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I thought today might be a good time to discuss one of the marketing aspects of a client site that, in most circumstances, the client has total control over. And that is the words being used on their web site…

Here’s something most people do not consider: Marketing people are Manipulative. Suprised? Probably not. That’s why you hire them. What the general public does not consider is the fact that marketing people just starting to move over to the web. They’ve been holding out for years now, but the inevitable exodus to online marketing has begun. With that in mind, we all need to understand that a lot of the web sites doing business online were NOT developed or handled by marketing people, and a lot of them still are not. Many of these web sites we see were set up and written by the everyday person, who was opportunistic enough to hop on the wave. Good for them. However, because of this, general marketing concepts were never even put into play by many of these sites, yet they still make sales. It’s another case of success in spite of… which should give people even more proof that the online market is for real. People want it.

As a result, the exodus I mentioned above is currently happening. Why? Because business people and marketers alike understand that if they implement some of these basic concepts onto the web and use their markeing minds to improve sales in this regard, things can basically go nowhere but up. Up sounds good to me, what do you think?

Which leads us to the use of Power, or, Muscle words. Are you using them on your site?

I found a truely excellent article written by Robin Nobles at search engine guide. The article is entitled: “The Use of Muscle Words on Your Web Site. . .148 Power Words Designed To Draw Your Customers In“

Ms. Nobles is absolutely right on with her advice and I suggest that anyone who updates their own web site copy read it and learn these power / muscle words AND how to use them on your web site. Not only does the use of these words increase the clicks to your site from within the SERP’s, but they also drive sales when the user lands there, and begins the shopping process.

To see this advice in action, we are given examples. Here is a mistake I know many of us make:

Another idea:
Go through your Web site copy. Look for the word “very.” Delete it. If you need to come up with a stronger adjective or verb, do so.

Example:

This very old book is in perfect condition and has been kept in a clear plastic bag to protect it.

Change to:

This antique book . . .
This heirloom book . . .
This museum-quality book . . .

“Perfect” is pretty lame too. Change it to:

flawless

Change “clear” to “sheer.”

Blunt and to the point, yes… but still true. The power of the written word has been constant throughout its time. Emotions are sparked, calls to action are followed and people can be gently guided towards an end goal they may never have followed before, simply because of a word. Conversly, the wrong emotion can be sparked with the wrong word and the outcome may be a quick exit from the site.

So I suggest we all take a look at our web site copy and see if we can do any better with our written words. I know I can do better, what about you?

If you’re looking for more proof that success on the web is directly related to content, look no further than the just released report Google in talks to buy YouTube.

In our Media Beat section, DT references YouTube and other user added content based sites (myspace, etc) quite often. Why does he talk about these sites so much? Because the column is called “The Media Beat” and this is where the beat will march us on. It can’t get any more evident than the 1.6 BILLION dollar price tag YouTube is getting slapped with.

Let me repeat the figure… 1.6 Billion dollars. What exactly is worth 1.6 billion? Well, user generated content is a major player in the future of advertising. And any store/site/spot that drives 40+ million people to come around the check things is going to be worth its weight in gold (that’s a lot of eyeballs). And the real brilliance in YouTube is not just the craze (original video) that has rapidly grown… but how that craze was grown. YouTube took advantage of the simple fact that people out there want their own content to be seen and heard. And deservedly so because some of those videos are flat out brilliant. Does YouTube sit in their offices trying to come up with crazy video ideas themselves? No, they do not. Instead they allow their crazy users to come up with content, post it, share it and spread it themselves. The more viral it gets the higher YouTube grows in user numbers which in turn increases their value.

Google is very aware of this phenomenon, having cashed in our their own search phenonmenon years ago. And it looks now that they are going straight for the jugular to capitalize on it.

So how does this fit in with us regular joes out there trying to build a website with the intention of monetization? Simple… regardless of the niche you’re in, it’s still all about the content. What have you been doing lately to increase the value of the content on your website? Do you allow your site visitors and customers to participate? Are you adding something useful for your visitors on a weekly, or even better, daily basis? Chances are the answer is no. Most content additions to ecommerce sites are by way of products and categories. Now don’t get me wrong, adding products and categories is great as long as there is value in those products and categories… but that is not the type of content I’m talking about here. Users EXPECT those products and categories… they also expect competitive prices, high quality customer service, etc… So simply following that method to add value to your site will do nothing more than keep a site as it should be.

The real value comes in the form of well thought out content additions that appeal to your customer base and become so noteworthy that people online ‘have to see it’. Just like that YouTube video of the squirrel water-skiing that became so popular a few years ago. Millions of people had to see it… Now, I understand your market is probably not as broad as the market of people who like to see funny things, but you’ve still got a market and you still need to speak to it in a manner that is not entirely self-serving (meaning: making sales).

I was interested to read a post from Rand at SEOmoz last week where he lays out time spent per SEO client and where his efforts lie (entitled: “Time Distribution for Effective Online Marketing“). It was no suprise to me that Rand spends 40% of his alloted SEO budget per client developing this type of content.

40% is a large part of the overall budget and the the investment is certainly a risky one (if the created content fails to draw visitors). But Rand is able to do this because he has a knack for developing must see stuff that speaks to a known group of active online participants. The problem with that is, most of us in the ecommerce world do not sell to the most tech savvy group of people out there which generally means they are not active participants in the commenting, user added value department. Regardless, that should not stop us. We still see many examples out there of how users can and will add content to a site which adds value, as well as site additions that are so useful people have to use them. An example that sticks out most in my mind that accomplishes both are the reviews at Amazon.com. I can not remember a time I purchased something at Amazon without spending at least 30 minutes reading user reviews. All Amazon did was provide a feedback form for customers and now they’ve got tons of user generated content that helps to MAKE MORE SALES. What’s better than that?

So if a piece or pieces of content can be created that have an impact on your users or an addition to your site can be made that encourages easy user participation, then it would certainly be considered time well spent, if done properly. The problem is most people in the ecommerce world do not even consider such a strategy as worthwhile and the few who do simply put up a blog and add content that is regurgitated throughout the internet. There is no value added there and the efforts seem to be drivin only by “I heard adding a blog to my site would help us in the search engines” and various other poorly thought out reasons.

So, what can you do to add value to your site, encourage your community to participate and build something truely value added and mutually beneficial?

An answer to that question along with an effective implementation plan might be one of the best investments you’ve ever made.

We’ve been noticing some interesting happenings around here with some of our SEO / Ecommerce clients. Generally, the indexing of a site isn’t a problem… it’s just a matter of time. However, lately I’ve been noticing a definite trend of product pages being ignored by Google.

The possibilties to why this is happening are endless… Therefore, I will be using this blog post to experiment and see what can be done to remedy this problem. In this case, it’s not a question of another site outranking our site… it’s a question of indexing the appropriate pages within a domain.

Our case study, Jildor Shoes, the famous footwear store, is having trouble with this problem as of a few weeks ago. In their store, they have a category dedicated to Michael Kor shoes. It’s here that we will begin to start our indexing test. The products on this page should generally have no problem getting indexed but for some reason, they are not. This first test is to see if a simple direct link to the category will prompt Google to spider down to the product level.

And just for good measure… here’s a direct link to a product page that currently is not in the index, a gorgeous KORS Sloan Suede Boot.

SEO / SEM guy tip* … if you’re looking to get that stylish lady in your life the perfect gift this winter, you can do no wrong with those puppies.

Stay Tuned for test results…

The quick answer: no…

The slightly longer answer: no, no, no, please do not add all that extra metadata… no.
(*It could quite possibly do damage to your SEO efforts and most certainly will not help them, depending on how you use these tags.)

Unsure of the types of metadata I’m talking about? In this case, ignorance is bliss. I’m even a little hesitant to shed light on these tags in our blog, as I’d rather not assist in the spreading of really bad SEO myths. But from the tone of this post, if anyone walks away thinking these tags are still useful, well… there’s nothing more I can do for those lost souls.

So against my better judgement, i’ll list the unnecessary meta tags I’m talking about now:

meta content=”TRUE” name=”MSSmartTagsPreventParsing”
meta content=”General” name=”rating”
meta content=”EN-US” name=”MS.LOCALE”
meta content=”home page” name=”CATEGORY”
meta content=”" http-equiv=”Classification”
meta name=”URL”
meta content=”31 days” name=”revisit-after”
meta name=”VW96.objecttype”
meta name=”DC.Title”
meta name=”DC.Subject”
meta name=”DC.Description”
meta content=”Global” name=”DC.Coverage.PlaceName”

To see a comprehensive list of what each one of these tags means, read this article entitled “Meta Tags Explained“. After reading the purpose each tag was/is meant to serve, it should become clear that these extra meta tags are entirely useless and sometimes even detrimental…

technorati tags: extra meta tags | meta tags | meta data

We’ve got some really great clients here at Ecommerce Partners… Often times, they will even be so kind as to send us some samples of their products. In this particular case, I think an overly hungry project manager (umm, Daryl) may have had something to do with it, but man did we get some good chocolate chip cookies from David’s Cookies today!

They’ve also sent us an assortment of crumbcakes and brownies before, which were amazing. I’d recommend this stuff to anybody who likes desert. Which probably happens to be 98% of the world’s population.

This just goes to show that client relationships are more than just that. Because of their generosity and excellent products, I tell people I know to buy their goods, as do my co-workers. In fact, I’ve done a lot of my own holiday and birthday shopping within our client base over the last couple of years. Their products are really that good and our clients cover so many sectors that it’s like a virtual mall…

So thanks again for the chocolate chip cookies, David’s Cookies… If Daryl’s mouth wasn’t full of chocolatey goodness right now, I’m sure he’d thank you himself!

technorati tags: chocolate chip cookies | david’s cookies

Due to a very busy day, I don’t really have enough time to post a full length blog entry. So instead i’ll post a quick SEO tip. For most of you who know a thing or two about the subject, this should come as no suprise. However, for the common website owner/operator, this one seems to consistantly fly right over their heads. 99% of sites i review continue to miss this simple thing…

And the SEO tip is: 1 Home page, 1 URL

What does this mean? Well, take a look at your site right now. Yes, right now. Roll over every link to your home page you can find. What URL is being used in these links? Is it the same each time? When i say URL, I don’t mean that it simply mentions ‘yourdomain.com’. Of course it’s going to say that. But what else does it say? Do you see something like /index.html in it?

For instance, here is a list of possible links to a sites homepage, depending on the markup/programming language being used: (ie: in this case we use .html, but if you run a PHP site, the extension would be .php)

• yourdomain.com
• www.yourdomain.com
• yourdomain.com/index.html
• www.yourdomain.com/index.html

Notice that all of these URLs are different, yet they all point to the same content, which is your home page. My point here is… Search Engines view all 4 of these URLs as different pages. By having ‘home page’ links within your site pointing to index.html, you are focusing link power to that URL. However, chances are, you’re not trying to build power to index.html, you are trying to build power to the base url.

If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it. Simply make the change. Choose one version from the above base domains (either yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com) and make sure to ALWAYS use that version when linking to your home page. Whether that link is internal (meaning on your site) or external (meaning on someone else’s site)… always link to your home page with whatever version you choose.

What does this accomplish for you? Well first and foremost, you are standardizing your site which makes thing much more clear to the search engines as to what page is what. Second, and most important, is that you are focusing power to one and only one URL. If you know SEO, you know linking is essential. Let’s say you get 10 links from excellent, on-topic sites… 5 of those links are pointing to yourdomain.com the other 5 are pointing to www.yourdomain.com.

What you’ve effectively done there is split the power those links might provide by 1/2.

50% of the link love will help boost yourdomain.com to higher rankings and 50% will help boost www.yourdomain.com. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Instead, if you choose one version and point all links to it, you will focus 100% of the link love to one URL and therefore take full advatage of your efforts.

Making this simple change will boost the power of your chosen URL to rank higher than it ever could before and the concept holds true for both on-site and off-site links.

At first glance I didn’t give Quigo much thought… in hindsight however, I see that there may be a little more than meets the eye with this company. Ironically enough, CNN Money.com ran a story today on this exact subject entitled “Quigo: The Next Google?”

At first glance, Quigo looks to be another ad serving platform running on the conventional model of contextual advertsing. There’s a lot of companies popping up in this space, so why is Quigo any different from the rest of them who’ve only seen small amounts of success?

The answer to that question lies in its AdSonar product. AdSonar is Quigo’s version of AdSense (for Google) and Content Match (for Yahoo)… But contrary to the other small ad serving platforms, some really big names actually do use AdSonar as their preferred monetization system, or are switching to it. Most notably, in the coming months, ESPN.com will be switching from Yahoo’s Content Match to AdSonar. But why the switch? As noted by the reporter in the article above, the product isn’t that much better than the big boys version… The ads were a bit more relevant, but not so much to call for a switch in models. SO… what’s the real reason?

As also mentioned in the article above… Quigo is NOT a threat to large-scale content providers, while Google and Yahoo certainly are. What do I mean by a threat? Well, Yahoo is a large-scale content provider itself. As of the latest reports, Yahoo is still the most viewed destination on the web (although just barely edging out MySpace). Within the Yahoo domain, one can find a plethora of information and potentially have no need to ever visit something like an ESPN.com. This, is a direct threat to the ESPN.com business model. But ESPN is a television station first and foremost, so let’s look at something a little more traditional. The real threat is focused at those Old Media Stallwarts, aka, the News Papers and other News outlets… Ever since the internet became a one stop destination for free news and effective advertising, readership among the most dominant publications has declined. Ad revenue is shrinking and people in ‘the old’ industry are panicking.

Because of this, some pretty common sense thought might bring the people in charge of a CNN.com to say, “Hey… we can get the same ad serving model and payoff from Quigo, who is not a direct threat to our business. Why are we sharing revenue with Google or Yahoo?”

To be honest, I don’t know why they are paying Google or Yahoo, and essentially building their businesses stronger… I’d rather go with Quigo, too.

technorati tags: quigo | adsonar

If the answer is, “We’re working on it right now”, you’re probably a little too late to make a huge difference this year. Am I raining on your parade when I say such things? If I am, I apologize… but it’s the truth. Let me explain…

Internet business and ecommerce is one of trends. I noted today to a co-worker that across most ecommerce sites I monitor, there are certain times throughout the year where internet users/shoppers tend to ‘unplug’, and traffic to these sites goes down accross the board (about 25% this time around). In turn, business is slow(er). Now, I’m not sure if this is the case across all types of sites, but it’s a definite trend in ecommerce and online shopping. An example of a time where things are consistently slower would be during the summer months. However, there are certain weeks or long weekends during the summer where things go almost totally black. These are generally the holiday weekends of memorial day, 4th of july and labor day which to me, is not suprising at all… People go away to the beach or elsewhere, and rightly so, forget about the internet and how addicted they’ve become to it.

Another obvious trend, and the purpose of this post, is that from labor day on through the holiday season, things really begin to pick up again. That 25% I noted lost during the summer is back in full force, and traffic across most sites looks to be on the verge of moving higher. Which has been a common trend for years now.

This, my friends, is the power of the holiday season online and the reason why you should be ready for it, today. So, I ask again… are you pepared?

It is during these slow summer months (and early spring) that all serious ecommerce site owners should be gearing up for this wave of traffic, which happens to be full of qualified buyers. It’s the perfect time to be making changes to your site, adding functionality, and tracking the results. Putting such tasks off until after summer is not a good idea. Technically, your site should be set and ready to sell in full force by mid September or so. The goal of every ecommerce site should be to outperform the year before. If you’ve been working on getting more traffic to you URL over the last year, that should indeed do the trick, but only to a degree.

What many people do not realize about doing business online is that a lot of sites sell, in spite of their efforts. What do I mean by that? Well, even though you might be doing some decent business online, chances are, you could be doing more. Getting more traffic is only one part of that equation… Another very important part is making site improvements which include things like testing usability, adding functionality via the back end (better shipping functionality, more streamlined checkout process, etc), making tweaks to the user-interface to draw more attention to important areas, implementing effective calls-to-action, etc… Have you been doing all of these things this summer?

Unfortunately, a large percentage of people seeling online have not been. Their only focus is ‘more traffic’. Like I said, more traffic will bring more business, but only to the degree of your overall conversion percentage. By increasing the effectiveness of your site at turning conversions, you’re also exponentially increasing the amount of success your site can see. Because not only are you now getting more traffic, you are converting at a higher rate than ever before. The result in eventual sales could very well be dramatic and push your site to an entire new level. And such is the beauty of ecommerce.

I often refer to building an ecommerce site as starting out with a small snowball on top of a very large hill that is called “Money Spent Online”. The amount of money spent online across the globe will only rise and in doing so, our snowy hill will indefinitely grow into a mountain the size of Everest, or bigger. It’s on top of this pile we place our newly formed snowball (or ecom site) and start it rolling down the hill. The further it rolls, the bigger it gets. But, The more sticky we make the snowball, the quicker it attracts more snow unto itself and the faster it grows. Putting up an effective ecommerce site that is search engine friendly while also providing value to your customers, is truely a ’snowball’. Unless major mistakes are made via customer service, order fulfillment, etc… the snowball WILL grow. This is true strictly because the market for your product online will increase over time (in general) as will the saturation of your site within the search engines. This formula leads to definite growth. But at what rate will it grow? Well, that is entirely up to you and your efforts. Sitting there, ‘watching and leaving things as is’ will show you a very slow growth rate, but growth nontheless. However, it’s the little extra things you do to increase your conversion rates that will cause your ecommerce site to really start ’snowballing’ into more sales and conversions. By making such changes, not only will you provide a better overall experience to your users, but your business will grow at a rate exponentially faster than if your only tactic is to increase traffic and hope people buy.

So… if you didn’t get on it this year and your site isn’t better than it was last year, be sure to take this into account for the next holiday season. Because one thing is for sure: Next year there will be more people buying online than there are this year, and your potential to capture more sales will only be higher. Take advantage of that fact as soon as you can and as often as you can.

I’ve noticed a trend lately that I find to be pretty interesting… As technology improves and the masses buy better computers and more up-to-date monitors, we as web developers make a decision to either grow with the masses or stay safe and design to strict low resolution standards. For anyone unaware of what I’m talking about, Jennifer Krynin at About.com does a nice write up on the subject in “A New Resolution”

So, how does this relate to advertising? The trend I’ve noticed is interesting to me because many High Traffic news sites and other high traffic sites looking to monetize their freely given content seem to be bucking the trend of upgrading with the times… Instead of making the decision to design for a higher resolution, they are sticking with their fixed width sites built for a minimum 800 X 600 user and using the extra space outside the right and/or left borders for advertising and branding. I’ve noticed this happening for a little while now, and the trend seems to be growing.

A few examples:

Here we see sportsillustrated.cnn.com taking advantage of the extra screen space and utilizing it to further push the brand Miller Lite wants to portray. In the top banner advertisment you’ll notice a grainy wood background behind the images and text… this wood background is then used vertically along the left and right borders to further seer that image into people minds. I’ve also noticed SI doing this when banner ads go up for movies. The latest example I saw was for the movie “Invincible”. Unfortunately, I wasn’t bright enough to get a screen shot of it at the time…

In this example we see MSNBC doing much of the same, except this site is fixed to the left and only has space to do so outside the right border. But again, notice they are using the ‘outside the width ad’ to compliment an ad that exists within the fixed width site. This reinforces the ad and brand a great deal.

So there we see two example of the trend I’m talking about… I hope to add more to this post as I find them. Have you seen anything similar to this? If you do happen to come across an example, take a screen shot and send it on over. It would be much appreciated.

What are your opinions on such a tactic? Is it worth the extra ad revenue to give this the new found real-estate? Would it be more effective to design to a higher resolution and utilize the extra space within the borders? Or is this a reactionary tactic taken by these big name sites because a) re-designing is a huge task and b) they are fearful that by increasing the design parameters they are not taking into consideration all of their users. Maybe this is just a happy medium for now…

Either way, I find it very interesting and a potentially powerful way the give their advertisers a value added service and an extra branding push.

technorati tags: white space ads | fixed width advertising | online marketing | off border ads

A very common mistake made among a large precentage of ecommerce site owners, realtive to SEO, is the repetition of a few major keywords throughout the entire site. Much of this is due to the nature of a dynamically driven website (template based), but even site owners that have an element of control over such things, consistantly make this mistake.

What is website infighting and page vs. page? let me explain…

I do a lot of website analysis around here. It’s the nature of my job. Generally, if I’m analyzing a website it’s because they either signed up for SEO services or are interested in them. From my experience, most people looking for SEO services have an idea of the major keywords in their niche. This means that they are well aware of certain traffic driving keywords they would like to target.

For instance; if a real estate company here in Manhattan is inquiring with us, some major (and obvious) keywords they could be looking to target might be something like ‘apartments nyc’, ‘manhattan apartment’, etc. When I go and take a look at the site in question, 99% of the time I click through it, EVERY SINGLE PAGE is targeting the same line of keywords! I’ll see something like the following:

Home page says: The best apartments in NYC, find your Manhattan apartment today!
About Us says: The best apartments in NYC, find your Manhattan apartment today!
Search Properties says: The best apartments in NYC, find your Manhattan apartment today!
Our Agents says: The best apartments in NYC, find your Manhattan apartment today!

get my drift?

In my opinion, this is a futile attempt at targeting a couple of highly competitive keywords. One of the basics of SEO understanding is that search engines list web pages, not web sites. With that simple philosophy in mind, logic states that only one page (possibly two if we’re going for the double listing) should be optimized for any given keyphrase. Anything more than that is complete overkill.

Question: But will this actually hurt my rankings if I continue to do it?
Answer: In my opinion, yes, it could

How will it hurt? Possibly, in a variety of ways. Here’s a few:

• Page vs. Page
  Getting back to the title of this post… what you’re creating when you do this on your site is in essence, infighting between the pages of your site. Each page and section is optimized for the same keyphrases and is, in essence, fighting the other pages for rankings (rankings for the targeted keywords). Which causes…
• Rotating listings:
  What ends up happening is Google and the other engines get confused as to which page it should list in the index. On any given day Google may spider your home page and list it, and on the next day they may decide to use your ‘About Us’ page instead. Depending on how strong your external linkage is, this is a real possibility. It’s even more prevelant throughout the interior structure of a site with a defined hierarchy. For instance, if you have an ecommerce store with mid-level categories which are all optimized for their parent category…

  Example: you sell Home products and have a category for bed frames… you have 4 sub-categories of bedframes (wrought iron, maple, pine, modern), but each sub-category of bedframes is optimized for the main category keyword ‘bedframes’. What happens here is that a search engine may serve any one of those sub-category pages in the listings for a general ‘bedframes’ search. Which brings us to…

• Wrong landing page is served in listings:
  If you’re serious about your user experience and conversions, you should be serious about what a user sees when landing on your site. Sticking with the example above: If someone searched for ‘bedframes’, will they be landing on your bedframes page that shows them all the sub-categories of bedframes you have? With page vs. page, it’s a crapshoot. By optimizing for ‘bedframes’ on the bedframes page AND across all sub-categories (wrought iron, maple, etc.) you’re essentially leaving it up to the search engines to choose from 1 of 5 pages targeted towards ‘bedframes’. When in fact it should be clear the bedframes section has bedframes and the maple bedframes section has… you guessed it, maple bedframes. All very logical stuff here.

So, there’s plenty of reasons to avoid this Page vs. Page syndrome, but my time has run out. If you’d like to read another discussion on this topic, view this blog post entitled keyword self-cannibalization over at SEOmoz.