Does it help search engine results to have different country domains pointing to your main .com website?

You have a great question and to be honest I can’t say whether it would be good to have or not.  I can say that one of my clients was going to sell to both Australia and the US so he used sub-domains eg:

• Aus.aubeautyblue.com
• Usa.aubeautyblue.com

As his business grows he can open more sub-domains through his host (which I’m pretty sure are free of charge) he could have all kinds of country sub-domains.. eg

• Uk.aubeautyblue.com
• Fr.aubeautyblue.com

Soooo…  You can use sub-domains with a .com website, or you can purchase more domain names and pay yearly for them.  Me personally I’d go with the sub-domains…  although I do stress I don’t know if a uk domain will actually help.  I’m guessing it won’t help unless you have a completely separate website that has a lot of unique UK articles in it.

Hope that helps some.

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

After you have created your page you now need to add it to the menu so that it can be found.  To do this you would:

• Login to your dashboard
• In the left navigation go to Appearance,
• Then menus

BE VERY CAREFUL HERE..  if you accidentally delete something that means you’ll have to spend a lot of time rebuilding it.  So be VERY careful whenever deleting anything here.

Here is where you can add or delete things in your menus.

• You have your header menu (main menu under you logo),
• links menu (the tiny links at the very top of the website)
• and your footer menu.

You have other menus here as well that I can explain later.  But for now use the 3 main menus.

Select the menu you want to edit (see attachment for example)

And then see below where there is a tab for Pages – you may have to click it so that it drops down.

This is where you can select the page and add it to the menu.

It will show up at the bottom of the page where the links are. You need to drag it up to the place you want it shown.

Then save your work and check out the changes to see if this is where you want it to be shown.

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

Is there a way I can change up the product categories a bit, there are a few that can come off and maybe one or two added?  Is there a way that I can do this when I have changes?

Yes, absolutely!

•  Login to your dashboard,
• On the left navigation click Products
• Then Select Categories

This is where you can add or delete or even change the names of your categories.  You can also edit the categories so that they are a sub-category some where else.  To do this you would click “edit” and then notice the option for “Parent” there is a drop down menu.  This is where you would select a “parent” link for your sub-category.  If you do not want your new category to be a sub-category then you would select “none”

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

Vector images also enables you to edit the images and colors piece by piece and color by color. Vectors are the best when it comes to photo editing.

I don’t really recommend using many full vector illustrations in certain designs that are more “serious” in nature as vectors tend to be more cartoonish and light-hearted. However, the design elements such as vector curls and swirls and background illustrations can be wonderful for even the more serious professional design.

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

I don’t know how many times I’ve used Google images, not because I wanted to use someone elses image, but because I was curious how something or someone looked.  Many times I’ve used Google images for Freebies (eg. free stock image).  There’s a LOT of trash on the search images so I don’t typically look long.

Here’s a simple guide on how you can add good images with great keyword names to your website so that you can get more traffic in your website.

Find the picture on your computer.  It should be in an easy to find file folder.  I keep a folder on my desktop so that I can get to my images quickly.

After you find your image double click slowly so that the name is highlighted and opens up.

Now you can change the name.  Notice in the illustration the other image names, some have iStock_ on them the others I have changed their name so that I can use them in the website.  The names I gave them have very good keywords that will compliment the web page and the website and will also help image searchers find your website – even by accident!

After you’ve changed the name you can load it to your website!

Having the name changed will also help you find your images when you want to use them again and again.  If your image just has a number or say “iStock_” on it then when you search for the image, it will take you a long time to find the image.  But if you give your image a name – such as “news” or “organic-skincare” then later on when you are looking for a good skincare image or an image for news, then when you type in the search box the keywords you’ll find your options there..

It’s great to change the image names, especially when you use important keywords for SEO purposes.

Hope this guide helps your site reach the stars – or at least the top of the search engines!   ;-D

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

A good stock photo image can make any website designer or illustrator look good!  even an OK designer can look great if they have a great stock photo image to work with!  I learned this in the beginning of my web designing career, lol.  So yes, I LOVE professional stock photo images.

This past weekend one of my clients shared a deal with me that one of his friends shared with him.  It was for 150 professional stock photo images from Depositphotos for only $49.  My mouth nearly hit the floor with disbelief when I saw the deal.  You see stock photo images can be VERY pricey… They cost a lot, especially the best of the best!  And when you want more than one, well, be prepared to spend $60, $80, $100 and more for a SMALL yet good collection of stock photo images!  150 stock photo images for the price of $49 and you can get the largest size available is just incredible!

I passed on the link to some of my other clients who were also very excited about the offer.  I hope they jump on it before this deal expires (whenever that is).  Here’s a link to the page if I’ve caught your attention as well.

Depositphotos has other great stockphoto deals, so be sure to check them out if this offer happens to be over.  They have wonderful stock photo models, stock backgrounds, stock vectors, stock illustrations and more!

I’ll be putting together some custom banner advertisements for my friend and client at smmcosmetics.com using one of the professional stock photo images at Depositphotos showing a beautiful model woman wearing makeup.  I plan to altar the color of her eye shadow to different eye shadow shades that will match my clients eye shadow collection.  This photo-manipulation will help my client advertise her different eye shadow shades.  I look forward to working on this project soon!

Shortly after that I plan to put together some more wonderful articles on one of my own hobby websites (survivingtheoregontrail.com) which features educational information and products for home school families looking to live more healthy and organic lifestyles.  I found the most wonderful stock photo collections at Depositphotos. I was nearly jumping out of my seat when I saw them and opened them up.

You’ve got to check these babies out!  See I KNOW I would be spending a LOT of money on just 1 of these photos even if they were sold separately.  But these stock photo collections have MANY items that I’m already interested in getting – all in one lump image.  I am such a winner today, yay me!  lol…  and you can be too!  When you look through their stock images, use the keyword “Collection” and see what wonderful collections you come up with.  Because I’m interested in herbs, plants and foods, this is the amazing collection of collections I came up with!  Check out my lightbox here.

When you are looking through stock photo images be sure to set up a lightbox like I have done.  Having a lightbox enables you to save a bunch of your favorite images to one place so that you can later on find your favorites, or compare them to each other so that you can find your absolute favorite of favorites when you are ready to buy and use them.

Well, I guess that’s about it for now!

Dig-in and have some fun photo searching – I sure do, it’s my fetish!   ;)

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

• Login to your dashboard
• Click Posts (tab shown on the left navigation)
• Then “Add New”
• Create a title for your page.  Think of keywords and provide some sort of question or answer to get the person interested in clicking to find the answer  (eg. “how to make pimples go away naturally”)
• Post your article in the description box below

Recommendations

• Consider adding pictures by using the “Add Media” box above (between the title area and description box).  It will help your page SEO if you give your picture a good name that matches your article (eg.   woman-applying-makeup.jpg or naturalfacecream.jpg )
• You can doll up your page with different fonts, using bold and italics and colors, but honestly I think if you “doll” it up too much it may end up making it look cheap.  So keep it clean and consistent with the websites colors.  Also, don’t use a lot of !!!’s and CAPS, IF YOU DO PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU ARE YELLING AT THEM. 
• Use the bold sparingly and on key words. The search engines pay a little extra attention to the bolded words as long as there’s not too many of them being bolded…  so use the bold wisely and on key words (words that will get people on the page).

Finishing Touches

• Be sure to check the appropriate category that your blog post belongs on.  (I created 2 categories for you.  One for blogging misc. thoughts of the day kind of stuff.. and another for “Tips & Trends”)
• You can now Publish OR…. you can do some SEO stuff to your post (to help the search engines find it even more)

SEO Help

• Notice below the description box a box called “WordPress SEO by Yoast” (that is if you have the plugin installed, if you don’t then I HIGHLY recommend you having it installed!)
• This is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to change the meta tags and description, which are very important to Search Engines who are looking for specific content for their browser folks.
• You don’t have to do this area, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a try.
• Think of special key words that will help people find your page.  The SEO Title is the most important, try to keep the most important key words near the front if at all possible.  (eg. “how to make all natural hair dye that’s good for your hair”)  errr.. or something like that… lol

Have fun and get familiar.

And don’t forget to save and publish your work when you’re done! 

Some people have spent a lot of time writing up an article only to walk away and the screen freezes up!  So consider saving your work often – just in case the screen freezes, or a kid comes by and accidentally bumps the power off… lol.  Save often is the point and you’ll save yourself some grey hairs along the way! 

Okay, there you go!  Have fun and giver her a go when you get a chance! 

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

• Dashboard
• Left navigation click Jigoshop Settings
• Then the Images tab found at the top
• You can now adjust the sizes here and save
• I tried a couple different sizes but the 450×450 seems to work best.

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

A: Those are most likely all spam, or at least the majority of them.

What I recommend doing is looking through the names and compare them to the email addresses.  If it doesn’t sound like a real name or look like a legitimate email address, or if the name doesn’t seem to have some connection to the email address it’s most likely a spam user and you want to delete these right away…  Sometimes if I’m not sure if the new subscriber is spam I will copy the email address over to google and google the email address.  Often times there will be clues in the google results that say this is a spam email address.  If there are no clues or anything saying it’s spam then it may be a legitimate person.

There are plugins that help deter spam.  I haven’t found a favorite yet.

Askemet is supposed to be good, but they ask for a donation in order to use it, it may be worthwhile, I’m not positive at this point, but it is worth looking into.  Have you checked out plugins yet?

It’s great for knowledge sake to know what your options are,

• In your dashboard on the left Navigation go to Plugins.
• Click to add a new plugin
• In the search box type in key words “User Spam”
• Check out the different options
• Don’t just jump on the first few options, look through the others as well
• Open some of them up that sound like it would apply to your needs
• Check out how many people have downloaded the plugin and notice how many stars it’s received for being a good plugin.
• I like to stick with widely used plugins with as many stars as possilbe.  I think the newer ones or ones with few stars are risky.

You can download and run the plugin. But keep in mind that sometimes a plugin will mess your website coding up (lol).  So only do a plugin at a time and see if things start to act up strangly on your site or in your dashboard, if they do then go to your plugins dashboard and unplug it right away.  This should fix the problem if it was the plugin causing it.

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal

Hi. I Wonder if you can please help me? I want to be able to:

1. Track coupon codes so that I can calculate sales commissions payable to individuals or companies.
2. I also want to track the sales on individual product and shade eg 5 lipstick in red, 10 lipsticks in pink, 15 foundations in beige etc and which coupon code (sales rep/company) it came from.

A:

The ecommerce software you are using might supply this – if not then if this is an important feature you may consider seeking your designer for a plugin to the software you are using or using a different ecommerce software altogether.

• Magento has a LOT of plugins (if you’re using that)
• Jigoshop has a lot of plugins as well – not sure if there’s coupon tracking there, but it’s worth looking into.
• I know that Network Solutions provides Barb a lot of tracking devices, not sure if it would cover all these details but it does cover a LOT of tracking…  but you pay for it (the hosting can be quite pricey if you want all the goodies included).

Sincerely,

Crystal Calhoun

Made To Be Unique

Surviving The Oregon Trail

Made To Be Unique - Oklahoma Christian Website, Ebay Store, Ecommerce Designs and More! Crystal