I own a very popular blog in my niche (5-digit RSS subscribers, 6-digit Facebook fans). I am planning to add on a store that sells related products. I would like to know your opinions regarding how best to approach this from a technical point of view.
SEO wise, what would be the ideal URL for this store? (I would like to leverage the PR 5 I have on my blog homepage)
or would I be better off getting a more keyword specific new domain that I can link to from my blog homepage?
With respect to the storefront software, any recommendations? I would like to integrate payments with my dropshipper & while I am considering Volusion it is a tad expensive. Feel free to let me know the ones you like.
In terms of SEO, it won’t make any difference - as long as your structure and links are properly set up, Google will find the two options just the same.
But from a usability perspective, the second one is much better. The main reason is that so many people are completely habituated into typing www. at the start of a URL, so with the first one, you would end up with a load of hits on www.store.mycurrentsite.com, which obviously wouldn’t work, whereas with the second one, if they go to www.mycurrentsite.com/store, it should work absolutely fine.
It also makes it easier for you to market, and for word of mouth to spread. If you type www.mycurrentsite.com/store into most text-based applications (eg email, social network sites, forum posts), it will be automagically linkified into a clickable link, which means there is a much higher chance of people clicking on it. With the first option, you either miss out on the clickable link, or you have to include the ugly http://, neither of which are ideal solutions.
If anything, the list of solutions out there will help you to start searching for solutions.
For hosted solutions (like volusion), I haven’t done a similar analysis yet, but I have heard of Etsy, Shopify, Volusion, Vendio, Shoply, networksolutions.com, storesonlinepro.com etc. I have used Shopify and it’s pretty easy to use and integrate, however I’m not too sure if your requirements can be met with the dropshipping though (haven’t tried that before). Hope this helps!
While both those addresses are good choices, I would suggest that you also think of a more specific domain name in order to better advertise it to your readers.
I think he meant the URLs as a generic example of whether or not to use a subdomain or otherwise for his store URL (where you replace mycurrentstore with his actual blog name)