SEO Articles

How do you communicate with your customers and build your brand? Are you talking at them, or do you have an online dialogue with them? Stepping into social media allows merchants the opportunity to speak to customers and build a brand-loyal community. This requires loss of some control, since customers will be generating their own content. It is worth the investment. Written for Multichannel Merchant, Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer and analyst Tim Gill discuss the benefits of social media for merchants.

Retailers can leverage this dialog to gain insight into marketing research, generate product feedback, conduct merchandise testing, and initiate product improvements. By taking a dialog approach to social media instead of a louder, flashier version of commercial interruption, you can learn what consumers want, and how they want it, on a one-to-one basis.

For more on this topic, read the complete article here.

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Keyword-rich contextually relevant text links are like fuel for your web site’s search engine rankings. Without good links, you are relegated to the bottom of the search results heap. Link building is arguably the most difficult; the most misunderstood and poorly executed aspect to SEO. In this session, you will learn criteria for evaluating a link’s value, creative link building strategies, link buying do’s and don’ts, how to approach webmasters, how to leverage your affiliates, how social media can be leveraged to build links, dangerous tactics, and more!

Moderator: Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

Panelists:
Neil Patel, Chief Technology Officer, Advantage Consulting Services
Seth Besmertnik, CEO, LinkExperts
Rhea Drysdale, Online Marketing Director, Less Everything

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There are basic SEO metrics that will help with the “blocking and tackling” — things like keyword popularity, indexation, link popularity, PageRank scores, rankings, top-referring keywords, etc. There are also the red herrings, like keyword density and KEI scores, that are only distractions. But most importantly, there are a whole new class of SEO metrics that are largely undiscovered by folks in SEO and analytics alike, that are essential in order to fully capitalize on the “Long Tail” of SEO. These Key Performance Indicators include:

• Brand-to-nonbrand Ratio — percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords
• Unique Pages — number of unique (non-duplicate) web pages crawled by search engine spiders
• Page Yield — percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month
• Keyword Yield — average number of keywords each page (minus the freeloaders) yields in a given month
• Visitors per Keyword — ratio of search engine delivered visitors to search terms
• Index-to-crawl Ratio — ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages
• Engine Yield — the amount of traffic a search engine delivers for every page it crawls

Speakers:
Brian Klais, Netconcepts
Richard Zwicky, Enquisite

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This session isn’t about SEO fundamentals. You won’t learn why links are important for rankings; you won’t learn how to justify SEO to your boss. What you will learn is how to take your search engine optimization skillset to the next level, even if you’re already a savvy search marketer. SEO expert Stephan Spencer opens up his toolkit to share insightful information that demonstrates each tool in action using audience members’ sites.

If you want the “secret sauce” to rocketing past your competitors in the search results, this session is for you.

• Learn how to gain higher rankings through “The Long Tail,” blogs, social networks, widgets, APIs, spiders, and more
• Obtain the tools and techniques to “reverse engineer” competing sites that outperform yours in Google

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Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you’re credibility will be shot-and your brand damaged. You’ll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex
Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts

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Wikipedia is powerful. Concerned about how your company or service is portrayed? Wikipedia experts answer your questions and take you live to the site for advice on how to interact with the service.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts

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This workshop will cover the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO). The workshop will focus on how to acquire unpaid (aka “organic”) web site visitors from search engines like Google & Yahoo, as well as from social networking & social media sites like Digg, MySpace, Facebook, & YouTube.

Workshop Presenters:
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
Muhammad Saleem, Advantage Consulting Services (ACS)

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In this edition of the SEO report card, Jeff Muendel reviews eCommerce site pinkorpunk.com. This niche eCommerce site sells accessories that (you guessed it) are either pink or punk. This website audit is especially helpful for other new eCommerce sites, since pinkorpunk.com launched quite recently. Here’s a little bit about what Jeff has to say about this unique boutique.

Pinkorpunk.com is a fairly new website, which may partially explain its PageRank of 0. But, the other factor in the ranking is the site’s small number of inbound links. Yahoo! sees 45 links from outside sites while Google doesn’t list any at all. Inbound links translate to PageRank, and higher PageRank translates to better search engine results. This site, with its vibrant content, should have no problem garnering links! A linking campaign is in order here. Research online directories and get listed in those that still have decent PageRank (many have been recently demoted by Google in that regard). A blog is also in order, especially with such hip content. Online press should be a target as well, as should social media avenues like MySpace, Flickr and Facebook.

For more about this niche eCommerce store, visit the Practical eCommerce website audit here.

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How do you navigate your way through the promises, uncertainties, and red herrings of SEO best practices? Testing is the key to achieving scalable SEO nirvana on your site. By monitoring and retesting specific SEO enhancements, you validate their benefit and appropriateness for your e-commerce site.

While conversion may be the hot topic for online retailers and marketers, having a well-optimized Website and e-commerce platform that facilitates your pages being efficiently crawled, indexed, and ranked is equally important. With a little upfront polishing, your site can really shine, offering its products to searchers and devoted customers alike.

Consider the following proven best practices as a starting point for your SEO testing regimen…

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Do you know what the difference is between SEO and online marketing? Confused about the terminology? In this article featured on Practical eCommerce, Jeff Muendel discusses how SEO is a specialty within the online marketing field.

By definition, SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website with the goal of having major search engines (primarily Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search) return pages from that website in highly-ranked search engine results. SEO is almost always employed as a form of marketing, but it is a very specific form of marketing that takes place within the search engines.

Lately, some industry blogs have suggested that SEO has grown beyond its primary parameters, suggesting that successful SEO includes expanding into other realms of marketing. I don’t think that makes any sense. By definition, SEO - search engine optimization - does not include any form of marketing that goes outside of search engines. The use of the term SEO in such a way is disingenuous and confuses many webmasters and owners of ecommerce sites.

For more about this controversial topic, visit the full article on Practical eCommerce here.

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