march 2008

 If you’re familiar with Sam’s Club or the similar store Costco, you know that shoppers pay a yearly membership fee and then have access to name-brand products from food to electronics at near-to-wholesale prices.

Sam’s Club recently started offering online SEO (search engine optimization) services, including local search marketing, Pay-per-click advertising and web design services along with the pallets of BBQ sauce, paper towels and tomato soup. Truth be told, when I first heard about this late last year I laughed and forgot about it. When it crept back into my consciousness, I realized that with the popularity of these membership stores there are probably a great many people who are considering these services and would like to know if it is a good idea to buy SEO and Internet marketing services this way.

For those of you business owners too busy to read a whole blog post, let me summarize for you thusly, NO! Read on for the details of the why nots.

SEO Is Not A Bulk Commodity

First of all, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that SEO can’t be purchased as a bulk package deal. Successful optimization requires taking the time to get to know the industry, the site’s needs, the personality of the site’s target customer, and industry-specific keywords. It takes time even for experienced optimizers to make changes and see results.

You can’t get much information about these services without filling out a form, but based on their introductory information, Sam’s Club explains that for $30 a month they will help you “establish a local profile” and submit your site to “the major search engines.” This is only a drop in the bucket of what true professional search engine optimization services offers. If this is all that is done, it is highly unlikely that any site would experience significant gains in their search engine rankings or traffic levels.

Search engine optimization requires an ongoing period of content creation and refinement. Attention must be paid to many different technical details of a site’s structure, which they do not even attempt to address with this service.

Site Submission Isn’t SEO

Sam’s Club is using the LeadConnect service from Innuity to provide the SEO services to their own members. LeadConnect allows businesses to create an online profile with business information that people can search for and find. If this sounds like pretty much the same thing as an online Yellow Pages listing, that’s because it is.

After your profile is built, Innuity promises to submit your website to all the major search engines and Internet Yellow Pages. This is unnecessary! I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it a scam to offer search engine submission services, but search engines find sites on their own and submission hasn’t been shown to make a difference. Besides, if your site is already listed and appearing on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, you already know they ‘found’ your ...

Just five days ago the Google Analytics program announced a new analytics data sharing feature. If you haven’t heard of it already, you’ll see the message asking you to ‘accept’ next time you log into your analytics account.

What’s really going on here? Whether you champion this data sharing or run from it will probably depend on your opinion of Google in general: If you are interested in getting as much free information as possible, this could be a good thing while on the other hand this program will give more powerful site visitor and transactional information to Google and for many people this may be another reason to distrust Google Almighty.

Personally, I’m holding off on making a judgment call until I see more about how the program works and the benefits they say they will provide . . . There’s a long list of good things Google could do with access to this much transaction data but I have too many questions about how useful the data will actually be.

Data Sharing Options

Google is offering the option of sharing your analytics data three ways:

1) With Google products only

This is the most vague option, as Google says sharing information with other Google products (not third-party products) will enhance the services they offer “as they become available,” and of course only businesses that share data get access to the enhanced services. This sounds like Google wants your help improving their services without telling anyone what they’ll get in return.

2) Anonymously with Google products and benchmarking services

The benchmarking service allows customers to compare their data with other sites in their same or similar industry. The service also promises to let you compare your site’s data with unrelated industries. With some in-depth comparisons, you could determine if all sites in your industry are experiencing the same ups and downs in traffic and also provide insight into cross-promotional opportunities with other industries who may be booming while your traffic is flat. The data is not shared with competitors and is anonymized before being shared.

Truth be told, I’m not sure why Google feels like they need to ask permission to do this, as their Privacy Policy already seems like it gives them carte blanche to gather and share user data however they want.

One of the drawbacks I see is that only data from sites that agree to participate will contribute to benchmarks, so the data already seems skewed from the beginning. I have to question how valuable the data will be if only a handful of sites in any industry are participating.

3) No sharing at all

So Google is letting you share a little with some undefined return benefit to you, share a lot with a potential benefit for industry comparison which may or may not be valuable, or not share at all.

What do you all think about this? Does Google really need us to improve its services? Is the return for us worth it?

Get from Point A to Point B, quickly and with the least effort.

Your Point A is that you are a small business owner and webmaster. Your Point B is that you need content on your website. Get from Point A to Point B faster by creating content using what you already have. Whether you manage an ecommerce website or large informational site or anything in between doesn’t matter. In order to keep yourself in the game, ranking well in the search engines and getting a healthy amount of traffic coming to your site requires that you all play by pretty much the same rules.

What do the engines want? 

The engines do have preferences, and your job is to give it to them. They want freshness. Serve the engines new content to see each time they come your way. They want quality. No keyword stuffing, no spammy content, no content written by word generators. Just real, useful content that is of the highest quality you can provide. They want quantity. It’s not fair but the more pages you have that an engine can index the more they like you. They want links. Links means other sites trust you and want to share with other sites what you have to say. Linkbait content such as videos, podcasts, white papers, newsletters and other content that is useful to people and easily shared provides incentive for people to link to you.

Marketing guru John Jantsch has written a post called “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose,” a slogan which he’s borrowing from the green movement and applying to the notion of  using content you already have to create more online content on your web pages. The post is from February 20, and I’m just reading it today (I’m behind on my blog reading…tell me you’re not?), but this advice never goes out of style. As I was reading it my thought process went something like this: a) Dang, I wish I wrote this post! b) Gee, our readers would find this really useful. c) Heeey, this matches up with advice I had given in recent posts about adding multimedia or other video content. d) I’ll keep the ‘reuse’ theme going by ‘using’ John’s post myself!

So here you go. I highly recommend clicking through to John’s original post, but here’s a tidbit of his advice.

• If you get the same questions over and over again, answer them all in an audio format.
• Take those same questions and turn them into blog posts.

Speaking at an industry event? Record all of your slide presentations and upload them to sites like YouTube and Slideshare. Check out John’s “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose” post for more easy ways you can utilize content you already have.

Tags: website, ecommerce, seo, search, engine, optimization, content, indexing

Is there a good, better and best way to categorize your items on an ecommerce website? I would say yes, definitely. Whether your site has hundreds or thousands of products or thousands of pages doesn’t really matter; the goal is to enable your site visitors to find the information they seek quickly and easily. Let’s look at some strategies for the best navigation experience you can offer your customers.

Top-level categorization 

There should be clear top-level categories. There could be only a handful or twenty, depending on how much information you have to spread around. The name of the category does make a big difference. If your site offers books, DVDs or other informational how-to products along with your regular product line, you might have one link titled ‘How-To,’ or ‘Media.’ Maybe ‘Books & More.’ The idea is to avoid naming your link something generic like, ‘Stuff.’ The top level category names should be general enough to encompass what you want them to contain but specific enough that customers immediately know what’s there.

Looking at one of our sites, PondBiz.com, their large and successful pond products site lists 24 categories in the left navigation bar. It could be really annoying to have to click through each category and then click again to get to the products or information within. But their site makes good use of another good usability idea, minimizing clicks.

Minimize Clicks

One way to allow for easy, quick navigation is to keep the site structure somewhat ‘flat’ so users don’t have to click many times to get to products.

The PondBiz.com navigation utilizes popout dynamic menus. Mousing over the navigation links reveals new subcategory options, saving a click.

Another of our sites also uses the click-saving technique in a different way. PrewittsWorkWear.com uses an expandable menu. With this option, a little plus sign appears next to the main categories that have subcategories within them. Clicking the plus to the left of ‘Specialty’ reveals sub-menus for ‘Flame-Resistant’ and ‘High-Visibility’ work wear. This does involve an extra click to open the subcategories, but it is another way to keep navigation tighter, and some people don’t like to chase the expandable menus.

Give More Ways to Shop MightyMerchant’s site manager allows the option to set up different category structures to give visitors more ways to shop. For example, it can be easy to set up Shop by Manufacturer, Shop by Brand, Shop by Season, Special Discounts, or Shop by Theme, as just a few examples.

LearningServicesUS.com is one of our sites with a huge product catalog of educational materials for teachers. They utilize the same dynamic pop-outs for navigation that PondBiz uses, but what I want you to notice on this site is that they have a regular search but also cross-category searches. These narrow down searches by subject, manufacturer, and grade level. If your catalog is huge, or even if it’s not and you just have multiple brands, provide multiple ways for people to find what they’re looking for.

The important thing is to ...