SEO Report Card #2

The second installment of my “SEO Report Card” column for Practical eCommerce magazine led to the ‘deconstruction’ of DiscountFlies.com, a small etailer who sells fly fishing flies. Boy did they miss the boat when it comes to SEO (pun intended, haha).

Nowhere to be found in the first 100 results in Google or Yahoo for “fly fishing” or “fishing flies”, the site really lacked good inbound links. The site suffered from an unfocused and illogical internal hierarchical structure. Keyword-rich copy was sparse on category pages and product pages. 

For the rest of the findings, read the full article. 

The rulebook for SEOs wanting to do business with big companies

Just read this awesome post from Chris Smith of Verizon Directories (SuperPages.com), where he lays out his criteria for selecting an SEO firm to work with. In summary (I’m paraphrasing here), the SEO agency…:

• should have longevity and track record of at least somewhat related work
• should not have promoted itself using unrealistic promises and representations
• should have a clean record (no black-hat methods)
• should not have tried to impress with a cursory 5-minute site assessment leading to naive recommendations
• should not have insulted our technical work
• should not have made claims of secret methods/knowledge
• should have priced their services reasonably
• should have posted information on their website about the companies/sites they’ve done work for
• should have demonstrated strong technical work on their own site as well as clients’ sites
• should have good people and make that evident on their company site
• should have projected a professional demeanor
• shouldn’t have pestered or been hard-selling
• should be flexible in legal contract negotiations, once selected

Good stuff! Read Chris’ full article: “How major companies choose SEOs”.

(Disclaimer: yes, Verizon SuperPages.com is a client of ours, and no we don’t wear sandals to business meetings.)

E-commerce Best Practices Tip #7: RSS feeds

RSS feeds are your tether — your lifeline — to your prospects after they’ve left your site. Unless they’ve ordered from you, how else can you reach out to that nameless, faceless hoard? It used to be that your email newsletter served that purpose, but consumers are bombarded with so much email now that they are reticent to subscribe to many more newsletters. RSS to the rescue!

A-List blogger Robert Scoble from Microsoft has said: “You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.” I love that quote!

Don’t just offer one single RSS feed. One size does not fit all. I may only be interested in one particular product category and not your entire online catalog. (Here’s just a sampling of Amazon’s category-specific feeds.) I may be interested in your new product arrivals. Or just your best sellers. Or just your clearance items. Customers may want more than a feed of products; they may also want product reviews, coupons and specials, tips and articles.

Ideally you should allow your shoppers to create custom RSS feeds that are tailored to their interests. For example, an RSS feed comprised of reviews, coupons, and tips, but not tech specs or press releases, and for only 2 of your 10 product categories. See the screenshot below for a nice example of a custom feed subscription form.

RSS feeds offer more than just to a direct-to-consumer channel that bypasses spam filters. It also tends to boost your link gain (PageRank). Bloggers subscribe to RSS feeds, and bloggers link to items of interest found in those RSS feeds. Heck, if you’re really lucky you may get entire feeds syndicated (that’s the second S in RSS) onto other sites!

Ecommerce Best Practice Tip #6: Be there around-the-clock

Those of us in New Zealand will probably remember the Amazon.com wanna-be that flamed out, FlyingPig.co.nz. The marketing fanfare that announced FlyingPig’s launch was undermined by the fact that the site was down within minutes of going live. Yes of course they should have done the usual load testing, and implemented server load balancing to be better prepared. But in addition, they really needed 24-hour server support to effectively manage their traffic surges. Do you have server support staff on-hand 24x7x365? If not, you should.

Downtime can’t be completely avoided, and of course it’s better if the downtime occurs in the wee hours of the night when fewer visitors will be affected. But for the customers who are experiencing the outage, it sucks and no amount of marketing B.S. or waffle will ease their pain. Customers don’t care whether it’s a planned or unplanned outage, so don’t bother telling them. They don’t care that your site is hugely successful and the virtual isles are brimming over with buyers, so don’t tell them that either (see screenshot, above left). Just try to give them a estimated time when the site will be back and offer at least some limited amount of functionality until then (like catalog browsing but not order-taking) or point them to a website that is working (like one of your distributors) so they can get on with their business if their need is urgent.

And what about your online customer service team? Do they punch out by dinnertime? Are they all racing for the door at 5pm like Fred Flintstone when the whistle blows? As a customer, it’s a bit of a roller coaster ride if you’re having problems: first, the frustration that something about the shopping experience isn’t working. Then comes the elation of finding that the etailer offers instant online chat. And then the huge letdown when it turns out that nobody’s home — like at 7:30am at Backcountry.com (see screenshot, right). Shoppers like having real-time support even when they’re in their pajamas; if you want their business you might want to offer it to them. If you’ve got money to invest in your online customer service, have a look at some of the customer chat solutions like LivePerson or PHP Live Support, and allocate a chunk of that budget on manning the online support 24-hours.

Optimizing your content for more Google AdSense revenue

Optimizing your site for higher search engine rankings is an obvious activity for anyone with a website. Optimizing your site for higher conversion rates is another obvious one. But how about optimizing for higher advertising revenue — specifically, a bigger check from Google for the AdSense ads that you display on your site.

Consider for example if you had a website on redecorating for Do-It-Yourselfers. You might have a page all about “housepainting.” But, as described in this article in USA Today about webmasters making money off of AdSense, “housepainting” isn’t a great money term for AdSense revenue — it’s only a 20-cent word. “Home improvement,” on the other hand, is worth $2. That’s a $1.80 difference.

So in effect you can give yourself a nice pay increase just by changing the keyword themes of your pages that display AdSense ads by creating new content pages around those keywords. And the real opportunists out there are creating pages about mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer caused by asbestos that lawyers are bidding on. That keyword is worth an order of magnitude more than “home improvement.” But that would be sooo dirty! Thankfully I don’t know anyone THAT dirty!

DMNews goes Web 2.0 – with feeds, trackbacks, comments, open archives

DMNews.com has relaunched with a new design and a new back-end, both done by us at Netconcepts. On their blog, DM News’ founder and publisher Adrian Courtenay talks about the relaunch and gives us such glowing praise that I feel myself blushing!

A few new features worth noting:

• The entire archives have been opened up. No more passwords required!
• Articles support both comments and trackbacks.
• Deep links to old articles have been maintained through 301 redirects.
• The site now offers RSS feeds. Not just one main RSS feed, but every category has an RSS feed.