http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1350-Conversion-15-Reasons-Why-Consumers-Will-Leave-Your-eCommerce-Site

Any other suggestions?

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/68143.html

Enjoy!

I ran across this information as I was browsing google for info on search engine optimization. Hope you find it useful:

Steps

1. Make sure that your website is ready (i.e. no broken links, has enough unique contents, etc).
2. Optimize your website for keywords that are highly related with your website content. You should use your main keyword for each page in the file name, meta tags (description and keywords section), in the heading of the page as well as in the first few sentences of the page preferably at the beginning of the first sentence. Also use that same main keyword a few times throughout your pages.
3. Create a sitemap file for your website. Sitemap file is a formatted file with an XML extension. It contains the URLs for all of your pages in your website. You can use free online or offline tools available to generate your sitemap file.
4. Upload the sitemap file to your website root directory.
5. Go to Google Webmasters Tools and log in using your Google account. Create if you don’t have one. It is free.
6. Type your website full URL in the “Add Site” field on the top of the Google Sitemap page and click OK.
7. Click the “Add Sitemap” link on the right of your website name.
8. Choose “General Web Sitemap ” on the “Choose Type” option list. Check all the checkboxes provided.
9. Type your full sitemap URL in the provided field and click “Add Web Sitemap” button.
10. Wait for about 2 or 3 days. Check Google by typing your website name in the search box with the word site: before the url example site:http://www.yourdomain.com. If it shows up in the result, it means that Google has indexed your website.

Some of the main PDG Commerce Version 5 New Features & Tools include:

PCI PA-DSS Certified – PDG Commerce Version 5 has been tested and certified as PCI PA-DSS compliant. The only software of its type (e.g. storefront) to achieve this certification and be recommended for new deployments on the PCI’s list of approved softwares, this certification helps make a merchant’s own PCI DSS certification simple and straight forward.

Improved Administration Panel with New Tabbed Layout – The Version 5 administration panel has undergone a tremendous make over, greatly simplifying a merchant’s navigation through both initial set up pages and pages you’ll access on a regular basis.

Full XHTML Compliant Storefront/Catalog Coding – PDG Commerce Version 5 introduces full XHTML strict compliance within both the HTML templates distributed with PDG Commerce, as well as any portions of code that are generated by PDG Commerce.

Unlimited Product Images and Automatic Resizing – Merchants can now upload and display an unlimited number of images for each product within their PDG storefront. As the merchant browses their computer for the image, PDG Commerce automatically creates a thumbnail and large image based on the merchant’s specifications. PDG Commerce Version 5 also provides an “alt text” field for each group of photos in order to maintain XHTML strict compliance and increase visibility for the product within search engines.

Navigation Breadcrumbs – PDG Commerce Version 5 can display a “breadcrumbs” trail at the top of your catalog pages in order to remind the customer where they are currently shopping within the storefront and provide 1-click access to return to the “parent” level of the category they’re currently shopping within (e.g. Clothing -> Mens -> Shirts -> Men’s Dress Shirts ; each respective link would direct the user back to the “top” area for that specific category).

Full Purchase/Order History for Registered Customers – Customers who register with your PDG Commerce enabled site will be able to view the details for all prior purchases – INCLUDING purchases that were completed prior to your upgrade to PDG Commerce Version 5. Within the details of their prior purchases, the customer can elect to add any or all of the items purchased in prior transactions to their current basket and can even choose the option of replicating the entire order. Users can also view the current payment and shipping status of the order based on the status of the order within the new Version 5 Order Manager (more below…).

Improved Product Searches – PDG Commerce Version 5 will allow your customers to search for products within certain categories – both parent and sub-categories. Searches within parent categories will automatically search within all respective sub-categories as well. Also, Version 5 will allow merchants using QuickBooks Point of Sale to provide a “search by size/style/color” function to their site (e.g. Show me all women’s shoes in size 7.5).

Improved Product Category Display – PDG Commerce Version 5 provides a nested unordered list display of your product category hierarchy, providing a simple way to introduce DHTML/CSS/JAVA based menus displays to provide accordion, fly-out and other dynamic menu options within your storefront (e.g. click/hover on parent category to see subcategories of that parent without having to load another page).

Shipping Cost Estimator – Customers shopping at your PDG Commerce Version 5 site will be able to get a quick estimate on shipping costs without having to go through the checkout process. Simply add a form to your basket or any other page to collect the zip, state and country of the shipping address and the customer’s preferred shipping method. Upon submitting, the page will reload displaying the estimated shipping costs. Better still – the shiping information will already be prepopulated for registered users shopping within your store – providing a 1-click shipping estimate.

WYSIWYG HTML Editor for Company Information Pages and Product Long Descriptions – Easily insert HTML encoded information for any of your PDG generated “company” pages, as well as long descriptions for your products. Just like working within FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc., simply enter the text, choose your format options (size, color, styling of text), insert images and other formatting options and PDG Commerce Version 5 automatically creates the HTML code for your display.

What’s New, Best Sellers and Other Custom Item Lists – PDG Commerce Version 5 allows you to insert a dynamically generated customized display of products within any of your PDG generated pages. This feature allows you to display a current list of “newly added” products, “best sellers” within your storefront, or build your own “custom” item list (e.g. “May Specials” or “Mother’s Day Flowers”). Choose from preprogrammed lists or create your own list within the PDG administration panel.

Administration Panel “Dashboard” – Providing a quick-glance view of your store’s operation, the Version 5 dashboard displays your top selling items, daily sales totals, version information and more. Subsequent Version 5 releases will provide additional customizable ‘widgets’ to tweak the dashboard to your satisfaction.

Version 5 Video Documentation and Tutorials – Based on feedback received regarding our QuickBooks and QuickBooks Point of Sale Integration Tutorials, PDG will now be offering future product documentation in video format. Providing a direct 1st person example of set up will allow new users to easily implement and set PDG Commerce features just by viewing and replicating what was demonstrated in the video docs.

Pricing information for new users interested in purchasing PDG Commerce Version 5 can be found at http://www.pdgsoft.com/commerce_purchase.htm .

Existing PDG Commerce users interested in upgrading to PDG Commerce Version 5 can find upgrade information at http://www.pdgsoft.com/commerce_upgrade_purchase.htm .

Finally, PDG Shopping Cart users interested in upgrading to PDG Commerce Version 5 can read more about their upgrade options at http://www.pdgsoft.com/commerce_upgrade_cart_purchase.htm .

Hope everyone enjoys!

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1046-Using-Google-Analytics-for-Keyword-Segmentation-and-In-Depth-Analysis

Enjoy!

If you are interested in participating in the Beta release, please email support@pdgsoft.com. We will contact you within the next 1-2 business days with the information necessary install PDG Commerce Version 5.

Google Analytics is a free tool available to anyone, regardless of whether or not you are utilizing Google AdWords. After signing up at http://www.google.com/analytics/, you are provided with a tracking code that can be inserted in any and all of your HTML pages — including dynamic pages created by PDG Commerce. The code, a sample of which appears below, can be accessed directly from within your Google Analytics account.


<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://
ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google–
analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-XX”); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}</script>

Unlike prior versions of Google Analytics, the newest version of the tracking code will automatically detect whether your user is on a secure or non-secure page within your site, and will load the remotely hosted javascript accordingly — thus preventing “not all items on this page are secure” errors.

When a user visits your page, this script will send information about the visitor to your Google Analytics account. Where did the user come from? What page did they visit before landing on this specific page? How long were they on the prior page? What keyword, either organic or PPC, led the user to your site? All of this and more will be available to you from within Google Analytics.

For your standard “catalog” pages within PDG Commerce, including the list categories page, a listing of products within a category, a “hard coded” search results page and a detailed item page, simply following the instructions provided by Google and pasting the code immediately inside of the within the corresponding PDG template is all you need to do to implement Google Analytics. The same will be true for any static pages within your site.

For pages that are being generated based on a form being posted to PDG Commerce, in which case the URL displayed in the browser is just simply “http://[your_site]/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi (or something similar…), a little trickery is required so that Google will know what page is actually being viewed. For example, when a user is on a PDG generated “Item” page (“preadd” link), entering a quantity and hitting “add to cart” posts the data to PDG Commerce. The resulting page does not include a unique identifier within the URL, as this same URL is also what would be displayed when the user enters a keyword and submits a search, proceeds to checkout, etc. To get around this, you can make a slight modification to the form that will make the distinction available to Google. When viewing your PDG Commerce “Item” template’s HTML source, you’ll see the HTML form. The first line of the form reads somethink like:

<form method="post" action="!---SCRIPT_NAME---">

When the page is being generated by PDG, the tag is replaced with the correct URL for the PDG Commerce executable (commerce.cgi or commerce.exe in most instances). When the user enters a quantity, selects an option or makes other changes within the page, this is the script that the data is posted to AND is the URL that would be displayed in the browser and recognized by Google. In order to help distinguish between all the pages that might show this same URL, we can add a “?[something]” following the tag. With a form post, the data following the ? is completely irrelevant to the webserver, so it won’t effect the functionality of the page, however the resulting URL displayed in the browser would include this additional text and help you identify precisely what page the visitor is on.

To apply a label of “basket” to the form on the ITEM page, you would modify the opening form to read:

<form method="post" action="!---SCRIPT_NAME---?basket">

Note that the label should identify what the subsequent page would be, thus why the form for adding to cart would be labeled “?basket”. Similarly, the form on your checkout template would need to be labeled “payment” or “verify” so that when the user submits and lands on the final payment page, the URL would display appropriately. For a search form, you might make your label “?search” (note this would apply to any PDG search forms on your site, regardless of whether they are on PDG generated dynamic pages, or on your own static pages).

The last step of implementing Google Analytics with PDG Commerce involves the “ecommerce tracking” capability of Google Analytics. This specific capability allows you to not only track a users progress as they navigate through the site, but will even post the purchase information from the user’s purchase — thus enabling a world of possibilities for tracking your ROI (return on investment) from your search efforts.

This script, similar to affiliate tracking scripts that post data back to affiliate softwares/programs, goes on the final “thank you” page that the user sees after their payment has been accepted. This would be the CreditAccept template for “online” transactions (e.g. online credit card, online check, PayPal Express Checkout, etc.), or the ThankYou template for “offline” transactions (e.g. user selected “mail in payment” or “bill my account”).

This code, unlike the generic tracking code above, does need to be formatted specifically for PDG Commerce. Through the work and effort of members of the PDG support staff and members of the PDG Message Board communinity, we’ve provided a sample of the script below. This script should be inserted just inside the </body> tag within your template, FOLLOWING the generic tracking code discussed above).

Note: Some merchants have reported trouble when copying and pasting from the sample below with WordPress (blog software) apparently converting some of the characters into upper ASCII characters.    We’ve provided a downloadable text document with the proper code at http://www.pdgsoft.com/msg/google_ecommerce_tracking_code.zip.

<script type="text/javascript">
pageTracker._addTrans(
"!–––INVOICE–––",
"Your_Store_Name",
"!–––NO_FORMAT_TOTAL–––",
"!–––NO_FORMAT_TAX–––",
"!–––NO_FORMAT_SHIPPING_TOTAL–––",
"!–––BILLCITY–––",
"!–––BILLSTATE–––",
"!–––BILLCOUNTRY–––"
);
<!–––BEGIN_REPEAT–––>
pageTracker._addItem(
"!–––INVOICE–––",
"!–––SKU–––",
"!–––DESC–––",
"!–––PRODUCT_CATEGORY_CODE–––",
"!–––NO_FORMAT_PRICE_WITH_ITEM_DISC–––",
"!–––QTY–––"
);
<!–––END_REPEAT–––>
pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>


You’ll need to remove any breaks within this example, so that each “pageTracker” is on its own line.

Also, note that all of the examples provided do not include a Google Analytics account name/#. Within each example, you would need to replace the default example with your own Google Analytics account number.

We hope this is helpful for some of users looking to get a grasp on their ad spending, incoming traffic and marketing ROI!

PDG

UPDATE 2/27/09

Just wanted to let folks know that the code provided in the original post had been modified today, Feb. 27, 2009 to accommodate for some new PDG tags designed specifically for Google Analytics. If you previously used what was provided in the post, you might want to update your templates with the new data to ensure correct operation. A huge thanks goes out to our friends at http://www.stickeen.com/ who have helped tremendously in identifying and correcting some problems encountered with the initial code. Thanks for your help guys!