Instrumental Music

Well - not really - more like the reappearance of an old issue. With IE7 and media players like Windows Media Player or Quicktime downloaded files are played straight away and it is far from obvious if or where they are saved. Although we recently upgraded some of our PC's to this configuration we hadn't spotted the issue ourselves and by some strange chance two customers raised it this morning. It took a while hunting around the menus in both the player and the browser, followed by a quick Google enquiry to track down the solution. This time with IE7 you go into Tools/General/ Browser history/Settings/View files to get to the Temporary Internet folder where your downloaded files are sitting quietly. I suppose that an explorer search set to look at hidden folders might have found them eventually but life is too short. So thanks to those two customers we'll be updating the site with that advice later today. If anyone know how we are supposed to keep up with developments lik...

For the last couple of weeks we have been reviewing and tightening up our keyword focus. This involved pulling together our historical targeting information with the new insights we got from Keyword Discovery . We have picked up some new targets from the later which we are trying out on pages that have not done too well on their existing targets. As you know Google discourages checks on SERPs with automated tools but their personalised search solution completely invalidates manual checks so we've had to bend the rules a little. The free tool which we have been using is slow and unreliable so we are not overdoing this. With this information to hand we have gone through each page and updated the content to better target a key phrase and then through the pages that link back to it to make sure that they are optimised too. Following Big Daddy we are not getting pages picked up by Googlebot as frequently as we used to. In fact Googlebot now accounts for much less bandwidth consumptio...

Everyone does it - don't they. Surely it's not spam - well? Any how we have taken the risk and emailed them all with an update on the improved link with PayPal and advice about a couple of free recording s which they may have overlooked. So we'll see what if any reaction there is and decide whether we need to ask permission in future. Having settled that long running performance issue we are having a fresh look at the keyword optimisation of the site. It has all got a bit haphazard over the months so we are sharpening it up not with the use of specific tools but based on memory of feedback from the Web Position Page Critic tool. I realise that it is not up to date but at least it should give us a chance in some of the less competitive areas. Interestingly some of the product pages are really doing their stuff even though they don,t contain much text - it is very focused.

While tackling the problems with the shop we have also taken a look at the Keyword Discovery Application using the free access they offered us. Like Word Tracker it is a web based solution and unlike Word Tracker it lets you work out your own work flow for yourself. It took me a little while to get to an optimum approach to this but once there it was quite quick and easy to understand. Keyword Discovery has its own approach to calculating a scale for the best Keywords to target based on the volume of daily searches and the level of competition and produces comparable results. I also made a couple of cross checks on the estimated daily volumes which were at least in the same order of magnitude, whilst the levels of competition were more a less equal on the few that I compared - not too surprising as they are the result of a Google search. The big differences are around the way the lists of keywords are generated. Keyword Discovery seems to generate longer lists of possible targets bu...

The last few weeks have, as they say, been a bit mixed. The problems at the shop have taken a lot of effort to resolve but we think we are there now. None of the small fixes did the job and so we had to upgrade our connexion to PayPal to their Immediate Notification system which doesn't depend on the customer doing what they are told and coming straight back to our site after they have made their payment. That change went in fairly smoothly but there was a bit of fiddly work to do on defining order status levels in response to the messages that come back from PayPal. Then came the real pig - download control. We went for the heavy duty option right from the get go but somewhere along the way a small change crept in to the configuration of one or two key directories on the site and the system was broken. But of course we first had to work through all the software eliminating problems before we got down to something so close to the physical layer. The trouble is that in a logical ...

Today I had an unusal response to this blog - Keyword Discovery approached me to try out their site because of the Wordtracker comments I made here ages ago. So naturally I'm going to give it a go and I'll let you know here how it looks and what it could mean for us. All seems to be quiet on the other fronts although Rank Pulse is indicating that another monthly rankings upheaval at Google in underway. I saw some comment to the effect that the last one was geared to clobbering some 'Black Hats' so we didn't see any real impact from that. In any case none of the free ranking tools we have been tempted to try from time to time seem to be working on Google now - perhaps they are part of the scope of the 'Black Hats' being targeted. We would not expect much impact because we don't see to much of that activity in our niches. We just watch the continuing pressure on the Russians and their interpretation of International Copyright law with interest because t...

One of the wonderful things about using open source software like OS Commerce is the opportunity to try the contributions provided by other users. Our shop would not operate were it not for some of these contributions but as we are warned every time - contributions are used at your own risk. To fix the lost orders problem we trawled the contributions lists for solutions and found a few. The easiest one to apply was the Alert which delivered a rather fierce pop message telling customers to make sure they come back from the Pay Pal site. What I didn't realise for a few days was that it also cut out the trip to Pay Pal and sent customers straight to their downloads without collecting any money. So that's been disabled now. But fortunately the more complex but better engineered solution for Holding Orders has gone in like a dream and seems to be working well. Prompted by this success we had a go at another longstanding problem of visibility of Orders from the Admin suite and her...

Delving into the Pay Pal and OS Commerce support areas have flagged further exposures to failures to return customers to their download screen after they have completed payment. So we've added a Pop Up advice screen that someone kindly contributed and today we're going to add another contribution which should give us Admin visibility to shopping carts that have been subject of this sort of failure to make recovery easier when we get the payment email from Pay Pal. There was another suggestion involving the product description that requires more investigation. And there is also a more expensive option from Pay Pal which would obviate the problem altogether but we are not yet earning enough to justify that.

For a start we are getting much more activity through the online shop now that it is the only option - the product info page is storming up the charts and we've had some successful purchases go through since the update at the weekend. I suspect that there may be more we can do to bring the transaction processing fully up to date but I want this change to bed in first and identify any remaining wrinkles. Google is taking its time picking up the changed pages so perhaps it is time to do a new site index.

So far our delvings into the inner workings /failures of the shop suggest that the issue relates to shoppers return behaviour at the conclusion of the Pay Pal part of the transaction. To overcome this common problem the recommendation is to switch on Auto Return at Pay Pal - a feature that wasn't even there when we originally built and tested the shop. So we'll have to see how that goes. Incidentally our musings on the passing of Bit Pass have evidently registered and some people have been finding us on "replacement for Bit Pass" which is ironic because we haven't found one and we're not sure yet whether we need one.

Yes by George they've done it. BitPass has been expunged from the working pages of our site, we've taken a copy of the relevant data from their site for our business records and we patiently await payment of our outstanding balance. It was a slog but the find and replace facilities in Dreamweaver proved invaluable for this task and we have done a final sweep to check that we didn't miss any remaining references. In the end we just re-used the Buy Now graphic from the shop package as our call to action on the product pages. There is a risk of visitors getting two instances of the player running at the same time if they don't wait until the end of the clip but it is easy enough to stop one if that occurs. So we'll pause for breath and see how visitors react to the new layout and navigation arrangements. The search engines will have lots of updated pages to digest so we may see some changes on that front but it shouldn't upset things significantly. Then we'll...

Yes it was a slog but our Ring tone pages have been re-configured to take account of the Bit Pass switch off. This work has exposed a problem with the More Bach entries in the catalog because the samples don't play on the catalog pages - not sure how I missed that on earlier. But today we are flogging through the remaining individual product pages to complete the removal of all traces of Bit Pass from our site only a few days after their closure.

The faint hope that a replacement supplier would appear to rescue us from the Bit Pass debacle is fading fast. The only one to poke their noses above the parapet look to be far to expensive for us. So we are slogging on - the composer pages are done but not the ring tones yet and only some of the selections pages. The individual track pages are a particular problem - they are not strictly necessary in the new configuration but I am reluctant to abandon them in case a Bit Pass replacement emerges and we can re-use them and their search engine positions so we are going to have to come up with some intelligent visitor guidance copy and boiler plate that.

Looking for the best way to respond to the BitPass debacle we have decided to simplify the main Composer and Selection pages with a "Listen & Buy" call to action against each product. The button then takes them to the product page in the shop which plays the clip and included the product details so they can be removed from the tables on the main pages. This leaves the product pages without a real role for the time being but they do draw in some traffic so we'll remove the BitPass content and leave them up for the time being while we consider whether we can replace BitPass for single purchases. Of course these are the last pages that we will be able to update not least because there are so many of them. The first of the new selection pages is already up : Steel Drums - because we needed to do a live test of the new design. If any one has any thoughts or reactions to any of this they would be most welcome - in public as a Blog Comment or privately by email to webmas...

They hoped it was just another hoax but the Bit Pass website today confirms that they are closing down in the next few days. This is sad because they really seemed to fill a need and they performed well - we had very few complaints and their system allowed us to resolve them promptly. For a business like ours that has been built around a unique service of this kind this is a hammer blow. We will obviously have to refocus around our own OS Commerce online store facilities but we know that they are less attractive to the casual browser not least because of the cost of individual transactions with Pay Pal. So we start today on the stack of work involved in deleting Bit Pass from hundreds of pages and replacing them with links to our store pages. And removing all the other references to it in the text and updating the calls to action to reflect the new situation. Not to mention some of the operational difficulties we have had recently with our store that need to be fixed. Lucky we didn...

In the light of recent publicity in news groups etc I had another look at All of MP3 . com and removed it from our legal mp3 search facility. Although they do claim to abide by their own local copyright legislation this isn't really good enough in my opinion when you are working in a Global market place. Their prices are just too low to allow anything sensible for copyright owners - so they are out.

Inevitably after the holidays the volume of iTunes help enquiries has subsided dramatically but it still obscures what is going on at the summary level. Rank pulse has been showing higher than usual churn in rankings in the last few days but nothing too dramatic. We have launched the Legal MP3 Search facility with it's own page now and done a bit of branding to its appearance. Given the recent publicity we probably need to have another look at the inclusion of the Russian sites in the domain list. But this really isn't going to develop much further if we don't manage to attract any collaborators so that is the splash on all our pages for the next little while and a Press Release may be in order now.

The surge may be over but the dominance of iTunes enquiries continues. Yes we are number 10 for "iTunes help" on Google and yes they do stop and read our helpful advice about dragging and dropping MP3s into iTunes - on average for several minutes - an age in site viewing statistics. But Widor's wedding march continues to be the most popular streamed item with over 100 visits yesterday! More seriously there is evidently a persistent problem with our shop software - we are collecting money but not releasing the goods until we get the payment email and then email the products. I had hoped to wait for the next OsCommerce release to tackle this but it looks like we will have to see it we can fix it now....

It almost doubled the normal number of visitors and on the festive day itself. Our iTune/Pod help pages were prompted by noticing a niche in this area which we sough to fill to our own advantage. We have been relatively successful and these are amongst if not quite always the most popular pages on our site. They also represent some of the longest visits which suggests that they do find the copy useful. But we are very unsuccessful at converting those visitors to listeners or paying customers. On reflection I suppose that this is just a piece of in appropriate targeting and we should really re-visit the whole novelty music issue.

Rank pulse is showing it's highest level of changes in rankings on one day for the last six months, so something is a foot. No comments on the SEO forums yet but I suppose that this is a good time to slip through a big change - too late to have a significant impact on the seasonal commercial activity and a quiet time in which to settle things down. We are seeing one of those seasonal increases in iTunes driven enquiries as people get their new iPods - just wish we knew how to convert a few of them into sales. Interest in the Carol of Bells is flagging a little but we'll keep it there until New Year or maybe even for the full 12 days of Christmas. Merry Christmas!