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Reasons to use Drupal with Drupal Commerce or Ubercart

One major confusion which is seen among start-ups and small & medium enterprises is which is the best content management system (CMS) for their business. No doubt there are many excellent CMS like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomlart etc. but choosing the best platform for your ecommerce website can be a real challenge.

Drupal-Ecommerce

So which CMS is cost-effective and at the same time helps your ecommerce website work in a better manner? Drupal surely is one of the best platforms for your business. A powerful and flexible platform Drupal not only helps you learn the nuances of the trade, but is also far more extendable when compared to WordPress.

How to get a Drupal based ecommerce website?

To launch your website on Drupal, all you need to do is install Drupal Commerce or Ubercart. These are two of the best shopping cart extensions for any online website and being budget-friendly, easy to install and integrated with Drupal ecommerce – they are the best option. With these extensions, you can very easily create a blog, forum, a community along with many other functions for your ecommerce store.

Advantages of using Drupal with Drupal Commerce or Ubercart

1. Powerful and Adaptable CMS

A good ecommerce website does not just take orders. Rather it has an engaging blog section, several forums, product reviews, activity and community sections. These elements paly a very crucial role in not only keeping your customers occupied, but also help in attracting new clients to your store. Being adaptable in nature, it is very easy to add and administer these features on your website.

2. Amazing list of themes

Website design plays a very crucial role in the popularity and boosting sales of your site. More and more ecommerce websites are adapting themes to make their website design not only unique but also very impressive. This is what you get from Drupal. It has a wide range of themes which can be downloaded with ease. Also with the help of their consultants you can avail excellent theming services.

Thus no longer to your web designers need to build themes from the scratch and yet they can very easily choose a store theme.

3. SEO friendly Platform

Every ecommerce website wants to have good search engine rankings. Drupal facilitates URL optimization, smart .htaccess and provides you with a host of modules which makes it easy for your website to be noticeable by Google and other search engines.

4. Secure Application Framework

Security of your ecommerce website is very crucial. A website which has a secure application framework instills trust and faith in the mind of the customers and boosts your credibility. With Drupal it is very easy for your web developers to write secure codes, ensure security of your store’s & customer’s information and protects the website from hackers.

5. Has Growing Community of Developers

With the growing community of Drupal and Ubercart project it is easier to custom code for your ecommerce websites. Also you get to know the new changes, can get issues fixed with the help of the developers in this community.

These are some of the major reasons of using Drupal with Drupal Commerce or Ubercart. Especially if you are a start-up, Drupal will help you sail through your competitors without much of an effort.

Why your Local Listing is not getting you Better Ranking?

Better ranking in the local listing plays a great role in bringing more sales to your business. Most popular search engines, especially Google keeps improving search algorithm at regular intervals. One such Google algorithm for local listing is Pigeon.

According to Google Pigeon provides a more useful and relevant experience doe searchers seeking local results. Due to this algorithm now more and more visitors can find a better match of the business/ service they are looking for. And in case you are wondering why your local listing is not getting you better rankings, then may be it is due to the changes in Pigeon.

As per the leading search engine optimization service providers these are some common reasons why you are losing out on your rankings:

You are using the wrong keywords: This is the most common mistake done by many online websites. If you use the wrong keywords in your website, you cannot expect the right traffic and leads to come on your website.
The homepage of your website has keywords but no content: Mere use of right keywords is not enough. Your website, especially the home page must have quality content as well. This will help the visitors know about your business in a better manner.
You are not using tags/ meta tags properly: Unless you do not use the right tags/ meta tags search engines will not be able to crawl your website.
The content used by you is too thin: Thin content means your website does not have enough content for the readers. In this case, it is critical that you come up with more content which is of high quality and has relevance to your business.
Your website has a lot of spammy links: One major problem seen with many website is spammy links. You need to get rid of these links from time to time in order to improve the ranking of your website.
You are casting your local net too wide: Casting your local net too wide is sure to hurt your local listing ranks. It is recommended that you avoid it.

Ways in which you can improve your local rankings

The only way in which you can improve your relevance in local listing and thereby boost the local ranking of your website is by making your website more useful for the visitors to your website.
You can do this by:

Using the right keywords and title tags
Coming up with content which is useful as well as engaging
Build a very good homepage – one which makes things easier to understand for the visitors on your website
Your website should have the right graphics as well as color combination

Apart from these basic steps, you need to use Schema Markup, Geo-tag your images and name all the images on your website so that it gets local focus. Along with this Citations play a very crucial role in boosting the local listings. Make it a point that that all your local offsite mentions have a consistent theme, logos, branding and business description along with name, address, phone number (NAP).

Once you make these changes in your website, we are sure that the local listing of your website will improve and thereby boost your search engine rankings. You can also hire the services of SEO experts to facelift your website and get better rankings and return on investment (ROI).

What are the common A/B Testing Blunders?

A/B testing or Split testing is one of the simple ways through which you can compare the two versions of the web page to see which page performs in a better manner. A/B testing can help you come up with an effective marketing strategy by helping you choose the right web design and elements for the promotion of your goods and services

Though A/B testing comes with several easy-to-use tools, it is usually seen that there are many testing blunders which are time and again committed by both experts as well as novices. Here is a list of the most common A/B blunders which are regularly committed and need to be avoided in order to get a real picture of the performance of your professional web design:

Conducting Before and After Tests

One of the most common blunders is running the ‘Before and After Tests’ even though you are warned against it. Whenever you conduct a ‘before and after test’ you measure conversions on your site for a period of time. Usually it is thought that by conducting before and after tests, you test the two or more versions of the web page – whereas in reality you end up testing different versions for different periods of time. This gives you a distorted picture of conversion rates which hurts your marketing strategy.

Not Running the Tests for Full Weeks

It is recommended that you run the A/B test for at least 7 days and until there is 95% or higher likelihood of getting a winning version. Apart from this you can also conducting tests until there are 100 conversions. Whenever these guidelines are followed, you are sure to get accurate results. But many times, it is seen that even experts miss out on this rule and run the test for hardly 3 days thereby getting faulty results.

Anticipating Small Changes will get you Big Results

It is usually seen that even with small changes like – headline changes or adding one line of copy to a page – webmasters expect great results. Thus it is recommended that only radical changes are tested in order to know how the conversions on your websites are impacted.

Running too Many Tests

There are instances when website designers conduct more than 15 tests all at one time. While one expects that more tests will bring greater conversion rates, the reality is that every test decreases conversions and thereby decreases the revenue. Rather it is recommended that you gather enough data, analyze the results and then conduct educated tests based on the data which you have collected. This way you will not burn through several tests which may always not benefit you.

Not Testing Every Change you make

There are many website designers who think that making changes in the homepage or rearranging picture on their site will not affect the conversions. But the fact remains that in fact there are fair chances that even minor changes might affect the conversions on the site. Therefore it is very important that you conduct test on each and every change which you make on your website.

These are some of the most common A/B Testing blunders which need to be avoided in order to make real progress in optimizing your website and getting better conversions.

Matt Cutts Latest Webmaster Help Video: How Small Sites Can Outrank Big Sites

The latest webmaster help video from Google takes on a following question: How small sites being able to outrank big sites.

Matt tackles the following question:

How can smaller sites with superior content ever rank over sites with superior traffic? It’s a vicious circle: A regional or national brick-and-mortar brand has higher traffic, leads to a higher rank, which leads to higher traffic, ad infinitum.

Google rephrased the question of the YouTube as “How can small sites become popular?”

Matt says, we see the sites that are smart enough to be agile, and be dynamic, and respond quickly, and roll out new ideas much faster than these sort of lumbering, larger sites, can often rank higher in Google search results. And it’s not the case that the smaller site with superior content can’t outdo the larger sites.

Matt gives an example of Myspace and Facebook and then Facebook and Instagram, all these small sites have often become very big. Even Alta Vista and Google because they do a better job of focusing on the user experience. They return something that adds more value.

Finally Matt suggests that whatever area you’re in, if you are doing it better than the other incumbents, then over time, you can expect to perform better and better. Think about concentrating on a smaller topic area and make sure you cover it really well and then you can sort of build out from the smaller area until you become larger and larger.

Here is the Matt Cutts Video:

Facebook News Feed Redesign Rollout

Exactly one year ago, Facebook laid out its vision for the future of news feed. Now Facebook announced its Newsfeed redesign, the handful of people that first got the redesigned Facebook Newsfeed didn’t like it, so the social network made some adjustments before rolling it out to everybody, starting on Thursday.

The new News Feed looks almost exactly like Facebook’s mobile News Feed, bearing new iconography, bigger photos, new fonts (Helvetica and Arial), and story cards.

There are also other slight changes to the redesign, like larger buttons added to the “people you may know” section along the right rail and slight design tweaks to icons on the “update status” and the “add/photos/videos” tabs across the top.

Facebook users with their languages set to English will also see a standard search bar across the top of the page, while others will see a standard search bar.

“We want to be clear that this update does not affect ad specs, ads performance or optimization,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “These changes are visual updates and do not affect how content is surfaced to people, nor do they change how stories are ranked in News Feed.”

Microsoft’s Siri Competitor To Be Named Cortana

Microsoft is working on a competitor to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant codenamed “Cortana,” it was originally glimpsed as “zcortana,” a software folder seen in screenshots of Beta version of the “Blue” update to Windows phone 8.

Cortana is a codename taken from an artificial intelligence from the popular “Halo” game series for PC and Xbox, capable of learning and adapting to environments, and assisting the main character, Master Chief. It not only allow users to interact with their devices using voice commands -it will utilize cloud technology to connect Microsoft systems across all platforms, including Windows Phone 8, the coming Xbox One and Windows 8 computers.

While Siri pulls information from Wolfram Alpha and Yelp to answer queries, Google Now is capable of using email and calendar data to anticipate queries and present data it suspects the user will find important. Cortana will likely go beyond voice commands like Google now, according to The Verge’s Tom Warren.

If you’re a Windows user and would like to take a sneak peek at the technology behind Cortana, check out the Bing Translator app for Windows. Microsoft is reportedly rolling out Cortana-derived enhancements to that app’s speech recognition system.

Yahoo Planning To Bring Back Search Tech

Yahoo reportedly wants out of a deal that tie its search services to Microsoft. According to Re/code post, Yahoo CEO Mayer is pushing two new initiatives called “Fast Break” and “Curveball” that could position Yahoo once again as a player in Web search and the lucrative search-advertising market that accompanies it.

It has been thus since former CEO Carol Bartz got Yahoo out of the search technology business in 2009, in favor of the Microsoft deal that was called the Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance. Under the 10-year agreement, Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides the search technology on Yahoo, as well as the search-advertising technology.

If Yahoo decides to create their own search engine, it’s very likely they would first start with English before expanding it to any other languages, making a Microsoft deal for those search results crucial. Yet it’s not clear how merely taking back control of its own search product will help Yahoo turn around its shrinking market share.

The “Thin-Content” Warning

According to Google Webmaster Blog by Chris Nelson, “Affiliates that produce thin content and have little-to-no-value-add on their site may be penalized for going against Google’s guidelines.”

Websites that copy the same content over to different pages, replacing just a few words or geographically anchoring the same information to a different location, will be susceptible to a “thin content” warning. Another more subtle aspect of websites that Google Webmaster Tools scans is the relevance of syndicated and RSS feed content.

Chris Nelson stated that “As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of our users’ search results.”

Article Original Source: http://bangalorewebdesigncompany.in/google-alert-subtle-warning-to-affiliates-thin-content/

Google Lets Google+ User Land In Your Gmail Inbox

Google announced new integration between Gmail and Google+, Gmail users will have a broader pool of names to select from, as Google+ connections will start to appear below saved contacts when typing out a recipient.

According to a blog post by Google product manager David Nachum, the sender will be able to send an email using only the person’s name. Your email address won’t be displayed to people who send you a message through Google+, but will become visible if you reply. The system will be turned on by default, but Google said it would let users opt out.

Emails from people you follow on Google+ will appear in your primary inbox; emails using the new system from people you don’t follow will appear in Gmail’s “social” inbox tab.

Back in December 2011, Google started keeping Gmail contacts automatically updated via Google+. Now Gmail goes a step further by suggesting your Google+ connections as recipients when you are composing a new email. These are potentially useful additions for Gmail users who actually use Google+, although there is clearly room for annoying emails. You can also adjust the “Email via Google+” setting in Gmail once it’s available to avoid receiving message from people you really don’t want to spam your inbox.

Article Original Source: bestwebsitedevelopmentcompany.com

Twitter Launches Question And Answer Based Search Engine ‘Jelly’

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced the first details of his new venture Jelly, a question and answer based search engine for iOS and Android.

In a description of Jelly featured on the startup’s website, the company says using Jelly is a more fun way to search for topics or images. It’s an app that lets you ask questions, push them out to your network, and get rapid responses. “If you have a question, there’s someone out there that knows the answer,” Stone says in a video accompanying the official blog post.

The app aims to capitalize on the popularity of mobile smartphones and the pervasiveness of social networks. The app is also meant to personalize the search experience—it might take more inspiration from Quora, a community-based question-and-answer site, than from Google or Bing.

Facebook is working on its own new search tool, called Graph search, which is meant to answer people’s questions based on information about their friends. And Microsoft’s Bing search engine already incorporates data from Facebook and Twitter into its search results to give users more context. And though it is not meant to be “social,” Google offers its Goggles search tool on mobile devices, which aims to answer questions based on photos. What Jelly will be doing differently is that it will tap into new algorithms to help target the questions to specific networks, specifically using images. Jelly is placing a bet on the altruistic side of human nature.

The app is available now for iOS and Android.