What is Google Product search?

If you’re not familiar with the name, Google Product Search gives online businesses the opportunity to have a presence in Google’s shopping results. Earlier this year we ran a blog piece talking about this service, if you missed it you can read it here.

So what is the new specification?

Google will be shortly issuing warnings to many Google Shopping feed owners that do not supply the following information alongside their existing feeds:

• Brand
• Gtin – EAN or barcode number
• Mpn – manufacturer product number

Any two of these three product identifiers must be displayed for the feed to stay live. If this information is not supplied then your feed will be suspended and if not corrected, deactivated.

As of 22^nd September 2011, further information will need to be displayed including:

• Availability – you must display whether the item is in stock or not.

This is required for all Google shopping feeds.

Other product identifiers such as Google category may also be needed depending on the nature of your business.

A full list of the other variations, depending on what items are being sold can be viewed here: Google’s summary of attribute requirements.

For your Google shopping feed to continue to run without a hitch, please contact us to discuss the options available. We can upgrade your website to incorporate new functionality, so that you can populate the new data into your feed.

It is a well-known fact that social media is fast becoming one of the most popular ways for people to communicate, socialise and network online. Businesses around the world are embracing social media and using these platforms to help reach out to their client bases.

Social Media Management can be an effective way to help your company spread news and information about your business, product or services. There are a wide range of solutions to choose from such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and soon Google Plus. We will look at a few of the most popular networks below.

Facebook

Why choose to use Facebook? The main purpose of having a Facebook business page is to improve your brand awareness. Facebook is the largest social networking platform in the world with currently over 500 million active users. Of these users, it is estimated that 50% log onto Facebook daily. On top of this, people spend around 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Facebook business pages can be used to promote your services, events, competitions or products and allow you to have a presence on the largest social network.

As the demographic of Facebook users becomes older, these users are often the decision makers when it comes to online purchases or using your services. BF Internet can build a business page and update accordingly to promote your business and campaign. This will help to increase awareness about your brand and drive traffic to your main website.

Twitter

The use of Twitter continues to grow and grow with everyone from children, students, business people, celebrities and everyone in-between all signing up for an account. On average there are 175 million registered users and on any one day there are around 95 million tweets.

Although Twitter “tweets” are limited to 140 characters, this medium provides a great way to give your audience news about products, promotions or even just to create more awareness about your brand. Twitter posts can also appear in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) because search engines such as Bing and Google now look for real time results as part of their algorithms.

YouTube

The YouTube channel is the second most used search engine in the world. This means that if your business has video content then it makes sense to have a presence on this search engine.

Uploading your videos to YouTube will help to increase your online presence by allowing you to share your content and get the highest amount of impressions. YouTube videos appear in the organic listings too giving your message even more exposure too.

These are just a few of the social media platforms on offer. Here at BF Internet, we can help you with all aspects of your social media campaign no matter which platform you choose. Whether it is simply setting up a social media account on your behalf or managing a social media campaign, we are happy to work alongside you. To find out more contact us or telephone 0845 519 4727.

Having worked on web projects since 1996, we have a lot of experience of making a web project run swiftly and smoothly, whilst avoiding obstacles that cause delays. As an agency we constantly refine and perfect our process, but as our customer there are plenty of things you can do to help ensure the project is completed efficiently.

Any project – be it a house renovation, car purchase, or a bespoke web project – requires research, planning and strategy, all of which contribute to its success. These points should be considered in your planning now, to ensure your project is delivered successfully:

1. A web project requires your time too

Although you have commissioned us to plan, develop and deploy your web project, your input as the client is an integral part of the process. The number one delay in a project arises when client input is not available due to other commitments. As a B2B company we understand your company requires large amounts of your time, but we do advise you to consider planning a project aside of things that you know will demand your time – staff holidays, shows and events, seasonal increases in trade, other business projects, etc.

Some project tasks can be delegated to other members of your team, but you should consider how these items will fit into your team’s working week:

• The initial planning of your website, its function and its content
• The creation and supply of content for each page
• Your feedback and sign-off during the design stages
• Your final feedback and sign-off of the web project, once it is built
• An ecommerce site will require product images, descriptions and prices to be prepared and inputted. We can help you with this, but it can require a surprisingly large amount of your time.
• A CMS may require you to create pages and enter content (depending on the package purchased)

2. Establish your online goals

To ensure that your web site works for your business, clear goals and objectives should be set out – what do you want your website to accomplish? Are you simply establishing an online presence and promoting awareness of your company or brand, driving online sales, generating offline sales or leads, improving business process & efficiency or something else entirely? A clear overview of these factors in advance, as well as ascertaining your target market, will make it far easier to actuate your goals further down the line giving us a point of reference throughout the design and build process.

3. Plan your content structure now

Although we offer our advice and experience when planning and developing your content structure (the sections and pages), it is something you should think about from the outset. A clear and well thought out vision of your desired end result will form a basis for us to refine, polish and perfect with you.

If you’re not sure how to get started, we can help you with information architecture – allowing you to formulate an easily navigable and usable content hierarchy, thus ensuring you get the most from your investment. Remember, your website’s visual interface exists to generate interest in and guide users through your content, so the more you know about this in advance the better.

4. Provide content as soon as possible

Put some time in your diary now for content creation. The second biggest delay in web projects is the lack of content to go into pages. Depending upon the size of your project, the creation of high quality content could require many days of your time, so it is important to plan ahead for this. Collecting product information from suppliers, taking photographs, writing about your company and services often takes longer than you might think. You may wish to delegate some of these tasks, or talk to us about how we can help you.

Ideally, the latest your content should be supplied to us would be at design sign-off; typically 3-6 weeks after your deposit has been received. However, it is highly recommended that you have your website content available when the design team begin creating visuals ensuring the end result is more appropriate when we can see the content that is being presented.

Queue Jumper: The advance supply of content is so critical to a project, that we operate a queue jumper scheme; if your content can be supplied within two weeks of project commencement (when your deposit payment has been received) we will jump your project to the front of the queue, and begin work right away!

5. Make arrangements with third parties immediately

Delays on a project caused by third parties may be out of both our control, but by starting discussions as soon as possible these stages can be completed well before the deadline. There are typically two processes you can start now, in preparation for your web project:

Arranging your payment provider

The arrangement of a payment provider and online merchant account can often cause delays for your ecommerce project. Negotiations with your bank, the signing and returning of paperwork, etc. can all take time. Read more about taking payments online here, and then take steps to set up a payment provider today.

Transfer of your domain name and hosting

The transfer of an existing domain name, along with your email and website hosting typically takes between one day and one week. To avoid delays, the transfer arrangements can be made well in advance of your new website being ready, so that the final ‘go live’ process takes just minutes and significantly reduces the risk of a loss of service. Talk to us today about how to make these arrangements.

Now that you’ve read this article, why not take a look at these links too?

1. Read about how we go about building your website
2. Complete a website design questionnaire

The card payment industry has changed massively in recent years, with greater focus on online security and fraud prevention through the introduction of CV2 numbers, 3D-secure authentication and additional layers of fraud checking. These advances have meant that other payment processing options (e.g. PayPal, Sage Pay..) have become far superior to PGP, offering improved PCI-compliant fraud protection for the merchant whilst widespread implementation has minimised costs.

This article looks at 3 options available to you, to allow payments to be taken online:

1. Sage Pay

   Sage Pay (a subsidiary of Sage) provides secure online credit and debit card payment solutions for thousands of online and mail order businesses across the UK. When Sage Pay has been implemented on a website, the merchant no longer has to manually process credit card details and the secure disposal & storage of credit card details is no longer a worry.

   With Sage Pay, taking payments is as simple as it can be. A customer can get instant feedback as to whether their payment has been successful, whilst the merchant knows straight away that the payment has been taken, the fraud checking been passed and shipping address confirmed. Sage Pay is also integrated with PayPal Express Checkout (a 3-click checkout for your customers) giving you the opportunity to add a PayPal option to your payment pages.

   Sage Pay Go (Small Business Service) is available from £20/month*, with no additional costs for up to 1,000 transactions per quarter.

   More details can be found at sagepay.com and you can sign up to use Sage Pay at yoursagepay.co.uk

2. PayPal – Website Payments Standard

   Established as the number 1 payment network for auction websites, PayPal is now rapidly growing in use amongst e-commerce businesses. PayPal Website Payments Standard is simple to set up and does not require an internet merchant account. PayPal allows you to accept credit and debit cards, bank transfer and PayPal balance payments in minutes.  Your customers do not need to have a PayPal account to pay you.

   Charges for using PayPal Website Payments Standard are made on a per-transaction basis and there are no monthly or annual fees. Fees range from 1.4% – 3.4% + £0.20*, more details can be found at:
   www.paypal.com

3. PayPal – Website Payments Pro

   Website Payments Pro offers all the benefits of a merchant account and gateway with PayPal. You can accept credit and debit cards, bank transfer and PayPal balance payments via Express Checkout (a 3-click checkout for your customers), via an unbranded direct credit/debit card checkout, or via phone/fax and mail. Your customers do not need to have a PayPal account to pay you.

   Charges for using PayPal Website Payments Pro can be made on a per-transaction basis ranging from 1.4% – 3.4% + £0.20*. Alternatively, an unlimited amount of transaction can be made for a set fee of £20/month. More details can be found at: www.paypal.com

* Prices correct at time of publication (5/2011)

If you sell products online yet you don’t use Google Product Search then are missing out. Google Product Search or Froogle as it was previously known was first launched in the UK back in 2004 and is a free service that allows companies to have their products displayed in the shopping results on Google.

For instance, if we were to do a search for the phrase ‘trilby hats‘ then you would see on the first page of results some shopping results for trilby hats. Typically, there are three or four listing with a small thumbnail image but these results can be expanded further by clicking the shopping tab at the top of the page or the text “Shopping results for trilby hats”. Doing so will take you to a whole section dedicated to shopping results powered by data uploaded to Google.

In order to get your products listed on Google product search, you will need to open a Merchant Center account with Google. This is a straightforward task and can be accessed from the settings link in your Google account. Once registered, you will be able to upload a product feed that will keep your product list up to date. The upload of the feed can be set to daily, fortnightly or monthly depending on the frequency your stock changes and you can specify what time you want the feed to run. Our Get-Trolleyed system can help you with this by uploading the automated product feed, we would be happy to discuss setting this up along with you on your behalf.

Once you have got your feed up and running, you can then turn your attention to optimising it to give your products a much better chance of being placed near the top of the list (remember, the top three or four listings appear on the first page of Google).

There are a few simple things you can do to give your product feed a better chance. Be careful not to overdo it though because this can be more harmful than doing nothing at all. Ensuring that you have some keywords in the title and description of each product can help to improve your placement in the shopping results. Also make sure that you all products in the feed have an image associated with them and if possible, the name of the image relates to the product.

If you are interested in setting up a Google Product Feed of your own and would like us to give you a quote, why not get in touch? Simply give us a call on 0845 519 4727 or use our contact form which can be found here.

You may not realise it but SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plays a large part in how easily your website is found by potential customers on the Internet. Sometimes this happens naturally but in many cases, websites need help to improve their rankings in the major search engines.

Perhaps the best way for a website to rank well is to use content that is relevant to your niche market. By this we mean words or phrases throughout your website that are often searched for by people when are looking for a product or service into a search engine. Search engine spiders also crawl through these relevant phrases and use them as part of their ranking algorithm which ultimately determines where you are placed in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

What you are aiming for is website that appeals to both the search engine spiders in order to ensure that you rank well, while at the same time making sure that the website is equally as presentable to human users too. SEO is used to help increase your website’s rankings by using targeted keywords in the body of the text as well as in the META data. These keywords are usually determined at the start of a project and are based on how many people search for them on the major search engines.

Once the best key phrases have been determined, they can then be used throughout the website. Updatable content such as blogs or articles can then be created again using these key phrases and added on to the website. These new pieces of optimised content can then be crawled by the search engine spiders and be indexed accordingly. This helps to give your website more relevance online allowing users and customers to find you when they search on the Internet.

It is important however, to always remember that it is all too easy to get carried away and put too many key phrases into the website. Doing so could be deemed as spam, which looks bad to a human user and could result in a penalty from the search engines that would damage your rankings.

SEO is important for your website because without it your products or services may not get the attention they deserve. If your website cannot be found easily then users will go somewhere else. By ensuring that your website is properly optimised, you can give your website the edge over your competition.

If you run a website with updatable content areas, such as an e-commerce platform or content management system, the chances are you’ve been called upon to edit or enhance your own images in order to make them ‘web friendly’. Although Adobe Photoshop has long been the industry standard for image manipulation among professionals, its costly nature and feature-laden interface are generally a turn-off for casual users – however, there are a plethora of free and useful alternatives available for download, a selection of which are outlined in this article.

These free image editors can be divided into two categories:

• Downloadable Image Editing Software
• Web-Based Image Editors

Downloadable Image Editing Software

A great deal of image editing software is available on the Internet for free download, with varying levels of functionality – and which you choose will depend largely on your requirements. The programs are all one-time downloads, with an advantage over web based image editors in that they do not rely on an Internet connection for use, and won’t be adversely affected by loading times and similar.

The GIMP

Quite possibly one of the most used and well known ‘free’ image editing software packages, GIMP is short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. First developed in 1995, this open source editing software is available in many guises and is compatible with Apple, Linux and Windows operating systems. The GIMP boasts a wide range of features that enable images to edited or enhanced and can even be set out to mimic the layout of Photoshop. Since The GIMP is open source there are many tutorials to help guide users through the editing process.

Paint.NET

Originally, Paint.NET was developed to be a free alternative to the Windows bundled paint software but over time has grown to be a simple to use but effective image editing tool.  Although only compatible with Microsoft operating systems, this software offers much of the functionality that its paid alternatives. Again, there are many online tutorials to help guide users through image editing.

Picasa 3

As you’d expect from a Google product, Picasa is a lightweight program allowing locating, editing and sharing of images via a single interface. Picasa will automatically search your computer for images, and allows them to be organised with ease. Also, being a Google product, it allows images to be geo tagged with Google maps and ‘one click’ publishing to online photo albums. Picasa also acts as an image viewer too, enabling the user to create slideshows, etc.

Web Based Image Editors

As the name suggests, online photo editors are accessed directly through an Internet browser from any location, and consequently require no software download or installation.  They allow users to upload images, to which adjustments and changes can be made using a variety of built-in tools and filters, and the resulting images subsequently saved to your local machine.

Pixlr

Pixlr has been designed with both professional and non-professional users in mind. Created using flash, this program allows users that only have simple editing needs such as editing web images to be posted on social networks, or for personal use. However, it can also be used by professionals who need to edit images for websites, etc. Since Pixlr is flash based, the speed of your computer will determine how fast this program will run. Also, Pixlr is in constant development therefore not all editing features may be available.

Sumo Paint

Sumo Paint is another flash based, cloud computing image editor and is compatible with Apple, Linux and Windows operating systems. A relative newcomer to the image editing market, this program offers all the usual editing or enhancement options that the other major applications do. Sumo Paint also allows users to sign up for a free account, giving users some storage space and the ability to save image layers, etc.

Image Editor

Image Editor does not boast as many features as the other image editing programs but is quite easy and intuative to use. This program could be used for simple image editing and has some predefined filters to allow users to apply different styles to text. As with the other online programes, Image Editor is flash based and therefore will perform better on faster machines.

All of these image editing programs will allow you to crop and manipulate images as well as provide some interesting features to enhance the apperance of the final images. Each program will have its own quirks and may perform better at handling specific tasks than others. Finding out which one suits your needs best is trial and error but all of the above will give you the freedom to take an existing image and make it shine.

Back in the early days of search engine optimisation it was more a case of everyone for themselves since search engine algorithms were nowhere near as complicated and sophisticated as they are today.  There were many tactics that were commonplace to help improve websites rankings that are now frowned upon by the search engines and SEO’s alike.

Like in any industry, there are always some people who want to try and cheat the system or fast track their website to the top of the rankings.  Short term they may achieve good results but eventually these techniques will always be found out by the major search engines and it is then that your site may start to suffer.  ‘Black Hat’ search engine optimisation as it is known should be avoided so let’s take a look at what to watch out for when considering online marketing.

Keyword stuffing

This was certainly one of the favourite techniques used by website optimisers in the early days of SEO. Stuffing lots of keywords into every page of a website was commonplace and often, the font would be the same colour of the background. This meant that unless you clicked over it with your mouse, it would be hidden from the user. The same thing could also be done behind the scences in the back end of the website where the META data, heading tags, etc could be filled with keywords.

These are still practised today with optimisers coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways of accomplishing them. This can make it difficult to spot these kinds of underhand methods except by someone who knows what they are looking for.

Gateway/Doorway pages

Put simply, these are pages that are not designed to be seen by the web user because they redirect very quickly to the main website. They are web pages that have been stuffed full of keywords that wouldn’t actually make any sense to the casual observer.  This excessive use of keywords is just one example of a practice known as spamming.  This is highly frowned upon by the major search engines as it is seen as trying to cheat the system.

Link Farming

This is where your website is submitted to large numbers of websites whose sole purpose is to list links to as many different sites as possible, whether they are relevant to your business or not.  This will not result in your website gaining any extra traffic and ultimately will likelyend up with your site being penalised.  The only real way to build good quality links to your website is through the writing and distribution of quality copy and submission to relevant directories.

These are just three examples as there are many other ways that ‘Black Hat’ optimisers can try to cut corners in order to achieve quick short term results to justify their existence and make themselves look good. It is very important to remember that online marketing should be seen as a long term project and not just a quick fix.

Ultimately, if you use an SEO company who are open and upfront about how they go about your online marketing and explain the associated processes that go with running a solid campaign then the chances are that they are not going to employ ‘Black Hat’ techniques. However, if you are promised the earth by a company but they are unwilling to discuss how they are going to go about it then perhaps you need to start asking them a few more questions.

Every e-commerce website, no matter what its size or focus, could benefit from an increase in activity over the busy and highly competitive Christmas period. According to research conducted by eBay advertising, 85% of consumers intend to maintain or increase their festive online shopping for 2009, and it’s estimated that online retailers will see an overall spend of £8.9 billion this Christmas. We’ve just passed “ Cyber Monday” – the busiest Internet shopping day of the year, which typically falls on the first Monday of December (7^th December for 2009).

• Add a Christmas Gift Section
• Provide Extra Delivery Options & Notify Customers of Dates
• Focus on Email Marketing
• Offer a Gift Wrapping Service

Christmas Gift Sections

Help your customers find gifts quickly and conveniently this year by adding a Christmas-specific department to your e-commerce website. Anything can be a potential Christmas present, so group your products into handy categories – for example, allow shoppers to sort by price or suggest gifts for potential recipients, ‘Under £20’, ‘For Her’, ‘Stocking Fillers’, to help guide your shoppers towards their ideal products. To make the selection process even easier, you could also consider offering a choice of gift cards or Christmas-themed gift packs.

Delivery Options & Dates

Provide clearly visible information to your customers regarding your Christmas delivery schedule, and make sure you offer the latest delivery deadlines available to you. Many shoppers leave Christmas shopping until the last minute, so it’s important to provide shipping as close to Christmas Eve as possible. The worst thing you can do is deliver late!

You might also expand your range of shipping options over the festive period to deal with demand – for instance, if you don’t currently offer a Next Day courier service, consider catering to last-minute shoppers and implementing one for Christmas.

It’s suggested that free delivery influences almost half of online purchasers – so you may want to offer complimentary shipping when customers spend over a certain threshold. Christmas is a hugely competitive period, and free shipping could consolidate a customer’s decision to purchase from you rather than another Internet retailer.

Focus on Email Marketing

As months turn into weeks and weeks turn into days, Christmas time seems to get closer and closer without us even realising. Try using our easy to use email marketing software, EmailTool, to send out mailshots and reminders – even though Christmas will probably see an influx of new customers to your retail website, it’s important not to neglect your existing ones! Email newsletters containing seasonal content – from Christmas gift ideas to festive promotions and discount codes – will encourage your email subscribers to make a return visit and subsequently a Christmas purchase.

Keep reminding your customers how close Christmas is… and, more importantly, how many Christmas shopping days remain!

Gift Wrapping Service

The weeks leading up to Christmas are hectic for a huge number of stressed shoppers, and taking Christmas gift-wrapping out of the equation for them could easily lead to a sale for you. If offering free gift-wrapping for your products proves prohibitively expensive or time consuming, you could always offer the service as a freebie with purchases over a certain value, or as an inconsequent additional cost per item.

As an even greater incentive, think about offering a varied choice of gift wrap to your customers, and displaying previews of your Christmas paper or even pre-wrapped and beribboned gifts on your website.