Webinar from Mzinga: Marketing Communications in a Social World

Although it might be clichéd to say that social media is revamping the way people and businesses communicate online, it is definitely true. Businesses today need to know about the commonly used applications that are available today. And business owners and marketers need to have a strategy for how they will approach these communities.

Mzinga has a free webinar next week that you will want to sign up for to get a basic knowledge of how to form your strategy. I've attended at least one webinar they offered previously and it was pretty well run and well attended. Read the following description.

From everyday blogs and micro-blogging sites like Twitter to social networking giants like Facebook and LinkedIn, social media has emerged as an essential component in every media-savvy company's corporate communications and marketing outreach strategies. But with so many tools, applications, and websites to choose from, it's important to fully understand your options so you can decide which applications are best-suited to your company’s unique needs and goals. Join early Internet and social media pioneers Dan Bruns and Rusty Williams as they discuss how social media applications and social networking sites are changing the way organizations across all industries approach corporate communications internally and externally.

Would you like to learn more? Sign up for this event: Marketing Communications in a Social World.

Final Feature Comparison [.pdf]

We've recently updated a chart for comparing version 4 with version 7. This form was very beneficial for the last migration process in 2008, but almost all of the version 7 features have been brought up to parity with version 4 in time for the software upgrade this year. Be sure to Download the Ecommerce Feature Comparison [pdf] to become more familiar.

You can also go inside a live Version 7 store using username: guest and password: Netsol1. Thanks and have a good weekend!

Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE 2009)

Every year, the IRCE is a big event attended and presented by dozens of the leading experts in ecommerce. It's a good review and meeting-of-the-minds for the industry. New developments are discussed and strategies recommended and reviewed. Based on this year's agenda, it's going to be pretty busy and informative.

With budgets being tight this year, it might not be as easy for the average merchant to be able to afford the trip and attendance. If you are interested in updates from the conference but will not be able to make it, be sure to subscribe to the new SMART Ecommerce Blog for constant updates. Our ecommerce team will keep you informed all week.

We Have Specified Your Canonical

There's been a good discussion lately about a potential Canonical Issue on the Network Solutions Forums and I wanted to explain a little bit about it so that everyone is up to speed. Our top notch ecommerce (v7) development team made a minor software change several months ago based on client-submitted feature requests and the recommendations of our industry-leading search engine optimization experts. We added a canonical link tag to each page. It looks something like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/keyword-url.aspx" />

The intent with this dynamic tag is to indicate to the major search engines which choice is the proper URL for the page that loaded. It's possible that for the example above, a search engine may find multiple links to it formatted as...

• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• http://www.example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• https://example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• https://www.example.com/keyword-url.aspx
• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx?ref=foo
• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx?start=25
• http://example.com/keyword-url.aspx?next

Even though a user loading the pages above would see the same content, the search bots would treat them as different --unless there is a specified canonical.

Google added support to this format to allow sites with content accessible via multiple URLs to specify a preferred URL to be returned in search results. We added this feature to point them in the right direction. This feature is a valuable improvement to help eliminate duplicate content worries.

Clients may see temporary fluctuations to their SERPs rankings as Google re-indexes their site to take into account the new format support. However, given the variables involved and recent Google update, it would be nearly impossible to determine the exact cause of any changes in their SERPs.

The forum discussion revolves around the fact that the home page is specified with a /index.aspx rather than just a /. It's perceived that home page ranking may have fluctuated due to this change. It's certainly possible, but I'm also aware that Google changes all the time and it may be unrelated. The SERPs are showing the /index.aspx for the home page, but that just might be because they are now displaying the canonical choice in the rankings page and does not indicate anything that would affect a site's actual listings.

If you'd like more information about Google and how they treat canonical, please see official Google blog post as well as Matt Cutts' post. In the future, we may be adding a new feature that will allow our merchants to specify their own home page for this link tag. But even so, normal "don't panic" rules of SEO should apply.

Free Ecommerce Software Upgrade! Version 4 to Version 7!

It's time to sign up for your software upgrade! The wait is finally over. All the processes and steps are in place. Check out our Free Software Upgrade page today! The email announcing it went out today. Pay particular attention to ...

A limited number of stores will be upgraded at a time, ensuring each customer receives a superior level of service.

I've been busy this past week training some of the team that will handling the white-glove support for this and I'm excited to see it get started. It may get a bit busy around here, but we are much better prepared this time around.