I had the opportunity to attend Google’s CommerceThink ’07 last week at the Google headquarters.  CommerceThink ’07 brought together a group of dedicated online and multichannel retail executives who ventured out of their offices in November to hear Google’s perspectives on search and multichannel retailing and to talk to each other about common challenges and [...]

You may have seen that STORES Magazine recently published its list of Favorite 50 Online Retailers.  Some interesting methodology was used to compile the list.  They asked two open-ended, write-in questions to nearly 8,000 consumers:  1. What website do you shop at most often for apparel items (clothing, shoes, accessories, etc.) and 2. What website [...]

My topic for the Intermediate Search Strategy session was “natural search,” so for my presentation I focused on a couple of great tools that make your SEO efforts a little bit easier. I also talked about some ways to handle duplicate content (either within your site or or on other sites) and keyword cannibalization (when [...]

 Finding the Unexpected in the Long Tail
 Thorough keyword research uncovers surprising topics in every study. It also presents us with numerically supported ratios that challenge our assumptions about our industry (eg. we may think that oversized bikinis are searched 5% as often as string bikinis, but research may show a different numerical relationship; this deeply [...]

At the BlogHer conference that took place this summer in Chicago, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe gave her first-ever conference presentation. She was on a panel about “professional blogging,” based on success with her blog about the the popular virtual pets site Neopets.com. Her blog, “The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site,” makes her about $35 per [...]