I'm exploring Bulk Email Service Provider, such as SMTPmart, to handle newsletters, promotional campaigns, and customer notifications for a Thirty Bees store.

The main things I'm looking for are:

• Good email deliverability
• Easy SMTP integration
• Support for bulk and transactional emails
• Reasonable pricing for growing stores

Has anyone here used a Bulk Email Service Provider such as SMTPmart with Thirty Bees? I'd be interested to hear about your experience or any setup tips.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations!

Most of you will know that SeoFrog is an excellent tool to make a website audit and to crawl for interesting data of your own (and others) web shop. It is possible to export this data into csv for example.

Today for example I wanted to check my categories for good meta data informaion (title and description length). This data I can get via SeoFrog easily and export the data into a csv.

The trick is now to connect this data to the corresponding ID_categories so I can edit meta titles etc. in a fast way in CSV and re-upload eventually into Thirtybees. I wonder how this can be done?

I know we are living in a social media driven ecommerce world! And the power that social media holds on the decision making and buying acumen of the Millenials is just staggering.

I am just curious to know how much realty do you put into social media?

Many times when I search for sports goods from previous years I open up sites that list those as out of stock and they are hidden in the normal product listings. But google sees this "half-inactive" product and shows a result. I click and open this site, otherwise I would not click this result.

Currently I set all old collection items to available - NO and I make 301 reddirect to analog product. So after some time I lose all those results in google.

In your opinion what is the best config for such products?

Availability - Yes
Visibility - Search only

or should I continue to 301 to new products?

I'm even not sure that the first scenario will result to the same behaviour I described in the start. If I enable search indexation will google 'search' for some products in order to get to those hiden products that are only search-visible?

Is there right way to optimize product pages? If someone has success, please share your experience.

I offer supplements in my shop and some of them come in variations such as: - Healthy oil, as capsules, plain flavor - Healthy oil, as gel, orange flavor - Healthy oil, as gel, lemon flavor etc.

In my old shop each one of these had its own product page. So there was a page each for: - Healthy oil, as capsules, plain flavor - Healthy oil, as gel, orange flavor - Healthy oil, as gel, lemon flavor etc.

Now, I put them all as one product "Healthy oil" and the customer can select the combination they want, eg - As gel - Orange flavor

I haven't been able to tell whether conversions or sales have gone down overall for these products, but I did notice that an affiliate who links to me is getting A LOT less conversions.

I'd like to figure out why this is.

Is it that the selection as attributes/combinations is too confusing (one customer has said so)?

Or is it something else that has to do with the shop?

What do you all think? Should each product above have its own page (the product description would generally be the same except for the ingredients) or is it fine as it is?

Just wondering why the title of a blog post is wrapped in an H4 tag instead of an H1 tag in post.tpl? An H1 tag makes much more sense for a title and it is also better from a SEO point of view. Any particular reason?

Of course, I can change it in post.tpl but then it will be overwritten with an update of that file.

I just discovered that there is SEO category too on this forum. Probably, this post should be moved to that category. But I don't know how.

I know everything not to do but I don't know where to start.

How can I improve my conversion?

I'm using COD (the most popular way of payment) and recently added my vPOS (from which I don't expect an improvement to be honest, 98% of orders are passing through COD here). I also have guest checkout, quick order option and all products are 1-2 clicks away from my Menu.

How can I improve my mobile conversion especially? I have more than 55% mobile guests.

1. Deactivate and forget (but get a lot of old product entries in the backoffice, and also a page that says "There is 1 error, This product is no longer available".)

2. Delete product and forget (but lose the indexed link with google)

3. Any other option...?

I have a lot of products that are out of stock in my store, which doesn't look nice. But setting up redirects to the home page (or parent category) for EVERY single removed product would be a pain and also bad UX in my opinion.

What do you guys usually do (SEO wise) after you delete a product from your catalogue?

Hopefully, some of you will find this useful. Not everything in this guide will be as easy to implement in thirty bees as others, but at the very least it should point those who are interested in the right direction. If anything is unclear please reach out.

If enough people want to know more about any of the areas I have discussed below, I may create a more detailed post covering the subject.

1. Lighten the load (page load that is)

Reduce external requests

Say no to web fonts

Most choose to avoid using system fonts and generic fonts, such as "sans-serif", for good reason — they can be unpredictable in headings (causing your layouts to fail) and make your site's design inconsistent across devices.

However, the solution I see most site owners using is unnecessary and problematic. Web fonts solve one problem poorly and cause other issues.

Not only does loading your fonts from another server cause slow rendering of the page content, your fonts may also load too late (the user sees your fallback font first). This contributes to a poor user experience.

Google uses web fonts as a fallback for their analytics software — while there are many people blocking Google Analytics with ad blockers, few are blocking Google Web fonts.

What's the alternative?

Want a lightning fast page load? Serve your own fonts. This gives you the best of both worlds. Simply convert your [suitable] fonts (check the licence) to woff/woff2 and serve them directly with CSS.

If anyone needs more information on this, let me know.

Forget Font Awesome

Font Awesome is convenient — to you, but not to your customers. Yes, that's another server to wait for before your page can render.

Did you know SVGs are often tiny (in file size), and with [inline] SVG sprites you can load all of your graphics without a single request, and they can be cloned/partially cloned across your page? Now that is more awesome than Font Awesome!

Better images guidelines

The number one performance issue I see, which covers online businesses of all sizes, is poor use of images.

Here are some best practices to solve slow loading pages and related poor conversions:

• Serve your own images (don't rely on CDNs and avoid hotlinking images)
• Standardise your image dimensions- Keep all images under 100kb
• Use srcsets in your code (where possible) to tell the browser which image to serve to which device.
• Your images should be high quality and consistent

There are a number of open source programs to help you resize and optimise your images. If you are comfortable with the command line, I strongly recommend using imagemagick.

If you want to know more about optimising images for the web and ways to automate the process, let me know.

2. Be minimal and functional

Your customers likely care more about function than style. People are busy — they want to find what they are looking for, buy and leave. The best user experience on an e-commerce site is a fast one.

For this reason:

• Make your design predictable and practical
  • Your logo links to the home page
  • Your contact page is in the main menu and/or details in the footer
  • Your Returns Policy, Privacy Policy, Ts & Cs should be in the footer
  • Your login button should be top-left
  • Your logo, tagline and branding should make it clear what you do

• Create a sensible link architecture
  • Link to your most popular products and pages in your footer
  • Have two site maps. XML (for crawlers) and HTML (this one linked to in your footer)

3. Blend in — take advantage of familiarity

Nothing says you are at the top of your game more than looking like you are at the top of your game. Don't try to be different for different's sake. Let familiarity be your friend. If you are new to the industry, research the leading sites in your industry and blend in. You should still have features that identify your brand and make you memorable, but too much personal expression and you will appear like the amateur in the industry.

The world's leading websites don't have flashy designs; they are, for the most part, basic in style, predictable and easy to use.

Ignore this rule only if the competition is poor and can easily and predictably be beaten.

4. Be better

So how do you stand out? Focus on your offering!

• Are you the cheapest?
• Do you deliver faster?
• Are you the ethical choice?
• Perhaps you have products which others cannot source?

If you don't know why your customers shouldn't buy from Amazon, neither do they.

As a general rule, if you want to sell more products than your competitors, provide more product information. The more information, the more confident your customer will feel in both the product and your website.

Also, this content WILL help you to rank higher on search engines.

Create elaborate pages about the collections you sell

Search intent is important to understand. This is possibly one of the most under utilised tools.

People often look for information before they look to buy. That means your product page may not be what they are looking for. If you sell wood burning stoves, share information about the brands, which stoves in your store are most suited for small homes, which stoves are the most offer the most "bang for your buck". Display the appropriate products on the pages and link to your products, you are likely to qualify a sale which wasn't accessible to you before.

Speak to manufacturers to see if you can gather more info on your products than your competitors.

There are numerous creative techniques I have used to achieve high search rankings and boosted sales conversions. If you are interested to learn more, let me know.

5. Be useful

Start creating content

Create [or ask others to create] guides which may help your potential customers. Digital Ocean (not an affiliate) sell server space, but part of what pushed them ahead of their competition was their content. They pay people to create technical guides as a way of on-boarding new customers.

What content would be useful to your potential customers?

Add to the blog (at least) once per week

If a visitor reads your post and returns in two weeks to see what else you have written only to find the same set of posts, they likely won't return.

Attract qualified visitors by helping them and you will build a loyal customer base.

If you want any advice on building a successful content strategy, let me know.

6. BONUS! The #1 Factor for Ranking on Google:

~~ Direct website visits ~~

• Are customers recommending your website?
• Do your customers return?
• Do customers search for your brand name?

As I'm sure you can see, the right offering and a winning user experience are vital!

Regards,

——— jollyfrog ———

Graphic Designer &
Digital/Content Strategist

For a google program

Thank you very much for your help

I have a curious question (Sorry I do have a lot of them lol) about reviews in a SEO light.. Over the past few weeks I have had to remove some products from my website as they are no longer available, but I have a few reviews against some of them. Do I

1. Keep them and if someone tries to click on it it goes to a "This product is no longer available. "

2. Use a redirect and take it to the home page

3. Remove the review completely .. Or anything else

Thanks

More curious than anything else  

Great article, thank you for examples.

I have a question about technical things:

One thing to notice is we did not sync the config directory. The reason for this is because we want the database on the remote server to act as a slave database to that server only, because accessing a slave across a network is just going to cause slowness. We did use the same settings.inc.php from the master server though, we still want the master write database to be seen as the New York City server. In the dbslaveserver.inc.php of both the Singapore and Frankfurt server we have listed the local host database as the slave. This will allow slaved database requests to come from the database on the server, speeding things up.

Next what we did was used MySQL replication to replicate the master database from New York City to both of the remote servers. Since we are not getting to technical, one thing I would like to point out is you need to limit your MySQL connections by ip address, you only want known IP addresses to be able to connect to your database.

@lesley may you elaborate how you did setup the database? Do you use some panel, like Webmin/Virtualmin or Cpanel or you do it manually?

May you send some further details or something to read?

1. Why Cloudflare? not eg. Amazon Route52 or ns1.com? What are benefits?

Thank you in advance.

We would like to fix this, but I am not sure how to do this... I cant find it in settings or a module...

Is this theme related or TB core related? Happens most on category pages for example... I hope someone can point me in the right direction?

i am doing new shop with multilanguage. Main language is DE. Extra languages: FR and EN. Can i remove in default language DE tag from url? 

bad: shopname.com/de/category/product_name

good: shopname.com/category/product_name

good: shopname.com/en/category/product_name, shopname.com/fr/category/product_name....

So I've tried to figure out how and which files I go into to fix this problem. But as I'm not coder it's thrown me. Can someone please point me in the right direction.......

This is my error(s) showing in Google webmaster: Unparsable structured dataInvalid value in field "itemtype"I can see it relates to my blog posts - so assume it's somewhere in there.

What do I do and what should the itemtype be please?

Thanks in advance,

Claire