Quick Shopping Cartat GoDaddy Web Hosting

 
The other day, I worked with
a client who has a website hosted
at GoDaddy.com. His was a shopping
cart website. His shopping cart
was called Quick Shopping Cart.

Apparently Quick Shopping Cart
is a GoDaddy item. Here's the promotional
page for Quick Shopping Cart:

Quick Shopping Cart at GoDaddy

This is a pretty good piece of software.
My client, who started in August, now has
a fully populated shopping cart in March.

By fully populated, I mean he has more stuff
for sale on his website than I could count by
hand. That's what you need as a beginner.
You need something that will get you up and
running very quickly. The name Quick
Shopping Cart is aptly chosen.

My client tells me he knows nothing about the
web and I believe it. For example, he knows
absolutely no HTML.

Having a Quick Shopping Cart at GoDaddy
cuts the work by half or more. As a beginner,
you don't have to know HTML. You just have to
populate your shopping cart.

In general, there's huge need on the web for
things that get you there in half the time.
Quick Shopping Cart is just such a
thing.

Be aware, though, that things that are simple
are also things that are limited. The way
GoDaddy has made Quick Shopping Cart
simple is by limiting it.

This is true of simple software in general.
Simple software is limited software.

The most severe limitation of Quick
Shopping Cart is you are limited as
to how you can manipulate the HTML. However,
this is an important limitation. It keeps
you from shooting yourself in the foot.

Later, after working with Quick Shopping
Cart for a year or more, you might choose
to graduate to a shopping cart program that
gives you more flexibility.

Be aware, though, that you will be paying
for that flexibility by having to know more.
That's just the way it is.

I'm not an expert on Quick Shopping Cart
but it looks to me as if you can only enter
HTML code into certain prescribed boxes. In
a sense, it is similar to a message board where
you are allowed to use HTML, but only to mark
up your message, not the whole web page.

I highly recommend Quick Shopping Cart
as a beginner's first shopping cart. You will
be so much happier learning what a shopping cart
is without having to learn everything all at once.

Ed Abbott

Search Engine Visibility at Godaddy

 
Today I worked with someone who
is a GoDaddy customer. He is
signed up for one of their add-on
products. As I recall, the name
of the product is Search Engine
Visibility.

Unlike many other tools like it,
this one is fairly accurate. It
gives accurate advice as to what
you need to do to optimize your
website for the search engines.

Of course, this only works if your
site is hosted at GoDaddy. I have
no idea whether or not this add-on
product is also available to other
hosting companies. Maybe it is
exclusive to GoDaddy and maybe not.

Here's a link to Godaddy's help page
for getting started with Search
Engine Visibility:

Getting Started with
Search Engine Visibility

Some of the best recommendations
that this tool makes include:

• Pay attention to keywords
• Pay attention to keyword
  density.
• Make sure one keyword stands
  head and shoulders above all the
  others
• Pay attention to title tags
• Pay attention to H1 tags

Admittedly, the tool does not
necessarily tell you to do all
of the above directly. Rather,
this is a show, not tell, tool.
It shows you what needs to be
done rather than telling you what
needs to be done.

In short, this tool complains
about your web pages until you
fix them. It uses the top-ten
approach. It has a top-ten list
of complaints about your site
expressed in terms of search engine
visibility.

While no tool like this can ever be
100 percent accurate in its advice,
this one comes pretty close. Keep
in mind it is an automated tool, not
a live person.

One of the things I like about the
tool is that it favors simplicity
over absolute accuracy. It keeps
things simple for the first-timer,
for someone who is new to
search engine optimization.

For those who are new to the term
search engine optimization,
it is often abbreviated as SEO
when written about.

So basically, Search Engine Visibility
is an SEO tool.

One of the errors that people fall
into when trying to optimize their
web pages for search engines is getting
lost in all the details. It's easy
to lose the point of the whole exercise
because you cannot tell which details
are more important than other details.

This tool is helpful in this regard.
By ranking its top-ten tips 1 through
10, it gives you a clear starting place.

I can quibble with the ranking of the
tips but I won't quibble too much.
Perhaps my biggest quibble is the tool
ranks the keyword meta tag and
the description meta tag too
highly. These days, meta tags are far
far less important than the body of
text that makes up your web page.

On the other hand, having a
keywords meta tag and a
description meta tag can
do no harm. You might as well
have them if you want to.

That said, the tool still does a pretty
good job of focusing your attention on
the things you need to do to make your
web pages more search engine relevant.

Relevant. That's really the key word
here. This is a search engine relevance tool.
This tool says nothing to you about authority.

Authority is one big leg that SEO stands
on and relevance is the other big leg.
So basically, this tool only gives you one half
of the equation.

You gain authority when other people link
to your website. You gain relevance when
you write your web pages in such as way as to be
topic specific. Both are important.

Because it is easier to measure relevance
than it is to measure authority, I assume
that this tool favors relevance.

Or maybe it's just the opposite. Because it is
so easy to let Google measure your authority
for you by inquiring of Google to find out what
your PageRank is, maybe this tool only worries
about relevance and let's Google tell you
what your authority level is.

In either case, Search Engine Visibility is a great
tool for beginners.

Ed Abbott

FTP and Quick Shopping Cart at Godaddy Hosting

 
This is a new blog.

Here I offer tips on how to
accomplish certain things
while logged in as a Godaddy
web hosting customer. As I
discover how to do something
under Godaddy hosting, I write
about it. That's the basic idea.

Today I'm doing something I've
done many times before. I'm
setting up, or discovering, an
FTP account for myself.

In some cases, I'm able to discover
an FTP account. In other cases,
I have to set one up. I've
forgotten just how you do this
under GoDaddy hosting.

OK. Just tried to do the
obvious thing. I tried to use
the control panel username and
password to FTP into the site.

At some hosting companies, this
will work. At GoDaddy, it does
not.

At some hosting companies, you
can do the following command on
the command line:

ftp ftp.mydomainname.com

Had the above command worked, I would
have tried to use the control panel
username and password as my FTP username
and password. Again, at some hosting
companies this will work. However, not
at GoDaddy.

At Godaddy, the above command hangs.
No response whatsoever. Obviously,
they don't want this to work for
security reasons. Can't say that I
blame them.

These days, FTP passwords are a sensitive
issue for hosting companies. If the
wrong people figure out your FTP
password, they can hack into your site.
Once in, they use your site to spread
malware to other people's computers.

Seems like GoDaddy has gone the way
of many hosting companies and that
is a multi-layered defense. They
layer the protection of the website.

One layer of defense seems to be that
the control panel password does not
work with a domain name URL.

Layering your defenses is a good idea.
The more layers of protection, the more
layers the bad guys wearing the black
hats have to penetrate.

Life is like that. You get your defenses
in layers. Not only does a tiger have
sharp claws. It also has sharp teeth and
night vision. Every animal in the wild
seems to have a layered protection scheme
that protects it from attack by outsiders.

OK. This post did not turn out the way
I thought it was going to turn out. Looks
like the client, in this case, is using
something called Quick Shopping Cart.

Looks like you cannot edit the HTML
directly with this product.

OK. So this is where my quest for an FTP
account ends. The answer seems to be that
you cannot get one.

The obvious reason for this is that GoDaddy
does not want you messing up your shopping
cart by editing it directly. Even if you
did edit it, it would probably be overwritten
by Quick Shopping Cart the next time
you published the site.

My assumption above that GoDaddy does not allow
you to use the domain name URL to FTP to the
site with the control panel password may not
be correct.

In this case, the client does not have a regular
hosting account. He only has a Quick Shopping
Cart account.

I'm unfamiliar with Quick Shopping Cart.
Sounds like a great idea though. Many people
need something like this to get started. Basically,
it is a product that generates a shopping cart
for you.

Ed Abbott