Accepting Credit Cards with PayPal

Say you’re a small business owner with a website with which you sell your goods and services, but you can’t afford the SSL encryption or merchant account necessary to do this. What are the options available to you?

Most web users are familiar with PayPal and the service it offers. What many small business website owners don’t realize is that PayPal can be used to accept payment for your goods and services online until you can spring for SSL security and a more sophisticated shopping cart system.

PayPal is extremely easy to set up, even for someone with low or no web savvy, and the average web user feels very comfortable using PayPal. It’s been around for quite awhile, and most people feel safe handing their money over that way.

The only real downside of using it is when the user hits “Buy Now” they don’t go to a shopping cart but to a PayPal login page, which can lead to confusion and potentially lower sales. Also, because of the way the Paypal log-in page is set up, many users mistakenly believe they must have a PayPal account to proceed, which isn’t the case. However I highly doubt PayPal will be correcting that any time soon, as it’s in their best interest to recruit as many new users as possible.

However, for a small business website owner, who needs to sell a few goods or services, and does not have the time or money to invest in the necessary technology to do so, PayPal is going to be your best solution.

Now, if you’re just starting your website, Paypal may very well be an absolute necessity. It’s very easy to set up, even for someone with little or no web design experience. You simply log in, create products, assign a price, and PayPal will give you a “Buy Now” button, which you can simply copy and paste onto your page. As time and your budget allows, you can invest in more sophisticated methods of accepting credit cards online.

Whatever you do, please don’t even consider using a standard web form to transmit credit card data to your e-mail address. Quite a few clients have come to me and asked why they cannot just do a simple form with a credit card field and have them form e-mailed to them. The answer is simple, standard Web forms have no security built-in, and for a relatively competent hacker it would be a fairly simple task to intercept this information in transit. This method of credit card data retrieval is so dangerous; no ethical web designer in his right mind would do so.

The Skinny on Keywords – Part 1

Anyone who has ever broached the subject of web design or search engine marketing is familiar with the term ‘keyword’. If you do any pay-per-click advertising then you should be spending a fair amount of time researching and tailoring your keywords to maximize your advertising budget.What I’ve found though, as time goes by, is that most people have truly only scratched the surface in terms of their knowledge of keywords and keyword phrases.

So What is a Keyword
A keyword – or more accurately – a ‘keyword phrase’ or ‘keyphrase’ is a word or phrase that people will use to search for a person, place or thing on the internet. Simply put, if I want to look into GPS tracking, I would go to my favorite search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, etc.) and search for, you guessed it – “GPS tracking”

Yeah…So?
So if I’m in the business of selling GPS tracking devices, I need to make sure that my website will be one of the first sites displayed when my prospect searches Google for such a product – PERIOD. If your site is not showing up in the search engines, it’s a waste of time and money.

Research has shown that most internet searches find what they need in the first 10 results. Choosing the correct keyphrases is the first step in effective search engine marketing.

Choosing Keywords – A Primer
So where does one begin? The best place to start is with the obvious. If I own a website that sells amplified phones, then the cornerstone of my keyphrase analysis is going to be ‘amplified phone’.

But not everyone is going to search for the phrase amplified phone. Some prospects will search for ‘amplified telephone’. Some will search for ‘phone amplifier’ and some will more than likely search phrases like ‘telephone for the hard of hearing’.

Google has a great keyword tool that’s free to use. It not only gives you keyword ideas, but shows you their individual ‘search volume’ – how often the phrases are searched. When I plug in amplified phone, I learn that the most commonly searched variation is actually ‘amplifier phone’. This is news to me. I have some work to do!

OK… Now What?
I’m glad you asked. Now you gather a list of what you believe will be your top 15 or so keywords. The more keywords you use, the less ‘relevant’ the search engines will deem them, so less truly is more.

In my next keyword post I’ll discuss long vs. short-tail keywords, targeting prospects who are ready to purchase, and proper implementation of HTML Meta tags.

Happy Friday

This image is a couple of years old, but it makes me smile every time I see it…