can you give me your opinion on the site? Also we need some tips on marketing. We already advertise with goggle, overture and espotting but we are looking for other more cost effective ways to do it thanks for your help

Hi

Looking at the design of your site it appears to have been created using OS commerce.

The actual layout is quite clear and ordering was a simple process - so well done there.

Unfortunately, because your site uses PHP a lot of the pages are created on the fly, which means they don't get indexed that well by the major search engines. Some pages will get indexed but it is a common problem amongst database driven sites. We design ASP shopping cart sites and have a similar issue.

My advice to combat this is to produce some static HTML pages. Throw in some good content. Try to list your sites on as many search engines, shopping directories, relevant B2B sites and anywhere else you feel appropriate. This will increase the importance of your site and push you up the search engines. A lot of this can be done for free but this is a ball breaking job, but the rewards can be quite fruitful. You might also need to set up a links page

Finally, fix those broken links, check for spelling mistakes and just keep pushing those links

Hope this helps

good luck

[futureweb]

I did some work for an unamed well known affiliate superb chap knows his stuff anyway point being I created an ASP system which was for news not products but the same can be applied to a cart. Basicly uses the file system object to produce static / dynamic pages I.E we add tennis set the script would create a static page called tennis-set.asp (or what ever you like) but still remains editable if edited or removed from the db the page reflected that. This could be applied to a shopping cart system no problem. I have since applied the same technique to contents management - this has also moved on even more allowing dynamic site maps and indexing every single page with out having to add them in ever again - bredcrum navigation to pages - and categorised links with as many levels as you like.

[eliteshops]

Originally Posted by futureweb I did some work for an unamed well known affiliate superb chap knows his stuff anyway point being I created an ASP system which was for news not products but the same can be applied to a cart. Basicly uses the file system object to produce static / dynamic pages I.E we add tennis set the script would create a static page called tennis-set.asp (or what ever you like) but still remains editable if edited or removed from the db the page reflected that. This could be applied to a shopping cart system no problem. I have since applied the same technique to contents management - this has also moved on even more allowing dynamic site maps and indexing every single page with out having to add them in ever again - bredcrum navigation to pages - and categorised links with as many levels as you like.

This sound interesting

can you PM me some more details and your development fees

Cheers

[NetNeo]

Originally Posted by eliteshops Unfortunately, because your site uses PHP a lot of the pages are created on the fly, which means they don't get indexed that well by the major search engines. Some pages will get indexed but it is a common problem amongst database driven sites. We design ASP shopping cart sites and have a similar issue.

Not quite true!
php spidering is no different from html as php outputs html when run. The problem comes with passing variables in the url (i.e. "whateverpage.php?product=1237&colour=red")
All you need to do to correct this is use a mod_rewrite on an apache server so the url is re-written. See my site guideonline.co.uk, it only has five real pages yet every page is spidered perfectly due to the way I use a mod_rewrite. It takes a url like "welcomecarfinance.xhtml" and converts it, the server actually rewrites the page call and outputs to the browser the page "showmerchant.php?merchant=welcomecarfinance" even though your url stays the same in the address bar (i.e. the server decdes based on rules what page you are atually asking for from your url, and outpupts the right page)
Dont have an apache server? or may dont understand mod_rewrite? OS Commerce comes with a "search engine friendly" switch option in the admin panel so it changes "whateverpage.php?product=1237&colour=red" to "whateverpage.php/product/1237/colour/red" which can help greatly with search engine spidering (smaller SE fail at carrying variable between page and drop everything after the ? so see an empty page). However, you do still loose a lot of the ability to SEO your site as you are very restricted to what is show in the url (like page names). This will however make sure your site is indexed better

My advice to combat this is to produce some static HTML pages. Throw in some good content. Try to list your sites on as many search engines, shopping directories, relevant B2B sites and anywhere else you feel appropriate. This will increase the importance of your site and push you up the search engines. A lot of this can be done for free but this is a ball breaking job, but the rewards can be quite fruitful. You might also need to set up a links page

Very much agree, content is king and any static page syou can make will do you now harm. This gives you the ability to add "SEO'ed" pages to your site. Problem with an OS Commercec site is that the page sonly exisit as long as the product. If you have an ever changing product, you are gaining and losing pages all the time. A site should always have good solid, consistant content which is ever increasing. (To be really smart you could use these pages with text links to link to products to help with search engine placement).

Personally I would say drop OSC and build a purpose built site
I built one from scratch (including the shopping cart back end) which has a total of 20 pages. With a nice MySQl back end and some niffty php/mod_rewrites the site "virtually" consists of 15000+ pages. Each and every one of these pages appears to a SE as a hand coded html document. (see the site at www.dataflowdirect.com)

[Swiss]

I'd second the suggestion of using mod_rewrite, my site is made up of very few actual pages, but appears as though there are well over a couple of thousand as its all dynamic (PHP/MySQL). You'll notice that all of my page URLs look like a directory structure with a .html document at the end. They definitly get spidered as my logs are stuffed with Google, MSN and Yahoo bots...

[pricethat]

its nice to give this guy some help of this nature but it wont be any help to him, most of the content isnt even hosted on his servers, its all from a subdomain of e2save for the real content he wants to get indexed.

He chose not to reply to his other thread when he got grilled more on that relationship with e2save citing an ifeed but no one has ever heard of such other than simply an affiliate feed.

to be able to make mod rewrite etc he would have to have some control over the e2save content which aint gonna happen.

[Darren M]

Originally Posted by futureweb I did some work for an unamed well known affiliate superb chap knows his stuff anyway point being I created an ASP system which was for news not products but the same can be applied to a cart. Basicly uses the file system object to produce static / dynamic pages I.E we add tennis set the script would create a static page called tennis-set.asp (or what ever you like) but still remains editable if edited or removed from the db the page reflected that. This could be applied to a shopping cart system no problem. I have since applied the same technique to contents management - this has also moved on even more allowing dynamic site maps and indexing every single page with out having to add them in ever again - bredcrum navigation to pages - and categorised links with as many levels as you like.

I did something similar to this a few years ago. I had a site with no scripting allowed (no asp, php or server side includes). So I stuck all of the content in an Access Database on my PC; whenever I needed to add a page or make an update I changed it in the database and just ran a vbscript to re-generate every HTML page in the whole site. Then all I needed to do was ftp it up. It was great for automating Meta keywords and the site map was automatically regenerated too.

[sellfones]

Thanks "price that for your comment" Its not that i went away when i got a grilling, i have just been off for a few days.

As i have explained yes we are using an e2save product feed.

This is soon to be changing within the next few weeks. As we have had a lot of feed back saying that we are an e2save affiliate and we are nt supplying our own gear and deals, we have decided to have the whole website redisgned and decided to do away with the e2save product feed. This will be replaced by our own.

This change will take place overthe next three weeks.