Blogging is one of the hottest trends on the web. A new blog is created every 5.8 seconds but, curiously, catalogers and retailers are notably absent from the “blogosphere” — the online blogging world. By lagging behind on this new trend, they’re missing a key opportunity to actively participate in the global online conversation that’s now happening without them.
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Outdoor equipment and clothing company REI used SEO to boost its sales after seeing its competitors achieve consistently higher rankings in the search engines than they were.
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Annual Catalog Conference — Orlando, Florida
Multichannel Merchant editorial director, Sherry Chiger will moderate. Learn about the latest news, trends, and opportunities in multichannel marketing from a panel of leading-edge experts, and take away tips for improving sales and profits.
Sherry Chiger, Editorial Director, Multichannel Merchant Magazine
Amy Africa, President, Creative Results
Ken Burke, CEO, MarketLive Inc.
Founder & President: Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
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This ecommerce site offers a range of items from cabinet hardware to telephone booths and from rubber duckies to magnificent clawfoot bathtubs. AntiqueHardware.com offers original restored antiques as well as flawless replica pieces perfect for any home or office. Visitors are greeted with their own account pages and an easily navigated shopping cart experience.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit The Site: Antique Hardware
Our work with DineWise, a one-stop shop for all your online gourmet frozen food needs, focused on building them a successful E-Commerce platform. DineWise offers chef-prepared meals in convenient, individual packaging that are ready in minutes. This required high-level database integration to handle the complexity of the DineWise product line, while offering user-friendly, customized meal planning to online purchasers. The development and launch of www.dinewise.com has allowed DineWise to become one of the nation’s premier online providers of complete meal solutions, specializing in customized meals and meal planning for diabetic and healthy lifestyles.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit the Site: DineWise
AmCham Breakfast — Auckland, New Zealand
Four speakers from leading companies give you the good oil on how to succeed in the USA!
Speaker #1: Neville Jordan, Executive Chairman, Endeavour Capital
Neville Jordan, CNZM, is the Executive Chairman of venture capital company Endeavour Capital. He founded Lower Hutt-based MAS Technology in 1976, growing it into a $100 million-a-year exporter which successfully listed on the NASDAQ in 1997. Neville was recently inducted into the NZ Hitech Hall of Fame. As an entrepreneur who has “been there and done that” in the US market, Neville will share practical hints and tips on selling into, and doing business with the US.
Speaker #2: Dr Paul Cossum, CEO, Proacta
Dr Paul Cossum is CEO of Auckland start-up cancer drug developer Proacta, which was named Biotechnology Company of the Year in the 2004 Westpac New Zealand Hi Tech Awards. Paul has 20 years of drug development industry experience in the US. He was most recently Executive Vice President of Drug Development at San Diego-based NewBiotics Inc. Paul will offer insights on attracting investment from US companies, as well as outline some of the pros and cons of setting up shop in the US.
Speaker #3: Stephan Spencer, Managing Director, Netconcepts
Stephan Spencer is the founder and managing director of Netconcepts, an online marketing and web development company specialising in e-commerce, website auditing and search engine optimisation. With headquarters in Browns Bay, Auckland, and offices in Madison, Wisconsin, Netconcepts delivers interactive services to US clients such as AOL and Verizon. Stephan brought Netconcepts to NZ from the US in 2000. He has successfully grown operations in the U.S. and is in an ideal position to provide, from an American’s perspective, unique insights for NZ businesses on how to best operate and market themselves in the U.S.
Speaker #4: Nigel Kirkpatrick, CEO, Industrial Research Limited
Nigel Kirkpatrick is the CEO of Industrial Research Limited, New Zealand’s leading industrial scientific research company. Nigel has substantial international business development experience. Before returning home to New Zealand in 2002 to head up IRL, he was the Zurich-based global innovation leader for DiverseyLever.
The US is a key market for IRL and one where it has been successful in winning key contracts.
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Etail 2004 — Fort Lauderdale, FL
Panelists:
Lorna Borenstein, VP & GM, eBay
Fiona Swerdlow, Vice President, e-Commerce, Tommy Hilfiger USA, Inc.
Ruth Crowley, VP, General Merchandise, Harley Davidson
Brian Klais, VP, eBusiness Services, Netconcepts
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Many ecommerce sites have session IDs or user IDs in the URL of their pages. This tends to cause either the pages to not get indexed by search engines like Google, or to cause the pages to get included many times over and over, clogging up the index with duplicates (this phenonemon is called a “spider trap”). Furthermore, having all these duplicates in the index causes the site’s importance score, known as PageRank, to be spread out across all these duplicates (this phenonemon is called “PageRank dilution”).
Ironically, Googlebot regularly gets caught in a spider trap while spidering one of its own sites - the Google Store (where they sell branded caps, shirts, umbrellas, etc.). The URLs of the store are not very search engine friendly: they and are overly complex, and include session IDs. This has resulted in 3,440 duplicate copies of the Accessories page and 3,420 copies of the Office page, for example.
If you have a dynamic, database-driven website and you want to avoid your own site becoming a spider trap, you’ll need to keep your URLs simple. Try to avoid having any ?, &, or = characters in the URLs. And try to keep the number of “parameters” to a minimum. With URLs and search engine friendliness, less is more.
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Our favorite tips for online catalogers: automatic spell correction on search queries, breadcrumb navigation, keyword themes, top 10 lists, open source, 1-click ordering, and more…
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In an interview with MultiChannelMerchant, Stephan Spencer had this to say to the announcement that Yahoo! would stop using Google’s technology in favor of its own search engine, and what it would mean for catalogers.
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HEADQUARTERS
2820 Walton Commons West, Suite 123
Madison, WI 53718 USA
Phone: (608) 285-6600
Toll-free: 888 207-1109
REGIONAL OFFICE
36 Anzac Rd., Browns Bay
Auckland, New Zealand
Phone: (+64) 9 476-4601
infodesk@netconcepts.com
