I’m a visual learner. I need to see and interact with things to understand them. It therefore helps me to mimic the behavior of search engine spiders when I’m digging into a site for the first time to review its search engine optimization issues. I like to think of it as “being the bot.”

The key thing to remember is that search engines crawlers don’t have JavaScript, CSS or cookies enabled. They can’t “see” content embedded in media files such as images, Flash, video or audio. You take all this away, and what are you left with? Plain HTML, text and links. In many cases, the entire focus of the page is rendered indecipherable, and in some cases the site isn’t even navigable. It’s an incredible illustration of the structural challenges bots (i.e. search engine robots) face when they’re crawling a site.

Emulate a Search Engine Spider

Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pederick will make surfing like a search spider much easier. For this exercise, focus on the yellow highlighted sections of the toolbar and select the following features:

1. Disable > Disable JavaScript > All JavaScript
2. Cookies > Disable Cookies > All Cookies
3. CSS > Disable Styles > All Styles
4. Images > Disable Images > All Images
5. Visit any page and you’re surfing approximately like a bot. If you’re already at the page you want to test, reload the page to get the full experience.

Another way to confirm what Googlebot is seeing is to visit Google’s text-only cache with JavaScript, cookies and CSS disabled. It should look the same as the live page with all those things disabled. If it doesn’t, it’s possible there is some form of user agent or bot detection in play on the site to deliver a different experience to search engine crawlers.

Let’s take a test drive. It’s very easy to see the difference on many major consumer brands, because their sites tend to be dependent on Flash and JavaScript to deliver a glossy, engaging, interactive brand experience. But what does this cost organic search traffic and sales from this traffic?

Peek at Victoria’s Secret

We’ll start with Victoriassecret.com, clearly a very brand-conscious site.

For starters, the header and footer navigation require JavaScript to load, effectively removing the navigation the site for search engine spider and for visitors without JavaScript enabled.

The primary content is image-based. The only text on the page for search engine spiders to crawl is the alternative attributes in the seven feature images on the page. This handful of alt attribute text, like the images, is entirely focused on enticing humans to click. No argument, that’s an important function of a home page. However, Victoria’s Secret is keeping its keyword theme of its home page a secret from the search engines. The title tag sends the sole focused keyword signal on the page.

If we were to peek at Victoria Secrets’ web analytics, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that they receive the vast majority of their natural search traffic and sales for branded search phrases (such as “victorias secret”), and a very small percentage for non-branded terms (such as “lingerie”). Despite Victoria Secret’s efforts to feature dresses, swimwear and sandals on the home page, it’s highly unlikely that it’s winning any non-branded searches for those very popular summer fashion search phrases. In short, creating strong textual signals for www.victoriassecret.com and ensuring that the navigation is crawlable would be the first step to winning non-branded traffic and sales.

What About Adidas?

Now let’s review another example, Adidas.com.

Adidas is using a tactic known as graceful degradation to provide a crawlable text-based experience when the user/agent visiting doesn’t support JavaScript or CSS. It’s certainly not pretty to human eyes, but it’s not supposed to be – that’s what the whiz-bang Flash version is for. To a bot or a human on a text reader it’s perfectly navigable.

That said, Adidas should pay more attention to the kinds of text it’s providing. While the amount of text and links is strong, the template and the words used don’t send a coherent keyword theme. The home page lacks a strong title tag and H1 heading, though there are several H3 headings. The text in the title tag and the H3 headings aren’t sending a signal that Adidas is a power in shoes, athletics, sports or any other relevant keyword market that Adidas should legitimately be able to capture.

Summary

Removing the signals that we humans are trained to pay attention to – the shiny, glossy images and animations – forces us to consider the textual signals that a site is really sending on each page. If those textual signals are weak, unfocused or nonexistent, search engines will have a harder time matching your site with popular search phrases when real customers are searching for your products.

by Jill Kocher
Practical eCommerce

You should always demand high quality source material to work with. When working with photographic content for example the “trash in, trash out” rule applies.

A good photo can take your work to another level, a badly lit low resolution photo will ruin your work. Most clients will send you what they have for grabs… most of the time they don’t understand quality or image resolutions. Bug them a bit and they’ll magically come up with better material.

With 2ndPeter.com, we want to provide our Bradenton, Sarasota, and Tampa Print & Web Site Design clients with the best quality work possible. That means our clients must provide top-notch photo images and that the rights to those images are owned by that client.

The human mind fills in gaps and will see the bigger picture if you aim for it. Using the border of your paper can be great fun and another tool to work with.

 

 The bleed is the part on the side of your document that gives your printer that small amount of space to move around paper and design inconsistencies. No matter what guidelines they have on their site, the printer will use anything you throw at them. A 3mm bleed on all sides is a safe standard for your work.

The settings in InDesign are right there in the new file dialog… but hidden! You need to hit the ‘more options’ button before they become visible. If you already have a document open you can find them in the file > document setup dialog.

2ndPeter.Com offers the best of Bradenton and Sarasota Website (Web Site) Design.

Google’s PageRank technology plays an important role in how online stores show up in search results. Understanding how this ranking system works will help ecommerce merchants improve their search engine optimization (SEO) and potentially increase website traffic.

PageRank is a proprietary mathematical formula (algorithm) that Google uses to calculate the importance of a particular web page/URL based on incoming links. The PageRank algorithm assigns each web page a numeric value. That value is a particular URL’s PageRank.

The underlying assumption is that links are analogous to “votes” for a page’s importance. The more votes a page has, the more important it is. What’s more, votes from important pages/URLs have more weight than votes from unimportant ones.

In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will (1) discuss why PageRank is important and (2) provide an explanation of how to use a simplified PageRank calculation to make sound SEO decisions about internal linking. In all, this article should give you a foundational understanding of this ranking system. And in future installments of Ecommerce Know-How, we will build on this fundamental PageRank information and apply it to SEO techniques like bot herding or siloing.

The Importance of PageRank

“Using PageRank, we are able to order search results so that more important and central Web pages are given preference. In experiments, this turns out to provide higher quality search results to users,” wrote Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (along with Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd) in their January 29, 1998 paper, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

In spite of this paper and the complex calculations it included, Google’s exact recipe for ranking web pages is not public information. But there is enough data available to make some educated guesses and assumptions about the PageRank algorithm and a search engine’s basic procedures.

Our search assumption goes like this: Jack starts a search for the phrase “golf clubs.” Google first seeks relevant pages that include content matching Jack’s query. Once Google has located the relevant pages, it ranks those pages based on importance—that is PageRank. The first page/URL listed on the Google results page had the most PageRank out of all the pages that were relevant to Jack’s search query. The last page/URL listed had the least.

Good content that matches a search query determines whether a given web page/URL will be included in Google’s results. But PageRank determines the order relevant pages are shown in.

PageRank is important then because it will determine if your site shows up first or last when a potential customers looks for your keywords.

Google’s Search Procedures

1. A Google user submits a search query.
2. Google searches all of the pages/URLs it has indexed for relevant content.
3. Google sorts the relevant pages/URLs based on PageRank scores.
4. Google displays a results page, placing those pages/URLs with the most PageRank (assumed importance) first.

Simplified PageRank and Ranking Power Estimates

Google does not disclose its exact PageRank formula. But it is a pretty safe bet that calculating PageRank is not easy math (note the “simple” PageRank formula at left).

The folks at SEOmoz have come up with an excellent guess about the PageRank algorithm in their paper, The Professional’s Guide To PageRank Optimization. And I recommend that paper for site owners that want to know how to estimate a page’s actual Google PageRank and don’t mind spending $39.99.

But when it comes to making certain good choices about SEO (particularly internal linking choices), you don’t really need to know a URL’s actual Google PageRank. Rather, a simple model that estimates the effect of one SEO strategy or another is just as good. For example, you’ll be able to compare two different internal linking strategies, estimating how each one will affect a page’s rank, without having to employ higher mathematics.

Our simplified PageRank modeler looks like this:

PageRank for a given page = Initial PageRank + (total ranking power ÷ number of outbound links) + …

Google assigns every new web page an initial PageRank score. For the sake of our example, that initial PageRank will be 1. If I create two new product pages, page A and page B, those pages would each have an initial PageRank of 1.

A link from page B to page A would effectively be a vote for page A’s importance, and that vote would increase page A’s PageRank to 2—page A’s initial PageRank plus the value of page B’s vote. Page B’s vote is worth its PageRank and is called ranking power.

If we add a new page C, and page B also linked to it, page A’s PageRank would fall from 2 to 1.5 while page C’s PageRank would rise from 1 to 1.5.

Adding more links from page B to either page A or page C will not change things, since only one link from page B to page A distributes ranking power. A second link would not add additional ranking power.

With just this simple model, we can now start to test some SEO tactics for internal linking. Simply plot out two or more scenarios, adding up each page’s PageRank to determine which tactic will work best for a given goal. For example, let’s imagine that your ecommerce site has five pages, including a home page, a category page, and three product pages, what is the best navigation strategy if your goal is to boost your category page’s rank? Interconnecting every page would give the category page a total PageRank of 2 as in Figure A.

Linking product pages to the category page only as shown in Figure B, would result in a PageRank of 5 for the category page, making it the better choice.

Summing Up

In this Ecommerce Know-How, I explained why PageRank is important and provided a simple model for estimating PageRank for internal linking tactics. This model is not faultless, but it should help you make informed choices about the SEO tactics you use.

by Armando Roggio
Practical eCommerce

Social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and blogs consistently rank high in search results. This means you have more opportunities to increase visibility, build your brand and learn about your audience if you’re utilizing social media. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it doesn’t need to be. Here are a few simple steps to get started.

Create Your Profile
Major social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have large and diverse audiences. Smaller social networks offer a more targeted group. First, do some research and decide which social networks are right for your business based on what you know about your target audience and what social networks out there fit their demographics and interests. Then visit the social sites you choose, sign up and start adding content to your profiles. Make sure you include relevant business information, contact info and a link to your website. Look at other businesses’ profiles for inspiration first.

Business networking sites offer the same benefits in search position and help you grow your professional network and establish credibility in your industry. Create a profile on LinkedIn, IncBizNet, ZoomInfo, Spoke, Jigsaw and others to start networking.

• Do: Complete your profile and make sure the design and tone reflects your business, marketing and branding strategies.
• Don’t: Forget to link to your website and keep your profiles up-to-date and consistent across sites.

Start Blogging
You don’t have to have your own blog to start blogging. There are millions out there that allow you to participate in the conversation by posting and commenting. Ask colleagues what blogs they read, or use Google’s Blog Search to find blogs and posts your audience is likely reading. Check the blogrolls (a list of that blogger’s favorite blogs) of the blogs you like. It’s a great way to find other, related blogs.

• Do: Be consistent and develop a dialogue. You won’t see results by dropping a comment here or there.
• Don’t: Get involved in conversations about competitors. Focus on building the visibility of your company and talking with your audience.

Share Photos and Video
Whether you have existing videos or photos on your website or just a few photos of company events, posting them on photo and video sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube is another opportunity to appear in search results and show your audience who you are.

• Do: Post content that your audience wants to see. These are not places to share internal training videos.
• Don’t: Disappoint visitors who return regularly looking for more videos or photos. Keeping adding to your collection.

Planning Can Make the Difference
Social media is an ongoing process. You’re participating in an online conversation, and you’ll only benefit from social media as long as you stay involved. Make a plan for long-term success.

What are your goals? Are you looking to increase your rank in search results, communicate with your audience or build your professional reputation?

Who are you talking to? Do you want to reach your customer, or are you looking to build your reputation in your industry by communicating with other professionals?

Where is your audience? In addition to large social networks, blogging, video and photo sharing sites, there are many niche options that target more specific groups. Look around to find your best options.

Who will participate? Will one or a few company representatives be participating and keeping up with your social media strategy? With fewer people, it’s easier to assure rules are followed and your message is consistent.

What are your guidelines? Lay down some basic rules for your social media communications. What do you want discussed online?

In very little time you can be a part of the social media marketing movement -communicating, building your brand and hearing the voice of your audience.

Source: Lisa Wehr

Marketers are known for talking, not listening.
That is not to suggest we have not used tools like focus groups, user surveys or other research instruments in the past. It’s just that, in the era of the participatory web, listening is not an option; it is a mandate.

It provides great opportunity to learn at a grassroots level what people really think about your brand, products or services. Indeed, listening to the groundswell of consumer-generated content is the new marketing.

Why Listen
People are talking and they are using the social web - blogs, social networks, wikis, forums, and video - as their mouthpiece. Take, for example, what happened on micro-blogging site Twitter following the Super Bowl. There was an outcry, even a backlash, against domain registrar Go Daddy for its controversial advertising. More than a few people went so far as to transfer their domains to other service providers!

While this was barely a blip on Go Daddy’s radar in so far as the net effect on its bottom line, the publicity cannot have been good. The effect of word of mouth in social media is not constrained to large companies either. Recently, I spoke at a gathering of local hospital marketing directors on the topic of social media.

In preparation, I visited a couple of healthcare rating and review sites to see if any of the hospitals represented might be mentioned. Oh boy, were they! One hospital in particular was dealt a number of severe blows in terms of negative reviews. Another experienced quite the opposite effect.

Don’t kid yourself. Reviews from “average people like me” are powerful. Not only do they influence consumer attitudes and behavior, often they show up prominently in search returns.

What to Listen For
There are three metrics involved in what is now referred to as Online Reputation Management: share of voice, tone of voice and trends over time.

Share of voice. This is a measurement of how much and to what degree people are talking about you. For many small businesses, it is often the case that nothing is being said. That’s almost as bad as if people are talking negatively. When that happens, it is vital that something be done to stimulate conversation. There are a number of ways you can do so, which I will cover later in the article.

Tone of voice. This is a gauge of whether the conversation is largely positive or negative and is often referred to as “sentiment analysis.” If the sentiment is positive, reward those who speak well of you. That will presumably encourage them to do even more. If the tone is largely negative, it is incumbent upon you to get to the root of the problem, if, in fact, a problem exists. Fix the problem and the tone will likely change. If it’s misinformation that’s being spread, you must engage the critics and correct their misunderstanding.

Bizzuka, the company I serve as marketing director, experienced this very issue a number of months ago. A blogger had written some factually incorrect information about the company and its content management system. Even worse, that post was displayed prominently on Google search returns for the word “Bizzuka.”

Two actions were taken. First, Bizzuka’s CEO responded to the post with a comment which added much needed balance. Second, we engaged in a content marketing strategy using blogs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, online press releases and a number of other online media.

While our primary intent was to provide consumers with useful content, a secondary benefit was that the critical post was driven off the front page, replaced instead by Bizzuka generated content.

Trends over time. It is important to monitor both the above metrics over the course of time in order to see the effects of your advertising, marketing and PR efforts.

How to Listen
A number of tools exist ranging in cost from free to very expensive. For example, you can employ a do-it-yourself approach using tools like Google Reader to subscribe to Google and Yahoo! news alerts, Technorati and Twitter keywords searches, and other RSS feeds for relevant keywords. However, using this approach there is great likelihood you will miss important information. If your budget allows, you can hire companies such as Radian6 or Techrigy to monitor the activity for you.

A more affordable alternative might be Trackur, an inexpensive software application that offers a number of features that make it more than adequate to meet the needs of most smaller ecommerce merchants.

Join the Conversation
If a conversation already exists, then you have a place to start. I refer to this as getting a seat at someone else’s table. Listen to what’s being said and respond when appropriate.

Again, find ways to reward those who speak well of you and, in an honest, courteous fashion, address those who spread misinformation. You will be amazed at what you can learn just by engaging the groundswell in either respect. It’s good research.

Source: Paul Chaney

Paid search is all about keywords. The more targeted keywords you have in your accounts, the more sales you are likely to realize from pay-per-click advertising. Invest just 10-20 minutes per day reviewing new keyword ideas – it will pay off big time in the long run.

Below is a list of helpful tools to get started.

Microsoft’s Keyword Mutation Detection
The easiest (and cheapest!) way to squeeze extra juice out of your PPC campaigns is to sprinkle misspellings across top performing campaigns. Microsoft’s tool does a great job at generating misspelling variations that matter. You don’t need to have thousands of keywords that a lot of other misspelling generators on the web offer. Focus on high traffic terms such as top product names and/or top brands.

Google’s New Search-based Keyword Tool
Make sure you log in to your AdWords account before going to this one. One major advantage of this tool over Google’s old tool is its direct link to your AdWords account. In other words, Google will only give you keywords that you do not have in your account. While it’s not perfect, and does produce duplicates from time to time, this tool is a must for all AdWords account owners. Run it on your account today and you’ll be surprised how many searches you’re missing out on.

Quantcast
Quantcast is not a keyword research tool. I would classify it as a public web analytics data aggregator. Regardless of the title, however, it has a few useful side tools that may be used in the search arena. Run a search for your own website and look for “Also Visited” and “Also Searched” columns on the right-hand side. Run the same search in Quantcast for your competitors. If you follow the thinking “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are,” you’re likely to stumble upon a few new word permutations that your customers use regularly to find either your site or sites of your competitors. The key here is to continue drilling down deeper into related-site URLs to figure out what may be some other ways to call your product/service.

Remember, the key to a winning pay-per-click campaign is to capture maximum traffic share and convert those visitors into paying customers. By investing just 10-20 minutes per day expanding your PPC keyword portfolio with relevant keywords, you will dramatically increase the chances of getting more prospects in the door.

Source: Greg Laptevsky

Flickr, a photo sharing site, can be a powerful tool for promoting your products. Not only can you upload images of your products, where they can be seen throughout the Flickr website, but you can encourage your customers to participate and socialize with your company and products by uploading and sharing their own images of your products.

The Action Shot
Product pictures on ecommerce sites should look professional, with well-designed placement, colors, and layouts. However these images often do not convey how the product is actually used. More casual action shots may not work as a primary product photo, but can be valuable buying information for your customers. Using Flickr to show these images alongside your professional photos will help your customers make purchase decisions without affecting your own portrayal of your products.

Action shots are also a great way to encourage your customers to participate by uploading their own photos of your products in use. Not only will you give a little recognition to your customers, you’ll also show potential customers how the product is used, and that other people have made a satisfying purchase. Flickr makes it easy to show any subset of your photos with their ready-to-go widgets.

Social Hour
By forming a group on Flickr, you give your customers a place to connect with you and each other. A Flickr group will encourage customers to upload their own photos of your products and comment on the photos already posted. Being able to interact with each other will give your customers a method for sharing experiences with your products and connecting to your company on a new level. Potential customers will be able to see what your customers are saying to each other and how they use your products.

Tag, You’re It
Tagging is the act of adding keywords to a photo in order to describe it and make it more findable. Flickr allows you to add keywords to your product images in order to make them show up in these searches. By showing up in keyword searches, you can introduce your products to a much wider range of possible customers. Having images that are fun and exciting (such as action shots) will also be more enticing to potential customers.

Flickr allows anyone to add notes to photos (if the author allows it). Customers will feel more connected to your products and brand if they can voice their opinions. Not only is this a great way to collect free market research, commenting gives you the opportunity to connect directly to your customers. You have the opportunity to improve your products and give your customers exactly what they are willing to spend money on.

Kick Start
Communities don’t start overnight, so just posting photos to Flickr will probably not be enough to get your customers involved. Customers are very selfish and they will want very clear benefits for any use of their time. A great way to get started is by offering an incentive, such as 5% off of the next purchase if customers post an action shot on Flickr. Another way is to run a contest and have your customers vote on the best photos in return for a free product, promotion or discount.

Rewards
As an added benefit of using social networks, your company and product names will appear more often in search results on search engines. Customers will feel more involved with your brand and company and will be more likely to refer you to other potential customers. Giving customers a way to connect with each other encourages interaction and also provides you with free market research and social marketing opportunities. Using Flickr as a promotion tool will work best if it is integrated into your overall marketing strategies and if you take the opportunity to listen and share with your customers.

Who Uses Flickr on Their Site?
Lots of ecommerce sites are jumping on the Flickr bandwagon. For example, you can check out some goofy and fun photos of tee shirt lovers in the Threadless Tees Photo Gallery. Threadless further encourages customer participation by offering a small monetary credit to customers who upload photos.

In another example, sellers of the Internet companion Chumby encourage customer participation through both Flickr and YouTube. Visitors can upload, view and share photos and videos of the Chumby in use. And, because the Chumby can be used to present photos and videos, that makes Chumby’s association with Flickr the perfect complement.

Source: Sarah Worsham

Because search engines tend to reward blogs in several ways, corporate and ecommerce sites ought to look at the possibility of adding one or more blogs. Search engines’ ranking algorithms revolve around links, and the blogosphere revolves around interlinking. As a result, adding corporate blogs is a great way to garner links.

Search engines also love fresh content, and blogs, by definition, are constant sources of new content. If written correctly – or more specifically interestingly – blogs can also provide wider link bait and garner links from outside the blogosphere. Search engines, of course, reward for good, inbound links regardless of whether they’re from other blogs.

So, where does a company begin if it wants to add a blog to its website? The answer: Choose a blog platform. While free services like Blog.com and Blogger.com offer simple-to-build interfaces, a company is better off using a platform that lives on its own servers and is under the same domain as the corporate site. Some of the best ones are free. Both MovableType and WordPress offer free software that can be run from most common servers.

Although MovableType is fine, my personal recommendation is WordPress, because – currently – it seems to have more SEO-friendly plugins (small upgrade programs that add functionality to the main software) that make blogging faster and easier.

For instance, my company, Netconcepts, offers three free WordPress Plugins that provide various shortcut functions and software upgrades. The most popular is SEO Title Tag which allows users to uncouple post titles from title tags. There are many other SEO-friendly plugins out there, most of them free. Taken together, they cover the majority of blogging issues.

Finding factual substantiation for a post or making references to support an expressed view are common elements of blog writing. Use of graphics can also be a concern, especially when you’re attempting to verify that you have the right to use a given image. To help, Yahoo! has developed Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress. This plugin finds keywords in your post as you type and integrates a preview of potential links for those keywords. If the link is applicable, you can opt to automatically link the corresponding text to the content. If the link doesn’t fit or you don’t like it, you reject it and it disappears.

In addition, the Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plugin also recommends Flickr images, based on your textual content. As with the text links, if you like an image, you can choose to embed it into the post, without copyright worry. Since the plugin references Creative Commons licensing graphics, it suggests on only sharable Flickr images. The plugin bases these choices on the key themes of your post, and it includes proper attribution to the original image creator, automatically. Unhappy with a suggested graphic? Give it the ax, and the graphic won’t appear again.

While it’s true that Yahoo! has a financial agenga behind this plugin, it’s also true that the Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plugin is a fantastic option for corporate or personal bloggers. This is especially true if the blog is not designed as a direct revenue stream, but as a way to add fresh content and quality link bait to an ecommerce site. If this plugin seems too impure for you, don’t use it. The point here is this: Having a blog is an important element of any corporate site, and the Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plugin can make the experience fast, simple, and valuable.

Source: Jeff Muendel