Podcasting Web Marketing Business Blogging Articles

iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo - social networks are the hottest topic of Web 2.0. Recent developments such as Google’s OpenSocial platform may further accelerate the explosive growth in widget and gadget application users. So what do widgets really mean to your customers and to your bottom line? What monetization strategies should you focus on to ensure widgets are more than just a buzzword to your organization? And how to you prevent your widget from becoming another lost or unused orphan among thousands of other apps? Misty Locke, co-founder and president of Range Online Media, has been working with numerous retailers to determine the most innovative, engaging and measurable approach to web applications. Misty will lead a discussion with other industry experts to answer these questions and to tackle how to succeed with widgets and gadgets today, pitfalls to avoid and emerging opportunities beyond 2008.

Speakers:
Misty Locke, Co-Founder and President, Range Online Media
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, NetConcepts
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP Marketing, ice.com

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Do you know what a widget is? Do you know how to design a widget that is based on SEO “best practices”? PJ Fusco, lead strategist for Netconcepts, shares her expertise on this popular topic.

If you want people to add your widget to their desktops, mobile phones, blogs, or social media applications, such as Facebook or MySpace, keep these commonly held best practices guidelines in mind:

• Make your widgets useful, contagious, simple, and genuine.
• Make your widgets easy to use, reliable, and ready to be shared.
• Make your widgets accessible on multiple frameworks and multiple formats.
• Make your widgets measurable.
• Make your widgets a big part of a global SEO campaign.

For more about the wonderful world of widgets, read the article on ClickZ.

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A few weeks ago, Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, announced the advent of Google Knol, a program meant to challenge Wikipedia, the popular user-generated encyclopedia. The idea, like Wikipedia, is to let anyone create a page of information on a specific topic, and all of those pages will be organized like an online encyclopedia. Google has not announced when Knol will launch.

Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about how this upcoming feature from search giant, Google, may affect eCommerce.

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In part one of this series about searchandising, PJ defined this term to set the stage for what this innovative concept is, how the search engines and online customers respond to it, and what retailers can do about it. Part Two described the effect of guided navigation and extreme pagination on the search engines.

As the finale of this three part series on searchandising, PJ Fusco offers her recommendations on how:

…you can enhance the contextual relevancy of critical category pages within a complex database-driven Web site by understanding what keywords and phrases drive your revenue. But you still need to contend with that wonky pagination scheme that’s killing your crawl equity.

For more expert advice from PJ, lead strategist for Netconcepts, on this topic, visit the conclusion of this three part series on searchandising.

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If you are a large online retailer, you’re looking at thousands upon thousands of pages that have the opportunity to get crawled and indexed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). You’re also looking at near infinite choices for how you interlink all those pages. Out of all those permutations, there is one configuration that is the most optimal from an SEO perspective. That’s because it maximizes the flow of link juice (e.g., PageRank if you’re speaking purely in Google terms) to your most important pages and minimizes (or cuts off completely) the flow of link juice to your least important pages. The most important pages are the ones that have the most potential to rank highly for the targeted keyword themes, to compel the searcher to click, and to drive that visitor toward a “conversion event” such as completing a purchase of one or more high-margin products.

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In part one of adventures in searchandising, PJ Fusco, lead strategist for Netconcepts, discussed how traditional merchandising methods are not optimal for online retail stores for a variety of reasons. PJ Fusco described “how merchandising strategies for brick-and-mortar retail stores don’t necessarily translate well for search engine referrals when incorporated into virtual, online retailer environments.”

As the middle of this three-part article, adventures in searchandising part two, PJ describes the effect of guided navigation and extreme pagination on the search engines. She writes,

It takes longer to crawl a searchandise-bloated site, so crawl efficiency is dampened. Over time, spiders take smaller bites of the site each time they visit, so indexed pages become stale. Fusty pages get fewer click-throughs, reduced traffic inhibits link building and page popularity, and so the downward spiral of search engine invisibility begins — all because the site provides a great user experience.

What can an e-commerce site do to add context and meaning to navigational searchandising and avoid the affects of extreme pagination while delivering a superior user experience? We’ll talk about some options next time.

With detailed examples and PJ’s expertise, this article focuses on the challenges many eCommerce sites face while they try to “searchandise.” For how to navigate through this fascinating aspect of online retail merchandising, read more about PJ’s recommended solutions in Part Three.

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Many local companies depend upon their information’s presence in various directories in order to advertise themselves, and the basic instrument of these marketing efforts is the Business Profile. The majority of businesses out there pay little attention to these beyond wanting their name, address, and phone numbers to be correct. However, there are far more components of business profiles beyond the bare basics, and this article will outline many of them and how they should be handled for best effect. Optimizing business listings and profiles can make all the difference in enabling potential customers to find you and in selecting you from your pack of competitors.

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Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDFs, docs, podcasts and RSS feeds.

Panelists:
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development Content Acquisition, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision

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As Part One of a three part series featured on ClickZ, PJ Fusco, Lead Strategist for Netconcepts discusses the concept of “searchandising.” Many merchants understand what it means to “merchandize” or make “products in retail outlets available to consumers, primarily by stocking shelves and displays,” according to Wikipedia. PJ goes on to explain why brick-and-mortar merchandising tactics don’t work on the web.

…merchandising strategies for brick-and-mortar retail stores don’t necessarily translate well for search engine referrals when incorporated into virtual, online retailer environments. Add a layer or 57 of behavior targeting and personalization tactics to online merchandising and you’ve got “searchandising,” which works exceedingly well for internal site search functionality and usability, but not so much for Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live Search.

For more about searchandising, read the complete article at ClickZ by PJ Fusco.

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Jeff Muendel writes in this article featured on Practical eCommerce:

Traffic down? Conversions starting to wane? It could be any number of SEO issues. Finding free online tools to hone search optimization for an ecommerce site can be tough. There are a lot of them out there, often promotional in nature, and they offer varying degrees of features and reliability. Some spit out data that is simply erroneous and applying this sort of information to website design can be useless at best and deadly, in Internet terms, of course, at worst.

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