Add Reviews to Your Web site
4 Comments
Written by Atila on August 18, 2008 – 12:53 am
Similar to the effect of adding a blog or forum to your Web site, adding reviews to your Web site can have a positive impact on your search-engine rankings while enhancing the overall credibility and sales of your Web site. Reviews provide an opportunity for your Web site visitors to learn from previous customers while providing you with fresh user-generated content, which search engines love.
User reviews have the same selling power as a testimonial. If you offer a product or service, other users’ reviews can help increase sales. People find comfort knowing that others have used the product or service with good results. Although you may be concerned that users may provide negative reviews of your products, the positive effect of having user reviews on your Web site far outweighs the risk of an occasional negative review.
Adding reviews on your e-commerce Web site can have a positive impact on your search-engine rankings, while enhancing the overall credibility and sales of your Web site. Reviews provide an opportunity for your Web site visitors to learn from previous customers, while providing you with fresh usergenerated content, which search engines love. User reviews have the same selling power as a testimonial. If you offer a product or service, other user reviews can help increase sales. P
eople find comfort in knowing that others have used the product or service with good results. While you may be concerned that users may provide negative reviews of your products, the positive effect of having user reviews on your Web site far outweighs the risk of an occasional negative review. Adding the ability for users to review products on your Web site is an effective approach to keeping your content fresh. Each user review adds original content to your Web site that is often keyword rich for your product or service.
User-generated content is free and tends to be favored by search engines because it is seen as authentic. User reviews get your users involved and active on your site. A user who may be considering purchasing a product on your site may check back frequently to read new reviews to help in the decision-making process. The more active your users are on your Web site, the more likely they are to find your site credible and useful, and the more likely the user is to become a customer.
Adding a review script to your Web site is easy and inexpensive. For example, Review-Script, located at www.review-script.com, provides an Amazon-style review script that allows users to rank a product or item on a scale of one to five stars and make comments related to the product for other users to read. The Review-Script Web site includes a demo so that you can preview the script and get some ideas for how you can use it on your Web site.
Review-Script.com uses a PHP script with a MySQL database backend. If you prefer working with ASP instead of PHP, you can use EasyReviewScript v1.0, located at www.easyreviewscript.com. Both Review-Script and EasyReviewScript require only a basic understanding of ASP or PHP and MySQL. In addition, a basic level of HTML is required during the installation process and is necessary if you want to make significant alterations to the appearance of the script. EasyReviewScript is easy to install and requires very little configuration and support.
You can customize EasyReviewScript to the look and feel of your site using HTML or CSS, which is essential if you intend to add your forum community to an existing Web site. EasyReviewScript allows your visitors to rate and review products, pictures, articles, and more using a star rating system based on a one to five scale. EasyReviewScript also allows you to log the IP address of each reviewer so you know where the reviews are coming from. The EasyReviewScript review software also has a fraud prevention system that validates e-mails before submission to keep users from submitting fraudulent e-mails.
A good post. I have used Review-script.com but there were many issues with it, some major security XSS vulnerabilities. After trying with it, I gave up and tried some other smaller ones. Then I found one called High 5 which has been perfect for me. They bring updates out at least once a month and support is first class. I agree review sites have a lot of potential, but chose the right script. Personally i recommend the high 5 script from my experience. You can see it here http://www.designmind.co.uk
Dear Atila:
I just ran across an article you wrote on Tvmama entitled Add Reviews to Your Website, posted August 18, 2008 http://www.tvmama.com/add-reviews-to-your-web-site/, and I would like to raise an issue that is of concern to Selling Power magazine, which is the use of our trademark.
The word “Selling Power” is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for sales effectiveness. For example you wrote: “User reviews have the same selling power as a testimonial.” We do not condone such uses of our trademark.
As a practical matter, when you describe sales effectiveness, there are a wide range of terms available such as: sales excellence, sales savvy, sales mastery, sales acumen, sales efficiency, and many more.
The reason for this letter is to educate writers like yourself that we want to protect our trademark, since we don’t want to risk Selling Power being declared by the courts a generic word. Therefore we ask you not to use Selling Power as a phrase since it is our legal trademark.
We would like to receive a written acknowledgment of this letter stating that you will in the future identify Selling Power as a trademark if you should write about our magazine, and not use Selling Power as a phrase. If we do not hear from you, we will need to take further action.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
All the best,
Gerhard Gschwandtner
Founder and Publisher
Selling Power
1140 International Parkway
Fredericksburg VA 22406
Office: 540-752-7000 Cell: 540-273-2555
P.S. Watch Selling Power videos online http://www.sellingpower.com/video
GG:ts
In response to first comment on this post…. High 5 is a joke. Their customer service does not exist!!! I bet the person that posted that comment is the actually owner of high 5. It’s a completely slanted opinion. I bought the script, submitted some questions needing support, got nothing in response. I emailed the sales department… got nothing in response. You can be sure that one of my first reviews will be about this worthless script with no support. I will be going with Review-Script.com which is what I should’ve done in the first place.
SellingPower - you gotta be kidding, right? Right? Guess not….
Just because you scored the domain name doesn’t mean you can rewrite the language. And a shameless plug & link for your product as well.
Good luck on your aim on copywriting a commonly used phrase. Be sure to post the courts response on your legal challenge.
Anyway to the main point, thanks for the links to the review software. I’ll have a go at it. Anyone finds any other apps out there, pls post.