Authority SEO has been growing amazingly and I wanted to thank all that have participated.  The new path has led to more than just online marketing and SEO.  Though those are important what has become of immediate value to many companies is that ability to optimize their sites for conversions.

If you are like many business owners you know your business not websites.  Why should you?  You have made your living understanding and achieve in your present line of business.  What happens then is that the website that is created doesn’t deliver the results that the businesses are looking for.

What Authority SEO has been able to offer is true ecommerce experience on a variety of different platforms to fix and transform current websites into website traffic machines.  In the process cleaning up a lot of poor programming that allows the new website to be scalable and the ability to be quickly updated with news and sales.

SEO will always be important though you have to have a website that converts to sales or leads before you invest in online marketing.  If you don’t you spend a lot of money and can drive lots of traffic with little to show for it.

A lot of questions have come up on the new load approval process for the FHA.  Parker Finch, a Phoenix based HOA community management company has investigated to make it easy to you to understand the new policies.  If you contact Parker Finch you can get information they gained from a seminar they attended by Carpenter, Hazelwood, Delgado & Wood on FHA approvals for condominiums.

Three quick questions to understand your approval

1. Are less than 50% of all units owner occupied
2. Do you currently have an excess of 15% in delinquencies
3. Does one person own more than 10% of all units

If you answered yes to any of the three questions listed above you will not be approved for FHA loan.  Learn more by contacting Parker Finch.

You might be thinking what is the difference between an Internet Marketing Adviser and and a SEO consultant?  The answer lies in if you or your company has already paid large sums of money to Internet marketing gurus only to find the only thing they are good at is sending invoices.  An Internet Marketing Adviser is a person who has experience with successful ecommerce businesses who can play a role in supporting a business make Internet marketing decisions including on consultants and vendors to hire.

The key difference is the adviser is not a vendor.  You will never get good feedback on your marketing ideas from a consultant who has it in his best interests to add more services to your bill.

This is a new role that Authority SEO plays for Valutek, a clean room supply company, who utilizes our unique Internet experience and knowledge to support them in creating and implementing their online strategies.

This is a vital new position in the world of business as every company wants to have a presence online though most business owners have little knowledge and in the past have been forced to get their information what the exact vendors who are sending the invoices.

Authority SEO is working to increase online visibility for the Diamond Development Team (DDT).  The Diamond Development Team is a group of successful business owners and network marketers who have come together to share ideas and proven strategies for business success.

The focus of the DDT right now is the Trump Network which is an exciting new network marketing opportunity by Donald Trump.  The team has idetified the Trump Network as it has one of the best compensation plans in the industry.

Authority SEO is working with the DDT to use Internet marketing as a new way of creating new members and a more financially successful team.

Hitwise did research on the use of the term “free shipping” in search engine rankings.  You can see from the graph below that the term “free shipping” spikes during the holiday season.

Online shopping is becoming more and more how people shop for Christmas and other holidays.  Take advantage of this by offering ‘free shipping” for your online store

You can also see from the graph that more people are searching “free shipping” over the years which is more proof that more people are using the internet to do their holiday shopping.

If you search online for a particular product you probably find lots of people who are selling what you want or what you are selling.  How does a person choose who to buy from?  You may think that price is important though you may be surprised it isn’t the only factor.  Plus, many websites have similar prices that don’t make significant differences, so it is how you differentiate what makes your business special that makes a difference.

For promotions like “Free Shipping” to work you need to make it obvious for online shoppers

For the tips listed below you can substitute what ever promotion your website has including flat rate shipping, free returns, gift with purchase, or etc.

Especially with the holiday season approaches, research has shown that promotions like free shipping or free returns is what makes the difference for holiday shoppers.

5 Ways to Promotion Your Promotion Like Free Shipping

1. Meta tags: meta tags are the information that is displayed in the search engine results like Google.  Adding your promotion into your meta tags means that online searchers are going to see that your organic listing offers free shipping which can be the reason a customer chooses to click on your search results over your competition.
2. Home page: is your promotion obvious on your home page?  That doesn’t mean at the bottom right of your navigation.  If your promotion is a business differentiator than highlight it in your header of your website so very visitor sees your promotion.
3. Product feeds: if you are using shopping portals like Shopping.com or Nextag.com as examples check out to see if the shopping portals allow you to put “free shipping” into your product feed.  In comparison shopping portals “free shipping” will drastically increase your click throughs and conversions.
4. Category pages: for your online store your category page shows a list of your products in that category.  This page may seem obvious so most people over look its potential.  This page is one of the #1 pages visitors look at so showing your promotion like “free shipping” underneath each product listing adds another opportunity for visitors to get your message.
5. Product pages: add your promotion in the title of your product pages so as people find the product they are looking for they automatically see your promotion.  Also, add your promotion right next to the “add to cart” button.  You can never over state your online store’s differentiators.

Tv Travel Online which delivers legitimacy and great business opportunities for those that want to work from home.  Through Tv Travel Online people can make a great living support people in getting great deals and low fares on travel.

Now, Tv Travel Online has partnered with Authority SEO to expand their client base so more people can achieve their financial goals with extra income or with a home based business.

Authority SEO is supporting them in increasing their online visibility through multiple mediums to allow more people online to find the great business opportunities that Tv Travel Online offers.

If you want to open an Ecommerce online store it is easier than ever.  There are many different options that allow users with no to little programming experience build an online store to sell their products.  The question comes how do you seperate yourself from your competition.  My first answer would be SEO.  If you can out rank your competition for not just major keywords though the thousands of different ways your customers are searching for your products right now you will be successful.

Videos are one Ecommerce trend you could implement without any tech knowledge

For the purpose of this post though we are looking at Ecommerce website store trends which are going to demonstrate more professionalism and hopefully work to convert more visitors to sales.  The goal of these trends are to increase conversion percentage though these are not listed as tested ways to increase conversions, simply trends in where online stores are going.

3 Ecommerce Website Store Trends

1. Videos: with the use of embed codes videos are easy to add to your website.  Videos offer the visitor greater access to what your products or services offer.  Also, videos increase time on the site which Google tracks and uses as a way to determine if people are liking your website.  Load your video onto a any of the video sites and then copy and paste the embed code into your website.  I personally really like Vimeo.com which has professional options that you can customize into your look and feel.
2. Content Sliders: content sliders are the carousels that websites use to showcase certain products with photos and descriptions that visitors can rotate through.  Content sliders increase the tech “know how” which in turns increases the web visitors confidence that your online store is professional.
3. Go Large: if you have noticed big is in.  Large product images, big banners, gigantic font, and so on is the latest trend in Ecommerce websites.  More people now have larger screen sizes and better updated browsers can handle the load times.  All of these factors allow bigger to be better.  Larger images and text draw the eyes to where you want them and are easier to read.  You have 3-5 seconds to grab your visitor into staying.  Going large makes that job easier for people to instantly understand what your website is about.

You are looking at the stats of your Google Analytics and you see foreign countries that have visited your ecommerce online store.  Won’t it be great if those people could read your products in their own language.  Yes, we could be myopic and think that they should just learn English.  Business is about opportunities and right now very few online stores are taking advantage of all the potential customers who speak different languages.  Especially even in the United States that has a heavily populated Hispanic population.

To translate your store you have to do more than Google translator

Google has a feature called Google Translator that will translate any web page into your language.  This sounds good though as you know not everything translates perfectly from language to language.

For those websites that want to capture non English speaking customers than you want to think about in terms of a commitment to making your website available for those non English speaking customers than just a quick fix.

5 Tips for Translating your Ecommerce Website

1. Rephrase: phrases mean different things in different languages.  You want to take the time to find out how different cultures call things differently.  For example if you are selling pocket knives you may call them folding knives in Spanish.
2. Translation Sheet: make a list of common terms used on your website, for example “On Sale.”  You many use this term hundreds to thousands of times throughout your website though you only want to pay to have it translated once.
3. Hire a Real Person: you will find that if you use a program to translate your website there will be all sorts of errors which you don’t even know about because you don’t speak the language.  You will make the money back in conversions and more sales if you hire a professional translator to match what you want to say into the right phrase in the new language.
4. Translation Memory: you can get a software program to track already translated terms and phrases.  This way you don’t have to hire a translator or a foreign language writer every time you add a new product.
5. Review: this works for your website in English as well.  It is vital that you review and look over your translated sections of your website.  You may have to hire a professional to do this.  Look for broken links not just errors in the text.

The most common thing that happens for many small businesses is that they create a website than start their Google Adwords program.  Only to find out the Adwords is costing them money with negative return on investment.  So the next step is turning to a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant.

Many web designers claim they know SEO

Many web designers claim they know SEO

This can be very confusing for a small business owner when their web designer claimed they knew SEO.  Which perpetuates the #1 myth with SEO that search engine optimization is a one time deal of add a couple things to your website and you are done.  The reality is SEO is a daily, yes I said daily, set of actions taken that directly support your website to rank higher in search results.

When is the best time for SEO?  The answer is as soon as you realize that traffic to your website is the most important aspect of your website.  It doesn’t matter how beautiful or how effective it will convert visitors if you have no visitors.  Getting a SEO consult inline with the development of your website can save you tons of money and time.

The best advice I have for small businesses creating websites is to take the budgeted money set aside for your website and switch your thinking to 15% for web site creation and 85% for online marketing.  You can always add more features to your website when your website is making money.  It is a lot harder to spend more on marketing when you are in the whole every month on your website.