There will be some changes around here

This underused blog will be brought back to life as an example in a web site optimizing tutorial found: HERE

Iscar and Kennametal products to be added

This announcement was a long time in coming. Discount Carbide has entered into a reseller arrangement with one of the world's largest distributors of brand name carbide inserts. We can now offer a wide variety of some of the top brands in the carbide insert industry at very competitive prices. At the outset, we will be focusing on client driven requests in terms of inventory that we will be stocking. To compliment our insert line up, which has up until this point been comprised of our generic house brands and products from Stellram, we will now be adding limited styles from both Iscar and Kennametal. Offerings from all of our manufacturing sources, including these 3 fine brand names, will increase with client demand.

New products arriving every day

In recent weeks we have been purchasing in large lots directly from Stellram in Tennessee. Most of the exceptionally well priced items were snapped up by an eager client base as they arrived, but this is beginning to change. We are finally able to dedicate some of these high quality inserts and tooling to our online store inventory. We will continue to run specials on select items for the next couple of weeks through our eBay presence HERE. Above is an example of the types of quality inserts that we are now carrying in large quantities for our online store inventory.

They do not appear in the store as yet but it is our hope that we can list these items before they sell out again. We are well stocked in the two VNMG432 insert styles seen above, as well as having good inventory in DNMG433-432-431. VNMG331 are on their way but as usual we expect them to be snapped up, possibly even before they get here.

The addittion of Stellram products to our line compliments our in house MP, LSU and MSU lines in a big way. Through large lot purchasing we are able to keep the pricing of all of our inserts and tooling constant across the board. For example: The inserts seen above regularly list at $12-$15 depending on quantities purchased. Our price is still just $7.00 per insert.

New tooling packages coming to Discount Carbide

It's been a long time since both this blog and the look of our online store have been updated. That is mostly because Discount Carbide has taken on a life of it's own. Weening longstanding clients from phone in orders with paper invoices sent to them in the mail has been a bit of a problem as well but to make a long story short, we've been very busy. This online store with it's few products listed, has turned into a payment gateway for clients that are willing to use credit cards to make their online purchases.

In the upcoming weeks, many new products will be added to the ecommerce storefront. Including a much wider selection of carbide inserts but also new lathe tooling at prices that are extremely competitive. We will continue with our package deals as they have been extremely popular. Clients can purchase a new lathe tool with 50 - 100 carbide inserts of different grades and varieties. This is something that no one else seems to be offering, maybe we have found our niche?

Coming in April will be at least a dozen regualrly featured tool and insert package deals, including all of the popular styles of inserts as well as lay down threading inserts and holders. 2006 is beginning to shape up as a great year for us. We would like ot thank all of those who are making this possible.

Build a simple, free online store - this is excellent

    In my ongoing efforts to optimize my online store I have been dropping Google spider bait all over the internet. A quick summary of what "spider bait" is; ...the Google search engine spiders seem to like finding web pages on their own much better than having webpages submitted to them. There are countless stories of webmasters attempting to garner Google search engine inclusion by the traditional means of submitting their website to find the efforts near futile. Meanwhile, carefully dropped links on classifieds, forums and other highly ranked sights gain much more attention from the Google spiders and subsequently a much higher page ranking. It is important to note that Blogit is one such very good place to drop your link. Two prime places on the Blogit site where the Google spiders are certain to find your link are in the right hand column of your blogs and in your comments section.

    To further facilitate increased page rank I now duplicate this blog on Blogger but that is not what I want to talk to you about today. If you have any notion to begin selling things online.....why not try it for free first? I have tripped across the perfect web site for doing this called Blujay classifieds but it is much more than an online classified site. It is a basic ecommerce set up, which is very easy to use and links directly to Froogle. If you have not had experience with Froogle, it is the recently launched shopping search facility owned by Google. Blujay is not a highly ranked website, it does not have the exposure that eBay or other means of selling online has but it does have one thing that beats them all hands down....IT'S FREE. This allows the novice web entrepreneur a chance to make their mistakes, learn about online promotion of their goods and generally get the feel of selling online without incurring expenses. Check out my one product free store; CLICK HERE

    If you decide to set up your own store, know 3 important things. First, there is no online payment gateway, payment for your goods must be arranged with the purchaser. Also be careful which user name you pick as it cannot be changed, choose a nice sounding store name as your user name. (I chose gomedome, which is my online non commercial alias, I will have to delete my store and start over again). Finally, they display your email address online for customer contact. It does have a bit of security as it has a code challenge and is not hotlinked but where it may stop robot email harvesters, anyone can contact you via this method. Set up a free email just for this store. Other things to know is that you get 3 images with each listing, a full description field and as I mentioned it is immediately hotlinked to Froogle. All this for free and with no adds is amazing. To check out Froogle; CLICK HERE

Important things to know about re-directing web visitors

    A few months back I was so proud of myself for writing an ASP format re-direct script that worked perfectly. The biggest advantage of using it was that it allowed someone to utilize unused web hosting space with a second domain name. I rushed headlong into building a website on the unused space from another web site but one question lingered in my mind. That was how the re-direct script was going to be treated by the search engines. I got my answer today when I searched Google......as seen below:

    This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.discountcarbide.com/ as retrieved on 7 Nov 2005 10:17:16 GMT.
G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.
The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting. This cached page may reference images which are no longer available. Click here for the cached text only.

To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:QKThT2mcG2QJ:www.discountcarbide.com/+&hl=en&lr=&strip=0

Google is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content.

    What is missing is that fact that there is a "cache" summary but no cached web page snapshot to accompany it. This means that the Google's web crawler stopped at the re-direct script. Though a little dissapointing, this is not the end of the world, nor am I the least bit worried about it. If you read the previous post, it was planned from the beginning to optimize a slightly different domain name that is being re-directed from the same server but utilizing a professionally written re-direct script. It is worth mentioning however that the original script has it place and a number of instances where it is valuable to a webmaster.

Having your existing clients find your online store

    I think one of the biggest blunders an online retailer can make is to assume that everyone that wants to purchase from you online is smart enough to find your online store. Don't laugh, how many times have any of us struggled to get back to a web page that we had visited in the past? Even knowing the name of the web page wasn't enough sometimes, it had to be entered into the browser address bar or search engine properly. I've come to learn that my clients, who range in computer literacy from semi-illiterate to average, generally speaking, cannot be counted on to get it right. The most common errors while searching were to add a space in my domain name where there shouldn't be one.

    My store's name is Discount Carbide but the domain name is one word; discountcarbide.com. Discount carbide is also a common search term, demonstrating the importance of incorporating a valuable keyword phrase into your domain name. However, if I leave things the way they are and just hope that my clients get it right I am sending a lot of traffic to my competitors who may be using the same keyword phrase in their site description. The simple solution costs $9 per year, I purchased the domain name discount-carbide.com. As all major search engines treat a hyphen as a space, anyone who now enters my store's name as 2 words will find it. The important keyword phrase is now totally locked up if all other site optimization details are equal.

    Doing this also serves another purpose. The original domain name (discountcarbide.com) resides as a parked domain on my web host. With a re-direct script in my web root it now takes web surfers directly to my online store which is hosted on another server. That's fine but search engines don't like this set up, I would have no chance of highly optimizing my site with this set up. But now by using discount-carbide.com, which is the more commonly entered of the 2 doman names I can re-direct from another source. That would be the online store providers themselves but this time with their re-direct scripting which is treated favourably by the search engines. Sure I've doubled the cost of my domain name but when you consider that $9 is less than the profit found in just one lost sale, I think it is worth it.

    In case I've lost you, to summarize: My store's first domain name (discountcarbide.com) looks like a professional domain name and is the one that appears on all of my product labels, letterhead and invoicing. Unfortunately the search engines will not follow the re-direct script that I utilize and my clients cannot be counted on to enter it exactly as it appears. Now with the second domain name (discount-carbide.com) utilizing a search engine friendly re-direct script from the same server where the store itself resides, I can not only allow my clients to find my store easier, I will fully capture a highly searched keyword phrase. This stuff is important, you can now get to my online store 3 ways. Via the actual web address if someone is still using it; http://stores.buyitsellit.com/DiscountCarbide/ via http://www.DiscountCarbide.com/ or via http://www.Discount-carbide.com/