Shop.org Blog

Blogs can be a powerful SEO tactic for an online retailer to employ. Steve Spangler Science Inc., a toy cataloger and client of ours (Netconcepts), attributes fully 13% of their online sales to their blog. RSS feeds, too, offer significant SEO benefits.

If you have, or are considering having, a blog or RSS feed, this post is an important read. There are some specific, not widely known, techniques and tactics to optimize your blog for search engine visibility. The same thing with your RSS feeds.

Firstly, here are some quick tips for search engine optimizing your blog…

1. Customize your title tags (rather than simply using the post title as your title tag). If you’re running your blog on WordPress, my SEO Title Tag plugin will give you that capability without having to do any programming.
2. Search engine optimize your URL structure — by avoiding the use of query strings (everything from the question mark on, in the URL), incorporating keywords into the URL, separating keywords with hyphens not underscores, reducing duplicate pages in the index in order to aggregate PageRank to a single canonical URL, and so on.
3. Add a tag cloud and tag pages to your blog and then optimize those tag pages. An example of this in action along with the resultant traffic increases here.
4. Include links to Related Posts
5. Add a Popular Posts list to your home page with text links to those posts that you most want to pass PageRank to 
6. Improve your anchor text on permalinks (don’t just use the word “Permalink”) and on external links to your other sites
7. Add intro copy, rich with keywords, to the top of the page through the use of “Sticky” Posts
8. Use heading tags (H1, H2 etc.) but only on keyword-rich headings and not on throwaway copy like the date of the post
9. Use bold or emphasis tags on important keyword-rich copy in the body of your posts 
10. (For blogs with multiple authors) Create an author page for each contributor which includes their latest posts as well as a bio and link to their site. 

Secondly, some quick tips for optimizing your RSS feeds:

1. Make your feeds “full text”, not summaries

2. Have twenty or more items in your feed instead of the default 10
3. Offer multiple feeds on your site, not just one. For example, “Best sellers” can be a separate feed, “Clearance items” can be a separate feed, “New products” another, and so on.
4. Make your item titles keyword-rich, because those item titles get sydicated onto other websites and become anchor text
5. Avoid putting tracking codes in the URLs or, if you do, 301 redirect so that the PageRank aggregates to a definitive version of the page

I made a screencast (kind of an archived webinar) — an extended, 1 hour long version of the presentation I’ve given numerous times at Search Engine Strategies, on the topic of SEOing your blogs and RSS feeds:

• Flash version (10 MB)
• Windows Media version (22 MB)

Here is the Powerpoint that went with it too.

Enjoy! And do let me know what you think of it.

For my fourth interview in the Word-of-Mouth Wisdom series, I decided to tap two of the smartest people I know in the field of marketing. Dr. Peter Fader and Dr. David Reibstein both teach marketing at The Wharton School, where I was fortunate enough to earn my MBA. Both have been friends and advisors ever since graduation, and somehow I convinced them to invest in Bazaarvoice!

Pete is well known on many levels. He was helping CDnow run analysis back in the pre-boom times. He has been very outspoken in the age of digital music, advising music companies on how to market in these rapidly changing times. I remember him best as my Markstrat professor, one of the better MBA classes I had the pleasure of taking.

Dave is also very well known. He consults for companies all over the world. He served as the Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute. And few know him as the co-founder of BizRate, where he served on their Board of Directors from its inception to when Scripps bought the company for $525 million in cash almost two years ago.

Read the Entire Post >

It’s entertaining to hear clients rant about SEO vendors (particularly when it’s not Netconcepts being ranted about! ) Last year I got a chuckle out of the story that Chris Smith from our client SuperPages.com regaled me with. (Chris manages the SEO, web development and a bunch of other stuff for SuperPages). Verizon Information Directories is a fairly conservative company, so when one of the execs from an SEO vendor that begins with a Z showed up in SANDALS for a pitch meeting, it not surprisingly didn’t go over well. No deals were struck that day, or ever, with that vendor.

Stuff like that seems like common sense. At least it does to me. But surprisingly vendors make big mistakes before, during, or shortly after the pitch, and it all goes off the rails. Or perhaps they win the deal, only to blow the relationship and any chance of future work during the engagement.

Inspired by the sandals incident, Chris Smith has kindly offered his advice to SEOs wanting to pitch SuperPages (by way of disclosure, they are a client of Netconcepts and they are happy with us, so best of luck to you )

According to Chris, SEOs should…

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

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

And then I saw just recently that Lee Odden of SEO vendor TopRank offered his Top 5 Ways SEO Agencies and Clients Piss Each Other Off.

Here are Lee’s top 5 ways SEO agencies tick off their clients:

• Agency overpromises and underdelivers
• Agency uses tricks and gets client site penalized by search engines
• SEO techie insults client side account manager on lack of knowledge about topics such as latent semantic indexing and not knowing the name of the last Google update
• SEO agency waits for search marketing performance to fail before assessing and implementing new SEO recommendations
• Agency uses client brand name in promotional materials without client permission

And here are Lee’s top 5 ways clients tick off their SEO agencies:

• Client doesn’t pay on time
• Client overwrites on-page site optimization or implements a new web design without telling the SEO agency
• Client fires the SEO firm without warning, without reason and via email
• Client wants to try every trick they’ve read about in 2 year old forum posts or heard about from someone’s cousin’s friend who has an ex-girlfriend working at MSN
• Client asks for work outside the scope of the agreement for no additional fees - frequently

I recommend going to Lee’s original post as the comments are just as enlightening.

Fellow Shop.org members,

Please help! We are seeking advice/guidance/referrals on a 2007 site re-design of Joann.com.

Would prefer design firm referrals in Los Angeles or Cleveland, OH, if at all possible. Looking for guidance on pricing & costs associated with graphics/site re-design, usability testing, etc.

Hoping for real-life “lessons learned” from other site re-design adventures!

We have a preliminary “scope” done for the re-design - currently looking at “prettying up” home page, merch category page, product page, creating new templates for product page, comparison charts page, etc.

Have done preliminary interviews with 2 designers; looking to learn much more from Shop.org community before proceeding with interviews.

Thank you! Heather Kline, Director of Content & PR 310.662.4472

A client recently asked me if there were any SEO concerns or repurcussions when using multi-variate testing systems such as Touch Clarity, Optimost, Vertster or Offermatica. That was such a good question I figure I should blog my answer.

First off, I should mention that I’m a fan of multivariate testing. It is a wonderful tool to help optimize conversion rates.

With that said, it is not a tool to optimize search rankings. In fact, quite the opposite could happen. If you look at conversion rate in isolation, the system may recommend a version that actually causes the search rankings for that page to tank! For example, if important keywords are removed because they didn’t convert well in the test.

I also like to think like a Google engineer whenever I implement something. I ask myself “What would Matt Cutts think of this?”. According to the engineers on Google’s Webspam team who I’ve spoken to, they want Googlebot to be part of the test set. In other words, they don’t want Googlebot to be excluded from ever seeing the content that real human users in the test set see — which makes sense. But given how multivariate testing is typically implemented, this is not the case. That’s because Javascript/AJAX/DHTML is used to modify the page content. Spiders don’t execute that, so that content is, in effect, hidden. The concern from Google lies in the fact that scuch an approach *could* be used for gaming and spamming.

So, I’m not wanting to discourage you from conducting tests, or from using multivariate testing vendors. Just bear in mind these things when you apply these tests beyond your PPC landing pages and onto your public website. It’s best to have all the information!