Authorize vs Capture CC paypal_payflow_pro by Brian Burton

Brian Burton with has done a great job on the paypal_payflow_pro module.  One thing I noticed is that it does not give us the option to do a credit card authorize vs. a credit card sale (which is an authorize and capture together).  I thought about adding this feature to is module but time does not allow so I just wanted to provide a quick work around.

Find this line of code:

        ‘TRXTYPE’          => ‘S’,  Changed from Authorize to Sale By CVB 2/27/2009

and replace it with this 

        ‘TRXTYPE’          => ‘A’,

Paypals documentation says the following:

“According to card association rules, most physical goods merchants should use a two-step
process, since settlement should occur when the goods are fulfilled or shipped.”

So really this is correct for product shipping businesses.  If you are selling digital products then your products are usually delivered immediatly so there will be no problem doing a S, sale transaction.

Blue One Armed Widgets or Blue One Arm Widget

Here is an example of how easy it is to get on the first page of Google.  That is, of course, for a very rare search term.  In our case the search term is Blue One Armed Widgets.  One could also call these Bloue One-Armed widgets.  The important thing to remember about first page placement is content is king.

Well content is king and not necessarily easy to accomplish in the case of much sought after search terms like mp3.  But content is king and easy for terms like “Blue One Arm Widget”

In this case the thing we have done properly is include multiple references to the famed Blue One Armed widgets.  We have also included them in our title tag, because I am using the Optimal Title plug in for WordPress.  I will also include an image with proper alt tags.

This is all we need to get great search engine placement.  See it is easy!!

Grow your business, 1st page of Google is easy

 
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Eighth E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Feb. 13th 2009.  First page of Transcription

Chris: Hi, welcome to the E-Webstyle podcast.

Paul: Yes, welcome back. Thanks for joining us for another fun-filled edition of the E-Webstyle podcast.

Chris: My name is Chris Burres, owner of E-Webstyle.

Paul: And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager of E-Webstyle.

Chris: We are having a peanut-free podcast.

Paul: How about a salmonella-free podcast?

Chris: That’s a good call.

Paul: Yeah. There we go.

Chris: It’s an interesting story that it looks like they run the “brink [00:36]” already.

Paul: And they shipped the peanuts anyway.

Chris: Man, come on. Somebody’s going to jail.

Paul: Come on. Gosh, I mean the times must really, really be tight if you’re going to send out some salmonella peanuts to your suppliers. Come on.

Continue reading “Grow your business, 1st page of Google is easy” »

Prepare your Website for SEO

Eighth E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Feb. 13th 2009.  Second page of Transcription

Paul: Really?

Chris: I do want to give, give props coming some of this information out of websitetips.com or we want to make sure that you visit them.

Paul: Yeah, awesome place for information.

Chris: Yeah. So we’re getting some of our information from there as well as some other locations and of course our own expertise, but this is a… Barbara Fischer has put together a great succinct document and we’re using that as a guideline for our discussion today.

Paul: I think that’s Barbara Cullen you’re saying. You better give me props on that.

Chris: [Laughing]. Yeah. Like you said we’re in this podcast to give back to SEO community and certainly this is a great document. So Barbara Fischer good on you, websitetips.com, make sure you guys visit them. They’re a good source. One thing we talked early on and one of our first podcast about the difference between SEM and SEO, search engine marketing and search engine optimization, and just kind of reiterate pay-per-click is definitely an aspect of search engine marketing. Search engine optimization is the process of focusing on organic search placement. And some of the things that we’re going to say as we go through and talk about pay-per-click, SEM is… pay-per-click is part of SEM. We’re really going to be talking about search engine marketing as a whole because all of these, the effectiveness of your pay-per-click, the effectiveness of your search engine marketing, in general, the effectiveness of your search engine optimization depends on your strategy. So it’s fitting that we started off with have an online strategy. And one of the things that you want to always want to identify and in fact, that was kind of the genesis of this discussion… is SE’s also a little slow; have a long term goal, have a short term goal. Maybe your long term goal is to only be going search engine optimization and only organic placement because statistics say that you get significantly more click to organic and there is at least one study. Unfortunately, I can’t quote what that study is. So you’re going to have to trust me on this. There is a study out there that talks about how people actually have more faith, give more credibility to links that they click when they click in the organic section. If I’m confusing you, what’s the difference between organic and pay-per-click, go back and listen to our podcast because we do discuss that.

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Five PPC tasks to focus on Everyday

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Eighth E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Feb. 13th 2009. Third page of Transcription

 

Chris:    Yeah. Well, at all is a little rough because if they’re in the door and they’re saying this is our service and we’ve got great website. Yes, it’s great website too. At least, it looks professional, but it doesn’t pitch to the customer on the website or the potential customer. “Here is why you should be Jo’s Office Supply. You should be with us because we have great customer service. We got a great sales force and you’re going to know Mary on a first name basis and you’re going to be able to pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Mary. How you doing? How are the kids? How’s the husband? And I need a pack of paper. Can you give that to me today?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul:     Yeah.

 

Chris:    That’s why people want to do business with Jo’s Office Supply and the website doesn’t represent that. So that’s a great example of “prepare your website.” So we put together a proposal. We’re saying, “Look, you need to work on this first, you know, put together 5 to 10 pages up front that are about you and on the back end, provide the ordering system, which is the shopping cart because your intention is not to compete with Office Max and Office Depot because you’re not going to win that, that’s just not going to happen. Unless it happens to be somebody who used to use your service and they see and say, “Oh, I want to use Jo again or you know whatever it may be.” So somebody in California probably is not going to use unless you’re beating him on price and even then it’s questionable because they just don’t know who Jo’s Office Supply.

  Continue reading “Five PPC tasks to focus on Everyday” »

Cant get SSL to work with oscommerce

I spent the better part of a day working on the problem of oscommerce not using the SSL certificate at the appropriate time.  I already had the SSL certificate installed properly.  I visited the confige.php until I had it memorized, you can test me.  My server, IIS on an HSphere cluster, worked fine with the standard install on application_top.php of
$request_type = (getenv(‘HTTPS’) == ‘on’) ? ‘SSL’ : ‘NONSSL’;
so I did not need to change it to
$request_type = (getenv(‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST’) == ‘ssl.perfora.net’) ? ‘SSL’ : ‘NONSSL’;

But no matter what I did I could not get the ssl to work.  I gave up.  That takes alot, but I gave up.  I was later working on another issue when I relized that the config.php file I had memorized had the wrong database information.  How is that possible you ask??  Because there is another config.php file in the includes/local folder.

Once I set the setting correct in this folder everything worked perfectly.  Yeah me!! Yeah osCommerce.  And of course Yeah my happy customer.

Do and Don’ts of SEO Outsourcing India, Philippines

 
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Seventh E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Feb. 6th 2009.  First page of Transcription

Chris:  We missed the podcast last week.  I was out with the flu.  I have finally decided I’m going to start taking the flu shot every year.

 

Paul:  Oh, okay. 

 

Chris:  ‘Cause that was not fun.  Oh, man.

 

Paul:  Welcome back.  I’m glad you feel better. 

 

Chris:  Thank you, thank you.  So let’s cover what we did last time.  We actually didn’t talk about too many subjects but we covered a whole lot of good information.  We talked about national, local and regional campaigns and the differences between those.  We talked about effectiveness of Search Engine Optimization as compared to, say, Yellow Pages or a newspaper ad or whatever it may be.  And that was from the context of one of our clients who does rattan furniture and how they wanted to branch out outside of the city of Houston. 

 

We also covered video submissions and, Paul, you don’t know this but I actually got our list of video submission websites on our blog last night. 

  Continue reading “Do and Don’ts of SEO Outsourcing India, Philippines” »

Properly Designed Landing Pages SEO

 
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Seventh E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Feb. 6th 2009.  Second page of Transcription

Chris: There’s a lot of different techniques that you can use in Search Engine Optimization.  Doorway pages is often talked about.  It was an older technique that where you would go out and just make lots of doorway pages.  Google tends not to like that.  Although what we’ll do is integrate doorway pages into your natural website.  And, really, the concept of the doorway pages still very relevant.  It’s the way people get into your website.  So we’ve got one client, PatrickWanis.com, he does a lot of blog entries and a lot of his blog entries are the doorway pages, if you will, for people to get to his website. 

 

So if they’re talking about doorway pages, just make sure they’re talking about it in terms of fully integrated into your website, not just the old school doorway pages.  And that speaks about what techniques are they going to use.  We’ve talked about white hat versus black hat.  And really that comes down to ethics.  So you want to make sure that the Search Engine Optimization company you’re working with just gives you a right feeling with regard to the ethics that that company has. 

 

Paul:  I would even ask about what techniques like “Are you using White Hat or Black Hat techniques” because if you know, what they do with your website, what the SEO techniques that they use could potentially have negative effects on your website.  So I would definitely ask about the techniques that you use.  And make sure they’re doing—they’re using the right techniques and they’re using ethical techniques. 

  Continue reading “Properly Designed Landing Pages SEO” »

How to avoid SEO Sabotage

 
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Seventh E-Webstyle.com SEO Podcast Feb. 6th 2009.  Third page of Transcription

Paul:  Yes, more traffic but now, what?  I’m on the first page.  You didn’t start SEO to get—yes, everyone wants to be at first place, first position.  But your goal behind that was to probably get more sales.  So what, you know, what—now that they’ve got you to the first page, what’s next? 

 

Chris:  Are they helping you or are they helping you design forms?  Are they helping you to collect emails and guiding you, again, to maximize the ROI for your business ‘cause you’re spending money on this Search Engine Optimization process, you want to get a return on that investment.  Absolutely. 

 

Paul:  Yes and traffic is just—an increase in traffic is good but that’s just—that’s like a starting point.  That’s not enough.  You need to—traffic is not going to [indiscernible, cross talking].

 

Chris:  Traffic does not equal sales.

 

Paul:  Yes, exactly.  Exactly.

 

Chris:  It tends to lead to sales.

 

Paul:  Yes.

Continue reading “How to avoid SEO Sabotage” »

Hsphere, register.com SSL certificate installation

I was trying to install a register.com SSL certificate to one of my domains on hsphere and the following process led to problems.

You do need to:

• Give the domain a fixed IP
• Turn on SSL
• Generate a self signed SSL certificate
• —-At this point you will notice two choices Import SSL certificate and Generate self signed SSL certificate you will choose the second option
• Get the right details for the certificate these are the details for the owner/contact for the domain for which you are getting the certificate
• Now you will get a screen with three parts SSL Certifcate Signing Request (CSR)(Which you need to copy SAVE and paste on register.com at the right time) also copy and save the Private Key. (let me stress SAVE both of these)
• Now go to register.com and login.  Purchase a SSL certifcate and then get back to you main register.com screen and click activate now.
• You will copy and paste the SSL Certificate Signing Request into the form on register.com
• Register.com will email you a link and a code.  Click the link and enter the code.
• Now go back to register.com and check the status of the certificate
• When I was using the rapid ssl certificate I would press the submit query at the bottom of this page.
• Now you wait for your certificate from Register.com
• When I got the certificate and “click to edit” the certificate on the ssl page of the hsphere control panel there are a couple of boxes.  The first is Install certificate based on previously generated Certificate request.  When I was using rapidSSL. This is where I pasted the certificate.  You must open the .crt files in notepad and then copy the contents into the specific boxes.
• Register provides 4 files and no combination of those files and the original (CSR) would work.  I always got Wrong key and certificate
• In Hsphere click Disable SSL support
• Then Click Import SSL Certificate
• Past the Private Key, remember the one I stressed that you save, in the Private Key area
• Open the crt, right click and open with notepad.
• Copy all the stuff
• Paste the stuff in the certificate area and submit
• BINGO!!

I actually called register and got my money back.  Then I was going to install an new certificate from godaddy.  To make sure I it would work I wanted to start from scratch.  So I clicked Disable SSL support on the Edit SSL screen in Hsphere.  Then I noticed the import SSL certificate link.

Now to call Register and ask them to not undue the charges;)