Interviewed by Jim Hedger of Metamend, Stephan Spencer, founder & president of Netconcepts, recaps a few tips, and tricks from his session at SES Toronto 2008. If you missed this powerful session at SES, learn some nuggets of useful link building tricks from one of the masters.
View the full video interview here.
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In this video Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts President & Founder is interviewed at the Internet Retailer conference by Get Elastic about Link Building strategies for online retailers. How can your organization increase PageRank to interior pages? Does a link building initiative mean building links only to your home page? What is ‘PageRank sculpting‘, and how can it impact a website?
To view the video interview and learn more on this topic, go here.
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Internet Retailer 2008 — Chicago, IL
The right links are fuel for a retail web site’s search engine rankings. But building the right links is among the most difficult, misunderstood and poorly executed aspects of search engine optimization. There are two kinds of links that retailers should focus on to improve such rankings. Links from an e-retailer’s product page to other relevant product pages within the site—with relevant, as judged by the search engine spider, being the keyword—is one type. But a retailer can’t just put a bunch of links on a site to achieve a higher rank without taking into account whether the links achieve business goals. Such links must make merchandising and business sense, otherwise they will interfere with the shopper’s experience and possibly have a deleterious effect on a retail site. The second kind of link is links coming into a site from external sources, which retailers have a lot less control over. A link from a hunting magazine to an outdoor retail site is a link from an authoritative external site and those kinds of links can boost a retailer’s search rankings. But they are much harder to achieve because they require persuading the outside site to link to the retailer’s site, a mostly manual process. This session will examine criteria for evaluating a link’s value, creative link building strategies, link building dos and don’ts, and how to leverage affiliates and social media content. It will tell attendees how seemingly innocent practices can undermine a search engine optimization program and how best practices in search marketing are likely to change in the near future.
Workshop Presenters:
P.J. Fusco, Senior Consultant, NetConcepts
Mark Kaufman, Associate Vice President, CNet Findability, CNet
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SMX Advanced — Seattle, WA
Want to learn how to build a database of high-value link acquisition targets? Want to know how to get on the radar of nonprofits, government and university departments and compel them to give you some of that sweet, authoritative link love? Want to learn the most coveted secrets to “buying” the links the engines would never consider a “paid link?” This, along with non-traditional link sources, linking strategies and nofollow PageRank “scuplting” or “siloing” are covered in the session.
Moderator:
Greg Boser, President/CEO, 3 Dog Media
Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
Jay Young, Owner, Link Fish Media, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3rd - Day 1
10:45am - 12:00pm
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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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ACCM 08 — Orlando, FL
Keyword-rich contextually relevant text links are like fuel for your web site’s search engine rankings. Without good links, you are relegated to the bottom of the search results heap. Link building is arguably the most difficult; the most misunderstood and poorly executed aspect to SEO. In this session, you will learn criteria for evaluating a link’s value, creative link building strategies, link buying do’s and don’ts, how to approach webmasters, how to leverage your affiliates, how social media can be leveraged to build links, dangerous tactics, and more!
Moderator: Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
Panelists:
Neil Patel, Chief Technology Officer, Advantage Consulting Services
Seth Besmertnik, CEO, LinkExperts
Rhea Drysdale, Online Marketing Director, Less Everything
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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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