In preparing for my “Natural Search Tactics for the Retailer” session at the Shop.org Annual Summit (which is coming right up!), I thought a similar handout would be in order — again, in the form of a checklist or tips sheet, but this time of top-performing SEO tactics. I was planning on pulling from this Multichannel Merchant article I wrote for their April issue, and this 2-part article for MarketingProfs.

Just between those two documents I have plenty of tips to share, but that’s just from one person’s perspective: mine. I want to be more inclusive than that. So I’m also hoping to include YOUR top SEO tips in the handout too. Got a favorite SEO tactic that’s performing really well? I’d love to hear it, for potential inclusion in the handout (with due credit to you, of course!). In particular I’m looking for tips on getting great links, building your keyword list, optimizing your “on-page factors”, optimizing your internal linking, and technical SEO (like redirects and rewrites). My email address is sspencer@netconcepts.com. I look forward to hearing from you!

One blog that has such a hook is Design Talk, a blog of helpful home decorating advice and tips do-it-yourself interior decorators, owned by HomeVisions, a DMSI brand. (By way of disclosure, DMSI is a client of ours and we built the blog for them.) DesignTalk’s “hook” is to share a wealth of home decor ideas that would rival any home decorating magazine.

But you can’t stop there. Being helpful is great, but you need to be memorable in terms of personality too. Whether you want your retail blog to be snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, self-deprecating, nihilistic, or voyeuristic, a great hook should either be written into every post or presented in such a way that it becomes unique for your brand.

One example of a retail blog that I think really nailed this concept is the Sparkle Like the Stars blog, owned by ice.com. Their blog is snarky, irreverent, fun, voyeuristic, trendy and useful — all at the same time! It’s like a celebrity gossip rag but with fashion advice that the average person can use to recreate a particular movie star’s look.

We at Netconcepts decided to follow in the footsteps of Sparkle Like the Stars to create a blog about celebrity footwear fashion we affectionately named, “The Shoe Paparazzi.” The idea behind it was to fuse a love for shoes with the “sport” of celebrity watching in order to capture and keep readers’ interest. At this point it’s still just an experiment, a pet project of Netconcepts that wasn’t commissioned by a client, but is something we hope can be used in the future to prove the case for the “celebrity watching hook” as a viable angle for online retailers. If you have the chance, I invite you to take a look at our “Shoe Paparazzi” blog experiment and let me know whether or not you think it has what it takes.

What about you? Does your brand / company have a blog, and if so, what’s your hook?

Philips 80 Watt Power Inverter
So you’ve defaulted on that variable-rate subprime mortgage and have to live in your car. So what? With this Philips 80-Watt Power Inverter, you’ll be blowdrying your hair and blending smoothies until the bank takes your car away, too… Read more

Granted, using such a snarky, smart-alec voice is risky for most online retailers, but Woot has been able to pull it off so far. And it makes for fun reading.

What do you think? Is this too much? What other retailers are getting edgy with their product copy?

A search engine optimized blog is an ASSET. It makes money for you while you sleep. It drives traffic whether you’ve blogged that week or not. Ideally you want a blog that is frequently updated, but it’s not essential. Steve Spangler, founder and CEO of an educational toy retailer, has a blog that drives over 13% of his ecommerce site’s sales, yet he only posts 3 to 5 times per month.

Note that Steve is on the Advanced Search panel session along with me and Elaine Wu this week at the Shop.org Annual Summit. Do try to make the session if you can!

Also check out the video highlights of Chloe on her panel at BlogHer. I’m so proud! :-)

I wanted to share with you the notes from these two interviews, which you won’t find in the article or elsewhere on the MarketingProfs site.

First off, notes from my interview with Seth Greenberg of Intuit…

It was crucial from the outset to sharpen the campaign and make it less corporate. They wanted to have fun with it — before people made fun of it. They probably wouldn’t have made it as crazy except for the fact that they landed Vanilla Ice as spokesperson. They threw out the idea, the timing was right, Vanilla Ice was available. So they flew to Florida and showed up at his house in Palm Beach. Vanilla Ice came up with his own rap. It was a load of fun, a really good process.

It took a couple of weeks to land Vanilla Ice as spokesman. The agreed deal was they got two hours at his house but Vanilla Ice gave them another two hours at no extra charge because he was having such fun. Vanilla Ice has been a big supporter. Vanilla Ice is very polarizing and that is the key… that is what is making this a phenomenon on YouTube.

The offline component has been much bigger than the online component. For example, Tax Rap was on Entertainment Weekly’s “Hit List” in the #10 slot. AdCritic was quoted as saying: “I don’t know how to read this campaign…”

There were 50 mentions of the Tax Rap campaign on TV — from CNN on down (Access Hollywood, local TV stations, etc.). It also made page 6 of the New York Post. Also, 800 blogs refer to the campaign.

Not measuring direct sales. Attempting to measure buzz but that is an elusive metric. Measuring the amount of press pick-up. Another thing they are measuring is how many people have left email addresses.

The way the contest worked is there was a $25,000 grand prize, and people submitted a video of their rap about taxes in order to compete for the prizes. All video submissions have to be in by March 30, voting starts on March 31 for about a week. Vanilla Ice picks the winner in April around the tax deadline.

They had about one million views of their videos. Intuit paid for visibility on the YouTube home page — over ten million people will see that. They also paid for a contest channel and a branded channel. Seth strongly encourages investing in a branded channel. This stuff is not inexpensive, but Seth believes it is hard to scale virally without it.

A tip that Seth offered: court people with huge subscriber bases. Those are the “connectors” (that’s Tipping Point talk for influencers/sneezers). So, for example, somebody might get 50,000 views of their submission because of their subscriber base. That then leads to Intuit piggy-backing on that submitter’s visibility and reputation in YouTube.

And now here’s my notes from my interview with Pinny Gniwisch…

Pinny went around different cities as “Mr. Cupid”, asking passersby to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences with Valentine’s Day — in places like Times Square, Rockerfeller Center, L.A., Las Vegas, Montreal, and Deer Valley, Utah — armed with his microphone and cameraman in tow.

For his second campaign, he interviewed actors walking in and out of a famous restaurant in L.A. asking them about their mothers and about Mother’s Day. Here’s an example: Pinny interviewing the Three 6 Mafia.

The first Mr. Cupid video got 10,000 views within a week, the six or seven other videos after that got featured by the editor. He has a Mr. Cupid channel and has recorded 50,000 views to that channel. He didn’t anticipate the success that he has achieved so far. He has 3,000 subscribers to his channel so he has a following and, when he publishes something new to his channel, this new content shows up on each subscriber’s home page.

There is no tracking of sales. They spent only $420 in expenses so this is very cost-effective. It cost $70/hour to shoot the videos. Revver wants to feature his content.

I turned these conversations into podcasts, which I think you’ll find beneficial in your SEO and SMM (social media marketing) efforts. There’s some real gold in those interviews.

Download/Listen:

• Vanessa Fox interview (40 minute MP3, 9 megs) – Google’s webmaster tools, SEO impacts of AJAX, Flash, duplicate content, redirects, etc.
• Neil Patel interview (15 minute MP3, 3 megs) – getting to the front page of Digg and other social media sites
• Eric Ward interview (36 minute MP3, 8 megs) – tips and secrets on how to garner links

More podcasts to come from other speakers, including Shop.org blog contributors and members, in the coming weeks. So be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss them.

UPDATE: I just posted the podcast interview of Google software engineer Amanda Camp (33 minute MP3, 8 megs)

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.

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.

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!

A savvy retailer will have created a profile for themselves in MySpace, developed a large network of friends, developed bulletins to send out to those friends, posted comments on some of the more influential friends’ profiles and encouraged comment posting on their own profile. They would have incorporated links to top selling products but in a soft sell sort of way. They would have made their profile stand out from the crowd with a custom layout –yet not varying it too much to cause the MySpace visitors to become disoriented and unable to navigate.
 

If you think that MySpace is just a hangout for kids you would be wrong. More than half of MySpace users are over 35. The infiltration by adults has gotten “so bad” that all the kids are leaving MySpace in droves — switching to Bebo where the adults are few and far between. Yes, the income-earning, money-wielding adults have staged a coup and taken over MySpace! And that is great news for us online retailers!
 

In my recent MarketingProfs article I shared some examples of retailers who are marketing effectively in MySpace. This includes a client of my company Netconcepts — namely Pugster.com, an online jewelry retailer. Their MySpace profile boasts a network of over 8000 “Friends”! They use their mascot, Pinky the pug dog, as the profile owner. They spend time daily reaching out to build relationships with their friends on MySpace. They make sure that when they make contact, it is personal and not salesy. They give their visitors something interesting to read, do and listen to on their profile. It is not about over-the-top selling.
 

There are definitely tricks to this MySpace thing. For example, how do you get to 8000 friends? The answer, once you know it, is surprisingly simple… You start with bands! There are tons of bands on MySpace and what band would refuse a friend request? After all, you might be a rabid fan, despite what your profile says about you. It is very easy to have friend requests granted with bands.  Once you have the numbers (e.g. a thousand or more), it makes it a lot easier to develop friends with more desirable MySpace users — i.e those who are more in your target market.
 

Just remember, as in the real world, having no friends in MySpace makes you look like a loser.