Late last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Alan, a true SEO veteran and head of SEO over at Expedia.com. Chris was one of my fellow speakers at the AMA Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conferences I chaired in Seattle and Boston last Fall.

Now this interview is finally available as a half hour long audio podcast for your listening enjoyment, as well as an abridged transcript for you speed readers who prefer the written word over the spoken.

Chris and I had a fascinating discussion about the unique challenges of search engine optimizing huge sites. One of the topics we covered was landing pages for SEO and how they differ from PPC landing pages. Chris explains that, unlike with paid search campaigns, in SEO you can't just switch out landing pages very easily -- at least not without some powerful technology. Furthermore, any changes to improve conversion on the SEO landing page can negatively impact the page's organic rankings, thus making it harder to pinpoint what's making the page less effective. What's needed is a solution that allows you to make changes to the page yet still maintain your rankings.

Chris understands the value of empirical testing. SEO is an experimental science. You can't just blindly implement SEO tactics prescribed by SEO experts on their blogs and in the forums. You need to test it for yourself. This is harder than it sounds when you're dealing with millions of pages indexed. That's why Expedia has a suite of very sophisticated tools at their disposal, that Chris could only briefly allude to.

Hope you enjoy this podcast!

Reputation monitoring and management have become hot topics and will only continue to grow. These are becoming important areas for all businesses, large and small, to focus on as more and more people turn to the Web to communicate through blogs, their own Web sites, as well as the ever-growing opportunities for online consumer reviews and ratings.

The above quote was written in a CNet: Searchlight post about DIY Reputation Management. In that post, I take an in-depth look at this popular topic for businesses and professionals, and offer a ton of tips like: places to monitor your online reputation, what to do, what not to do, and some friendly reminders. I'd like to share with you one of my tips: set up Google and Yahoo! alerts for keywords, your brand name, or other things that relate to your reputation. By doing so, you can easily keep up with what kinds of content the search engines are serving up.

One of the areas that I'm starting to see a rapid growth in, is local search. It's important that business owners start taking advantage of this growth in popularity, so that they claim a stake in this soon-to-be competitive market. Believe it or not, there are a number of free tools where you can list your business locally through the major search engines. I talk about those tools and the importance of taking advantage of them in my article on CNET: Searchlight my SEO blog. One example of the tools I discuss is Google's local.google.com. By following a few, easy instructions, you are well on your way into the local listings.

Whether you post on blogs or run a website, at some point or another you've probably come across anchor text that reads, "click here." Every time you add anchor text with words like "here," "more," or "this," you are sending a message to the search engines that that simple word is what your link is all about. The end result doesn't change much for humans, but it does mean something to the search engines. If you are interested in ranking for particular keywords, you'll want to pay close attention to your anchor text.

My article on CNet, which can be found on my CNet: Searchlight blog, talks about why you should implement keywords in your anchor text links on your site to help boost your rankings.

Whether you own a small, online shop or a large retail site, you're probably scrambling to get some last-minute things done to gear up for a successful holiday season. In my article at CNet, I go into some great last-minute tips to help you achieve the success you want online. One of the tips I think would be the most useful would be to manage your existing blog content during this busy time. By planning posts in advance for future publishing, you'll not only save yourself some time, but will have the ability to reach out to your customers with great content that doesn't just sound like a sales pitch. If you don't have a blog, take advantage of all the social media networks out there and start reaching out to your customers.

For the full article, you can find it on my CNet: Searchlight blog. Hope you have a successful holiday season!

Big name companies often miss out on one of the basic concepts of SEO: Canonicalization, which means "identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source." How are they missing out? Grab a handful of your favorite companies and see whether or not they have a http://www.yourdomain.com and a http://yourdomain.com that leads to the same page. You'd be surprised how many "culprits" there are out there that don't have a 301 permanent redirect in place to preserve their home page's Page Rank. By having two sets of pages out there, it creates duplicate content because the search engines see pages based on their URLs. So instead of splitting your Page Rank between two, identical URLs, take control over your traffic and make sure you have a 301 permanent redirect in place.

For more on this topic, read my full post on my CNet: Searchlight blog.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bryan Eisenberg, who is the co-founder and CPO of Future Now, Inc. Bryan is also a high profile speaker, author, consultant, blogger, and the publisher of GrokDotCom. In additional to his role at Future Now, Bryan is also one of the founders and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

My interview with Bryan was about personas and "Persuasion Architecture," a process that helps persuade customers to make a decision on your website when traditional marketing methods fail. As an inventor of Persuasion Architecture, Bryan shares a wealth of expertise into the world of crafting personas to get into your customers' minds in order to give them the content they need in order for them to make their next click decision.

There are several nuggets that we can take from Bryan's interview, that revolve around the idea of personalized search. I asked Bryan what the typical rate was for a typical online retailer. His answer? "The average online conversion rate for a typical retailer today is 2.4%." That's pretty depressing when you think about it. So how to you help your conversion rate through managing your content?

Persuasion Architecture is based on Bryan's idea that, "everybody does things for their own reasons." These reasons translate into four, distinct preferences, the how and why people do the things that they do. Once you understand the four basic personality types -- emotional, logical, fast-paced, and disciplined -- you can build perspectives or snapshots that give you insight into how your customers might want to purchase your products. Once you understand the "how," then you can build the "who." Who is buying your products from your site? That's where profiles come into play, small pictures to what Bryan says will "give us a little better understanding of who that grouping or that mode of behavior is going to be -- and then ultimately two personas."

Listen to my interview with Bryan Eisenberg for more about how to boost your site's conversion rate. This podcast is 40 minutes long, and is a 10 MB download. Enjoy!

A couple weeks ago I was invited by the folks at Elastic Path to speak to their clients and partners via webcast on a topic that's near and dear to my heart -- any guesses? -- yup, SEO. The webinar, titled "SEO Secrets for Online Retailers" was an hour long and is archived and available for playback over at SlideShare.net. Incidentally, speaking of SlideShare, I met one of the founders while at WordCamp this past weekend. There she announced that Tuesday (which is today) they would be unveiling audio recordings synchronized to the Powerpoint, so you can advance a slide at a time and the audio jumps to that part of the presentation. Tres cool! As one of the first slideshows with synchronized audio, this SEO Secrets webinar made it to SlideShare's most viewed slideshows list for today! :-)

Watch the webinar and let me know what you think of the content and of the SlideShare format. If you prefer the SlideShare format over a screencast in Flash (like this one), I'll upload a bunch more onto SlideShare.

The article "A Marketing Geyser: E-retailer blogs aid branding, marketing and search, as long as they stay on message just came out in this month's issue of Internet Retailer. A great article about how retailers are taking advantage of blogging for marketing purposes. I'm quoted in the article, and so are our (Netconcepts') clients: Steve Spangler Science and DMSI (HomeVisions.com).

(As an aside, I'll be speaking on the same topic -- blogging for retailers -- later this month at the ACCM conference along with panelists Pinny Gniwisch of Ice.com and Steve Spangler of Steve Spangler Science. Ping me if you're going to be at ACCM... I'd love to meet up with my readers.)

Thought you'd also enjoy reading the transcript of my interview with the journalist, Elizabeth Gardner, of Internet Retailer, which was conducted over email:

What are the potential benefits of blogging, specifically from a retailer's point of view?

1. Search engines - Google in particular - love blogs. So anything you have to say or sell, if done as a blog, will rank better in the search engines - all else being equal.
2. If you have a good blog, you can get readers "hooked" and coming back for more (either via your RSS feed or via your email 'blogletter'), thus further burning your brand into their minds and increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases.
3. Having a blog helps get you links. If you are a blogger, then other bloggers think of you as "one of them". As such, they will be more likely to link to you and to give you favorable coverage on their blogs. It is also more likely that you will be "on their radar", because bloggers are more apt to follow your company's movements by subscribing to you blog's RSS feed than by subscribing to your email newsletter or periodically visiting your site.
4. Having a blog helps get you press from the mainstream media. That's because journalists read blogs. For example, I received unsolicited interview requests from journalists from the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News because of blog posts I wrote.
5. A blog builds your credibility and can position you as a "thought leader" in your niche. For example, a blog about stamp collecting (with interesting trends, news tidbits, insightful commentary, etc.) would position an ecommerce shop selling collectible stamps as a credible, trusted expert source for stamps.
6. A blog can help you get invited to speak at conferences and to author articles.

How time, effort, cost, etc., is involved in doing it right?

A blog, in order to be viewed as active, should have at least a few blog posts per week. The higher the quality of the posts, the less frequently you have to post. Posting daily is ideal. You should allocate a minimum of 5 to 10 hours per week to blog writing. Allocate another 5 to 10 hours per week minimum to commenting on others' blogs.

Developing your blog strategy should probably involve a blog consultant and will likely run in the $5,000 to $15,000 price range. Don't skimp on the blog strategy: as much time and energy should be put into that as any offline marketing strategy. The initial web development and search engine optimization can run in the $10,000-and-up price range.

I'd also suggest hiring a blog consultant on a retainer basis, to help guide you through that crucial first year of blogging. That can cost anywhere from $1000 to $5000 per month.

If you're going to recruit non-employee evangelists to blog (e.g. passionate customers), then you should allocate some small amount of budget to swag and little gifts through the year in appreciation of their contributions to the blog.

Can you share a few tips on how to go about doing it right?

1. Really let your personality shine through. You blog should have a human voice, and should show there are real human beings behind the blog. Introduce your blogger(s) with an About page on the blog, and include a photo. People buy from people, not from faceless corporations.
2. It really helps if you can come up with an "angle". For example, jewelry retailer ice.com came up with a "gossip rag" angle with their Sparkle Like the Stars blog -- the blog has a trendy fasionista / gossip columnist writing style, talking about what jewelry celebrities are wearing and how to replicate the "look" yourself. That is much more buzzworthy than a "here's what's new in stock" blog.
3. Don't just regurgitate news and content that's already out there on the Net. Share your own insightful commentary too.
4. It's good etiquette to cite your sources and to credit the blog that led you to find the newsy tidbit you are blogging about (this is known as a "hat tip").
5. A good blogger is one who participates in the blogosphere and doesn't write in isolation -- commenting on others' blogs as much as they write on their own blog. Also build relationships with other bloggers within virtual communities like MyBlogLog and in the real world by attending conferences like BlogOn, BlogHer, and Blog Business Summit.
6. As far as retaining readers, recency is more important than frequency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody's home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear "fresh". Personally I don't like keeping RSS feeds in my newsreader that haven't had recent activity.

And any warnings about what not to do?

1. You need to do it with sincerity and transparency. Don't hire a ghost writer to pretend to be someone they are not. Blogs have been lambasted for trying to fool their readers (e.g. Raging Cow, Wal-Mart).
2. Abandoned blogs look very bad. If you're going to blog, you have to be committed to keeping it going.

Any examples of retailer cluelessness in this area?

Hmm... http://www.blogmagazine.com -- It's from Magazines.com and it comes off as sales propaganda that isn't even thinly veiled. It looks like they've abandoned it too.

You may also want to check out my "5 Tips for Multichannel Retailers Entering the Blogosphere, which is the transcript from an interview I did last year with Multichannel Merchant magazine.

This Thursday I am presenting a webinar, "Search Marketing Essentials for Online Retailers," along with George Michie of Rimm-Kaufman Group, for MarketingProfs.com. It starts at noon Eastern.

It is free for MarketingProfs Premium Plus members and $99 for others (although it is a better deal if you just sign up for Premium Plus membership for $299 then you can gain access to a whole library of past virtual seminars and can attend upcoming ones for a year).

We will be talking about...

• strategies for optimizing for your head terms,
• strategies for optimizing for the Long Tail,
• strategies for competing with larger better funded competitors,
• ...and much more.

Sign up now or become a Premium Plus member.