SEO and the BIG Picture
 Search Engine Marketing, SEO, and Optimization are all terms thrown around in trying to get your site to rank. The nature of getting your site exposed to the right market has evolved away from just keywords. Don’t keep your head in the clouds, a well rounded online marketing plan will include search engine optimization, digital asset optimization, social media optimization, and even micromedia optimization (sometimes referred to as real time SEO). Utilizing these will make it easier for various types of search engines to index, find, and rank your content.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO has a significant impact on how your site is found, indexed, and ranked. SEO is all about refining your website in efforts to improve volume, quality of traffic, and therefore helping improve your results in major search engines. The next three optimization tactics are a great opportunity area that you may be lacking.

Digital Asset Optimization “DAO”
How does DAO differ from SEO? Digital Asset Optimization ensures that search engines pick up all of your content: videos, animation, podcasts, message boards, maps, images, and other non-text based files. Everything from your file names to meta tags are an important part of DAO, Including alternative text for your images, and clear descriptions of video and audio files.

Social Media Optimization “SMO”
What is social media optimization? It is about going outside your site and allowing easily found information to be shared and distributed amongst the community.  It is an advanced form of word of mouth advertising through the use of the web. Examples of using social media are: forums and online communities, blogs, social networks, multimedia sharing, social bookmarking and user ratings, Diggs, and RSS feeds. Choosing the ones that will create the most amount of “buzz” can be difficult. Keep your goal in mind; is it to increase conversions, industry credibility, or brand recognition traffic. Also keep your customers in mind; you don’t want to use a social media form that is not often utilized by your target customers or it will be a wasted effort. When SMO is done correctly it will make your site highly visible, help build your brand, get quicker feedback from your customers and reduce gaps between the business and the customer.

Micromedia Optimization
This is a newer term that has been tossed around as of late, which is a spin-off of social media optimization. This is essentially marketing in real time through the use of Facebook status updates, Tweets, and Linkedin updates. Evangelistic consumers like to group together in order to create new demands and trends.  Micromedia optimization allows you to capitalize on this opportunity area.

As long as there are search engines, there will always be a need for some kind of optimization, and to improve search engine visibility. Companies need to consider all the digital assets they have to work with in order to give both search engines and customers the information they are looking for in the formats they will react to best.
AspDotNetStorefront helps your site’s optimization levels with several tools. Right out of the box AspDotNetStorefront is extremely SEO friendly. URL structures right out of the box are very SEO friendly and easy to read. For example a product link may read as such; Yoursite.com/p-16-6830s-notebook-fu500es.aspx.  Which, broken down means that product number 16 is a notebook (Compaq laptop) model number 6930S-FU500ES. Store administrators can change the URL formats for products, topics, entities, etc with simple changes to the web.config file. You can even change the page’s extension (.html, .aspx, etc) if desired. In addition you can create meta information for each product, category, department, and product and entity images can be given alt text.  Another feature right out of the box is the ability to manage product ratings. Enabling ratings allows customers to leave comments on your products, which can help boost sales.  One more SEO feature is the ability to create and execute feeds to sites such as Googlebase, Amazon, and Shopzilla.com. The last AspDotNetStorefront SEO tool that helps get your site indexed more frequently is the ability to generate an XML file that can be submitted to Google/Yahoo sitemaps.  This will ensure that search engines are aware of all pages on your site. To see more information regarding SEO please refer to our online manual at: http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-200-what-is-seo-how-can-we-help.aspx

Which AspDotNetStorefront product is right for me?
E-Commerce can be over whelming to begin with; therefore deciding which product is the right choice may be even more difficult.  Today we are going to go over the some of the big differences that may impact your buying decision when considering an AspDotNetStorefront platform.  Currently AspDotNetStorefront’s software is running on over 11,000 websites and used by some 6,000+ developers.  Additionally our licensing is a onetime purchase and there are no monthly or recurring license fees.  For a full list of our features please visit our product matrix page at: http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-features.aspx

ML Express
ML/Express is designed for a company that really wants to break into the e-Commerce industry with little startup costs.  This platform is the most cost effective option which really lowers the barrier of entry. If you are a small company with few requirements, ML/Express is a great option.  This is the perfect product if your company wants to upgrade from their archaic expensive hosted online store, or obsolete shopping cart platform. AspDotNetStorefront ML/Express is available starting at $695 and supports an easy upgrade path to the full AspDotNetStorefront ML shopping cart platform, allowing your growing business to effortlessly expand while your online sales soar.  If you are only shipping within the United States, have less than 500 products, and do not require source code for any special customizations then ML/Express is your perfect choice. 

ML
Available at $1295 ML is our flagship product and is the most feature rich shopping cart software available.  As the most popular platform that AspDotNetStorefront sells, ML paves the way for many of our other software offerings. It has the ability to support up to 250,000 products, but has no hard-coded limitations internally on the amount of products you wish to sell.  ML supports worldwide shipping, multiple languages, and multiple currencies allowing you to break into the international marketplace!  When purchasing the ML platform there is an option to purchase full source code available in VB.net and C#, allowing you to customize the software as necessary for your sites success.  If you are interested in integrating 3rd party applications please be sure to take a look at our systems integrations page at: http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-3rdpartyintegrations.aspx

ML/64
For those of you who are or planning to operate in a 64 bit environment but require the functionality of our ML platform then ML/64 is the one for you!  The advantages of operating within a 64 bit environment allow your site to utilize the full potential of your server’s processing and memory capabilities.  Feature for feature the ML and ML/64 platforms are identical, with minimal exceptions.   

Multi-Store
Using the AspDotNetStorefront Multi-Store product will give your company a huge productivity boost!  For many business reasons, a company may want to open multiple web stores that give the flexibility and power for each store to have its own unique look and feel enabling you to market products to a specific target audience.  Our Multi-Store product will empower site owners to operate multiple AspDotNetStorefront E-commerce stores and manage them by using a single backend admin console.  AspDotNetStorefront makes the administration of sites easier than ever by eliminating the need for additional overhead and costs and by automating accounting, warehousing, inventory control and reporting.  Currently available as a beta release, the Multi-Store product includes a $200.00 discount and one year of FREE continuous updates for each site license (roughly a $600.00 value!).  AspDotNetStorefront’s Multi-Store product line will greatly enhance your brand image that reaches and engages its prospective customers.