BalancedLifeProducts.com is a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yoga mats, meditation cushions, and reiki timers. The site doesn’t fare well in the search engines in the natural (unpaid) search results, so they have been relying on Google AdWords to fill in the gaps. It wasn’t hard to see why their rankings in natural search traffic were so low. After a quick health check-up of their level of search engine optimization, I made the following diagnosis…
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This screencast, presented by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer, explains how to install and use the free Firefox extension SEO-Links to gauge the succesfulness of text link advertisers.
First Stephan installs the extension. Then he jumps to the Seacoastonline.com home page, which is selling links over in the right column half-way down the page. By simply hovering the cursor over each of the text link ads, he obtains backlink counts for each advertiser and their rankings across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search for the phrase in the anchor text. This provides an indication as to how effective that advertiser is at SEO. The assumption is that an SEO-savvy and successful text link advertiser will make better advertising decisions than an unsuccessful one. If a bunch of successful ones flock to a particular site selling text link ads, then that’s an indication that the site is a good one to advertise on (assuming other things check out like the advertisers aren’t using spam tactics).
Turns out the site is not a good site for link advertisers. Find out why by downloading the 4 minute video as either a 2 megabyte WMV file or a 5 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)
Filed under: Link Building Screencasts SEO
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I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.
Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.
Filed under: Blogs Business Blogging Tools
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Search Engine Strategies — Chicago, IL
This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and feed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com
Speakers:
Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars SEO
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Blogs and RSS feeds may sound like a lot of nerdy buzzwords, but President of Netconcepts Stephan Spencer wades in with his thoughts for webpronews.com, particularly when it comes to driving search engines to one’s site. It’s all about personalizing the content they receive he says.
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University of Wisconsin Executive Education - Integrated Customer Communications — Madison, WI
Technology continues to revolutionize the sales and marketing efforts of firms worldwide. Businesses must either adapt or put themselves at risk. Companies and customers communicate and interact with each other in substantially different ways than 10 or even 5 years ago. Direct and interactive marketing are converging, financial metrics are increasingly mainstream, and customers expect channel “silos” to be broken down. Learn how to benefit from the new tools and thinking in managing customer relations to increase sales, improve strategies, and reach online and offline markets.
Search engine marketing
- Make your site “search engine friendly”
- Explore “Pay-per-click” search advertising
- Analyze benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI
- Identify trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising
Create a buzz - viral marketing
- Explore blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
- Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
- Discover the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message
Filed under: Business Blogging RSS Marketing Seminars Web Marketing
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Tools For Less, as the name implies, sells power tools and equipment at discount prices through their online catalog. The ecommerce site developed by Netconcepts is full-featured, with extensive functionality in the back-end administrative interface, and with a clean intuitive user experience for customers.
Among the additional out-of-the-ordinary features offered to customers is a Wish List capability which is integrated throughout the site and is as simple to use as the shopping cart itself.
The site is built search engine friendly, of course, with static looking URLs, unique keyword rich title tags, and more.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit The Site: Tools For Less
Filed under: B2B B2C Ecommerce Portfolio SEO Web Development
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“If you don’t have good placement in search engines it’s equivalent to having an unlisted phone number for your business.” Stephan Spencer speaks to The New Zealand Herald about how his company audits and builds e-commerce websites for big US retailers, optimising sites for search engines, and other e-marketing products and services while working in two countries.
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An RSS feed is merely an XML file that you host on your Web server — it kind of looks like HTML code. But don’t let its simplicity fool you; in the hands of a sophisticated marketer, the potential applications for RSS are huge.
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