Guest Posted April 29, 2005 Share Posted April 29, 2005 The osCommerce community sponsor program is offered to those interested in furthering the development of the application through monetary means. There comes a point in the lifecycle of every application where a constant flow of money overhead is needed to maintain top knotch services and development...osC is not different. The stated reasons for accepting sponsor money is given as the following: * Server and hardware upgrades for the osCommerce support site * Organization of public and internal meetings * Travel and accommodation to public events * Fund development and support provided by project team members There are some hidden gems in community sponsorship. Most don't realize that the perks given are well worth the small monthly fee for sponsorship! As an example, I'll show you how to utilize one of the sponsor only services for search engine optimization purposes: the sponsor blog. Definition of Blog A short form for weblog, a personal journal published on the Web. Blogs frequently include philosophical reflections, opinions on the Internet and social issues, and provide a "log" of the author's favorite web links. Blogs are usually presented in journal style with a new entry each day. As part of the community sponsor package a hosted weblog is available. This allows the member to publish entries as it relates to their website. There is a rule that the blog area "must not be abused as a means to advertise commercial services" but can be used to record your thoughts about a particular product or category. So, what does that have to do with SEO? The blog area provides a means of obtaining quality one way links to your resources of interest from an established authority site! As an example, let's take a look at the jcall's blog => 1 Blog Up, Scotty. The main blog index page has a Google PageRank of 5. This is a significant PR to control and is (should be) a one way link. Tremendous value! Now let's take a look at getting the most SEO benefit from a community sponsor blog! First, there is a setting for the blog name which is displayed as part of the title. Remeber, the title is the most important page tag. It should be keyword rich and only a few words long. In the case of Jared's blog (since I'm also familiar with his site) it would be best to use something like "Scrapbook Supply Blog". This gets a few keywords in the title...although it will be hard to overcome the general theme of "osCommerce" the added keywords will still be of benefit. There is also another option for the blog description. I'm not sure of the character limit but it should be used to re-enforce the blog content and should be accurate. Using Jared's blog as an example again it could be something like "Scrapbook Supply, Idea, and Layout Blog of An Online Store". Now that you have the title and description set for the blog it's time to start making entries! This is the perk that gives the most benefit as you can craft the content and choose the anchor text most appropriate for the entry. Here is an example web log entry that could be used on Jared's: Today I implemented an all products contribution with the intent of giving spiders an easily crawled list. The scrapbooking supplies product list will help get those spiders deeper into the site and the product pages more quickly indexed. OR Today I added several accordion albums to the scrapbook supply catalog. We now offer a total of 10 accordion albums for our customers! Each of these entries would be on a PR5 page! This ensures that the page being linked to will receive a minimum PR3 and maybe a PR4 just from the community support blog entries! It may take months before that PR is passed but the immediate benefit is that it will result in increased spider traffic to those pages. Not only will that blog entry display on a PR5 page but will also get a dedicated page which will range from PR2-PR4. One of Jared's earlier blog entries was about his anticipated difficulty installing PHP on his Netware servers. Currently, it is a PR3 page! If that blog entry pointed to one of the pages on his site or part of the store it would be a one way link with only one outbound link on the page! OK...some of you may not be aware of SEO, text links, outbound, inbound, strength of authority site, or maybe even the need to have links pointing to your site. However, let's compare a third party link broker compared prices to that as offered by the community sponsor blog perk. Textlinkbrokers.com has an average price of $35 per month for a text link on a PR5 page. Let's say that there are 10 blog entries on the main index page...that would be a $350 value at market price! Also, text links on PR3 pages go for about $15 each monthly. So, if you had 30 blog entries that each receive a PR3 dedicated page that would be a $450 value at market price! The cost for community sponsorship is just over $10 per month. $10 per month. $10 per month. $10 per month. $10 per month when the blog feature alone would be worth $800 if contracted from a third party link broker! Do your website a favor and become a community sponsor. :) Bobby Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 30, 2005 Share Posted April 30, 2005 Sheesh, Bobby - - Now you're making me feel guilty that I haven't turned my rants into marketing tools. :) Good point, though. -jared Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 30, 2005 Share Posted April 30, 2005 hehehe...there are so many tools around! The trick is to find the ones that will be of most benefit and use them. The community sponsor blog is just one of them. For a new store that just opened the doors the community sponsorship program is ideal to get those first spiders to crawl the site...just blog it! Bobby Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 30, 2005 Share Posted April 30, 2005 Interesting thoughts here from you Bobby which of course make perfect sense... but... (why is there always a but!) it can also backfire on you big time if your not careful. The situation I have noticed is this... these forums have a good PR and so do the blogs, which is great. A new customer whose not sure about your new store might type into google or whatever your store name, because of the high page rank the store user clicks a link to some oscommerce forum they have never heard of and stumbles across your postings/ramblings about your store. If your not careful the user might have found a post where your asking for help, or alternatively it could be something worse like talking about fixing a security issue or similar. What chance do you think there is that the customer will ever return to your store after what he could potentially read here? Of course most users are searching for product names/descriptions etc so are unlikely to come across this forum that way but its something to be mindful of IMHO. Any benefit could potentially be lost and more so. What are your thoughts on this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 30, 2005 Share Posted April 30, 2005 ...A new customer whose not sure about your new store might type into google or whatever your store name, because of the high page rank the store user clicks a link to some oscommerce forum they have never heard of and stumbles across your postings/ramblings about your store. Is that a customer or a stalker? :) I don't believe that is a significant concern since the blog content pages will not (*should not*) have the site title as the blog title. It should be general and help establish the theme of the blog itself. The only way it'll come up is if they do a link:domain.com search and even then it won't come up since most PR5 and higher backlinks are masked (filtered) by Google. Besides, the only people that do link: searches are competitors and SEO's...not customers :) If your not careful the user might have found a post where your asking for help, or alternatively it could be something worse like talking about fixing a security issue or similar. Once again, I don't think that is a significant concern. For this to be valid several things have to happen: 1. The customer has stalker tendencies 2. The customer has to click beyond the initial blog page entry point (and not on the link that interests them) 3. The customer has to read through "X" number of posts to find anything Remember, if a customer is looking for "blue widgets" and finds the osCommerce blog entry about "blue widgets" they will click on the "blue widget" link. What motivation would they have to look beyond what they were searching for initially? I can see this happening if they are competitors doing their research on your site (such as link partners, application used for shopping cart, etc) but not for the average customer. ...Of course most users are searching for product names/descriptions etc so are unlikely to come across this forum that way but its something to be mindful of IMHO. Any benefit could potentially be lost and more so. Every day that you walk outside your door there is a possibility of being hit by a vehicle while crossing the street. However, the odds of it actually happening are so low that it does not affect the daily decision to go to outside. In the case of using the community sponsor blog service for SEO activities there is possibility that a potential customer will find support requests on the open board and will affect their puchasing decision...but the odds of it actually happening are so low that the risk is insignificant when compared to the benefits. Bobby Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisW123 Posted May 1, 2005 Share Posted May 1, 2005 Great idea Bobby, thanks for sharing that. I didn't even realize that osC had a blog! On SEOchat.com I read you (everyone) should also use blogger.com to start a free blog to advertise your site links and give usefull information, etc. Blogger.com is owned by Google and apparently Google spiders it frequently looking for new stuff, giving new site owners a fast way to get spidered, etc. -Chris. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted May 1, 2005 Share Posted May 1, 2005 Great idea Bobby, thanks for sharing that. I didn't even realize that osC had a blog! On SEOchat.com I read you (everyone) should also use blogger.com to start a free blog to advertise your site links and give usefull information, etc. Blogger.com is owned by Google and apparently Google spiders it frequently looking for new stuff, giving new site owners a fast way to get spidered, etc. -Chris. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The general concept is to control the content of another website that is completely separate: C block IP address, domain, title...everything. The only thing the blog should share with the main site that it is being used for is theme. There is an option for the community blog to redirect to a blog service of your choosing. In my case I redirect to my osCommerce blog on Blogger.com :) I do this mainly for the convenience of having an integrated "blog-this-page" feature that was installed for my browser (Mozilla). It makes blogging so much easier and convenient... Bobby Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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