Web Development Web Marketing Website Audits

A team of long time e-commerce experts will provide live reviews and makeovers for sites from the audience members. Retailers in the audience will be asked to bring search marketing, user experience, e-commerce strategy and other design questions to this session where experts will view the sites in question and provide answers to fix what ails their web sites. Audience members who volunteer their sites for critique will receive a $25 Starbucks gift card.

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

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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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In this month’s edition of the SEO Report Card on Practical eCommerce, Netconcepts Jeff Muendel takes an in-depth look at Seenon.com, a celebrity fashion site. From home page content to what Jeff calls “an attractive and aggressive design,” this is a good website audit to read for the trendy and stylish.

This month’s report card website is Seenon.com, an ecommerce site that tracks the fashion tendencies of the famous and sells those garments and accoutrements to interested consumers. The site is pleasant to the eye and has an exciting, almost urgent feel to it, but how does it do in terms of search engine optimization? Not bad at all actually, and to that end, I thought it would serve as a good example of attractive and aggressive design that does not come at the expense of SEO.

For more about this fashion site web audit, visit Practical eCommerce here.

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In this teleseminar, learn what to measure, including…

• 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

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In this SEO report card on Practical eCommerce, Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, writes a full review of an all-about-yarn ecommerce store recommending that they redesign the site to be more search-friendly.

Jeff’s expertise begins with a critique of their home page:

I always harp on having a sitemap linked to the home page, and while some sites need it less than others, Agoodyarn.net could benefit from one almost immediately. A sitemap, which is a page that has links to all the major categories an subcategories of a web page, helps search engines through all the sections of a site. It can also be a shopping asset for customers. Almost all of the textual content on the home page is set as link text. Not only does this water down the keyword promotion that the links might garner, but it’s also just plain spammy. While it may not be the webmaster’s intent, this is a form of link stuffing, and it is frowned upon by search engines. The site’s title and logo text, “Fine yarn, classic patterns and odd notions,” are not textual but graphical, and therefore invisible to the search engines.

Be sure to read the full article for how simple fixes and a savvy re-design of their eCommerce site can boost this yarn retail store’s website and their overall SEO.

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iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo - social networks are the hottest topic of Web 2.0. Recent developments such as Google’s OpenSocial platform may further accelerate the explosive growth in widget and gadget application users. So what do widgets really mean to your customers and to your bottom line? What monetization strategies should you focus on to ensure widgets are more than just a buzzword to your organization? And how to you prevent your widget from becoming another lost or unused orphan among thousands of other apps? Misty Locke, co-founder and president of Range Online Media, has been working with numerous retailers to determine the most innovative, engaging and measurable approach to web applications. Misty will lead a discussion with other industry experts to answer these questions and to tackle how to succeed with widgets and gadgets today, pitfalls to avoid and emerging opportunities beyond 2008.

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

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The site focuses on hip, modern and stylish adolescent clothes for tweens (ages 7-12). Juvieshop.com is just over one-year-old and the site has built a PageRank of 3 for its homepage. Its theme is wholesome and the site is pleasant to the eye.

Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts, covers a hip site that is targeted toward a specific age group in this website audit.

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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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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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In this SEO report card Jeff Muendel, Analyst for Netconcepts, reviews a site called “Back40books.com.” Jeff writes, “According to the site’s “About Us” page, Back 40 Books is run by back-to-nature people and the books they sell on their site are predominantly focused on issues related to that lifestyle. It also sounds as if the website was put together by these same outdoor people with little help from web professionals. This is to be commended, but everyone needs a little help sometimes.”

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