Panelists:
Lauren Freedman, President, the e-tailing group
Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts
Amy Africa, President, Eight by Eight

• Abandonment metrics - for uncovering why visitors are leaving your site prematurely
• Conversion metrics - for insight into your acquisition funnel
• Retention metrics - for boosting your customer retention
• Search engine metrics - for obtaining the best return on your search marketing investment
• Email marketing metrics - for achieving the highest response rates from your email campaigns

Is your web site successful? Is your online marketing — including your SEO, paid search ads, email campaigns — all working, and how can you find out? The answer lies in metrics. It’s hard to improve upon something you’re not measuring. You could drop $100,000 on a high-end web analytics package. But if you don’t have a staffer dedicated to making sense of all those reports and taking some sort action as a result, it’s wasted money. Better to spend $10,000 on a lesser web analytics solution and $90,000 for a salary to employ someone highly skilled in web analytics. In fact, you’d be surprised the powerful tools you can get for free (and yes, we’ll go over some of the most exciting ones during the teleseminar). However, right now your first investment should be in signing up for this teleseminar.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer — Founder and President, Netconcepts
Avinash Kaushik — Author, Speaker and Analytics Evangelist

Speakers:
Misty Locke, Co-Founder and President, Range Online Media
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, NetConcepts
Pinny Gniwisch, Founder and EVP Marketing, ice.com

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.

In this article originally published on Practical eCommerce Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes about Aaron Wall’s Website Health Check tool, a beneficial “free” SEO tool that offers easy-to-read, uncomplicated reports on a number of issues that includes missing title tags and meta descriptions to checking for duplicate content and verifying your error pages are returning the correct code.

Jeff also recommends some of Stephan Spencer’s previous articles for more SEO tool information and suggestions “on developing an SEO toolkit, Google Webmaster Tools, and SEO: Tools For Link Building.”

Is there a place in Wikipedia for you? Can you protect your interests within Wikipedia in a way that is appropriate and minimizes the risk of a backlash — now and in the future? Want to know the best ways to interact with the service? Want to learn some valuable lessons from a few Wikipedia marketing successes and failures? Then this session is for you!

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates
Don Steele, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Mickey Alam Khan,
Editor in Chief,
DM News

Problem

PoolDawg, an online billiards store, was in need of taking their internet marketing presence to the next level. They determined that SEO was the means to get them there.

“As a newer company in an established market, it was extremely important to get a jump start on our search engine listings,” says Mike Feiman, Director of Marketing for PoolDawg.com.

Their original website suffered from several structural/functional limitations and relatively low conversion rates.

Solution

An initial SEO analysis document was completed and presented for PoolDawg. The analysis covered the primary aspects for best practices in search engine optimization and provided PoolDawg a blue print for optimal execution into the organic search channel.

The analysis also provided insights that a new site structure, with optimized design and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), would benefit PoolDawg.com’s exposure in the search engines.

In order to capitalize on the SEO, structural and functional opportunities, PoolDawg decided to utilize Netconcepts’ GravityMarket Search Optimized Ecommerce Solution. GravityMarket provided PoolDawg.com an optimal site design and on a robust, scalable, software infrastructure.

“After delivering our analysis to PoolDawg, Netconcepts realized that a new site structure would do good things for their business online. We are pleased to see that our recommendation to get a new infrastructure was correct and PoolDawg is realizing the return,” stated Jody Hartwig, Netconcepts’ Vice President of Ecommerce.

New ecommerce features for PoolDawg include:

• Best practices in design and navigation, including optimal CSS files
• A stream lined, 3 step checkout process
• Estimated shipping calculated in shopping cart page
• Featured Products RSS Feed
• Enhanced Content Management System

Results

Implementation of the recommendations from the SEO Analysis yielded a 300% increase in search engine traffic.

Now that the redesign has taken effect, PoolDawg currently receives page one rankings for the targeted search term, “pool cues.”

Attention to best practices in website design, and merchandising, has paid dividends as well. Since the redesign, PoolDawg has enjoyed a conversion rate increase of 27%.

The new site design, and capabilities work to maximize the consumers’ entire shopping experience and drive them through to complete an order.

Feiman commented, “We saw an overall increase of over 300% in our search engine traffic within the first 60 days of implementation. We are extremely pleased with our initial results and look forward to expanding our relationship with Netconcepts.”

(Be sure to check out PoolDawg’s Podcast with PRWeb and Netconcepts’ VP of Client Services, Jody Hartwig)

(Also be sure to check out PoolDawg’s testimonial for Netconcepts)

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

I’ve seen designs copied, content copied, even entire sites copied. It’s so easy for infringers to “View Source” and take whatever they like, without regard to copyright.

You can locate copyright infringers pretty easily with Copyscape if they’ve lifted some of your page copy. It’s much more difficult if they’ve limited their sticky fingers to just your design.

So far I’ve discovered by tip-off or by chance that our Netconcepts.com site design has been “pinched” multiple times. Eventually, many months later, the infringers finally stopped using our design, but the evidence of their misbehavior is permanently archived in the Wayback Machine (example 1 and 2).

In fact, the Wayback Machine is quite useful in that it can serve as indisputable proof of who is the source and who is the copy: Whichever site shows the design in use before the other is the source.

The way I see it, you have five options for dealing with an infringer:

1. File a DMCA infringement notification.
2. Contact the infringing company’s CEO.
3. “Out” them on your blog.
4. Have your lawyer send them a nastygram.
5. Do nothing.

If you do nothing, eventually the infringer will redesign (probably stealing another design from somewhere else). That’s not a great option if you’re serious about protecting your intellectual property rights, however.

A phone call to the CEO is inexpensive and it can work. It has worked for us in the past: he asked for two months to redesign, which we’ve granted him. But this isn’t a viable option if you’re dealing with an entity that operates overseas and has masked its domain contact information.

Luckily, the DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, provides a useful hammer to beat on copyright infringers without the need to contact them. That hammer is a DMCA infringement notification. In DMCA legalspeak, this notification is also known as a “Takedown Notice.”

As a content producer, you have the right to enforce your copyright. When your content gets “repurposed” on others’ Web sites without your permission, you would simply file a DMCA Infringement Notification to the infringer’s Web hosting provider to get that infringer’s Web site shut down (like Ian McAnerin did recently).

You can also get the naughty infringer de-listed from the search engines by filing DMCA notices to Google and the other major engines. (I can hear you saying “Excellent!” in a Mr. Burns voice right now).

It is not a daunting procedure. It might take an hour of your time, and it is well worth it. The process is as follows:

1. First, look up the Web host and the domain registrar of the offending site, using lookup tools such as this one from Netcraft and this one from Domain Tools. You can usually ascertain who the Web host is from the Name Servers and/or the Netblock Owner.
2. Next, check the official directory of designated DMCA agents for the host and the registrar. (Hopefully, they’re listed.)
3. Then prepare a letter to send to the designated agent of the Web host. The notice you write should include your contact information, the name of the content that was copied, the Web address of the copied content, a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is not legal, a statement that under penalty of perjury you are the copyright holder, and your signature. Some Web hosts will allow you to email your notice to them, making it all that more convenient.
4. Also be sure to send a similar notification to the search engines. That will cut off their air supply, in case the site doesn’t get taken down right away. Here are instructions and contact details for each engine: Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search (formerly MSN Search). Note that Google requires you to mail or fax your letter, whereas Yahoo and Microsoft (Live Search) allow you to email your notification.
5. If the Web host doesn’t take the site down promptly, then submit a DMCA notice to the infringer’s domain registrar. Note: It might be worth sending a notice to the data center that the Web host uses before you try the registrar, as Dan Richard recommends.

Ian McAnerin posted some handy DMCA notification letter templates to make this process even easier: for the Web host, for Google, for Yahoo, and for Live Search.

I would be remiss to not mention that the DMCA takedown procedure is a double-edged sword. Like any other tool, a DMCA notice can be used for good or evil. Specifically, someone could use DMCA unfairly against you! It happens. Competitors do use the DMCA to silence competitors.

Therefore, you, as a Web site owner, need to protect yourself from unwarranted (or at least unwelcome) prosecution. If the potential exists for you to inadvertently host infringing material on your website—for example, if you are hosting online forums, group blogs, blog comments, or other types of content that can be submitted from others besides yourself—then here are some actions you can take to help protect yourself:

1. It’s helpful if you can qualify as a service provider that can be covered under the Safe Harbor provision. For example, you may qualify if you offer a search engine or a bulletin board system.
2. If so, notify your customers of your policies regarding copyright infringement and the consequences of repeated infringing activity. One way is to make it part of your Terms of Use.
3. Also, publish a page on your Web site with DMCA filing instructions and state that, if and when you get a DMCA notification, you will act on it. Here’s an example of such a DMCA Notification Instructions page.
4. And most important, check the directory of designated agents,; if your company isn’t listed there, complete and file this form (pdf) to the Copyright Office for inclusion in the directory.
   If you’re interested in the gory details of the DMCA, you can read this on Wikipedia.

Disclaimer: None of this is legal advice.