SEO & E-Commerce Blog

New E-commerce Features in Boss Cart v1.6

Bagi Zoltán — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:09:06 +0000

The development team at Boss Cart E-commerce Software put the new e-commerce features and significantly better, unambiguous interfaces to the centre.

The newly integrated payment gateways as below:

* HSBC checkout
* CCNow
* Ideal
* Epdq
* CardSave
* Payment sense

The development team carried out considerable improvement regarding the checkout process, thus you can easily configure optional shipping charges like Collection mode with free shipping, and your customers may select the desired delivery date according to the shopkeeper’s settings.

I suppose the biggest the greatest leap forward is the integration of „Anonymous Checkout module” and the visitors may forget the forced registration when any of PayPal Payment Standard, Google Checkout, PayPal Express Checkout is configured as active payment gateway.

On the storefront visitors will see a more sophisticated, ecommerce template with wrapped newsletter sign up box in the leftbar.
I must mention the improved product attributes. The weight of the product attributes changes the product and shipping prices on the fly.
After logging into the customer account it is easy to recognize that a new Reward tab is added, since from this release Shopkeeper has the facility to encourage the customers with the loyalty point system as well –beside the various discounting modules. Using the new options at the Order History tab repeating a previous order, or clearing an incomplete payment has never been so easy.

Boss Cart has a surprise for the seo world as well, since the Google Ecommerce Tracking is integrated as an automatic. The implementation is still not perfect in this version, since javascript needs interpreter to push the transaction details to Google, but I am very sure this module will be improved soon.

Hosted E-Commerce Packages

Bagi Zoltán — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:04:15 +0000

After some years of successful distribution of the Premium Software, the team at Boss Cart has decided to establish the hosted packages targeting really demanded users who would like to focus on their business instead of the website maintenance.

Two packages has been compiled so far, the difference is the provide hosting plan, and the maximum number of uploadable products. However the installed software gives you all the advanced features of Boss Cart Premium including:

Guest checkout.
Google Base uploader.
eBay product export tool.
Bulk csv product import.

UK E-Commerce and Distance Sellings Regulations

Bagi Zoltán — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:59:57 +0000

Every UK companies are overseen by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

If you sell goods or services to consumers by:

the internet
digital television
mail order, including catalogue shopping
phone
fax

then Distance Selling Regulations concern you.

You must give clear information before your customers place orders at your website, which includes:

Identity of your business.
The main characteristic of the offered good.
The price of the goods including all taxes.
The delivery cost.
Information how the payments can be made.
when the payment is required in advance, you must let your customers know your full geographic address.
The terms of services.
If your customer have to call a premium-rate phone number, you must specify the cost of the call (inc. taxes).
Validity period your offer.
The minimum duration of the contract where goods or services are to be provided permanently or recurrently.
The declaration that you will pay the cost of returning any product that you supply as substitutes instead of out of stock items.

The E-Commerce regulations (ECRs) are concern you when you request for payment via electronic equipment prior to providing the service or deliverying the good. Some of the information which you must supply overlaps the DSRs and includes:

The full name of your business.
Geographic address of your business, if your as trading from home it means your home address.
Your contact details, to enable effective communication with you.
Your registration number.
Your VAT registration number if you are subject to VAT
The details of any supervisory authority, where applicable.
Clear identification if the prices include taxes and delivery costs.

When an order is placed at your eShop

Customer must receive an acknowledgement of the receipt of the order without delay.
You must provide consumers a clear identification of input errors prior to their order is placed.

Boss Cart Premium E-Commerce Shopping Cart Software is the result of over 10 years experience in Internet, shopping carts and web applications and designed by a British team of highly skilled BSc and MSc qualified programmers with you, the user and the regulations in mind.

Link Building Service Under Magnifier

Bagi Zoltán — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:21:39 +0000

Not very long ago I have visited a very promising link building. service provider. The website is very demanded and at the main page I immediately got a very good overview about the offered services:

Content Related Websites
Blog Reviews
Social Media BookMarking
Article Distribution
General Directory Submission
Niche Directory Submission
Web Templates - Designed by
Forums Signatures

According to their portfolio, the main strength of the company is utilizing the different social media, which one of the most effective way to boost the website traffic. After spending long minutes reading text snippets I found out that they mostly focus on the British market, but it makes the really valueable for a lot of European webmasters.
I think you won’t regret visiting this real gem.

Webmaster blog under magnifier

Bagi Zoltán — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:21:27 +0000

I don’t know if you have heard the nick name Temi. If you are a regular visitor of the various webmaster forums, you may find this name similar, but if you are a regular poster at the various virtual marketplaces you must know him pretty well.

Still doesn’t sound familiar?

OK, and if say Link bid script , or Haabaa directory?

Yes, Temi Odurinde has been in the web directory business for many years. It was more than a year ago, when he released an excellent article at this blog about the secret of successful directory managing. I think this is one of the best article ever posted here.

When I started to read his blog, I recognised that there are some exceptionally nice articles about web hosting, reflecting many year of experience and deep knowledge. If you are considering to get into web hosting, those writings are must.

I almost forget to mention that Temi is a huge fan of the different forums. He has plenty of them, but the best one is the UK Webmaster forum. Not a member yet?
What are you waiting for?

Have a nice further day!

Painless CAPTCHA

Bagi Zoltán — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:43:43 +0000

For me the word CAPTCHA has only one meaning and it is PAIN, though I am convinced that we need it in order to protect our forms against spamming bots.

I considered that it would be really nice if we could provide a CAPTCHA script at our websites which gives an immediate feedback about the correctness of the typed password. I can hardly imagine more annoying thing than when after posting you need to recognize that the control number was false and your form was reseted as well.

After a couple of hour work it seems that I managed to compile a quite fancy method to handle this issue.

The html code of the input is the following:

, it will receive evaluation from the JavaScript code below when a keyboard key is released (onkeyup event).

The code has two inputs: the $_SESSION[’secword’] which is generated by the CAPTCHA script and the other one is the seccode input. Unfortunately I couldn’t avoid displaying the CAPTCHA string in the source hence I used the preg_replace php and the replace js function in order to mask it, inserting and deleting the %51% string among the chracters of the CAPTCHA.

The operation of the script in nutshell is the following. The JavaScript grabs the value of the input after every typed character, inspects its length and examine if the same length string of the CAPTCHA are identical with it. If the result is YES the background of the input will turn green, otherwise it will turn red and a warning message will be injected into the span element.

The last three lines are mostly for the fancy effect, when the typed and the generated strings are the same in their full length, the mootools framework will set the opacity of the containing div to 0.

Working demo

Have a nice further day!

Premium Web 2.0 shopping cart is knocking

Bagi Zoltán — Sat, 24 May 2008 11:41:03 +0000

Yesterday an update post has been released at the official Boss Cart blog reporting that their newest script, the WEB 2.0 compatible shopping software, called Boss Cart Premium is very close to the public release.

Following the free JV script among the fast growing eCommerce shopping cart family this script is the second releases in the last 12 months period.

I asked for a demo page from the spokesman of the webdesign company, who showed me the newest version of the software. He said that the final testing will be finished in the next 2 weeks, and after that a demonstration micro site will be uploaded for the Public. I got permission to the backend as well, and after spending there about 20 minutes I need to say that the programmers did a fantastic job.

I believe that in a couple of week I will have possibility to present the script functions with screenshots as well.

Have a nice further day!

Simple SEO Tips

Bagi Zoltán — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:16:55 +0000

So when is the best time to start SEO on a new website or redesign? Well I would recommend right at the beginning. Seems pretty obvious eh? But you would be surprised how many companies I have seen that build a website THEN do the SEO (which is totally wrong in my opinion). Why? Well there are so many little factors that you have to take into account when doing SEO on a website, for example navigation architecture, site architecture etc.
If you’re new to SEO and/or are a web designer that has limited SEO knowledge, below are a few tips that I want to share with you, just to give you a rough idea of the dos and do not’s when thinking of building a website or redesigning an existing website.

1 ) To Flash or not to Flash?

This is a coming, yes costly misconception to many who are trying to design a search engine friendly website. There’s nothing really wrong with using Flash and no reason that I can think of for not using it. What you do need to try and avoid is a site totally built in Flash, as well as Flash navigation. But that’s it. If you do decide to build and an all out singing and dancing Flash website, there are way’s you can work around it but it will be a longer process and much bigger task.

2 ) Should all scripts be pulled from external files?

This is a great way to keep file size down to a minimum and make it easy to update your pages, but it has nothing to do with search engines or how your pages are ranked within them. Search engines have long known how to ignore code that is of no use to them. Whether your scripts are right there in the source code of the page or called up externally will have no bearing on your rankings or search engine relevance. I like to keep my code down to a minimum because it does help the spiders “crawl” your site easier because they don’t need to wade through all of the code before they hit the juicy part which is the content. One way around this is by using tags. This should push your content up to the top of your page.

3 ) A Website should be designed using CSS as much as possible.

This is just another myth. CSS doesn’t have any special properties that search engines like better than tables or any other HTML code. Again, it may make it easier for you to update your pages, or to use your content for other things, but it’s not an SEO technique that will increase rankings or relevance.
When designing a site, think logical about it for example, if you’re building an informational website use HTML, don’t use dynamic coding like ColdFusion. Pretty obvious when you think about it right?

4 ) The CSS should be called from external files.

Again, just the same as pulling scripts from external files, good to do but it’s not a search engine issue in the slightest. I do like house them in an external file, as well as my scripts just because I like clean code and I want to search engine spiders to be able to read as much content as possible without having to “break” for the code.

5 ) All comments in the code should be added to an FAQ section or Doc-type file.

Umm, why shouldn’t they be in the code? I have no idea where this silly myth came from, but I guess if you’re thinking that file sizes affect search engine rankings, then you might also believe this one!. It may have also come about because some people used to think that adding keyword phrases to comment tags would help, (which they don’t) search engine rankings. Comment tags have long been ignored by the search engines, and because of this, you can use them as often as you like or as little as you like in your source code.

6 ) All code on each page needs to change from page to page so that the search engines don’t view it as duplicate content

You don’t need to change the code in your pages to avoid duplicate content problems. Take a look at some website templates; they have code that is EXACTLY throughout the site. The search engines have no issues with this and if you have been reading, I have already pointed out that the search engine spiders ignore code anyway to some extent. The thing you SHOULD change on every page is your content! But a few sentences don’t harm, just not an entire article!

7 ) All picture links should have text links under the pictures

I can’t think of a valid reason for this. Image links that make use of the image alt attribute (alt tags) have always been followed easily by the search engines and will always be followed. They’re followed even without the alt attribute, but the words you place in there tell the search engines and the site users exactly what they’ll be getting when they follow the link. It’s essentially the same thing as the anchor text of a text link. This is more about the usability of your website rather than search engines.

8 ) Never use drop down or fly-out menus using JavaScript

Not bad advice, however, there are very easy ways to work around if you have to use JavaScript menu. The “noscript” tag is a perfectly good place to recreate your menu for those who (like the search engines) can’t do JavaScript. These days a CSS menu would be a far option.

9 ) Always use basic HTML link navigation (text link navigation, no JavaScript mouse-over, and no image map navigation)

Well, Yes and no. JavaScript links are definitely not a smart idea. But there are plenty of spider-friendly image maps, as I mentioned previously, graphical links are ok with search engines.

10 ) Every page must be validated by an HTML validator and all style sheets need to be validated through a CSS validator

Yes because it’s nice to do but no because it has nothing to do with search engines.

11 ) The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly.

Not really. Dynamic pages are just as easy to crawl and rank as static pages. Most sites today are dynamic because they’re simply easier to maintain. The search engines have figured out how to crawl and rank them just fine for many years now. There are certain things you need to watch out for when creating a dynamic site, but most developers are aware of the worst of the issues. There’s no reason to have only static pages on your site because you’re worried about the search engines being able to index dynamic pages. Just make sure to MOD_REWRITE all the dynamic URL’s.

12 ) The site needs to be compatible with browsers and screen resolution compatible

This is more about usability but as for SEO, it has no bearing on the search engines at all.
KingPin’s SEO Blog

Automatic defending script against bad robots

Bagi Zoltán — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:56:54 +0000

Last week a Hungarian guy asked me if I could develop something effective solution against bad robots so some days ago I started to execute a fast survey on topic and found many solution, but most of them based on certain host placed into .htaccess, and none of them was automatic, so the challenge was given.

Some days ago I started a little survey on topic and found a lot of htaccess rules, where certain hosts were rejected via .htaccess, but they were not automatic, so the challange was given. The most useful site I found was this resource which let me know the basic attitude of bad robots to the robots.txt files. They ignore the specified restrictions.

1. Open your existing robots.txt file or upload one and place the following lines into it

User-agent: *
Disallow: /core

The name of the restricted folder is not important, but would be great if the humanoid atteckers would find it enough attractive as well since this folder will be the live-bait.

2. Create the folder on your hosting space which is specified in the robots.txt file, in my example this is called core and upload an index.php file with the following content:

$ip = $_SERVER[”REMOTE_ADDR”];
$logfile = ‘bannolnilog.txt’;
//collect the IP adresses or something else into the logfile
$fp = fopen($logfile, ‘a’);
fputs($fp, “$ip
“);
fputs($fp, ” “);
fclose($fp);
echo “your IP was logged for security reasons and your visit is now over”;
?>

3. As you may see in the code I defined a $logfile where the IP adresses will be collected and stored hence we need to upload to the same (core) folder a blank txt file called bannolnilog.txt (chmod 644).

4. We need to upload one more php file which will check if the visitor is bannished whenever a page is requested, I named this file validator.php and its content is the following.

$ip = $_SERVER[”REMOTE_ADDR”];
$logfile = ‘bannolnilog.txt’;
$target = file(dirname(__FILE__). “/core/bannolnilog.txt”);
foreach($target as $item){
$item = trim($item);
if(stristr($ip, $item)){
header(”HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden”);
exit;
}
}
?>

5. As final step you need to insert this line into the very front of your script header or index file, the point is that this is how the script must started whenever a page is requested

Note: You may truncate the logfile deleting the collected IPs, and please take into consideration that WordPress is make quotation marks display a bit odd, so you may want to double check the syntax of the code.
I warrant nothing, but works very well at one of my sites.

Have a nice further day!

Defend your site against google proxy hacking

Bagi Zoltán — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:44:44 +0000

Short story

The problem was given. At the end of the linked posts there is an advised “reverse cloaking” solution link, but all I achieved after implementing that was the Unreachable network error at Google Webmaster Tools.

Days were gone, but finally I found this thread at WebmasterWorld.com. IncrediBILL suggested a solution which based on the reverse-forward DNS robot validation with the following php script:

// Get the user agent.
$ua = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
// Check the user agent to see if it's identifying itself as a search engine bot.
if(strstr($ua, 'msnbot') || stristr($ua, 'Googlebot') || stristr($ua, 'Yahoo! Slurp')){
// The user agent is purporting to be MSN's bot or Google's bot or Yahoo! Slurp.
// If the user agent string is spoofed, we won't find googlebot.com in the host name.
// Get the IP address requesting the page.
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
// Reverse DNS lookup the IP address to get a hostname.
$hostname = gethostbyaddr($ip);
// Check for '.googlebot.com' and '/search.live.com' in hostname.
if(!preg_match("/\.googlebot\.com$/", $hostname) &&!preg_match("/search\.live\.com$/", $hostname) &&!preg_match("/crawl\.yahoo\.net$/", $hostname)) {
// The host name does not belong to either live.com or googlebot.com.
// Remember the UA already said it is either MSNBot or Googlebot.
$block = TRUE;
header("HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden");
exit;
} else {
// Now we have a hit that half-passes the check. One last go:
// Forward DNS lookup the hostname to get an IP address.
$real_ip = gethostbyname($hostname);
if($ip!= $real_ip){
$block = TRUE;
header("HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden");
exit;
} else {
// Real bot.
$block = FALSE;
}
}
}
?>

The original script didn’t validate the Yahoo Slurp bot, but I additonally completed the script with it.

So all you need to do is to download the installation package and implement them according to attached guides. If you are a WordPress I have a really good new for you. Due to mosquito a WordPress plugin is also available with guide as well.

Yes, and don’t forget about the testing. Open your Firefox browser and insert “about:config” without quotes into the adress bar and press enter. Press mouse right click, select new string and add “general.useragent.override” as name and “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)” as value. Refresh your site after implementing the defending script/plugin and you will see exactly what the robot will see when come through a proxy site.

Downloads

Installation pack

WordPress plugin