Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?
Balance pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization
By: Boris Mordkovich

Pay-per-click advertising is, no doubt, one of the most effective ways of getting new leads and prospects to come to your website. Within a period of 24 hours, any business—large or small—can appear at the top positions for any keyword that’s applicable to their business.

However, it does have its downfalls. Primarily, at the point when you stop paying for the clicks, your ads disappear from the search results. In other words—no money, no honey.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a different animal. It is accomplished by optimizing your website to make it more search-engine friendly and increasing your link popularity by purchasing or exchanging links, so that it will rank higher in the natural results.

SEO is quite difficult, and nobody has the right, sure-fire way of doing it. It takes months to get up to the first pages of results for specific keywords and, even then, there are no guarantees you will stay there.

Also, while you don’t have to pay for individual clicks, you may wind up either paying a professional to work on your website to optimize it or spending a lot of time learning to do it yourself.

In any case, over the long term, well-done search-engine optimization can yield terrific results and even surpass pay-per-click in terms of effectiveness. If you manage to get your website high up in the rankings for popular keywords relating to your business, you will have a steady stream of new customers without paying anything for each one. This is especially true because most searchers tend to click on the “natural” listings before they click on the “sponsored” ones.

So, ultimately—is one method better than the other? Not necessarily. If you have the opportunity, you should approach both techniques to get the most out of search marketing. PPC should be used as the short-term (although it will work quite well in the long term, as well) way of acquiring traffic from the search engines, while SEO should be planned for the long term (six months and more). Together, they will produce the most results for your business.

Miva Merchant^® 5+ Users: After years helping Miva Merchant users with their sites, Chuck Lasker has taken the most common questions, the best tips, ideas and code samples, and compiled them for you right here. Additionally, he is adding more information every day, to create the largest compendium of Miva Merchant 5 information anywhere.

San Diego, CA, 2008/04/08 –

Dear Fellow Miva Merchant,

In a few short weeks, we will be streaming out the new 5.5 update to Miva Merchant 5. This is an important milestone for us since acquiring Miva Merchant some 8 months ago and I wanted to share a few highlights with you.First off, this is a major improvement to version 5 that will yet again establish Miva Merchant as the best-of-breed e-commerce platform–bar none. Here are just a few of the most noteworthy improvements:

• A far more intuitive Admin interface that focuses on click-efficiency and adds many conveniences, such as the new launchpad function
• Seamless import/export of all of your items and pages to/from Dreamweaver™
• Built-in SEO features including full control of your DOCTYPE, Product, and Category Metatags, and search-friendly links
• The ability switch between the default MMUI framework to our new skin-able CSS framework. This feature is currently in a public beta download and will ship about 30 days after 5.5

Most importantly, nothing you are doing now as a 5 storeowner will be negatively impacted by the new release, which was one of our driving principles. You’ll be right at home as soon as you update to the new product, and start benefitting from it immediately.

I want to personally thank you for your commitment to Miva Merchant and I’m confident that all of the hard work of our staff will show up in a better store for you, our valued clients.

MIVA Merchant is a great shopping cart. Miva Merchant is a browser-based storefront development and management system that allows merchants to create multiple online stores from anywhere in the world where there is Internet access. Miva does not host your site for you. The hosting service you use has to be configured specifically for miva. Which limits your hosting options and making it more difficult for you.

One thing that stands out about miva is their customer service. It was by far the worst company that I dealt with during the review process. They are not interested in answering your questions. Maybe if you pay an additional six hundred dollars to be a Platinum member you might receive some extra attention. But, you shouldn’t have to pay for customer service. The bottom line is that Miva Merchant is a great product but you should be aware of the poor support system.

Feature Set: 

A couple of the features that stand out in Miva Merchant are their shipping and tax configuration capabilities. Miva uses your existing FedEx account info to create a “Meter Number” which links your website to accurate shipping information. Miva also provides real-time calculation of US Postal Service rates for orders in your Miva Merchant store. Miva Mailer conveniently emails your customers, affiliates, etc. within your system special offers and relevant information about your site. Another great feature is their affiliate capabilites. This new feature makes it easy to control commissions you pay to affiliates for both sales and click-thrus. Both you and your affiliates have access to payout reports and you can even choose to add your affiliates automatically or with administrative approval.

Miva has a couple of limitations. Miva offers the ability to integrate with quickbooks for your accounting needs. However, you need to pay an extra $399.00 for it. Their customer support was terrible. Questions take a long time to be answered. Despite the fact that Miva has great brand recognition in the shopping cart industry, they are apparently not concerned with your needs.

Ease of Use: 

Miva is server based software. The merchant tools are setup up with a step-by-step wizard to guide you through the entire process of setting up your website, adding products, configuring shipping, and taxes. Miva adminstration is very simple to use with their interface design. The design is set up with a left side navigation bar to jump to whichever topic you need.

Ease of Installation:  

It is not easy to install Miva. The merchant needs to find a hosting service that already has miva software on it so that it can run your shopping cart. This limits where you can host your site. Also, if you have a question with installation it may be difficult and take a lot of time to receive any help.

Help/Documentation:  

The Help is very poor, unless paid for. First you have to sign up for support ranging from $150.00 to $600.00 a year. They do have FAQs and How-to-Guides on their website.

True E-Commerce Solution:

Is Miva Merchant an E–commerce solution? Yes. They have hosting partners available (although they won’t host it themselves), they give you the tools to develop your website, the merchant tools to manage your website, they offer the ability for credit card processing, and allow flexible shipping options.

Summary:  

Miva Merchant 5 is a good product and receives our eighth ranking of all the products reviewed. Overall it is easy to use and has many features that will help. You can purchase this software so you can host it where you want. However, if you expect good customer support and help getting set up, look elsewhere.

Review: Miva Merchant 5
By Sean Michael Kerner
June 30, 2005

The name “Miva” is now more inclusive than just an e-commerce storefront, thanks to a corporate rebranding of FindWhat.com and a string of acquisitions. Yet the name, Miva is still best known for its Miva Merchant e-commerce solution, which recently hit version 5. The new version includes a number of new and improved features that will likely help to keep the name Miva synonymous with e-commerce storefronts for some time to come.

What is Miva Merchant 5?
Miva Merchant 5 is a mature and robust e-commerce storefront solution with the usual sorts of e-commerce functionality. It allows you to create and manage an e-commerce catalogue, handle payments and shipping - as well as Inventory and Merchandising capabilities.

Miva Merchant 5, as was the case with its predecessors, is quite extensible thanks to a long list of add-on module (at various prices, many of them listed on http://mivacentral.com/). Miva Merchant is available from Miva directly (for installation on your own and installed on your own web server) as well as from Miva hosting partners as a hosted service.

San Diego, CA, 2007/08/06 — Miva Small Business Solutions has been purchased from Miva, Inc. by a management team led by Russell Carroll, who will serve as new CEO for the enterprise, and former Miva executive Rick Wilson, its new Executive Vice President. Rounding out the team are Mark Johnson, VP of Development, and David Roquemore, VP of Technology.

Russ Carroll stated “Our entire focus will be on improving our customers’ experience by concentrating on our core products, enhancing our hosting partner relationships, and supporting our developers.”

Executive VP Rick Wilson added, “As an example of our customer-centered focus, we will be transferring support in-house as quickly as possible. This will dramatically improve service levels as well as strengthen the feedback mechanism from our client base.”

About Miva Small Business Solutions

Miva Small Business Solutions, maker of Miva Merchant, is the world leader in e-commerce software.

Contact Info:
Miva Small Business Solutions
Penni Walraven, (858) 490.2570 x100
pwalraven@mivamerchant.com

San Diego, CA, 2007/08/07 – Miva Small Business Solutions has brought its technical support department back to be staffed and managed “in-house” at its San Diego office. Our new support hours effective immediately are 7 AM – 3 PM Pacific Time.

The new support team is being led by former Miva support engineer Wayne Smith as the new support manager who is building the team with only the highest quality support reps in the industry.

Wayne says, “Building our customers trust in the quality of our product support is my single objective here at Miva Small Business. We’re focused not just on providing support but providing the most competent support for our products possible. Please bear with us as we complete building the team back home in San Diego. While we might have to schedule callbacks with our customers during peak hours, the tradeoff for excellent support is an easy choice.”

Please note when calling during peak hours (usually between 9 AM and 10 AM Pacific time and Noon and 2 PM Pacific time) we may ask clients to leave a message for a callback or go online and open a ticket in our support system.