As reported by Allison Enright for Internet Retailer, a recent study by Forrester Research Inc. concluded that the worldwide online population will increase 43% by 2014. It is projected to grow from 1.63 billion in 2009 to 2.32 billion forecast for 2014.

The report says that the Middle East and Africa will grow the fastest followed by Southern, Central and Eastern Europe.

Chinese consumers will surpass India while Brazil will continue to be at the top of e-commerce spending in Latin America.

The study also projects the US and Canadian online population to grow each year by 3%, but those users will only make-up 13% of the worldwide population by 2014, which is down 3% from 16% in 2009.

The European online population is expected to grow about 20% between 2010 and 2014. It would account for 22% of the worldwide online population.

With numbers like these, can you afford to restrict your business to your home country? Maybe you already do a fair share of overseas business, but if not, this may be the time to plan for global expansion.

Shipping, currency exchange and taxes are a few of the obstacles faced by global merchants. Fortunately, there are tools and resources that can make the transition easier. When you consider the demand for US products, the strength of foreign currencies and the growing online population, it just may be worth it.

The Advanced Shipping Manager and iShopUSA are just a couple of the services that can help make your leap into the international marketplace easier. Along with unprecedented control over how your shipping is calculated, the Advanced Shipping Manager allows you to enter tax rates for any country. iShopUSA is an integrated solution compatible with Yahoo! stores that provides solutions for a wide range of challenges.

They say that nothing good ever comes easily, and that may be true, but luckily there are tools to make the “good” come a little easier!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic lately. Have you researched it, or paid someone to optimize your site for you? Maybe you just nod your head in agreement when others talk of its importance, all the while having no clue what they mean?

It isn’t as intimidating as you may think – in fact you can easily improve with just a few tips. Sure, you can get into all kind of charts and graphs and other confusing looking things, but you can also just focus on a few common areas to improve your ranking.

Google recently improved their web indexing system, maybe you heard of it-Caffeine. With the rise of video, real-time updating and social media, available information is constantly being updated and changing. Caffeine allows for this updated information to show up in searches much quicker.

That said – fresh content on your site means more now than ever. You may want to increase the frequency of your blog posts, or begin a blog. With a blog, you can offer special deals or discount codes. It will also allow you to offer a RSS feed of the blog and offer your customers the chance to join your mailing list to receive advance notice of sales, product updates and special deals.

Have you ever thought about making commercials for your business or individual products? YouTube is owned by Google, therefore one could imagine it will be indexed quite frequently. Get out your video camera and get creative – -post on YouTube and link to the product or your homepage.

Do you have a forum on your site? These will be searched as well, and it’s a great chance to provide your customers with a place to share information and tips relating to your products.

You may find it a bit addicting, once you start with SEO, you may not be able to stop! I’ll Include a few more in depth links to keep you going!

Here you’ll find rankings data for different SEO factors.

Here is an E-commerce SEO checklist.

Here are some more expanded tips.

When compared with traditional print writing,  internet grammar and usage is full of “exceptions to the rule”. This can prove intimidating whether or not you feel you possess adequate writing skills. Thankfully, we now have a reference guide.

Yahoo! is set to release “The Yahoo! Style Guide”; it will be available in print as well as digital versions. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to buy it- the companion website is full of tips.

The site gives advice on writing for the web, editing and a resources section. The resources section has information on basic webpage coding, SEO and additional tools of the trade. It also has an “Ask an Editor” section where you can submit your most perplexing questions to Yahoo!’s editorial staff.

There is also a word list that features many newer terms or words and phrases that aren’t commonly found in a dictionary. For example, when to use real time and when to use real-time, you will have to check out the site to find out for yourself!

The print and digital versions will release simultaneously on July 6^th, but you can take advantage now of the free resources on the website.

We had a great time meeting new friends and catching up with old ones.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the IRCR or Yahoo! Summit in Chicago, Yahoo! is holding another Summit in Santa Clara California on September 13th and 14th. KingWebmaster will also be attending that event.

For an in depth look at the Chicago Summit, check out Ina Steiner’s article from AuctionBytes.com.

Sometime at the end of April-beginning of May, Google made an algorithmic change that affected long tail queries.  Goggle makes changes on a daily basis that largely go unnoticed; exactly the point. If they updated infrequently, it would undoubtedly cause widespread chaos.

This change certainly has everyone’s attention.  Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s Web Spam Team explained that the primary goal was to address content farms, or sites that do the minimum to avoid being classified as spammers. Unfortunately, many e commerce sites seem to have been affected as well. This is mainly due to the fact that retail sites have many product pages that are a few clicks from the home page, without many links to it and contain little unique or value added content.

So, what can you do about it? Turn those lemons into lemonade! Seriously, it isn’t going to get you anywhere to get mad and not do anything about it.  Use this as a springboard to improve your content. I know it can seem like a daunting task, but just work on a bit at a time and you’ll get there.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1.  Do you have a blog page?  A better question-are you using your blog page? Use it to write product reviews and suggestions and link to product pages. Place special promotional offers or coupons and promote your social media links.

2. Stop copying and pasting your product descriptions from the supplier! Get creative and write unique, engaging product descriptions.

3. Keep the content topical on your product pages. If you have too much unrelated marketing, it can water-down your page topic.

4. Focus on your social media networking; this can be a great resource for your business. Still think it’s a waste of time? Check out these stats on social media usage.

5. Improve the linking within your website pages and use social media to link directly to your product pages. Better linking will improve the prominence of the pages in Google searches.

Like I said above, don’t get overwhelmed! Pick a task or two a day to tackle. Do you have a teenager on summer vacation? Instant intern! You may be surprised at some of the original descriptions they can come up with. Better yet, turn over your Facebook profile and don’t be surprised if you have 1,000 fans by summer’s end.

1.6 Million Dollar Mistake

Last weekend, 6pm.com, a sister site to the wildly popular zappos.com made a very expensive mistake.  A few symbols were overlooked when coding a new rule for their pricing engine. This resulted in items being sold on 6pm.com to be capped at $49.95-for 6 hours! Items sold on both sites were not affected by the mistake.

In line with the company’s outstanding customer service reputation, they are honoring all orders placed during the pricing mistake. Nice example of turning a huge loss into a PR opportunity. I imagine online shoppers who haven’t shopped at either site could feel compelled to in the future.

Zappos was already planning on improving their pricing engine so it is easier to use. They will also be adding checks and balances to guard against this happening again.

Yahoo! Acquires Koprol

Yahoo! has acquired Koprol. With headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia, Koprol is a location based software along the lines of Foursquare and Gowalla. It allows users to connect and share information about their surroundings in real time with their mobile phone browser.

Rose Tsou, senior vice president, Asia Region at Yahoo! explains, “Users are increasingly relying on mobile devices to communicate and access the Internet and they are looking for seamless integration between those devices and PCs. This is especially true in many emerging markets where we are introducing the Yahoo! brand to many new-to-Net users.”

In a related story, Yahoo! and Nokia have entered into a partnership where Nokia will run mapping and navigation services for Yahoo! and in turn, Yahoo! will provide e-mail and messaging services on Nokia phones.

Legislators Plan to Review Telecom Bill

According to the NY Times, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (WV), chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and Representative Harry A. Waxman (CA), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said they would hold meetings in June to review ” how the Communications Act meets the current needs of consumers, the telecommunications industry and the Federal Communications Commission.”

The 1996 Telecommunications Act took over five years to craft, so any future revisions could undoubtedly take quite a while. That was only the second time the telecommunication law had been altered since the Communications Act of 1934.