Netconcepts

Shop.org Roundtable: Thorny SEO Issues for Retailers

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:18:37 +0000

Are you attending the Shop.org Annual Summit? Join Netconcepts Founder & President Stephan Spencer as he facilitates this roundtable discussion on “Faceted (Attribute-based) Navigation and Other Thorny SEO Issues for Retailers“.

To read the details of the full conference visit the Shop.org conference website.

SEO Report Card: Littlepixiegifts.com.au

Jeff Muendel — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:47:21 +0000

A SEO review of this site and the Best Practices in use, as well as opportunities for new optimization. Analyst Jeff Muendel of Netconcepts goes through the site with a fine tooth comb. Learn from his findings on how to analyze your ecommerce website and tweak it in time for holiday traffic.

If Little Pixie Gifts has an SEO weak point, it is in the URLs. As search engines spider the URL addresses along with title tags and page content, each URL should reflect the keyword theme of the page. Instead, Little Pixie Gifts has URLs like http://www.littlepixiegifts.com.au/cart.php?target=category&category_id=62. While such a URL doesn’t necessarily hurt things from a search engine perspective, it certainly doesn’t help.

To read the full article, visit Practical Ecommerce.

Be a Converter

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:09:13 +0000

Do you know your website’s conversion rate? Do you know if it is above or below average for a typical merchant? The average conversion rate is only about 2.4%. How can you increase your site’s conversion rate? Learn from Netconcepts Founder & President, Stephan Spencer about how to improve your organization’s website to become a better converter. In this article for MultiChannel Merchant, Stephan discusses the use of Persuasion Architecture, how to design for different personality types, analyze your audience’s needs and to adjust your tone.

Technology is not a means to higher conversion rates; it is just a tool that must be properly managed, configured, and implemented in order to reach your goals. Just having a great CMS with an advanced shopping cart system is not enough — there are no “set it and forget it” solutions for improving your conversion rate.

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

Social Media Tips and Tricks

Netconcepts — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:03:15 +0000

Interviewed by Jim Hedger of Metamend, Stephan Spencer, founder & president of Netconcepts, recaps a few tips, and tricks from his session at SES Toronto 2008. If you missed this powerful session at SES, learn some nuggets of useful link building tricks from one of the masters.

View the full video interview here.

Link Building Strategies for Internet Retailers

Netconcepts — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:06:12 +0000

In this video Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts President & Founder is interviewed at the Internet Retailer conference by Get Elastic about Link Building strategies for online retailers. How can your organization increase PageRank to interior pages? Does a link building initiative mean building links only to your home page? What is ‘PageRank sculpting‘, and how can it impact a website?

To view the video interview and learn more on this topic, go here.

SEO: How Creative Link Building Can Multiply Site Traffic

Patricia Fusco — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:13:09 +0000

The right links are fuel for a retail web site’s search engine rankings. But building the right links is among the most difficult, misunderstood and poorly executed aspects of search engine optimization. There are two kinds of links that retailers should focus on to improve such rankings. Links from an e-retailer’s product page to other relevant product pages within the site—with relevant, as judged by the search engine spider, being the keyword—is one type. But a retailer can’t just put a bunch of links on a site to achieve a higher rank without taking into account whether the links achieve business goals. Such links must make merchandising and business sense, otherwise they will interfere with the shopper’s experience and possibly have a deleterious effect on a retail site. The second kind of link is links coming into a site from external sources, which retailers have a lot less control over. A link from a hunting magazine to an outdoor retail site is a link from an authoritative external site and those kinds of links can boost a retailer’s search rankings. But they are much harder to achieve because they require persuading the outside site to link to the retailer’s site, a mostly manual process. This session will examine criteria for evaluating a link’s value, creative link building strategies, link building dos and don’ts, and how to leverage affiliates and social media content. It will tell attendees how seemingly innocent practices can undermine a search engine optimization program and how best practices in search marketing are likely to change in the near future.

Workshop Presenters:
P.J. Fusco, Senior Consultant, NetConcepts
Mark Kaufman, Associate Vice President, CNet Findability, CNet

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

Stephan Spencer — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:24:29 +0000

Want to learn how to build a database of high-value link acquisition targets? Want to know how to get on the radar of nonprofits, government and university departments and compel them to give you some of that sweet, authoritative link love? Want to learn the most coveted secrets to “buying” the links the engines would never consider a “paid link?” This, along with non-traditional link sources, linking strategies and nofollow PageRank “scuplting” or “siloing” are covered in the session.

Moderator:
Greg Boser, President/CEO, 3 Dog Media

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
Jay Young, Owner, Link Fish Media, Inc.

Tuesday, June 3rd - Day 1
10:45am - 12:00pm

Secrets for Getting More & Better Links for Higher Search Rankings

Stephan Spencer — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:42:32 +0000

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

SEO Report Card: Pinkorpunk.com

Jeff Muendel — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:31:01 +0000

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.

Being Off-Topic, Off-Message, or Off-Brand Can Be Good For Your SEO!

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:26:23 +0000

Ok, perhaps I’m being a bit provocative here, but sometimes it’s the off-topic, off-message, or off-brand content that earns you the most valuable links—links that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Those links can really pay the bills, in terms of the extra search traffic and resulting sales. The brand police within your company may pitch a fit, but heck, it’ll be worth it! Here’s how it’s done:

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.