Jeff Muendel
Jeff Muendel is the SEO Manager for W W Grainger, a leading industrial supply company based in Lake Forest, IL. He began his career with the IBM Corporation in New York, and then rode the dot-com boom through startup companies in California, Texas, and Wisconsin. He specializes in search marketing and related entities including web content development, website architecture, link building, and social media.
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Design & Development
Google Translate Launches iPhone App; Machine Translations Improve
March 3, 2011 • Jeff Muendel
Google has recently released a Google Translate app for iPhone. The real-time language translation app was previously available as a browser-based app, and as an Android app, but now it is available as a native iPhone app. It is condensed from the full, desktop version of Translate, and...
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Design & Development
Google Docs Adds Capabilities for Mobile Users
February 2, 2011 • Jeff Muendel
Google announced in Sept. 2010 that it would add editing capabilities to Google Docs for the iPad, iPhone, and Android. By allowing users to collaborate and co-edit documents and files from a wider range of devices, the users will no longer need to rely on third party apps like Quickoff...
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Business
Google’s High-Speed Fiber Network Still Progressing
January 3, 2011 • Jeff Muendel
Editor's Note: Google is much more than a search engine. Its many products and services are innovative and, oftentimes, useful to ecommerce merchants. But keeping track of Google takes time. For 2011, we've asked contributor Jeff Muendel to file a monthly post on a non-search Google act...
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Conversion
The Shopping Experience: OfficeDepot.com Offers Free Shipping, After a Twist
July 12, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Office Depot is well known as a brick-and-mortar store, but I had never purchased products from its ecommerce site, OfficeDepot.com. Since I was looking for a new desk, I decided to give the site a try. OfficeDepot.com is much like a typical office; it is utilitarian without much in the...
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Conversion
The Shopping Experience: OldNavy.com Easy to Use, But Not Perfect
June 4, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Editor's Note: "The Shopping Experience" is an occasional feature whereby we purchase an actual product from an ecommerce merchant, and then critique the process. For this installment, contributor describes his purchase of a jacket. Summertime requires summer clothing, and I was in ne...
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Conversion
The Shopping Experience: Poorly Described Item Disappoints
May 6, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Editor's Note: "The Shopping Experience" is an occasional feature whereby we purchase an actual product from an ecommerce merchant, and then critique the process. For this installment, contributor describes his attempt to purchase a book. I was searching for a book recommended to me b...
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Conversion
The Shopping Experience: MusiciansFriend.com
April 5, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
"The Shopping Experience" is our monthly description of purchasing a product from a leading ecommerce retailer and then critiquing the process. For this installment, we chose Musician’s Friend, one of the largest retailers of musical instruments and accessories. We chose Musician’s Fr...
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Google Ads
Google’s AdWords Tool Helps with Both Pay-per-click and SEO
February 9, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Keyword research is one of the pillars of both natural and paid search campaigns. By following the keyword choices used by consumers in the search engines, websites can focus on those terms to capture traffic. This tenet of online marketing and search engine optimization is fairly well ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Google Expands Personalized Search
January 6, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Google’s announcement in December that it would be expanding personalized search to include users not signed in to Google certainly created some anxiety for companies and individuals that are dependent upon search results for income. What exactly does this change mean, and how does an e...
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Link Building
SEO: Link-building Opportunities
December 3, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Link building is an ever-changing landscape. This is because the search engines make changes to their algorithms to thwart artificial link building, and because link building as a practice continues to morph. As time goes on, more webmasters will become aware of the importance that inbo...
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Conversion
Forums: Still Useful to eCommerce Merchants
November 2, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
The term "web forums" conjures-up visions of an outdated Internet. I remember the first time that I got “on line” it was done by dialing directly (by way of a 14.4 kbps modem) into an electronic bulletin board which was, essentially, a stand-alone forum. But we’ve never really stopped ...
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Conversion
Six Pointers for Generating Traffic from YouTube
October 5, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
YouTube ranks only behind Google in the number of searches on its site. This is according to comScore, the Internet measurement and analysis firm. That means there are more searches on YouTube than on Yahoo! search, or Bing, or Ask.com. However, the searches are not general searches lik...
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Marketing & Advertising
Search-engine Success: Don’t Forget Description Tags
September 2, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
The description tags in search engine snippets have improved in recent years. Years ago, many search results would include snippets in the top results that were just plain nonsense. However, search today usually returns more quality snippets even in deeper results. Part of this may be d...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Sites Are Also Search Engines
August 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Blended search results by the major search engines sometimes include postings to social media sites in search engine results. But some of the major social media services are themselves becoming search tools, which increases the need for ecommerce sites to get involved with social media....
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Conversion
The Landing Page as a Multipurpose Tool
July 6, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Landing pages are always worth a review because their use is often misunderstood. A landing page is any web page to which users are sent for a particular presentation, result, and/or measurement. Landing pages, in short, have uses beyond simply presenting information. People sometimes...
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Marketing & Advertising
Wolfram|Alpha: A Search Engine Not Ready for eCommerce Merchants
May 29, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Wolfram|Alpha is a search engine that aims to deliver answers to factual queries. Many search-engine-optimization blogs have referred to Wolfram|Alpha, and one colleague of mine – a sharp SEOer, and evidently a total SEO geek – even professed on Facebook to having “Wolfram|Alpha Fever.”...
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Conversion
Online Marketing Overview: Where to Best Invest
May 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
I was contacted by a gentleman in the music industry who wanted advice regarding online marketing for his website. He seemed to have strong old-school marketing ties, but also knew that efforts surrounding social media and search engine optimization were important things to consider. ...
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Conversion
Is Twitter an Ecommerce Tool?
April 9, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
I hear it a lot. People say they know they should use Twitter for marketing purposes, but the idea of “Twittering” doesn’t sit well with them. On a personal level, I have no interest in letting the world know what I’m doing hour-to-hour, much less moment-to-moment. But Twittering on beh...
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Design & Development
Facebook Dickers with Terms-of-Service Language
March 2, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Practical eCommerce readers may have heard the online rumblings regarding some intrusive changes Facebook tried to make to its terms of service agreement. The new terms declared that Facebook would retain full license to any and all user content on the site, even when it had been remove...
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Design & Development
Add Social Media to Your Site with Google Friend Connect
February 3, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
People want to be social on the web, whether it is to share things about themselves through a personal profile or to discover other people with similar interests. It’s also a great way to attract traffic that is focused on a specific topic or set of topics. What’s been difficult for man...
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Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: SolsticeSupply.com
January 5, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
This month’s report card is SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. The site is very pleasant to the eye with large, expansive photos of wintry scenes and skiing action. But how does it do in terms of S...
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Marketing & Advertising
Voice Recognition Software: Just "Talk It Out"
December 29, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
Having good content on a website is always important because it is that content upon which both search engines and customers make decisions about your website. The better it is – with regards to focused keywords, information, and style – the more likely a website is to draw search users...
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Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Pkging.com
December 5, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
Packaging becomes particularly important at this time of year when many of us are shipping gifts for the holidays. I’ve lived in several parts of the country and I don’t much do cards. I’m the type to either ship a gift package or send an email greeting. With that in mind, the website f...
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Link Building
SEO: Buying Links is Risky Business
December 2, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
Garnering inbound links from websites with good PageRank is a mainstay of search engine optimization. Links are like votes for a given website in the eyes of search engines, and their number and quality have much to do with determining the outcome of search engine results. That’s why ...
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Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Socialcouture.com Stresses Social Media
November 13, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
I like parties, and Social Couture is a high-end party supply website. On its corresponding MySpace site (always a good thing to have, but especially important if your gig is party supplies) Social Couture says, “whether your style is traditional or modern or whether your guests are you...
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Link Building
Find and Measure Links Better with Linkscape
November 7, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
One of the most important attributes of search engine optimization (SEO) is link building, which is garnering quality inbound links to a website. A single link from a high-quality, trusted source can raise the rankings of multiple pages on a website because search engines aren’t just co...
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Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Icewraps.net
September 29, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
I went on a hike this weekend and it was a lot of fun—until the next day when I began to feel as if I had participated in something more like a death march. My leg muscles were so sore, it was tough to trek through the grocery store in search of ibuprofen. In honor of my pain (it’...
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SEO Tools
Boost Sales with Google SEO Tools
September 25, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
As search engines have gotten better at discovering web content in many forms, manually submitting to them has become less of a focus. But content and distribution platforms continue to expand, and as they do so, the need for manual search engine submission remains an important, if chan...
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Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Starwest-botanicals.com
September 8, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
Starwest Botanicals’ home page begins with this statement: “Starwest Botanicals is your on-line supply source for bulk herbs and natural products. Bulk organic herbs, organic spices, loose leaf organic teas, organic essential oils and aromatherapy supplies are part of the almost 3000 na...
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Keyword Research
Keyword Research: Wordpot Rivals KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker
September 4, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
While website architecture, link building, and template coding all affect search engine optimization, keyword research and placement is perhaps the easiest SEO attribute to implement. It is often the low hanging fruit of an SEO campaign. To that end, a few months ago, I wrote about Goog...
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