Ecommerce Link Building Case Studies

This article from the IT section of the Herald highlights five technology trends that are changing the face of retailing. Our own Stephan Spencer weighs in with his thoughts on where things are heading…

Filed under: Ecommerce Press | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

• On page 1 for “website hosting” in Google within first 8 weeks
• Hosts over 12 million members
• Sustained high search engine rankings since early 2004

Filed under: Case Studies Link Building SEO Website Audits | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | 1 Comment »

Spread the word:      

• Turned a loss making site into a profit center
• Now generates over $5000 per month in Google AdSense revenue
• Over 86,000 pages in Google
• Traffic levels in the hundreds of thousands of visitors per month

Filed under: Case Studies Link Building SEO | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Link building is not all about transferring PageRank. Don’t get caught in the trap of basing your decision on high PageRank score alone. There are other considerations to be taken into account.

For example, your backlinks need to represent a range of importance scores (PageRank) so that Google doesn’t construe your link network as unnatural. Building links exclusively or mostly from high PageRank endowed sites may flag your site for artificially trying to boost your PageRank. And do you really want to attract additional scrutiny?

For long term benefit and security, sites that are selected for inbound links should be from an on-topic neighborhood, have aged domains, and if possible, have .edu and .gov sites in there. The list of sites needs to be analyzed to ensure that there are no technical limitations that slow the flow of “link gain” (e.g. PageRank). For example, the directory Gimpsy.com has let pages with session IDs (”PHPSESSID”) in the URLs slip into the indices, which makes it less ideal as a backlink.

In general, all links help (unless from “bad neighborhoods”), regardless of their PageRank. Some of the links NEED to be topically-relevant or your site is going to appear unfocused and the links won’t appear to have been “earned,” but instead bought, borrowed, bartered or stolen.

Directory submissions should be a component of your link building strategy, but don’t put too much emphasis on them. As Stuntdubl says, you need to balance the link equation and not rely too heavily on directories, and you need to spread your submissions out over time.

Certain directories are considered to be “hubs” or “authorities” or both (unfortunately only the search engines know which ones, so try to cover your bases as best you can), in which case it may be used by a search engine as an indicator of the topically-relevant neighborhood that your site belongs in.

Bear in mind that toolbar PR scores are months old and can’t really be trusted. The REAL PageRank is outside of our grasp, locked up within the Googleplex.

Also bear in mind that PageRank is Google-specific. That’s not to say that you can’t use PageRank to make some inferences about the importance of a page in the eyes of Yahoo! and MSN Search. The concept of “link gain” or weighted link popularity is alive and well at Yahoo and Microsoft, they just have different ways of calculating it and names for it. At Yahoo it’s been referred to as “Web Rank” and “link flux” (a term from their days at Inktomi). I don’t know what MSN calls it. The higher the PageRank, the more useful it is as an indicator of a powerfully important site across all 3 engines. For example, I’d have little doubt that a PageRank 9 link would be an amazing link opportunity that would reap benefits across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search.

Filed under: Blogs Link Building SEO | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | 3 Comments »

Spread the word:      

• Went from loss-making venture into a profitable web project
• Google AdSense revenue regularly exceeds $10,000 per month
• SEO techniques turned Innsite into an ongoing revenue stream
• A free service for users, yet still profitable for us

Filed under: Case Studies Link Building SEO | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Zearth.com’s staff operates a blog at zearth.blogspot.com, although they are relatively new to the concept. They signed up for a free Blogger.com blog, which wasn’t ideal as you’ll soon discover. The traffic into the blog is only a trickle, but they have received a couple thousand dollars in sales because of it, so it’s a start.

Filed under: Articles Ecommerce SEO Website Audits | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

In the past I’ve made the case for using wikis for online marketing.

Perusing Amazon.com recently I saw that there were already over 7500 product wikis contributed by Amazon customers. Cool! (Unfortunately not a single one of their wikis is indexed in Google because of the search engine unfriendly way they’ve implemented wikis on their site. Indeed, I couldn’t even find a way to link to their wikis from here, because links like this one expire and stop working after a while.)

It made me wonder how many other e-commerce sites were embracing wikis as a way to augment their product information and encourage customer participation in the site. I??haven’t heard of any other online retailers doing this.

Know of any etailers experimenting with wikis?

There is the ShopWiki website, which is not an online retailer but a site targeted to online retail. ShopWiki was founded by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman (DoubleClick’s former CEO and former CTO, respectively). There is some good stuff in ShopWiki. For example, if you are looking to buy a compound bow, there is great buying guide as well as an explanation of how a compound bow works, type of material used in its manufacture, etc. (Unfortunately, like with Amazon’s wikis, ShopWiki’s wikis — including their buying guide on the compound bow — aren’t making it into Google. Fewer than 72 wiki pages are indexed).

Not strictly an online retail wiki, yet it overlaps partially with the ShopWiki is wikiHow, a how-to manual launched by the dotcom eHow. I am unclear why eHow started a separate wiki rather than folding it into eHow.com. I think they should have just opened up their eHow site for user contributions.

I think a wiki is especially suited to applications such as buyers guides, encyclopedias, glossaries, manuals, travel guides, etc when you want to elicit user contributions without making visible a lot of back-and-forth discussion. The real value is in the final product, not in the discussion that got to that point. That is where a wiki really shines.

Filed under: Blogs Ecommerce | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | 2 Comments »

Spread the word:      

“We saw an overall increase of over 300% in our search engine traffic within the first 60 days of implementation. We are extremely pleased with our initial results and look forward to expanding our relationship with Netconcepts.”

Filed under: Ecommerce SEO Testimonials | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | 3 Comments »

Spread the word:      

Even though I’ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didn’t ask for it. Why? Because this month I’m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretions, rather than subject a loyal Practical eCommerce reader to potential intense and unwanted scrutiny by search engine reps reading this article. There are so many sites out there committing search engine sins, it was really hard to settle on one.

Filed under: Articles Ecommerce SEO Website Audits | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word:      

Data now out from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were all brick-and-mortar retailers:

1. “home depot”
2. “walmart”
3. “target”
4. “sears”
5. “best buy”

SearchEngineWatch Blog then arrived at the conclusion that:

These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it is they want.

I disagree. I think most Americans already know where their local Home Depot is. Instead, these searchers are looking to buy online. Some will opt for in-store pickup (which both Sears and Best Buy offer). Some may be on the hunt for product information, buyer’s guides, or the current circular with the week’s in-store specials.

I believe brick-and-mortar brands dominate shopping-related searches because those are the brands that are the most pervasive/popular/trusted in the marketplace. Their online shops offer a safe and familiar place to buy online.

A huge number of Internet users are searching for “home depot” when they could be typing in homedepot.com directly into their browser’s Location bar. Why is this? I imagine that for many people, typing in “home depot” into the Google Toolbar or into the search box on their Start Page is just easier or most comfortable. Perhaps some, like myself, even configured their Google Toolbar to display the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, to go straight to the first search result.

Filed under: Blogs Ecommerce | Email to a Friend | Printer-Friendly | No Comments »

Spread the word: