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To choose and run an e-commerce website a powerful shopping cart program is very much important to the success of your online business. Shopping Cart plays a very significant role in managing an online store. There are many different kinds of online store management software programs available  on the market today.

OsCommerce which is also known as Open Source e-Commerce Solution is one of the most commonly and widely used online shopping cart programs to manage online store or ecommerce site. The osCommerce application can be easily installed through Fantastico in your cPanel control panel. It can be integrate with any web server having PHP and MySQL installed.

This osCommerce shopping cart program is a free software available under the General Public License (GNU). This article will explain you the simple steps to install an osCommerce software as well as steps to configure the dedicated SSL and shared SSL certificate to secure your online transactions.

Steps to install osCommerce Shopping Cart:

1) First login into your cPanel account and click on the Fantastico icon which can be easily notice by a smiling icon at you on bottom of your main page.

2) Now, navigate to the “E-commerce” section and simply click on the “osCommerce” link.

3) Next, click on the “New Installation” link.

4) Now its time to go through a multi-step procedure in order to define the installation location:

• Select your domain from the drop-down menu on which you want to install osCommerce.
• Enter the name of the directory where you wish osCommerce to be installed.

Remember that never add dashes in the “install in directory” field. Enter a simple phrase of the new folder or else every time the installation will fail.

• Re-check the information you have entered in the above fields. If you wish you customers to access your e-commerce site using “http://domain.com” then leave the “Install in Directory” field blank.  Or if you already have an existing website, you want to enter a given directory name in that field.  Suppose, if you decide to use “store” as the directory name, customers would access your osCommerce online store by visiting “http://domain.com/store”.

5) After entering the required information for the installation destination, enter a user name and password for your osCommerce administrative area.

6) Lastly, enter the name of your store, an owner name, and valid email address.

Steps to Activate SSL Certificate:

Once you have the installation destination squared away, the proceeding steps are self explanatory.  The SSL process deserves a little bit detailed explanation.

1) Set the “Use SSL” option to”Yes”

2) Enter the hostname for your secure server.

Remember, that if you have a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate for your website, just enter your domain name in the next field. If not, simply use the server name entered above.

3) Select the information you want to require from your customers. You will see that these options are pretty straightforward and can be simply set to “Yes or “No.”

4) After entering the information, click on the “Install osCommerce” tab.

5) At last, on the next page click “Finish installation”.

Now, you have successfully installed the osCommerce shopping cart program integrated with an SSL certificate to secure your online transaction. Now, simply open the appropriate URL into the browser to log in and set up your online e-commerce store.

Now all you have to do is the click the provided link or type the appropriate URL into your browser to log in and set up your online store. Checkout the SEO Secrets for E-commerce Websites to boost your online business.

Posted under e-Commerce

As the industry is changing as rapidly as Google tweaks their algorithm, it is hard to decide what the most important factors are. The On-site and off-site are the two major factors in SEO which is necessary for every type of website. Normally, most of the webmasters starts with the on-site SEO, because your aim is to get your website recognize by Google. If they don’t, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword?

The search engine spiders that crawl your E-commerce website will be looking at several different attributes on every page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google search engine.

Another factor worth mentioning is a Keyword. What is a Keyword?

A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your E-commerce website. I am using a Bodhost.co.uk website as an example. People could search for “Web Hosting”, but they might also search for “Cheap Web Hosting”, “VPS Web Hosting” and “UK Web Hosting Service”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases.

However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note that almost all On-site SEO has to do with is placing high-quality keywords throughout your E-commerce website content where search engine robots, spiders, or software might be able to decide what your website is about.

6 On-Site SEO Factors That Can Influence Your SERP Ranking:

• The Title of the Page
• The keywords used in the text on your website
• The keywords are used in H1 Tags
• Keywords used in your domain name
• Keywords used in the URL of a webpage
• Meta Keywords

3 Major Off-Site SEO Factors That Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking:

Backlinks to Your E-commerce Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a UK Web Hosting, and you provide that service, they may link to your website with “UK Web Hosting” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Bodhost’s official website or something along those lines.

The Age of Your E-commerce Website

The reason I listed this as an off-site related issue, because it really doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks.

I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. As compare to Google, Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this.

Posted under e-Commerce, SEO Tips