Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a leading retailer of specialty outdoor equipment and clothing, with revenues reaching close to $1 billion a year. REI is also seen as a leader in multi-channel strategies, offering a consistent sales and brand experience to their members and customers — whether through the 70+ retail stores, REI.com, or their catalog business.

Problem

While REI.com had developed a successful online store, they knew their limited search engine visibility represented a key missed opportunity to drive additional traffic and sales. REI.com didn’t rank well in search engines for many of its top products and the majority of its web pages and products weren’t getting indexed, resulting in greatly reduced visibility. UJ Cha of REI Online said: “it was a problem we wanted to address right away”.
While REI has a great range of products, its website suffered from several problems that were causing many of these products to never appear in search engine indices. The dynamic URLs that were used across REI’s online catalog were a big part of the problem, resulting in the site never being fully spidered. Their natural search visibility problem was compounded by small but significant issues with page titles, site structure, page content and link text, for example.
Understanding they had a problem, REI chose to work with Netconcepts to address its natural search challenges.

Solution

Netconcepts produced an audit report on REI’s website listing the problems and making recommendations on how to optimize the site. Realizing that this task involved a significant amount of work, REI engaged Netconcepts to help make the changes. We began by simplifying the URLs to make them more accessible to search bots and then worked on refining the REI site. As UJ Cha states, “The site in general needed optimizing for search engines” and work was undertaken to ease navigation, focus on keywords and make the site more search engine friendly.
Along the way Netconcepts took the time to help REI’s staff learn more about SEO best practices. As REI changes and updates their website, this training will help them keep REI.com search engine optimal. Netconcepts continues to work with REI to assist with seasonal keyword targeting and further SEO refinement.

Results

UJ Cha comments: “Netconcepts’ work has been very helpful, so far we have been very happy with all the work we have done together in 2004. We have been able to achieve full indexing in Google and we have had a measurable natural search traffic and sales increase.”
UJ Cha continues; “We received more than a 200% gain from overall natural search sales and more than a 250% gain in “non-branded” natural search sales since the start of the engagement with Netconcepts. Having a successful natural search strategy nicely complements our already successful paid search campaigns”.
In fact, the full indexing by Google means thousands of REI’s products are now visible to web consumers that were never visible before. REI’s site visibility has increased by 1000%, increasing overall natural search sales.
“We have decided to renew our contract with Netconcepts for 2005. Netconcepts has opened our eyes, not just on the importance of many of these elements but on specifically how to implement best practices.”

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figleaves.com, is the global leader of multi-brand intimate apparel etailers. The figleaves.com website features 250 brands and more than 30,000 items of lingerie, swimwear, sleepwear, activewear, menswear and hosiery. Brands range from designers such as La Perla and Andres Sarda to basic Playtex and Wacoal. Additionally, figleaves.com provides quality service to over 70 countries worldwide.

Challenge:

After establishing a headquarters in the United States, figleaves.com came to the realization that if they wanted to compete in the global market, they would need an expert SEO company. They had already engaged another search marketing company to help them with aspects of SEO, but figleaves.com wasn’t reaping the benefits that they expected and were starting to experience a decline in natural search traffic. figleaves.com was seeing moderate traffic for a variety of keywords but not seeing the natural search conversion they expected. They wanted to increase natural search traffic to the most relevant pages without making visitors dig through pages of results.

Solution:

Knowing the reputation of Netconcepts and the work of their president, Stephan Spencer, figleaves.com chose to consult with Netconcepts to complete a Natural Search Audit of their E-Commerce site. “Netconcepts’ audit process showed us all the areas of our site that needed attention, and helped us understand how to prioritize them to achieve a search optimized site,” stated Richard Brooks, Search Manager at figleaves.com. Netconcepts prescribed an initial focus on resolving structural barriers like URL structure, linking, and navigation before moving on to content optimization and other SEO tactics. “Netconcepts really helped us to clarify what our priorities should be,” stated Richard Brooks. “Netconcepts’ expert analysis and prioritization of our SEO issues helped us rally the support we needed in our organization to make some real SEO progress.”

Results:

Netconcepts provided the SEO methodology and program structure figleaves.com lacked internally to fully capitalize on their natural search potential. Within the first months of implementing Netconcepts’ recommendations, figleaves.com had already experienced a 40% increase in their natural search traffic. “We now rank on page one on Google for three of our most important keywords: “swimwear,” “underwear,” and “bras,” stated Richard Brooks. One of the most important influences in increasing rankings is the acquisition of back-links. Already, figleaves.com has more than doubled their number of back-links. Indexation alone has risen over 15% across Google, Yahoo, and MSN to top 300,000. Ed Bussey, Senior Vice President and Head of figleaves.com US had this to say, “We got great buy-in during our discussions and have seen great results from your recommendations. When we want to improve our SEO strategy further, we will come back to Netconcepts.”

Headlines are a primary focus for print marketers. “Good” headlines can catch the reader’s attention and pull them into the article. However, “good” happens to be in the eye of the beholder. Clever and witty headlines may catch reader’s attention but search engines are not so easily persuaded.

In this article, Netconcepts Founder and President, Stephan Spencer, is sought out for his SEO and content optimization expertise. “The headline itself doesn’t necessarily have to be modified if you know how SEO works,” stated Spencer.

Read this entire article and learn how to find your happy medium between catchy and functional copywriting.

I have had the privilege of reviewing Gerry’s upcoming book Creating Killer Content; It is unquestionably one of the best books I have read on writing copy for the web — accessible yet packed with practical advice. Gerry knows how to bring together disparate concepts and weave them into a cohesive strategy, including readability, usability, search engine visibility, conversion and online sales.

Gerry has pioneered a powerful technique for online marketers called Customer Carewords. His clients who have used this technique successfully read like a Who’s Who: Rolls Royce, BBC, Wells Fargo and Tetra Pak.

Gerry is an incredibly entertained public speaker with an enchanting Irish accent. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak live in person and via webcast. As a professional speaker and a consultant, Gerry sells his time at many thousands of dollars per day, which I can say in all candor is an excellent investment. I have been a long-time reader of Gerry’s weekly email newsletter “New Thinking.” Each issue delivers hard-hitting advice. Subscribe here.

Without any further ado, my interview with Gerry McGovern…

What is the biggest mistake that companies make in regards to their website content?
Thinking that customers care one little bit about the company. Customers care about themselves (their loved ones and their community). They hate websites that are organization-centric. How do you know if you have an organization-centric website? If any of your sentences or headings begin with the name of your organization. Stop talking about yourself. The customer knows who you are. They’re at your website, for crikes sakes. There’s a big, fat logo at the top of the page screaming out your name. You’ve already got their attention. Now it’s time to give them some attention.

What’s the best way to be customer-centric? Talk about benefits. Use second person–YOU. Paint a picture for the customer. Speak their language. Use their words. Stand where they stand, feel what they feel. Forget you’re part of the organization and think like the customer.

You ran an agency with over 100 staff. You have also been a solo consultant. What was the greatest lesson that you have learned from each of those two experiences?
The first lesson I learned was that I should have cashed out earlier. I was part of the whole dot com craze and had a company valued at $200 million at one stage. 12 months later it went bust. Seriously, what did I learn? Patience and focus. I’m a slow learner. I make a lot of mistakes, but I’m persistent. Sometimes I hate to learn so I have to work hard to keep my mind open. I think you need a long term plan. Even in an age of major change I still think you need a vision.

When I started on the Web around 1994, I felt that content was going to be really important. I stuck with that idea, and began to research how to create quality web content. It may sounds obvious now, but it was hard to sell the quality content concept during the Nineties. So many people bought into the idea that all you needed was some content management software and that then–magically–quality content would get produced. Without any management. And with little or no cost. Doesn’t happen that way.

Who are the people who most influenced you in your career choice?
I don’t mean to sound arrogant but I was pretty much self-motivated because I had to be. I come from a very rural part of Ireland. The idea of going to college was pretty new around where I lived. I chose marketing, and I really didn’t have a clue what it meant but I knew that it sounded different.

Peter Drucker would be a major influence now. He wrote in such a simple, clear manner, and he was so incredibly insightful. One quote I keep coming back to from him is that we have spent the last 50 years focusing on the T in IT, and we’ll spend the next 50 years focusing on the I.

Why have you dedicated yourself career-wise to website content? What is so special about that, that it has become your passion?
I always wanted to be good at something. I think someone once said that they had failed their way to success, and I certainly feel like that. There were so many things I found I wasn’t that good at–or that I found that I couldn’t really excel at. However, all along I was–in one way or another–working with content. And when I saw the Web the first time, it looked like this World Wide Web of Content. And it also was this huge opportunity. It was new. It was vast. It still is full of the smell of adventure. And I liked that. So I got up on my horse and headed out West to the new lands that content was building.

There is so much content on the web already. I get stressed surfing the web trying to keep up with the blogs in my industry because there is so much content. It is just exploding. The content is already out of control. Our brains can’t take it. Where is this all heading?
It’s a good question. I’m reading a book at the moment on how the mind works. It estimates that we are exposed to 11,000 bits of information a second, but that we are only conscious of 40 of them. (The word ‘bit’ being a technical measure of information.) Whatever the measure is, we’re exposed to a lot more today that we were 10 years ago.

But I think we’ll be fine. We’re going through a period of flux now as we move from an industrial age society to an information age one. The essence of what we need to know remains reasonably stable, in my opinion. Wisdom is not about volume. Quality does not always come with quality. There are long term trends at play. There are core patterns beneath the hum of noise.

First and foremost, we need to manage the content, not be managed by it. We have to stop being email slaves. Being constantly busy is not productive, and it’s certainly not good management. We need to focus more now on what we’re not going to do, on whose blog we’re going to stop reading this week because they’re repeating themselves. And ironically, in an age of content we need to get out more and talk to people–particularly our customers.

Consultants often talk of going after the “low hanging fruit” — the easy stuff that yields the biggest impact. What do you think is the lowest hanging fruit for companies with an online presence today in regards to their website content?
That’s a tough question. I think a lot of websites suffer from a belief by management that all the fruit is low-hanging. That if they just buy this fancy technology they get this amazing ladder that makes all the fruit low-hanging. Unfortunately, I think that if you visited a lot of websites today, you’d find a lot of rotting fruit lying around.

Basically, it’s time for management. The Web has been around long enough for a typical organization to be able to answer this question: Has the Web the potential to deliver real value to our organization? For a lot of organizations, the answer will be no. The website will deliver a little value, but will have negligible impact on the bottom line. For some organizations, the Web has the potential to deliver substantial value. And in that situation, it’s time to get serious. Time to manage, not administer.

Quality content is hard work. I’m sorry. I’d love to say otherwise, but it’s just not the case. But quality content can deliver significant return on investment on the Web.

I notice that you haven’t started a blog. Do you think this whole blogging trend really has something to it? Or is it all a bunch of hot air? Do you encourage any of your clients to blog? Is blog content too ephemeral?
You’d never know I might start one yet! In fact, because of your constant prodding, I’m talking with a group of my partners about starting a joint blog. I think blogging is amazing, and such a positive reflection of an open, inquisitive, questioning culture. There will always be a role for the book but the blog is the conversation where the next book might just be born.

Everything in its place. Let’s not get carried away. Blogging is a new form of conversation; a rough and ready way to share knowledge. It’s a form of research, a way of getting down and dirty and digging into the roots of an idea. To watch a brilliant thinker and writer blog is very illuminating. But I find that quality blogs–that I can go back to time and time again–are pretty hard to find.

I have so far not encouraged any of my clients to blog. Most of my clients–and they include some very large organizations–are still mastering the basics of how to manage content professionally. Blogging may seem simple, but it’s quite a sophisticated strategy, and it requires a very open, sharing culture.

Great content can persuade the reader. What should a company do to convince its website visitors that it is a responsible corporate citizen, one that gives back to the greater community and the greater good?

I buy a lot from Amazon. My sons keep telling me to use play.com because it’s cheaper, but I’m a loyal Amazon customer, and it would take a lot to make me change. The reason I’m a loyal Amazon customer is because I actually genuinely believe that they care about me. Every time I’ve ever had a problem, their response has been simply fantastic–every single time.

There’s so much bullshit in marketing. So many organizations spinning that they love the environment or whatever just as some “branding” exercise. There are organizations out there that I detest because of the way they treat me as a customer. Citizenship begins at home. Organizations should treat their customers right. Show you actually, genuinely care about your customers. If we all did that, I think we’d make society a better place.

Even if your message gets past the filters, it doesn’t mean your email will be opened. Your recipients are brutal when it comes to slashing through the commercial messages clogging their inboxes. A split second decision will decide your email’s fate, based squarely on your From line and Subject line, and to a smaller extent, what’s visible in the Preview pane. After navigating these deliverability and openability hazards, you still have to get the recipient to comprehend and act on your message. A pretty tall order nowadays.

This virtual seminar is going to get “hands on” with reviews of actual email campaigns submitted by seminar attendees. Not all will be chosen, so give yourself the best chance of having your campaign critiqued: submit your entry early. Stephan is one of the most popularly and highly acclaimed MarketingProfs seminar leaders.

If you’ve ever wondered what you were doing wrong with your email marketing, or wondered what you could be doing better, then this is the seminar for you.

You will learn:

• How to write messages that are opened and read
• How to create subject lines that are the best they can be
• Best practices for your call-to-action and value proposition
• How to balance text and images
• When to use Text or HTML
• Whether your email is compliant with CAN-SPAM legislation
• Whether your messages will get past spam filters

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

Once pages have been identified, search engines order the results according to relevance. Relevance can be determined based on dozens and dozens of criteria, such as keyword prominence (how often your keywords appear on a page, and where they appear). Crafting Your Page As you begin to start thinking the way a search engine does, most copywriters will realize that they are being too verbose in the first few paragraphs. It also occurs to them as they are writing that the title tag for the page they are working on doesn’t have the most important keywords listed first, but rather last. Moving the most important keywords for that page to the beginning of the title tag, as well as moving those keywords to the top of the page copy, can really help to boost your page ranking.

It is also important that you do not go overboard with what is called “keyword density”. This refers to the number of times your keywords appear on a page. Too many occurrences of your keywords and the page will trip the spam penalty algorithm, which will damage your page’s rank. Also, if you are going after a particular keyword phrase, your web page will appear more relevant if the individuals words in that phrase appear together in your page copy.

In addition to placing your selected keywords at the beginning of your title tag and also in the first paragraph or two of page copy, it also helps to emphasize your keywords by enclosing them in heading tags (i.e. <h1>). Think through how you can best structure the information on your page so that your keywords appear inside heading tags, body copy, and other tags while still writing something interesting and compelling.

Once you have thought about each of these points, it is time to start writing. Try to write at least a couple of hundred words of page copy. This is not a rule, but a good guideline to follow. When you are creating links from text, be mindful to include good keyword-rich text in your link text. Avoid using phrases such as “click here” and “more information” in your links, and instead choose words that are relevant to the page the link will go to.

Test The Waters

At this point, you presumably now have well-written, interesting and useful page copy that includes your most important targeted keywords in all the right places. However, don’t just assume that you have gotten it right, especially if you are new at this. Run your copy past a human being or two to ensure that it is interesting, engaging, and communicates your message effectively. If it doesn’t, it’s time to start again and rethink your copy.

Once you have human approval, it’s time to run the draft page through a search engine spider simulator such as the one at searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi. This tool, and others like it, will tell you how many times you used each keyword. It will parse the text just like a search engine would, and occasionally you will see that another keyword comes through more strongly than you had intended and a more important keyword is dwarfed in comparison. Don’t worry, now is the time to fix this, and with a little practice you will have a good gut feeling far what will rank well.

The final test, of course, is linking your new page to the rest of your website and seeing how it performs with the real search engines. If the results are lower than expected you can make some adjustments by moving text around, adding and subtracting copy, and so forth. Pay particular attention to your title META tag as this is given the most importance by the search engines out of everything on your page.

Another way to help convince visitors to click through to your website is to write a descriptive summary of your page to be included in your description META tag. Make sure that your description contains the targeted keywords that you have chosen for this page, and be brief. While this does not help with your search engine ranking, having a compelling description is just good form and worth doing.

This article appeared in the December 2005 issue of Practical Ecommerce magazine.

Irishman Gerry McGovern, an internationally acclaimed guru on website content, spoke at a recent Wellington conference on the topic. McGovern has spoken, written and consulted extensively on web content and knowledge management issues since 1994. He’s published two books: Content Critical and The Web Content Style Guide, and a third, titled Killer Web Content, is due out later this year.

McGovern reckons most websites, until recently, have been administered rather than managed. Stuff was put up on them and then left there. Here’s his 12 tips on creating and maintaining killer web content:

Quality over quantity: Publish the size of website you can manage easily. Too many websites are a dumping ground for obsolete or irrelevant information. The value you deliver matters more than size.

Fresh: Continually ensure your site has accurate, up-to-date content. This is a growing problem, particularly for government websites. At past workshops, McGovern asked web managers to stand up if they could swear in a court of law that all of their website content was accurate. Nobody stood. He asked the same question at the recent Wellington conference. Again, everyone remained seated.

Have a common web information layout: This is especially true for all government websites. If every government website looked the same from a layout point of view, it would save citizens a lot of hassle. Otherwise, site visitors have to spend time figuring out how the website works, instead of completing the task they came to the website for.

Task completion: Identify the top three tasks for your website and make sure they shine. Task completion is the only real measure of website success.

Action versus reaction: If a visitor to the site does something on your web site that then results in a lengthy wait they won’t bother coming back. The time they spend on their action should be matched by the time it takes the website to react. For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menu bar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.

80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the page views. On Microsoft.com, 1% of content accounted for 99% of the page views. In fact, 35% of its pages had never been viewed. That’s well over a million pages of content, which people at Microsoft worked hard to write — for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won’t.

Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So it becomes difficult to read text that has a long line width. McGovern recommends a three-column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% dedicated to the middle column, and the remaining 20% or so for the right hand column.

Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The centre column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.

Links: Links in the middle of body copy distract readers, making it difficult for them to read the paragraph. The message you’re giving them is, “Click on me, the rest of this text is really boring!” Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. You can also repeat them underneath the body copy in the centre column.

Simplicity: Einstein purportedly said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Apply this to your web copy. Web readers tend not to read long copy. Typically, with a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end, 20% will read 500 words, and 5% will scan 1,000 words. McGovern advises headings should be around four to eight words, summaries 30 to 50 words, sentences 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs 40 to 70 words.
Kill your darlings: If there’s a particular expression or way of saying something that you’re particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you’re probably overusing it.

Search engine optimise: Incorporate words into your page that people care about an type into the search engines. People are unlikely to find you under search words you don’t use yourself in your body copy or page titles. Tools like the one at inventory.overture.com can help you find out what words are popular with searchers.

Imagine telling a PR person 10 years ago that, in the future, the way to catch the eye of various journalists is to become a journalist yourself and then write about THEM, that PR person would think you were off your rocker. My, how times have changed!

As an up-and-coming blogger, you might be tempted to brown-nose the A-List bloggers. Don’t kiss up to them, but don’t denigrate them either. This isn’t necessarily a hard-and-fast rule, just a suggested guideline. Some bloggers are quite open to being taken to task. They even encourage it.

There is a line of course that shouldn’t be crossed. Always act in good taste. Scoble himself described, during our MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit last month on business blogging, how it really isn’t a “line,” it is more like a “membrane.” There is give-and-take, and flexibility with what’s ok to say in your blog and what’s not, particularly as you build rapport with different bloggers in the blogosphere and you build up your reputation. But don’t push too hard or too often, or that “membrane” may rupture!

Now I wonder if Scoble will blog about this post…

There is a wealth of content out there under a liberal Creative Commons licence that will allow you to reuse and repurpose that content in your own projects. But finding that content used to be hard work. (Actually there was previously another way to search, but it wasn’t as comprehensive, and it wasn’t from a major search engine). Now it’s just a search query away, thanks to Yahoo!

I can hear you asking yourself: “That’s all fine and good, but what use will I have with it?” Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Collect interesting articles on a particular topic from different authors, write your own overview/summary to go with it, then assemble it all into an ebook and offer it on your site as a free download.
2. Take information relating to a particular company that you would like to land as a customer and arrange it into a scrapbook, then post it on your blog and ask readers to contribute to it further. Hopefully the prospective customer will take notice of your initiative and of your interest in them. If not, bring it to their attention. (What a great, new spin on the standard “cold call”!)
3. Augment your articles, white papers, etc. with excerpted content relevant to the topic you’re covering. For example, if you wrote a white paper about “How Google Works,” add Creative Commons-licensed photos and text descriptions describing their data centers.
4. Identify keywords that you want to rank well for and create a mini library of Creative Commons-licensed content about that keyword.

These are just a few ideas, and of course you have to abide by the terms of each content-owner’s license. Idea #4, for example, would be considered commercial use if that library of pages were serving as landing pages to get searchers who find you to buy something. IMPORTANT: Don’t just assume that because it showed up in the search results, it’s licensed under Creative Commons. Some plain ol’ copyrighted material will have undoubtedly snuck into the index. No search engine is 100% perfect. I didn’t have time to test it out much myself, but it seems to pass muster with Tara at ResearchBuzz, so it must be pretty good!

An insightful reader on Slashdot commented that it would be brilliant if Yahoo! took the next step and launched a Bittorrent tracker that was limited to Creative Commons licensed content, with a centralized directory-style index. Bittorrent, if you aren’t familiar with it, offers super-fast de-centralized file sharing on a file-by-file basis. It can be used to download legitimate files, like a trial version of a software program or music under a Creative Commons license. To get started, you need to have the Bittorrent software installed on your computer, and you’ll need to have somehow obtained a Torrent file for a particular big file that you want. This Torrent file is tiny, and it contains information about how to connect with others who have parts of the file you want. But where do you find these Torrent files? That’s where a tracker comes in. More on Bittorent later, in a separate post.

With that, I’ll let you get on with using this new Yahoo! engine to “embrace and extend” to your heart’s content.

Oh, by the way… If you want to learn more the fascinating story of copyright law (no, I’m not kidding! The way Larry Lessig tells it, it really IS interesting!), check out Larry Lessig’s speech at OSCON, with audio syncronized with his Powerpoint slides. Larry is the brains behind the Creative Commons and an overall brilliant lawyer/author/blogger/Stanford professor.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ultimate targeted, low cost and high return weapon in the e-marketer’s promotional arsenal.

Learn how to maximize your reach through the “organic” (unpaid) results in the search engines:

• Which search engines to target
• Keyword research tools and tactics
• Writing copy that “sings” to the search engines
• Benchmarking against your competitors
• Link building strategies that work
• Optimal search engine architecture
• Best practices to emulate
• Scams exposed
• Case studies - including the “inside scoop” on what worked and what didn’t
• Making your e-commerce or database-driven site “search engine friendly”
• Measuring the return on your search engine marketing investment
• Developing a search engine marketing plan
• Criteria for selecting a search engine marketing agency
• Online tools and resources