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.

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!

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.”

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.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of the “Long Tail,” it refers to the extremely long right-hand portion of the distribution graph, usually of an online retailer’s product inventory. The term was coined by the Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. In comparison, the head occupies very little of the X-axis but is full of the “top hits” and best sellers. Put another way, the head represents the “vital few” and the tail represents the “trivial many.” Anderson argued that the tail could actually add up to as much business as the head for an online retailer with unlimited virtual shelf space and therefore seemingly infinite selection, as is the case for Amazon.com and Netflix.

There are “Long Tail” distribution graphs when it comes to SEO too. Consider the distribution of a keyword portfolio or the distribution of search-delivered traffic among indexed pages of a website. A handful of your search terms are your vital few, driving much of your business — in terms of paid and organic search. A handful of your web pages pull in most of your search visitors. For an online retailer, I purport that the “Long Tail” is where the growth potential in search lies, due to less competition and higher conversion rates. In other words, it will be easier to rank for an esoteric search term containing a model number or a string of keywords, and the visitor brought in through such a query is more likely to turn into a sale.

Typically, there are the several “trophy terms” that the CEO always checks first in the morning. Assuming those search terms are popular with search engine users too, which is not always a given, then these represents part of the “head.” If your rankings drop for a trophy term, I bet you’ll hear about that — probably from the CEO himself/herself. The thing is, trophy term watchers aren’t seeing the big picture. Sure, the head is important, don’t get me wrong. But the tail is just as important, in fact perhaps more so.

Let’s contrast optimizing for the head with optimizing for the “Long Tail.” When optimizing for the head, the home page and secondary level pages represent your best opportunity, because those are the pages most highly endowed with link juice (PageRank). Therefore, you’d focus your energies on optimizing these top-level pages first, targeting no more than three keyword themes per page. The more popular the head keywords are with searchers, the better. You’d place the targeted search term in the title tag, in the H1 tag, and high up in the body copy. You’d further reinforce that page’s PageRank by building inbound links direct to that page and through your internal linking structure. With the internal links, you’d want to consistently incorporate the targeted keywords into the anchor text. With the inbound links, you would not always want the same anchor text, as that doesn’t look natural.

But what should you do to capture the “Long Tail” of SEO? That requires a different plan of attack.

You’ll need to cast a much wider net. Individually optimizing thousands of pages by hand doesn’t make sense; it just won’t scale. Instead, channel your energy into optimizing your HTML templates, your URLs and your internal linking structure because your efforts there are capable of creating cascading effects throughout your website.

Focus on unbranded keywords, as those offer much greater growth potential.

Treat your consumers as content co-creators — populating product reviews, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and so on with content — thus incorporating your consumers’ vocabulary into your site.

Employ a “Long Tail” SEO approach that we at Netconcepts call “thin slicing.” It involves touching key elements such as title tags and heading tags across thousands of pages quickly, monitoring for impact, and refining based on those results.

Incorporate tag clouds in your site to flatten your internal linking structure and interject keyword-rich text links.

Syndicate your site content (and links) via RSS feeds, as the “Long Tail” is determined in part by the efficient distribution of pages.

And finally, identify your “freeloaders” — the pages in your site that drive no search traffic. Most e-commerce sites are comprised mainly (e.g. 80 plus percent) of “freeloader” pages. Most merchants don’t even know this, or recognize it to be a problem. No JavaScript-based analytics package will tell you this either. It’s an indication you lack a “Long Tail” of unbranded keyword traffic.

Amy Africa

I love Red Envelope. The catalog breaks many traditional direct marketing rules, which is one of my pet peeves, yet I still think it’s fantastic.

I like the products. Red Envelope has a great selection of unique gifts for weddings, new arrivals, anniversaries, birthdays, thank yous, and especially holidays. Its merchants pick quality items that are often accompanied by excellent visual representation, good stories, and topnotch packaging.

The company has great online and offline customer service. Its phone reps are consistently friendly and helpful, and its LivePerson-hosted chat is probably one of the best and most efficient around.

And I think Red Envelope’s Website sucks.

Granted, it does a lot of things right. But for a company its size and with a reputation as one of the best places to find a present, RedEnvelope should be doing a lot of things better. A lot better, in fact.

Let’s start by reviewing the site’s search and navigation.

In recent months, Red Envelope has made major improvements in the site’s navigation. It is now using at-a-glance, left-hand navigation (albeit inconsistently) on the entry page to help you find gifts faster.

You can find gifts by occasion, recipient, and shops (what’s new, favorites, home and garden, and so on.) It also has links to business gifts, gift certificates, last-minute gifts, and the sale shop. Hopefully, you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for, because the text search function leaves so much to be desired it’s almost humorous.

A quick search for “food” yields Murano heart bracelets, baby milestone photo frames, and a grilling set — among other things. Is that the best example I can come up with? Probably not. A search for “cigar” gets you a crocodile-embossed wallet. “Bar” yields a golfer’s shoe carrier. “Sale” finds 35 items, 10% of which don’t even have special pricing. “Kids” gets you therapeutic spa slippers — and if you buy them, Acorn (the company that makes them) will donate to Earth-care concerns or a children’s charity. “Business associate” yields exactly zero results, which is interesting because it’s one of their navigational drop-downs.

This list goes on and on, and I haven’t even begun to mention the particularly amusing things — like when you search for “wedding,” you get 26 items, one of which is a personal compass.

The search refinement function — which is a must-have for any site — has good choices. You can sort by favorites, new items, catalog items (kind of odd), and price high to low and price low to high. Copious testing shows that it’s not always consistent, but at least it’s a good start.

Another thing that’s missing from a navigational perspective is a recently viewed items listing. The site does employ breadcrumbs, just not a listing of items you’ve looked at. So if you find something that you want, you’d better put it in your “shopping bag” because if you don’t, you have to find it again, which isn’t always easy.

When it comes to asking for the order, I hear it all the time: “When you’re a hoity-toity, chi-chi-la-la site, you don’t feel like you should be too aggressive.” But it’s been empirically proven — over and over — that the more you ask for the order, the more customers think you want it. The little, red “add to bag” with the mini, mouse-sized font on the second view doesn’t really show much interest on Red Envelope’s part.

Web designers will design things as one page, but users see things differently. They see every view as a different page. If they have to scroll down, it’s “another page.” So if you don’t have a request-for-the-order on the page they are looking at, you’re not going to get as much conversion as you would if you have it on say, every view, like Collectibles Today (www.collectiblestoday.com) does.

Of course, the big difference between a gift site like Collectibles Today (a division of Bradford Exchange) is that it asks for the order on every view and reminds you how much it wants the sale by showing you a perpetual cart, actually three of them, throughout the site. (A PC, perpetual cart, is a cart that stays with you at all times. Collectibles Today uses one at the top, the right-hand, and the bottom of their navigation.)

Asking for the order on every view, adding perpetual carts, allowing people to buy an item when they see it (for example, on category and gate pages), are all little things that go a long way to making viewers feel that you are interested in their purchase.

The Red Envelope shopping bag/cart/U-Haul truck needs work. It’s functional if you order one gift, but if you order two or more to be shipped to different addresses, you’d better have a Ph.D. and a heck of a lot of patience. Here’s why:

Say I want to buy two gifts, one for my friend Barbara and another one for my friend/client Linda. I go through the site and pick out a gift for each of them.

That part is simple it has a nice and easy to use “select name from this list or add your own” feature so, on the product page, I can assign the individual’s name to the gift. Barbara has a sweet tooth so she gets Dancing Deer Chewy Brownies, and Linda has done a huge favor for me so she gets the brownies and a random “office-munchies”-type food collection in a spiffy green box.

At the product level, you can decide whether or not you want to pay $4.95 for their signature red gift box and you can read the story that’s going to go along with your present. “Every gift has a story.”

When you get to the checkout, it’s a train wreck. The bill-to section is fine, but the shipping address section? It’s just a flipping number! The first part says “shipping address” with a list of required fields and optional gift message. The second part? Well, that says shipping address too! You have four choices: 1) you remember how you added things to your cart; 2) you guess how you added things to your cart; 3) you go back to the view cart page and see what you order ed and then type them in accordingly; or for the best (and most likely!) choice of all; YOU ABANDON. I mean really.

If you’ve ordered from Red Envelope before (as I have, under many different names and various addresses) and have someone in your address book, it will say “Barbara Shipping and Gift Message.” Not that it matters though: The name pops up but the address doesn’t. I’m not exactly sure what good it is to have an address book that doesn’t keep addresses.

The order summary allows you to change anything you’d like to change about the address. With that said, removing an item is impossible unless you go back to the beginning and start all over from the view page.

On top of the pressing payment information, it asks “how did you hear about us?” There’s a handy drop-down with choices (in no apparent order) and the field is not required, but this is not exactly the place for it. Emphasis on not exactly.

One of the benefits of the Red Envelope shopping bag is that after you submit your order, you can set up a gift reminder where “each year, they’ll remind you 14 and 4 days before the occasion.”

Because subtlety is Red Envelope’s middle name, it doesn’t upsell at all at the view shopping bag level or in the checkout. Harry & David, another seller of gifts, has a nice feature: If you order something for someone else, you are given an incentive to order something for yourself.

Red Envelope misses out on several other opportunities. It waits until the 11th hour to address security — still an important issue for many folks. It also doesn’t have a traditional temperature bar (a proven technique to guide the user through the process) or ways to easily print your cart, view your cart, save your cart, or e-mail your cart to yourself.

The latter is a big issue because the site appears to delete abandoned carts at a moment’s notice so if you’re shopping during the day when you’re not supposed to be (read: at work), you may or may not have your cart when you come back.

Red Envelope also does not allow you to choose when your item is going to be shipped — it allows you to choose standard, next day, and second day delivery options, but if I want to order my Christmas presents right after Thanksgiving, I can’t instruct the site to wait until almost Christmas to send them. (1-800-Flowers.com does an excellent job at this.)

As I mentioned earlier, Red Envelope has excellent merchandising It has great photography — the pictures are nicely done, and in several of the products it uses multiple visuals. The copy is okay, not perfect but definitely not the world’s worst either.

So, how can the site “suck”?

The thing is that navigation is 40% to 60% of a site’s success, at a minimum, and its navigation, although much improved, is still weak at best. That, and its somewhat dismal shopping bag, leave a site that’s far from perfect and definitely not as good as it should be.

It doesn’t matter who you are: You can’t ignore the stuff that’s important.

Stephan Spencer

Red Envelope’s Website is powered by BroadVision, a sophisticated e-commerce platform when it comes to functionality — but not when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The home page redirects to a very search engine-unfriendly URL with seven parameters in the query string. That is way too many for the tastes of any of the three major search engines.

What’s worse, one of those parameters is a session ID. Session IDs are anathema to search engines, as they create an infinite number of URLs that point to the same content. Also, the URL is three directories deep. Category and subcollection page URLs are similarly unfriendly to spiders, with three directories deep and up to nine parameters (in other words: eight ampersands).

Google reveals in its cached copy of the home page (i.e., search Google for “cache:www.redenvelope.com”) links containing session IDs. Furthermore, a Google search for “inurl:BV_SessionID site:redenvelope.com” confirms that session ID-containing URLs are making it into Google’s index, which is bad news because a URL with a session ID will obtain only a minimal number of links.

The category and subcollection pages are not making it into the search engines at all — not because of their spider unfriendly URLs, but because they are being specifically blocked through “disallow” directives in the site’s robots.txt file. Robots.txt is the place where you can give commands to Googlebot and the other spiders, such as “stay away from this directory” or “stay away from this file type.”

Looking at the site’s robots.txt file, I see that category pages, sub-collection pages and product information pages are all being disallowed. You might wonder why this is the case. Wouldn’t Red Envelope want these pages indexed and ranked, despite any inherent search engine unfriendliness? Well, in this case, the answer is no.

That’s because Red Envelope has alternate pages for the spiders to index, using a technology called SearchDex. SearchDex autogenerates thousands (more precisely, 2,250, according to Google search results) of sitemap pages. These doorway pages (such as the one at http://www.redenvelope.com/giftcatalog/Ccat10095.jsp) are built specifically to lead spiders to product-level content pages.

These SearchDex “Ccat” pages may appear to be full of meaty, keyword-rich content, but upon closer examination of the content, it is quite apparent that the content was not written by a human. For example, consider this fine prose in the second sentence of the first paragraph on the aforementioned Ccat10095.jsp: “Our men’s accessories range from men’s fashion accessories to men’s leather accessories, which are reasonably priced and unique to RedEnvelope.com.” Yuck!

Or consider the lead sentences on http://www.redenvelope.com/giftcatalog/Ccat10629.jsp: “Great Christmas presents make holidays magic. Unique Christmas presents from our collection of our newest gifts this Christmas season will bring good cheer.”

It’s throwaway copy from the reader’s perspective, but certainly dense with keywords: 10 occurrences of “accessories” and “men’s” in the first paragraph of the former example, seven occurrences of either “Christmas presents” or “Christmas present” in the second example.

There are names for this black hat SEO tactic, none of which are complimentary: “keyword stuffing,” “spamglish,” and “doorway page” are just three that come to mind. This is a search engine ban waiting to happen.

Also in the aforementioned paragraph on Ccat10629.jsp, the words “my Christmas presents” are actually wrapped within heading tags, yet that fact is hidden from the user. The headings are given the exact same font, style, and treatment as the rest of the paragraph copy, so they are indistinguishable from the surrounding text and buried within the paragraph.

Links within the paragraph copy are hidden in the same way. Clearly, this was done only for search engines and not for humans. This is definitely the sort of thing that Google’s automated algorithms seek to detect and penalize.

The title tags are similarly keyword-stuffed. A good rule of thumb with title tags is not to repeat a word three times and not to repeat more than two words. In the title tag of the aforementioned page (Ccat10629.jsp), “Christmas presents” is repeated twice, “gifts” is repeated three times, and then “gift.” Furthermore, the title spans 17 words — too long. I would go for a dozen words or less.

Looking again at the cached version of the home page (the one that Googlebot was given), I see that the majority of links on that page are wasted, because they link to category and subcollection pages that are being disallowed. Where are the links to the SearchDex pages?

There’s only one SearchDex link — to the top page of the SearchDex sitemap. And that’s quietly tucked away in the copyright line at the bottom of the page, since the linked page is not really meant for human consumption, only for spiders. There are no graphics on this sitemap page; it is a page chock-full of text links to various SearchDex Ccat pages.

Links contained on the home page along with their anchor text count heavily toward SEO. For instance, the “jewelry” text link would, in normal circumstances, help the linked page rank well for jewelry-related searches. That’s because the search engines associate the anchor text with the page being linked to. Not so here; these navigation links are of no value because of the disallow.

If the “jewelry” category page weren’t disallowed, it would be unlikely to rank well due to the lack of text content on the page. Contained on this page, however, are text links to search results pages. Search results pages can make for good search engine fodder, but fewer than 100 of these search results pages are making it into Google’s index. And nearly all of those are in the supplemental index — an indicator that they are unlikely to rank well in all but obscure queries.

The logo in the top left on all the pages across the site (with the exception of the SearchDex pages) links to the home page — but using the spider unfriendly URL complete with session ID, rather than http://www.redenvelope.com/. Thus these links pass PageRank to a different version of the home page rather than reinforcing the PageRank of the true home page.

Although you wouldn’t be able to tell this from the Google toolbar (due to the unique session ID-containing URL you will have been redirected to upon visiting), RedEnvelope.com has a respectable home page PageRank. By using the “PageRank Lookup” tool from SEOChat.com, I was able to determine that the home page scores a 6 out of 10.

But since PageRank is on a logarithmic scale, 6 is not as good as you may think — a 7 or an 8 would be much better. SEOChat’s “PageRank Search” tool reveals something rather alarming: The majority of the SearchDex auto-generated pages score 0 out of 10, particularly at the product level. A number of Ccat pages have a PageRank 2 or 3, and only a few have a PageRank 4.

Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) reveals quite a healthy set of inlinks — from blogs, shopping sites, news articles, directories, and so on. Yahoo counts nearly 20,000 inlinks (excluding internal links). With some re-architecting of the site, this “link juice” could really be much more effectively leveraged across Red Envelope’s site. That — along with rewriting the URLs to eliminate session IDs and “stop characters” (ampersands, equal signs, question marks) from the URLs; discontinuing the questionable SEO tactics of doorway pages and hidden links; and adding meaty content — should have a profound impact on Red Envelope’s rankings and search traffic.

Read this article about product reviews here, and learn how to take control over your product sales through review management and product level search engine optimization.