In part one of adventures in searchandising, PJ Fusco, lead strategist for Netconcepts, discussed how traditional merchandising methods are not optimal for online retail stores for a variety of reasons. PJ Fusco described “how merchandising strategies for brick-and-mortar retail stores don’t necessarily translate well for search engine referrals when incorporated into virtual, online retailer environments.”
As the middle of this three-part article, adventures in searchandising part two, PJ describes the effect of guided navigation and extreme pagination on the search engines. She writes,
It takes longer to crawl a searchandise-bloated site, so crawl efficiency is dampened. Over time, spiders take smaller bites of the site each time they visit, so indexed pages become stale. Fusty pages get fewer click-throughs, reduced traffic inhibits link building and page popularity, and so the downward spiral of search engine invisibility begins — all because the site provides a great user experience.
What can an e-commerce site do to add context and meaning to navigational searchandising and avoid the affects of extreme pagination while delivering a superior user experience? We’ll talk about some options next time.
With detailed examples and PJ’s expertise, this article focuses on the challenges many eCommerce sites face while they try to “searchandise.” For how to navigate through this fascinating aspect of online retail merchandising, read more about PJ’s recommended solutions in Part Three.
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In early December, I spoke at the PubCon conference where I had the chance to sit down with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti-spam team.
Matt was kind enough to agree to an interview, where he shared invaluable tips about Flash, syndicating content, the change to their supplemental results, and a lot more. His insight and advice is really helpful; he provides clarity on topics that can be really confusing.
If you prefer a written transcript, you can read the interview transcript with Matt Cutts on my blog. I invite you to listen to the podcast interview, which is available now.

Interview with Google's Matt Cutts [31:50m]:
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In September 2007, Spencer revisited the SEO progress of Discountflies.com, and reports his findings in the video tutorial below.
This video tutorial requires Flash Player version 8 or above.
Click the link below to launch the tutorial.
Video SEO Tutorial with Stephan Spencer.
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Many local companies depend upon their information’s presence in various directories in order to advertise themselves, and the basic instrument of these marketing efforts is the Business Profile. The majority of businesses out there pay little attention to these beyond wanting their name, address, and phone numbers to be correct. However, there are far more components of business profiles beyond the bare basics, and this article will outline many of them and how they should be handled for best effect. Optimizing business listings and profiles can make all the difference in enabling potential customers to find you and in selecting you from your pack of competitors.
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PubCon 2007 — Las Vegas, NV
Learn the best tips, tools, and techniques for non-traditional optimization for both indexing as well as ranking support. This includes files such as PDFs, docs, podcasts and RSS feeds.
Panelists:
Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development Content Acquisition, Google
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
George Aspland, Founder & President, eVision
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Search Engine Strategies — Chicago, IL
Regular search engines can’t understand text trapped within images, and this session looks at strategies to combat this problem for the image-intensive site. It also examines how to generate traffic using your images via image-specific search engines.
Speakers:
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Chris Smith, Lead Search Strategist, Netconcepts
Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
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As Part One of a three part series featured on ClickZ, PJ Fusco, Lead Strategist for Netconcepts discusses the concept of “searchandising.” Many merchants understand what it means to “merchandize” or make “products in retail outlets available to consumers, primarily by stocking shelves and displays,” according to Wikipedia. PJ goes on to explain why brick-and-mortar merchandising tactics don’t work on the web.
…merchandising strategies for brick-and-mortar retail stores don’t necessarily translate well for search engine referrals when incorporated into virtual, online retailer environments. Add a layer or 57 of behavior targeting and personalization tactics to online merchandising and you’ve got “searchandising,” which works exceedingly well for internal site search functionality and usability, but not so much for Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live Search.
For more about searchandising, read the complete article at ClickZ by PJ Fusco.
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Jeff Muendel writes in this article featured on Practical eCommerce:
Traffic down? Conversions starting to wane? It could be any number of SEO issues. Finding free online tools to hone search optimization for an ecommerce site can be tough. There are a lot of them out there, often promotional in nature, and they offer varying degrees of features and reliability. Some spit out data that is simply erroneous and applying this sort of information to website design can be useless at best and deadly, in Internet terms, of course, at worst.
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“Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers. But, for each Monday after Black Friday, consumer searches spike up on the internet and online retail websites enjoy their highest traffic and associated sales of the year. Search engine use is directly impacting businesses during this period, and companies which haven’t optimized their internet presence stand to lose out on some of the sales they could be getting if consumers could find them. This is true for online businesses as well as for brick-and-mortar stores.
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.
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“In this era of Web 2.0, it seems that blogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, and wikis have been the buzzwords occupying most of the limelight. But personally, tagging is the Web 2.0 technology that excites me the most, because of its versatility and wide applicability,” writes Stephan Spencer, President and Founder of Netconcepts, in this article written for Search Engine Land. Find out how you can utilize effective tagging for your website, social bookmarks, or other Web 2.0 functionality to get the most out of tagging and SEO.
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