Ecommerce Articles social media

Meeting Focus: Search Engine Optimization

This session focuses on balancing search-engine friendly practices with a persuasive and engaging visitor experience. Leading search engine optimization trends and advanced techniques for optimizing sites will be discussed by industry experts and Chris Murvine, Global Internet Marketing Manager at Promega will share advanced Google tips and tricks. There will also be a hands-on component in the afternoon with exercises to apply learnings and to develop SEO strategies you can use for your organization.

Presentors:
Jody Hartwig, Vice President, E-Business
Jeff Muendel, Online Marketing Analyst

UW Consortium event description page

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How do you communicate with your customers and build your brand? Are you talking at them, or do you have an online dialogue with them? Stepping into social media allows merchants the opportunity to speak to customers and build a brand-loyal community. This requires loss of some control, since customers will be generating their own content. It is worth the investment. Written for Multichannel Merchant, Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer and analyst Tim Gill discuss the benefits of social media for merchants.

Retailers can leverage this dialog to gain insight into marketing research, generate product feedback, conduct merchandise testing, and initiate product improvements. By taking a dialog approach to social media instead of a louder, flashier version of commercial interruption, you can learn what consumers want, and how they want it, on a one-to-one basis.

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

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Web users rely on community-contributed-content sites such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. These sites enable you to communicate directly with an engaged audience. But contribute to the conversation with care. Too much spin and you’re credibility will be shot-and your brand damaged. You’ll come away from this session knowing how these influential sites work and how to participate constructively.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex
Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts

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Wikipedia is powerful. Concerned about how your company or service is portrayed? Wikipedia experts answer your questions and take you live to the site for advice on how to interact with the service.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Lise Broer “Durova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Jeff Muendel, Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts

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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.

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How do you navigate your way through the promises, uncertainties, and red herrings of SEO best practices? Testing is the key to achieving scalable SEO nirvana on your site. By monitoring and retesting specific SEO enhancements, you validate their benefit and appropriateness for your e-commerce site.

While conversion may be the hot topic for online retailers and marketers, having a well-optimized Website and e-commerce platform that facilitates your pages being efficiently crawled, indexed, and ranked is equally important. With a little upfront polishing, your site can really shine, offering its products to searchers and devoted customers alike.

Consider the following proven best practices as a starting point for your SEO testing regimen…

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Do you know what the difference is between SEO and online marketing? Confused about the terminology? In this article featured on Practical eCommerce, Jeff Muendel discusses how SEO is a specialty within the online marketing field.

By definition, SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website with the goal of having major search engines (primarily Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search) return pages from that website in highly-ranked search engine results. SEO is almost always employed as a form of marketing, but it is a very specific form of marketing that takes place within the search engines.

Lately, some industry blogs have suggested that SEO has grown beyond its primary parameters, suggesting that successful SEO includes expanding into other realms of marketing. I don’t think that makes any sense. By definition, SEO - search engine optimization - does not include any form of marketing that goes outside of search engines. The use of the term SEO in such a way is disingenuous and confuses many webmasters and owners of ecommerce sites.

For more about this controversial topic, visit the full article on Practical eCommerce here.

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Are you interested in doing some content optimization for your website? Do you know the difference between keyword suggestion tools and keyword analytics tools? In this article, written by Director of Natural Search Consulting PJ Fusco, learn about how keyword suggestion tools can really help boost the quality of your content optimization. PJ defines Keyword analytics tools as:

Keyword suggestion tools help you understand what words are used in search queries and what phrases are associated with those words. Keyword analytical tools provide some measure of keyword suggestion functionality, as well as the ability to understand the competition levels for specific search terms. More importantly, keyword analytics tools help you determine the relative size of the search referral market associated with specific keywords and phrases.

Read more about keyword analytics tools and how effective they might be for your site in this article at ClickZ here.

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Are you keeping track of how much Google values your home page? Google’s trademarked PageRank score, or the value it places on your home and interior pages is measured and displayed in the Google toolbar. Your home page usually scores the higest in your site, and there is a way to ‘sculpt‘ your interlinking within your site to make the most of your PageRank:

With PageRank sculpting, your goal is to optimize the flow of PageRank internally in your site so that the most important of your deeper pages get a larger share of PageRank than unimportant pages.

To read the full article go to MarketingProfs.

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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:

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