Gintou.com

The use of Regular Meetings

Ulco — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:25:28 +0000

I just got back from a meeting with the other owner of Top Nutrition. We schedule regular meetings about once a month and since I work during the day we usually have a “meet & eat” in a pub nearby. I hate official (business) meetings but these are really fun and useful.

We discuss progress (if all goes well this month we’ll have about 30% more sales than last month), todo’s and share new ideas. It’s amazing how much more you can come up with if you talk about it with someone else. And offcourse, since we both work alone most of the time so it’s great to have someone to brag to from time to time :-)

My todo-list for now:

Get more links
Edit title tags
Update the Adwords account
Write new texts for the landingpages
Get even more links…

It’s not the nicest work to do but the sales you get from doing things right are addictive. Let’s see what I can get done this weekend (3 days woohoo!).

Optimize your webshop

Ulco — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:38:34 +0000

One of Gintou’s subsidiaries: TopNutrition recently launched its new webshop. Before the launch we have spent a decent amount of time setting up a solid SEO strategy. On our other e-commerce web sites organic search accounts for approximately 35% of all sales which makes it obvious that SEO is an important factor in business decisions.

As a second (and maybe third) post on this blog I figured it would be nice to explain a bit of the SEO features and functionality we have implemented on our webshop.

Technology: OsCommerce

The shop is based on OsCommerce, a pretty solid and complete e-commerce package if you’re running on a budget. It’s open source and highly customizable (though this may require some programming knowledge). However, if you are planning to start a webshop I’d sit out the wait for Magento Commerce. They have already released a very promising beta and the first production version is expected around March/April.

Optimized URLs

Standard OsCommerce URLs are really crappy, dynamic and full of parameters. Useless from an SEO point of view. The standard SEO Friendly URLs add-on is better (static, descriptive) but still not optimized. All pages are placed in the domain root which isn’t very usable if you have a lot of different products. We’ve created our own add-on that generates well structured, descriptive URLs without the nonsense.

Page titles

Page titles are perhaps the most valuable factor in SEO. Not only are they indispensable if you want to achieve good rankings but they are also displayed in the SERPS. Having a well written title can increase the CTR from the SERPS with more than 50%. We have set up OsCommerce in a way that we can give every page its entirely unique title. Currently only “product name” or “category name” are displayed but we will add the site name later.

Page descriptions

Page descriptions are underestimated. It’s true that they don’t really matter in terms of ranking but since they’re also displayed in the SERPS they can influence your CTR. Having a great “call to action” can convince someone to click your snippet, even if you’re not in first place.

More in a next post…

First post

admin — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:27:03 +0000

First post, new blog - always a pain in the ass… Luckily for me no-one knows about this blog yet so I can probably keep this short. I started my first weblog around ‘03, being somewhat of a quitter I stopped and started again for a couple of times making this my fifth (serious) blog.

I hope this one will last a bit longer than the others. I have good faith though because this one is going to be different. Not focussed around a subject but more about a person, me… Surely I’ll write about those other topics, search, adsense, spam and god knows what but it won’t be exclusively. Well, I guess we just have to wait and see what happens. For know I am just happy that me first post is almost over :-)

What can you expect here?

Posts about me, my life, SEO, SEA, my business, investing in other businesses, usability, online marketing in general, adsense, and all other things that I run into in my on- and offline life. It’ll probably not be as exciting as my previous blogs but then again: This one isn’t meant to just get as much visitors as possible. Still, I hope you enjoy it!