http://www.practicalecommerce.com/authors/53/Jeff-Muendel/ Jeff Muendel is a Search Analyst for Netconcepts, a search engine marketing firm in Madison, Wisconsin. He began his technical writing and SEO career with the IBM Corporation in Poughkeepsie, NY, and then rode the dot-com boom through startup companies in California, Texas, and Wisconsin. He specializes in SEO related to Flash, video, social networking, and other Web 2.0 parameters. Muendel can be contacted at (608) 285-6600 or via email at jmuendel@netconcepts.com. en-us Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing Mon, 12 May 2008 15:36:02 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/rss/ Practical Ecommerce v2.0.1 Ecommerce kmurdock@practicalecommerce.com bgetting@practicalecommerce.com 60 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/733/SEO-Report-Card-Pawleyfarmcom/ This month's report card website is Pawleyfarm.com, a small site that sells personalized country photographs and note cards. The home page says, "Just as a home-cooked meal nourishes body and soul, our custom matted and framed artwork carries along a bit of peace and contentment." The down-home look and feel of the site is pleasant to the eye, but does it do well with the search engines? The site is simple and built on the Yahoo! ecommerce platform (not the best platform ever), but many basic SEO attributes are in place. Let's take a look. Home Page Content The home page has plenty of text, and while there are pleasant graphics, they are secondary to the textual content. While graphics are not necessarily an SEO problem, they need to be balanced with permanent, keyword-rich textual content as represented here. There is a sitemap linked to the home page, and alt tags are properly used. It may not be the slickest home page, but it is quite optimal for search engines. Inbound... Mon, 12 May 2008 15:36:02 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/733/SEO-Report-Card-Pawleyfarmcom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/732/Quick-Keyword-Research-Tools/ At the core of many search engine optimization campaigns is keyword research. In order to target what Internet users are looking for, the choice of words they use to describe those things must be known. By following tendencies in keyword choices, a website can target searches for those terms to capture traffic from search engines, internal searches and even social media entities. There are many keyword research tools of varying size and complexity, but often only a quick and simple reference is needed. When a large number of pages is being optimized (as they often are in ecommerce situations, such as creating or improving product pages) the subject is obvious, time is of the essence, and only a cursory amount of keyword research is needed. An effective and basic tool for this scenario is actually right at your fingertips: Google Suggest. Google Suggest began as a separate interface within the Google itself as an experimental page that would offer a dropdown menu of... Wed, 07 May 2008 17:56:34 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/732/Quick-Keyword-Research-Tools/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/708/SEO-Report-Card-Pinkorpunkcom/ I have to admit that both the design and focus of this month's report card recipient stood out from the many requests I receive. The website is not subtle, and it's probably not even pretty in the classical sense, but it's certainly fun. Pinkorpunk.com sells clothing accessories that have one of two things in common: They are pink or they are punk. Need a white leather piano keyboard belt? Not pink, but very punk, and imagine how cool you'd look at the office with it around your waist! But while the site is visually intriguing, there are improvements that can be made to its search engine optimization. Let's take a look. Homepage Content While visually interesting, Pinkorpunk.com does not feature enough textual content on its homepage. At the top of the page, the line "Welcome to PinkorPunk.com" appears, but that simply isn't enough. Some good keyword research is in order to determine what a potential customer might be searching for. Those identified terms should then be added... Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:45:27 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/708/SEO-Report-Card-Pinkorpunkcom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/706/When-SEO-Isnt-Really-SEO/ A potential client recently asked a good question. She regularly reads various search-engine-optimization websites, and she was confused as to the current meaning of the term "SEO." What, she wondered, was the difference between SEO and online marketing? Search engine optimization, or SEO, is constantly changing. As the major search engines update their algorithms and redefine how their search results will be determined and displayed, the SEO industry must adjust and redefine to follow those trends. But there is a new trend as well: Search optimizers going well beyond search engine results and into other marketing areas but still calling it SEO. It gets a bit confusing. 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... Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:22:46 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/706/When-SEO-Isnt-Really-SEO/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/691/SEO-Report-Card-Seenoncom/ 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. Let's take a look. Home Page Content This is one spot where Seenon.com could make improvements, especially with regard to textual content. The home page - and much of the site - is graphically focused rather than textually focused. While graphics are certainly not a problem, for SEO purposes they need to be balanced with permanent, keyword-rich textual content. Seenon.com does feature textual content on the homepage, but much of it changes frequently and is therefore not permanent. Adding even a... Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:54:08 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/691/SEO-Report-Card-Seenoncom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/689/Ecommerce-Blogging-Who-What-And-When/ Last month I talked about blogging platforms and the value blogging can bring to ecommerce sites. When a website makes the decision to begin a blog and decides upon a blogging platform, it will then have to decide who will blog and how often. Time allotted to blogging is also a relative issue, as is subject matter. So why bother at all? Relative to static ecommerce sites, search engines consider blogs more real and trusted because blogs tend to have fresh content and there is a less financial, more informational link between a blog and its readers. An ecommerce site should take advantage of this tendency by adding a blog to augment the overall site. A focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters. These recurring communications will help to tie potential customers to your site, encourage natural link building and increase repeat visits. Journalists are also more... Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:45:33 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/689/Ecommerce-Blogging-Who-What-And-When/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/669/-SEO-Report-Card-Agoodyarnnet/ I don’t knit, but around the holidays I was given a fantastic sweater knitted by the gift-giver. It’s warm and unique, and just to be in the spirit, I’m wearing it as I write this. Uniqueness, of course, is also an issue in terms of search engine optimization; every page of a website needs to have unique titles, descriptions and content. The website for this month’s SEO Report Card, Agoodyarn.net, does a decent job with unique content, but the site harbors structural issues that are impeding the search engine spiders abilities to crawl the site. Several other issues present themselves as well, though many of them should be easy to clean up. Let’s take a look. Home Page Content 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... Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:58:51 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/669/-SEO-Report-Card-Agoodyarnnet/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/667/Choose-A-Platform-And-Blog-Blog-Blog/ 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. As Stephan Spencer underscores "SEO: Blogging Your Way To The Top", 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. (Next month, we’ll discuss the importance of knowing who will blog, how often, and about what.) While free services like... Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:13:43 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/667/Choose-A-Platform-And-Blog-Blog-Blog/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/643/SEO-Report-Card-Juvieshopcom/ Juvie is a kid’s clothing store in Los Angeles, and it is balancing the hipness of Flash-based features (not particularly SEO-friendly) with the common sense of good textual content (always SEO-friendly) on the home page of its ecommerce site. 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. Yet there are several ways the company could improve with regard to search engine optimization. Let’s dig down into the laundry basket to see how this site can grow its search traffic. Home Page Content Flash-based features are not particularly SEO-friendly. Search engines rely primarily on text as the main source of information and Flash .swf files are notoriously hard to extract textual content from. And, as a result, pages that are entirely designed in Flash are not well optimized for search... Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:06:34 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/643/SEO-Report-Card-Juvieshopcom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/641/Google-Knol-Looks-To-Take-On-Wikipedia/ Online reputation is an important part of any SEO campaign. It can drive traffic and promote links, and when a new opportunity arises for such reputation management, it should be explored sooner rather than later. A few weeks ago, Udi Manber, Google's vice president of engineering, announced the advent of Google Knol, a program meant to challenge Wikipedia, the popular user-generated encyclopedia. The idea, like Wikipedia, is to let anyone create a page of information on a specific topic, and all of those pages will be organized like an online encyclopedia. Google has not announced when Knol will launch. Why is this interesting to those of us involved in ecommerce? Well, just search for something that might be core to what you sell online and, odds are, a Wikipedia listing on that subject is on the first page of Google results. For example, the search results for the term “wristwatch” has a Wikipedia listing as No. 1. While it is impossible to predict all the parameters... Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:52:36 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/641/Google-Knol-Looks-To-Take-On-Wikipedia/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/618/If-Website-Is-Broke-Dont-Go-Broke-Fixing-It/ 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. Some of these free tools should be avoided at all costs. On site I was recently investigating offers keyword-related statistics so cryptic, disorganized and just plain wrong that it attracted a group of giggling SEO specialists around my cubicle. I checked back a few days later just to give the site the benefit of the doubt, and the results were the same. Of course there are many SEO tools out there that cost money and are quite worth it, but not all websites and ecommerce companies have the income or SEO focus to... Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:43:33 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/618/If-Website-Is-Broke-Dont-Go-Broke-Fixing-It/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/603/SEO-Report-Card-Back40bookscom/ 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. Let’s take a look: Home Page Content Back 40 Books could use some permanent, textual content on their home page that is reflective of the focus of the site. As it stands, much of the text is contained in graphics or is in book descriptions that, more than likely, rotate in and out (in other words, they have no permanency). A few sentences about the site and what it offers could make a big difference. The left-hand navigation is the strongest asset of the home page, featuring some fairly keyword-rich links to all the site’s major categories. This allows search engine spiders to easily find and crawl... Wed, 07 Nov 2007 11:44:10 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/603/SEO-Report-Card-Back40bookscom/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/600/Ecommerce-Facebook-Applications/ Facebook.com — a company that less than a year ago looked like fools for not accepting Yahoo’s bid to purchase it — has become the powerhouse of social media websites. It’s been said that much of the success is due simply to Facebook being the latest in a string of recently-hip online socialization sites, with MySpace being the last destination to peek out and then slow as the “true hipsters” move on, drawing the semi-hip behind them. A large part of that rise, however, has been Facebook’s open source policy with regard to the creation of Facebook applications. The result has been twofold: A huge demand for fun and informative applications and the corresponding, explosive proliferation of applications created for the site. A Facebook application (or “app” for short) is simply a small program that can be placed on a user’s site to lend some form of added functionality to the generic interface. Applications are popular because individual users can customize pages... Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:22:20 -0700 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/600/Ecommerce-Facebook-Applications/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/578/SEO-Report-Card-Link-Building-Could-Improve-Strong-Site/ Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets of good SEO are observed and incorporated. Let’s take a closer look. Home Page Content The site features good textual content at the top of the page, including keywords that searchers are likely to use (wedding favors, bridal shower favors, bridesmaid gifts, wedding accessories, and more). The left-hand navigation is fairly keyword-rich and offers links to all the site’s major categories. This allows search engine spiders to easily find and crawl those categories through the links, and they also function as quality keywords. The home page also includes links to the internal sitemap and the site’s blog. While there are eye-catching graphics, they are surrounded by good textual content.... Mon, 01 Oct 2007 10:36:48 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/578/SEO-Report-Card-Link-Building-Could-Improve-Strong-Site/ http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/575/Baiting-The-Social-Media-Crowd/ You may recall that Stephan Spencer (I am now taking over his two columns here at Practical Ecommerce) wrote about link baiting some months ago. To sum up his thoughts, inbound links are good. Search engines improve rankings of a given page or website based upon the number and quality of links it receives. As Stephan pointed out, link bait is online content that is useful, funny, or otherwise intriguing to the point webmasters or bloggers can’t resist but to set up links from their pages to your content, and consequently help to improve your search engine rankings. It’s not often that an ecommerce site is going to have naturally occurring link bait, because baiting isn't just about selling. The best link bait may not try to sell at all, but rather simply tie itself to something of interest with regard to your products. Thus, more than likely, the bait is something you’re going to have to make an effort to create. One great avenue for link bait is social media – sites... Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:33:16 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/575/Baiting-The-Social-Media-Crowd/