Don’t be afraid to do something off-color. Most folks in the corporate communications, PR, and legal departments shy away from anything potentially controversial. And for good reason, right? Then why would a company selling life insurance online dare to venture into the taboo topic of weird and disturbing death trivia? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly what Lifeinsure.com did with their link bait article, “19 Things You Didn’t Know About Death.” With such goodies as “After being decapitated, the average person remains conscious for an additional 15-20 seconds,” you can imagine how much of a hit it was with the irreverent alpha-geeks that make up the Digg community. The article made it to the Digg front page, which in turn got it in front of countless bloggers and social bookmarkers. Surely the success of this article in attracting links has contributed to Lifeinsure.com’s impressive #4 ranking for “life insurance.” Not surprisingly though, this contentious article is nowhere to be found in Lifeinsure.com’s navigation hierarchy, so customers and prospects are unlikely to stumble across it (phew!).

Deviate from your core business. Successful enterprises are built on the relentless pursuit of excellence in their core business, trimming the fat, and outsourcing the rest. It may seem like a bad idea for an SEO firm like ours to own a bed and breakfast directory and a writers community. But the great links these sites attract make it a good investment.

Netconcepts benefits from these links in two ways: link juice is passed from these sites to our own corporate site, and both sites’ rankings have earned (and continue to earn) us a respectable passive income from Google AdSense (six figures for each site, in total, to date). Our firm also develops WordPress plugins and distributes them for free on our corporate site (netconcepts.com). Dedicating resources to WordPress plugin development when the market for WordPress is mostly made up of individuals and small businesses may seem counterintuitive, given that our focus is SEO for ecommerce and that our target market is large, brand name retailers. But it works. Our free SEO Title Tag plugin has been a magnet for links from bloggers, to the point that the traffic to the plugin page now exceeds that of our home page.

Do it for a good cause. The linkerati love a good corporate citizen, so be one. Consider such activities not as an expense, but as an investment that will generate a return in the form of links. With Second Chance Trees, social media marketing agency Converseon really went out on a limb (ugh, bad pun, I know!)—creating a charitable initiative using internal resource and expertise that could have instead been put on to billable work. The idea was to create an island in Second Life where players could purchase a virtual tree with Linden dollars and plant it. This would then trigger the planting of a real tree of the same species in an ecologically sensitive region, such as a Central or South American rain forest. For a charitable endeavor, the payoff was huge. High-value links came from news outlets, the blogosphere, organizations, and elsewhere. Nicely done, Converseon!

Be bold, be off-the-wall. You don’t always have to toe the corporate line. If you’re thinking that this will garner links that aren’t very relevant to your business and industry, you’re probably right. But remember that PageRank is topic independent. Time after time, the tests we conduct at Netconcepts show that high PageRank endowed yet topically irrelevant links still help—and they can help a lot. Definitely still work to acquire topically relevant links as well, but don’t neglect the off-topic ones too.

Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Features Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Chris Smith, Lead Search Strategist, NetConcepts
Phil Stelter

Q&A Speakers:
Paul Dillon, Director, Live Search Shopping, Microsoft
Ken Kronquist, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Shopping

There are a lot of local businesses out there that have no addresses. These are frequently independent contractors like plumbers, electricians, mobile auto repairmen, house painters, roofing contractors, building contractors, and so on. These guys may operate out of their vans and trucks, and are not set up for having the public show up on their doorstep.

A brick-and-mortar location for a business is not just its "home base.” A store with a sign out front typically serves as a kind of advertisement, too, allowing passers-by to spontaneously decide to drop in, or to file the biz away in their memory for any future needs. The address-less types of businesses don’t get to benefit from this type of in situ advertising, and so they’re even more dependent upon other advertising such as newspaper, yellow pages, television, and internet—as well as word-of-mouth.

So, here you have these traditional service providers flung abruptly into the modern world of rapidly-evolving local search. As printed phone book usage may be decreasing, these guys need internet presence and they know it. The savvier ones also know that people are increasingly searching for businesses via search engines, and particularly in local search engines.

For these guys who need biz directory placement, it really kills them if they can’t get into a service like Google Maps.

Just to get a feel for the scope of the issue, compare the results in Google Maps for a search for "Plumbers in Dallas, TX":

If you scroll through the listings, you’ll notice that only businesses with actual street addresses are listed in the first page of results.

By contrast, in yellow pages sites like Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, and Yellowbook.com, as well as in some of the other local search sites like Yahoo! Local and Live Search Maps, quite a number of plumbers who don’t have physical addresses displayed are also included in the results.

With Google’s local search popularity on the rise, these small businesses are getting more and more driven to get into the listings.

So, what was Michael Jones’s answer to Dick’s question—how are businesses with no addresses supposed to get into Google Maps results?

He essentially said that they should try to get an address in the city because Google did not display businesses that didn’t have addresses—after all, he quipped, one can’t pinpoint something without an address on the map. He suggested that those businesses could rent a post box to accomplish this.

I found this suggestion surprising and a bit disappointing. I’d rather expected him to declare that they expected to soon deploy a new version that would allow some method of displaying local businesses that didn’t have specific addresses.

I’d actually recommended that businesses might use rented mail boxes to get better Maps rankings as a sort of "extreme local search tactic" way back in January of 2007, but I did that while figuring that few businesses were likely to actually do that. The tactic is apparently not so "extreme" after all. Google Maps help provides similar advice.

Hearing this method recommended by Google was surprising to many of us, because it seems like something of a hack—it is a hack. The expected/needed functionality isn’t there, so you have to resort to doing something nonintuitive/unnatural to make it work.

There are rare cases where Google Maps does display a business without an address:

Maps personnel suggest this may have happened due to "incomplete" data from yellow pages providers. The data may be incomplete from Google’s perspective, but YP sites allow display without an address, as mentioned above.

This is not the only case where businesses might have to go through Google’s yellow pages partners to achieve presentation treatment they’ve grown to expect as a standard directory feature. Mike Blumenthal has outlined how Google’s sharply limited number of business categories has also caused some heartburn, and those wishing for a more granular category designation would likely also have to achieve it through their listings at a yellow pages site.

Google’s desire to use mailing addresses to verify businesses seems reasonable, but it shouldn’t be necessary to actually display the address. It’s also reasonable to say that a graphic map interface perhaps shouldn’t be pinpointing items without specific addresses—in the screen grab above, the address is defaulting to a city or ZIP code centroid, making the business location appear to be floating out in an area without roads. This aspect is a bit of a downer from a user-experience perspective.

Google Maps isn’t purely just the graphic map, though. The listings at the side of the map and the listings appearing in regular keyword search results for local queries provide a more traditional directory format. It could be possible to display the addressless businesses in these listings without pinpointing them on the map.

While Google’s decisions around this are founded on their usual, laudable pro-user-experience bias, this situation isn’t at all desirable from the user’s perspective, either. Most small, established businesses have expectation of being represented in directories and don’t know that they need to rent a post-box to appear here. So, these logic rules are reducing the degree of choice available among providers and reducing competition. Google factors ratings into their rankings, too, and one may assume that some of the best businesses in a local area may not be appearing in Google Maps search results.

If you are one of the small businesses who desires presence in Google Maps without listing your actual street address, I’d recommend that you get your mailbox service at a UPS Store, since it will allow you to use a full street address instead of just a PO box.

To achieve that search engine optimal configuration of your internal linking structure, you need to think strategically about how you “spend” the link juice that has been bestowed on your site through inbound links.

Think of these inbound links as “votes,” and remember that we’re dealing with a meritocracy here, and not a democracy. In other words, not all “votes” are created equal. Of all the pages of your site, it’s probably the home page that has earned the most and best votes and is the most endowed with PageRank. Therefore, your site’s hierarchical tree structure largely determines how your link juice is “spent” within your site. So, I hope you organized your site tree with SEO in mind, not just usability!

One of the most powerful, and most underdeveloped, on-page SEO tactics is rejigging your internal hierarchical linking structure to optimize the flow of link juice. I’ve written about this before, in the context of tag clouds and of breadcrumb navigation. But there’s another way to optimize to your internal linking structure: selectively “nofollowing” some of your internal links. Google engineer Matt Cutts refers to this tactic as “sculpting your PageRank.”

Rel=nofollow (which can be inserted into the HTML of the link like so: <a rel=nofollow href=”whereever”>) was originally developed by the search engines to remove the incentive for blog comment spamming, and the search engines positioned the nofollow as a way to not “vouch” for a link (i.e., not treat it as a “vote” that passes link juice). But the engines have evolved their thinking. They realize now that rel=nofollow is a much more versatile tool than when it was first conceived. Matt Cutts of Google was quoted recently as saying:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g., a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

The way I interpret Matt’s reference to “link-level granularity” as “laser-like precision” — as in: the size and shape of your site’s navigational hierarchy is your blunt instrument and rel=nofollow is your scalpel.

So whip out the scalpel and nofollow your links to low-value internal pages such as: Legal Notices, Privacy Policy, Order Status, Customer Help Center, Testimonials, Email Us, View Shopping Cart, My Account, FAQ, About Us, and Shipping Info. This technique is valid for low-value outbound links too, such as “Click to Verify” VeriSign and HackerSafe seals. Doing so will save a larger share of PageRank for the remaining links to your more important pages (e.g., category pages).

In my interview with Matt Cutts at PubCon, Matt confirmed that links with rel=nofollow weren’t “used for discovery; they are not used for PageRank; they are not used for anchor text in any way.”

Speaking of anchor text, that brings to mind another use for nofollows on internal links: when the anchor text is suboptimal and the link is redundant. For example, I’ve seen countless blogs with multiple links to the same permalink page: one uses the post title as the anchor text, and the others contain such throwaway anchor text as “Continue Reading,” “Comments,” or “Permalink.” In fact, that was one of my Twelve Mistakes that Most Bloggers Make (Mistake #5, to be exact). On ecommerce sites, you’ll see this same phenomenon manifest itself as redundant links leading to product pages: one uses the product name, the other uses throwaway phrases like “Click Here” or “Order Now” or “Product Info” or the product’s price; or the link is an image of the product with an alt attribute of “product_image.”

The first place to begin sculpting PageRank is on your home page, because that page holds so much weight in the search engines’ eyes. Typically, the home page needs fewer links to new or recently-reviewed products, and more to top-selling (and high margin) products, categories, and sub-categories. Often, I’ll see that a retailer’s home page has well over Google’s recommended “100 links per page.” In my aforementioned interview with Matt, he offered further insight into Google’s “100 links” guideline:

“The reason for the 100 links per page guideline is because we used to crawl only about the first 101 kilobytes of a page. If somebody had a lot more than a hundred links, then it was a little more likely that after we truncated the page at a 100 kilobytes, that page would get truncated and some of the links would not be followed or would not be counted. Nowadays, I forget exactly how much we crawl and index and save, but I think it is at least, we are willing to save half a megabyte from each page. So, if you look at the guidelines, we have two sets of guidelines on one page. We have: quality guidelines which are essentially spam and how to avoid spam; and we have technical guidelines. The technical guidelines are more like best practices. So, the 100 links is more like a “best practice” suggestion, because if you keep it under 100, you are guaranteed you are never get truncated.”

By using the “Disable JavaScript” and “View Link Information” functions of the Web Developer Firefox extension, in that order, you can easily obtain your page’s outbound link count. Try to keep it to a reasonable number (ideally under 100), and remember that the more links you have on the page, the smaller the slice of PageRank that each link receives.

To get some insight into how some of the bigger online retailers were sculpting PageRank, I culled through Internet Retailer magazine’s “Hot 100″ Retail Websites using the SEO for Firefox extension, which highlights nofollowed links in red. I wasn’t surprised when I found that hardly any of them employed “nofollows” on their home page to sculpt PageRank. In fact, I found only one doing it to any real degree: Altrec, an outdoor sports retailer that competes with the likes of REI and Cabela’s. Altrec have chosen not to squander their hard-earned link juice on scrolling headlines, Live Chat, “My Store,” and social bookmark services. Admittedly, they could have gone further and nofollowed “Today’s Deal,” “Give Us Your Feedback,” “Shipping & Ordering,” “Privacy & Security,” and “EASY Returns,” to name a few.

Digging a little deeper, I found that Altrec implements nofollows across their site. Sizes, expanded views, duplicate pages, and hot links are all “nofollowed” to sculpt PageRank. As a result, they’ve reduced duplication and passed a larger amount of link juice to their category pages, which appear to rank extremely well. Heck, even product pages have a PageRank of four in many cases. Admittedly, there are many more opportunities for them to further hone the flow of link juice, but they’re off to a great start.

So, what are you waiting for? Get sculpting!

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Click the link below to launch the tutorial.

Video SEO Tutorial with Stephan Spencer.

While savvy companies planned for this season all the way back in the summer, and already have their internet storefronts in order, it’s not too late to do a few more things to insure a business can squeeze out more from gift shoppers on the “Cyber Mondays” following Black Friday.

The first Monday after Thanksgiving is called “Cyber Monday,” although we really should say “Cyber Mondays”—plural—since there are multiple high-traffic Mondays ramping upward and peaking out somewhere around the middle of December.

Source: DoubleClick Performics Chief Marketer blog: holiday peak day planning

Source: comScore Press Release: Cyber Monday E-Commerce Spending Beats Forecast

Although the term “Cyber Monday” was coined just a couple of years back as a conceit to help promote online sales for etailers by creating “buzz” similar to that of Black Friday, the term does describe a very real seasonal trend caused by internet users who are purchasing gifts online or who are looking for offline shops where they’ll buy presents and holiday supplies. For many sites, Mondays have the highest internet usage every week, and this normal trend line becomes even more exaggerated and increased as shoppers flock to find product information, locate stores, or buy online.

Keyword searches for holiday-related subjects traditionally start increasing sharply during the last quarter of every year, maxing out just before Christmas:

Source: Google Trends

It’s thought that the first Monday after Thanksgiving is when this really kicks into high gear, as people return to work from the holidays and squeeze in a moment or two at their office computers trying to find gifts. This year, according to a BIGresearch survey conducted for Shop.org, 54.5 percent of office workers with Internet access, or 68.5 million people will shop for holiday gifts from work, up substantially from 50.7 percent in 2006 and 44.7 percent in 2005. Forrester Research is predicting a 21% increase in online retail sales this year, compared with last.

The internet impact on shopping continues to increase, and changes in search engines’ formatting and layouts of their search results will likely divert users from their initial intentions by some degree. Users searching for products to buy online could easily end up opting to go to a physical store location near them out of concern that they might not receive shipped gifts in time. And, users performing various local searches to find store locations could get lured by contextual advertising into ultimately buying gifts online due to the convenience and free shipping offered by many etailers.

So, if you’re a business that needs holiday shopping to make your year a success, there are two major things you need to enable.

Brick-and-mortar stores need to be optimal for local search—your website should have easy-to-find street address, online map, and phone numbers for each of your locations. You should also be easily found in local search engines and online yellow pages directories.

Online retailers (”e-tailers”) should be findable when consumers use search engines to perform keyword searches for products and types of items that they wish to buy.

Since it can take some time to optimize a site for natural search traffic, and additional time for the search engine bots to index the changes and rank them properly for users to find, even if you did perform some optimization development on your site right now, chances are good that any changes would likely not have sufficient time to help you for this shopping season. But, there’s still a few ways to improve if you haven’t already done so.

Last-minute online optimization tips for local store sites and etailers:

• Brick-and-mortar stores should check their listing information in online yellow pages sites and local search engines. Fix anything that’s incorrect, and those changes have a very good chance of going live within a day or two.
• Brick-and-mortar stores should especially check to see that the Categories they’re listed under are correct. You’d be amazed at how often this is wrong, and how much more business you can get if users find your listing in the categories that are appropriate for them.
• If you’re not on the first page of results for your categories in online yellow pages and local search engines, you might think about advertising right now to get there. Bumping up your prominence will get you noticed more and will result in more conversions.
• For all types of sites, if you’re not already doing Pay-Per-Click advertising, consider buying a few good ads now in major search engines, in online yellow pages, and in other places across the internet where you believe your customers might likely hang out and find you. Afraid it might be too complex to manage hundreds or thousands of keyword ad campaigns if you have many products? Just set up one or two campaigns—it might be worthwhile in traffic for you; some traffic is better than none. Set up ads based on particular product names, product types, your type of store, and ads promoting your offline store locations. Ex: “candy stores in Boston, ma.”
• For e-tailers, consider uploading your products to Google Base so your product pages can get more referral traffic. Google Base feeds into Google Products, and Google Products listings can now appear for some searches, blended into the regular web search results pages (this “blended” format keyword search results page was introduced by Google earlier this year, and it’s called “Universal Search”). Overwhelmed at the thought of developing a database extraction and formatting it correctly? You could perhaps even just upload a very few products and it wouldn’t be a great burden.
• Join the crowd and issue a press release or two, related to the season. Talk about what’s selling hot, or funny things that happened in one of your stores, or what’s ultra-cool to buy this season. Make sure the online press release includes good keywords and links back to your website. A little humor or human interest aspect is particularly effective, too!
• List some of your prime products on eBay, and make sure your product description on there is linked back to your website, too, with a little text like “More items like this at ____” or “Find us online at ___”. Also make sure your item name is very accurate and includes the keywords that most users might use to find you, including a generic kind of name for the product. For example, “GPS Navigation System: Electronics Gifts for Dad.” I know eBay is a bit high on the time it takes to set up a listing and might not seem scalable to you in terms of the hassles of shipping. Think of this as another advertisement, though. You might be surprised how many people will get referred over to your website from a good eBay listing—this is a type of advertisement for you.
• Contact some of your local charities and offer to donate some amount of money for each sale of a certain product of yours if the purchaser shows you a copy of an email note or newsletter printed from the charity website outlining the offer. This can leverage the power of a charity to do promotion on your behalf by emailing their membership, and it also helps benefit a good cause!
• Make sure you’ve prominently promoted a discount of something you carry on your website! Forrester Research says that free shipping will figure heavily for online sales, and that gift cards will be a big winner this year.

Finally, if you’re reading this and need to do some gift shopping yourself, you might try visiting Shop.org’s website, Cyber Monday, which is a nice guide of loads of top online merchants. Cyber Monday’s set up as an affiliate of these etailers, and percentages of all purchases through this shopping portal go to support the Ray M. Greenly Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for students interested in an eCommerce career.

We’re told that more than 500 retailers will be posting holiday promotions and special savings both on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday season, so you might even find some good deals through there. On Cyber Monday itself, more than 400 special offers will be available on the site, some of which will be exclusive promotions only available on CyberMonday.com. Offers will include free shipping specials, doorbuster deals, percentages off, and free gifts with purchase.

May your eHoliday season be very warm and merry!

According to the site’s “About Us” page, Back 40 Books is run by back-to-nature people and the books they sell on their site are predominantly focused on issues related to that lifestyle. It also sounds as if the website was put together by these same outdoor people with little help from web professionals. This is to be commended, but everyone needs a little help sometimes.

In this SEO Report Card featured on Practical eCommerce, Netconcepts’ Search Analyst Jeff Muendel takes an in-depth review of this online bookseller. From recommending “permanent, textual content on their home page” to reflecting on keyword themes and the use of JavaScript and how it affects crawlability of the site, this review highlights areas that many online retailers could keep in mind, in order to improve their site.

In conclusion, Jeff remarks that,

“There are many intriguing and educational books on Back40books.com, and that rich content needs to be better reflected from the home page down. While product pages do feature decent content that is both focused and reflective of potential keywords, even their content could be improved, at the very least by the use of header tags. Get all that Javascript bloat off the pages and into .JS files on the server! Keywords reflected in title tags and URLs will further optimize the site to take full advantage of what search engines have to offer.”

Click the link below to launch the tutorial.
Video Tutorial with Stephan Spencer

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As I state in almost every article, navigation accounts for 40% to 60% of a site’s success at a minimum — emphasis on at a minimum.

Navigation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what I give you. If I give you a lot of choices, you get a lot of choices to choose from. If I give you nothing, you get nothing.

Production Tool Supply has limited navigation. It just doesn’t offer much in terms of choices. Period. If you know what catalog item number you’re looking for, there’s a chance you’ll find it. But if you want to shop or browse at PTS, or as its tagline says, at “America’s Tool Crib,” well, pray for miracles because it’s not exactly possible without divine intervention.

The action bar — the list at the top of the site of the things that a visitor must do or see — showcases Home, Products, Customer Service, About PTS, Specials, and Browse Catalog. Under Products, the company offers Line Card, MSDS, Hardinge Machinery, and Hazard Codes. The entry page for product boasts that it has more than 235,000 PTS products, plus many hard-to-find items.

I guess the operative words are “hard to find,” because if you click on any one of the choices underneath (including abrasives, hand tools, plant and safety, and so on), all you get — and I mean all you get — is an alphabetical list of manufacturers, with one or two clickable links.

And that’s not even the best part. The best part is that when you click those links, you go to that particular manufacturer’s Website. Hello? What year is this — 1998?

There’s no other way to say it: That just plain stinks.

(Yeah, I wanted to say, That just plain sucks. But in my last critique I postulated that a well-known and well-respected Website sucked. To say I got a lot of feedback would be an understatement. Whether they agreed or disagreed that the site sucked, it seems that direct marketers take offense at the word suck.)

It’s bad enough that the site’s Browse Catalog section is one of the world’s most unusable formats — framed PDFs — but driving people to other sites? Granted, PTS does have nifty page and part number finders (helpful if you have a catalog at your side), but neither of those things are enough to make the site shoppable.

The “Specials,” which the site promotes all over, and should be commended for, are colorful ads, offline sales fliers, if you will. But they are not clickable. So if you find something you are interested in or want to learn more about, you’ll need a connection to Dionne Warwick or one of her psychic friends for help determining the part number.

With the Specials sections, PTS is so close, yet so far. If the users could interact with the site, it would be the perfect reason to visit the site on a frequent basis. It’s clear that PTS has everything if you need the sort of stuff it sells, but what good is it if you can’t interact with it? Can’t find it? Can’t buy it?

Granted, navigation is often a difficult thing for companies to improve overnight. It takes time, effort, and a lot of studying of your data (however sparse it may be) to do it right. So what can PTS do to improve its site in the meantime?

First, the merchant should work on its home page. Production Tool Supply’s home page is dismal at best, and not just because of the lack of C-navigation, either. (C-navigation is top, bottom, and left-hand navigation.) The benefit of the page — its simplicity — is also its biggest weakness. If your goal is to sell, you need to show things to buy. PTS does an excellent job of promoting credit card logos, but unless it sells MC, Visa, Discover and AmEx, it’s a waste of space.

What it needs to do is to showcase several (preferably 12 or so) of its most popular items on the entry page. For each product, this would include a picture of the item, a headline and possibly one to two lines about the product and more information, and buy now/add to cart buttons.

PTS should also include a perpetual cart (a shopping cart that stays with you at all times) in the upper right-hand corner. The site could even include a cart in the right column and at the bottom column as well.

If it has the resources, the company could also use its entry page to feature the current specials it offers each week. From a graphical and selling perspective, PTS does a good job with the fliers, and it wouldn’t take a lot to make them into entry pages. It would be good if the site made the products look more discounty (showing the amount of savings). And if PTS employs this type of strategy, it should also make sure to include a deadline.

One of the many benefits of using special offers on the Web is that they create urgency and they cause people to focus. Highlighting that the user has just a few days to take advantage of the offer would be an excellent strategy for PTS.

As stated earlier, PTS boasts it accepts MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express, and that it is VeriSign secured. It offers you options to order with and without registering. Click on “order without registering” and you get four choices — current flier specials, machinery solutions, featured vendors, and introducing NortonSG Blaze. What does clicking on any one of those things get you? More framed PDFs!

PTS desperately needs to find another way to present its products. A PDF is a great format for white papers and such, but it’s definitely not the best for encouraging users to engage in purchasing a product. PTS needs to work on changing this, along with accommodating catalog quick orders and orders from other non-direct/no-referrer channels.

What are the site’s redeeming qualities? Well, for starters it doesn’t have a text search, which is probably a good thing for the merchant. Text search, especially on this number of products, would most likely be the kiss of death, unless PTS invested in a package like Endeca or Mercardo.

The site includes lots of good customer service information — a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions, a complete list of store locations, and links to sales and product support to name a few. But most of its customer service pages are what a user would consider a “dead end.” What is a dead end? It’s a page without pictures.

The thing is, users see things in pictures. Search engines see things in text, but it’s been empirically proven over and over that users will stay longer and/or drill deeper/click more when there’s something (read: a graphic) for them to look at. PTS has a lot of the typical forms on their site — free catalog sign-ups, support requests — and none of them have any associated graphics.

Additionally, PTS should make its “submit” buttons bigger, red in color, and more in-your-face. The site should also make sure that it includes its phone and fax numbers on each form. It’s important to have contact information on every form on your site as those are printed out the most often.

And when someone fills out a request, they should get a thank you confirmation page that sets their expectations. How long will it take to get the catalog? What can I do if I want to order in the meantime? And so on and so forth. This friendly “good dog” page should also give the user five products that they may want to look at in the meantime.

If you are carefully watching your analytics, you should see that you get about a quarter of the people to drill back into the site. If you are not getting that many, you may want to look at and tweak which products you are featuring because it does make all the difference.

A follow-up e-mail thanking customers for whatever it is that they did (e.g., requested a catalog, asked a question) should also be sent. If you can get the e-mail into the user’s inbox within a couple minutes, it will perform best, as the user may still be online even if he or she is not still at your site.

Stephan Spencer

When it comes to search engine optimization, the Production Tool Supply Website is in a terrible state. Despite the company’s extensive catalog, which is 235,000 items strong, PTS makes none of that content available to the search engines.

Only 20 pages exist in Google of the site PTS-Tools.com (according to a search for “site: pts-tools.com”), and of those 20, only one has a title or snippet with it. A lack of title and snippet in a Google listing indicates that the page content has not been indexed; Googlebot knows of that page’s URL through links, but for whatever reason has decided not to spider and index that page.

PTS fares even worse in Yahoo, with only one page indexed. What of the hundreds of thousands of product pages, you may ask? Unfortunately, the online catalog is comprised of print catalog pages converted into PDF documents. Thus, there are no product pages available in HTML.

Making matters worse, the PDFs are displayed within frames, which are notoriously spider unfriendly, and then cookies are required to access the PDFs through PTS’s navigation. Since spiders don’t support cookies, the sessions will always be expired or never started.

PTS visitors with expired sessions are greeted with: “You have been disconnected! If your computer was left unattended for over 20 minutes, you have been automatically disconnected. To sign-on again, close this window and LOGIN.” Trying to access the PDF catalog with cookies turned off yields an “Error 500” message and then a blank screen.

As long as the online catalog content is locked up within PDFs in a framed, cookies-requiring viewer, there’s little point in me critiquing the HTML templates, design, CSS, or other SEO elements. Without content, these are a moot point. People looking for the kinds of products that PTS carries won’t find them in the search engines.

For example, “countersinks” is a category for PTS (as one can see on page 123 of the PDF-based catalog), yet this mildly competitive search term does not present PTS anywhere in the results. Even if the PDF of page 123 were in Google’s index, it wouldn’t rank highly. That’s because it does not have the same capacity to convey contextual clues to the engines that HTML does through semantic markup (e.g., through H1 tags).

It’s even hard to find PTS by name in Google. A Google query for “production tool supply” yields a confusing array of results in the top five, above the fold — all of which have the title of “production tool supply.”

It’s hard to know which is the official site. Turns out the first two listings lead to the home page of the official site, the next two listings lead to other companies. Why is the PTS home page repeated in the first two listings?

Google has a duplicate copy of the PTS site — under the ptsxpress.com domain — because of the lack of a permanent (301) redirect from ptsxpress.com to pts-tools.com. Only eight pages of ptsxpress.com exist in Google, and all of them have snippetless and titleless listings.

Speaking of redirects, requests for www.pts-tools.com receive a temporary (302) redirect to https://www.pts-tools.com/home/home.asp. That is the wrong kind of redirect, as a 302 redirect does not pass PageRank. Also, it’s not a good idea to host your entire public Website under a secure (HTTPS) URL. Instead save HTTPS for your checkout process and for your customer extranet.

Looking at the home page, from a search engine optimization standpoint it is practically content-free. There’s nothing for the spiders to sink their teeth into. The home page text consists of fewer than 30 words, none of which are important keywords.

The major categories of the PTS catalog (abrasives, carbide, fluids, cutting tools, hand tools, etc.) are not represented, either as text or as links, and ideally they should be both. The title tag on the home page doesn’t contain any keywords either, only the company name. It was a shame to waste these prime opportunities. In the eyes of the search engines, the title tag is the most important element on the page, and the home page is the most important page of the site.

The PTS site is also weak on inbound links. Also known as “back links” or “inlinks,” these play a pivotal role in search engine rankings. Without a healthy amount of high quality, relevant, important (highly PageRank endowed) links, a Website will wallow at the bottom of the search results.

Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool reveals 218 inlinks to pts-tools.com. (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2F
www.pts-tools.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s) and 51 inlinks to ptsxpress.com (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2F
www.ptsxpress.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s).

Competitors far outperformed PTS with regards to inbound links: MSC Direct had 5,564 inlinks (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2F
www.mscdirect.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s), J&L Industrial had 2,697 inlinks (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2F
www.jlindustrial.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s), and IDG had 534 inlinks (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2F
www.idglink.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s).

PTS needs to engage in some serious link building to catch up.

This would need to go well beyond directory submissions and into blog marketing, “link baiting” (developing content that is irresistible for bloggers to link to) and “social media marketing” (creating viral marketing campaigns and seeding those campaigns into social networks such as Digg, del.icio.us, Netscape.com, and YouTube).

Putting the 301 redirect in place from ptsxpress.com to pts-tools.com will also help, by aggregating the link popularity that is spread across the two domains.

Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets of good SEO are observed and incorporated.

In this SEO report card originally featured on Practical eCommerce, Netconcepts’ Search Analyst Jeff Muendel takes an in-depth look at how inbound links and sculpting PageRank can help improve the overall site.

Jeff writes how the ScanAlert Hacker Safe logo “bleeds PageRank away from every page, so add NoFollow tags to these links.” Here, the placement of the logo is also an issue since it’s “among the first pieces of code a search engine spider sees on each page. Moving the logo further down the page would be better.” Another valuable find that Jeff discovered was the fact that this site’s error pages were not delivering the proper 404 code, so outdated pages are not dropped from the search engines’ indexes.

In conclusion, Jeff recommends that:

A good link building campaign is what this site needs most! Read Stephan’s article called “Weaving A Web Of Links” for great suggestions on getting started. With that and a few technical changes, Candles And Such will have a website that is optimized at an above-average level. Once inbound links begin to build, they should reap the benefits of their SEO.