SEO the Secret Weapon in the E-Commerce Wars

The Opportunity

It has been well documented that consumers use search engines to research and buy products online. They read reviews and descriptions, analyze ratings, and research pricing as they compare products and vendors. A successful e-commerce site must offer a positive customer experience and build trust. However, in the nitty-gritty world of online retail sales, probably the most important success factors are the accessibility of the product and price.

It follows then that high rankings in the search engines are essential to the success of an e-commerce site, because high rankings make the products more accessible to the online shoppers. The site should rank highly not just for the general keywords that describe the business, but, ideally, all of the words that describe the products sold on the site.

The Challenge

There are two primary methods to achieve high rankings in search engines. One is to optimize your website naturally, i.e. organically, so that search engines rank it highly for your important terms on their search results pages. The second way to achieve high rankings is to buy Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads that appear on search results pages. .

Which method drives the best traffic for online retailers? According to a recent study conducted by Jupiter Research and presented at the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference in March, 2005, “6 out of 7 clicks from the organic listings as opposed to Pay-Per-Click listings.” .

Clearly, high natural listings in the search engines are key for a successful e-commerce site. .

In spite of this fact, many online retailers still focus exclusively on PPC advertising to drive traffic to their sites. The explosion in the popularity of PPC advertising for e-commerce sites is likely due to a variety of factors, including the ease of setting up campaigns, competitive peer-pressure, and the ease of budget approvals based on the lure of quicker returns on ad spend. The rewards of organic site optimization, although greater than PPC, appear over a longer period of time. .

For an e-commerce business, a PPC-only strategy is a short-sighted solution that has known pitfalls, too. As competition increases, PPC ad prices also increase, which erodes profit margins and forces the e-commerce business owner to increase their PPC budgets just to keep up. .

Many experienced SEO practitioners have problems optimizing for online retail sites because they lack the necessary programming skills to optimize dynamic pages from shopping cart software. Un-optimized dynamic pages are often invisible to search engines. To compound the problem there are hundreds of different types of shopping cart software, each of which has different optimization requirements. .

The Solution

To successfully optimize an E-Commerce site for search engines requires specialized techniques and processes that are above and beyond regular optimizations performed for non-commerce sites. .

These include: .

• Development of web server output filters that enable Title and Meta tag reconfiguration even if the shopping cart application doesn?t allow it. These filters can be applied to PHP and IIS with amazing results.
• Implementing sitemaps that allow search engines to index the entire site, even when cookies are required to access certain parts of the site.
• Optimizing product and page titles and descriptions to match the phrases that consumers actually search on. For example an online store in Thailand was selling Kaw Kwy statues. After research it was found this phrase was not a popular search term. Further investigation found a more common search term for Kaw Kwy – ?Fake Ivory?. After changing the product names, titles, and descriptions, the client started being found for his products and selling them.
• Develop product feeds to the major shopping engines such as Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, and BizRate to ensure maximum exposure for the products at prices far below current PPC ad prices.
• Undertake usability research and analysis so you know how people are really using the site and where they are abandoning the site or your shopping cart.
• Implement analytics to understand traffic, reporting and visitor conversion patterns.
• Implementation of other SEO tools such as paid inclusion (including Yahoo?s SiteMatch) to increase the frequency of spidering if there is a constant stream of new products to your E-Commerce site.

The Results

Natural optimization for an E-Commerce site can have a truly profound impact on the performance of the website and profitability of the business.

A major supplier of car and truck accessories reduced PPC increased visitors, and profits while reducing their PPC ad spending by $6000 per month. They achieved these results in less than three months by applying web and eCommerce analytics to an existing paid placement campaign, and then applying what they learned from the analytics in their e-commerce search engine optimization strategy. After 6 months their PPC sourced revenue and their organic sourced revenue were equal and their overall advertising spend was decreased by 30%.

A distributor of rugs and carpets, who had previously worked with two other “regular” SEO firms with only minimal success, implemented these e-commerce optimization techniques, and increased revenues 200% — after only three months!

Conclusion

As PPC ad prices continue to rise, savvy online retailers E-Commerce site owners providers need to take a fresh look at how much true success they actually gain from their PPC campaigns, and evaluate (or re-evaluate) possible gains from integrating organic search optimization, too.

Optimizing an E-commerce website is different than optimizing a content-only site. While there are many SEO consulting firms all over the world who can work wonders with regular sites, there are only a few SEO practitioners who have expertise in e-Commerce optimization. Be aware of the difference when selecting a firm to work on your e-commerce site. .

Taking steps now to optimize your E-commerce correctly for natural search engine rankings can increase your profits, and help you gain a competitive advantage over most online retailers who are still using only PPC campaigns.

Dylan Downhill is the CIO and Technical Director and James Peggie is the Director of Marketing for Elixir Systems ? a search marketing agency located in Scottsdale, Arizona. www.ElixirSystems.com

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Your Marketing Strategy and SEO

As on owner of an online business you should have a clear understanding of your markets. This understanding of your markets should always be determined before going into business. How you read your markets and present your products to your customers will determine how successful your business will be. Unfortunately many people start up an online business without researching their markets or having a marketing plan in place.

Traditional marketing theory states that your marketing goal is to deliver the right product at the right price and have it available in the right place. The correct promotion mix must be used to deliver your message to the right people (your target market). You should have all these concepts adapted into a marketing plan before you start up your operations.

A great deal of your online marketing effort should revolve around building your brand name. Whether your brand is your product or your service your aim should be to build trust. Trust and credibility are essential to establishing a relationship with customers. Often the trust that your brand conveys is the only thing that differentiates you from your competitors. Take a look at your site, and your brand, from your visitor?s point of view. Does it give you a sense of credibility? Remember that having high search engine rankings alone will not give your business any credibility.

The goal of marketing is to make sales. That is the only goal. In the field of Internet marketing it is easy to lose sight this very simple concept. There are so many distractions; high search engine rankings, site traffic, hits, etc.

Search Engine Optimization?s (SEO) goal is to give your business visibility within the search engines. However this visibility will not guarantee sales. Exposure alone does not result in sales. There must be a strong marketing campaign behind any visibility to help drive sales. Being top for a search term will mean nothing for your business if you do not make sales.

SEO can be viewed on as publicity for your company. Natural search engine listings can be viewed as editorial public relations placed alongside your paid search advertising listings which are part of an overall marketing direction. This publicity should be part of your marketing plan ?but it should not BE your marketing plan. Your business should be focused on marketing ? i.e. getting customers not visitors.

SEO alone does not sell your products or services. It may increase targeted visitors. However even targeted visitors do not guarantee sales. Only your marketing endeavors will bring sales – and increase your profits.

What can you do to help build your online business?

Remember that price alone does not bring sales. Value drives sales, and your value is determined by your brand. If you establish an important and unique brand value then customers will remember it and return to buy your products. Therefore build your brand.

Differentiate yourself from your competition. Customers will look at various sites offering similar products and try to ascertain the differences between one company and another. The differences could feature perceived value, customer service, experience, or website impression. You can look to dominate a specific area of expertise which will establish your unique brand value.

Make sure you site is focused on the customer and dedicated towards enhancing the customer experience. Many websites are built focusing on the company or its products. It is often the case that what a company thinks should be on a website is different that what its customers think should be there. Avoid building a site that is basically a brochure for your company.

What do you do to make your site customer focused? It should be quick to load and easy to navigate. It should have informational content that is relevant to your targeted customers and should be regularly updated. This content should focus on building levels of trust and credibility. Measure how people use your site and constantly look for ways to increase performance.

Successful websites are built on a philosophy of sound marketing strategy not search engine traffic. SEO should be a part of your total marketing strategy ? not you?re only marketing strategy. Your website should be customer focused and you should constantly strive to offer your customers unique brand value which will set you apart from your competition.

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Guarantees from SEO Companies

Recently there has been a spate of well publicized court cases against SEO companies who have been involved in dubious practices such as making false claims or false guarantees. That is why it is essential to hire an ethical SEO company.

It has become clear that companies operating within the industry must become accountable for what they claim. In terms of search engine rankings it is impossible for an organic SEO company to guarantee specific placement. This is because organic SEOs do not control the search engine rankings. The rankings are controlled only by the individual search engines. Therefore SEO companies must set realistic claims in their communications with clients.

The truth is a guarantee by a SEO company relating to rankings means little or nothing. What the SEO company should be offering is a guarantee that they will work with the utmost dedication and diligence towards getting your site ranked.

In reality that is all that they can guarantee.

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Paid Search Placement and Search Engine Optimization

Search engine marketing takes two main forms the free listings or organic listings and the paid listings. The strategy of improving organic listings is known as search engine optimization. The paid listings or paid placement allows you to pay to include your listing for a particular search term. Today we will look at how to integrate paid search placement into your search strategy. The paid search market was $2.9 billion in 2004. It is expected to double by 2009. Read more on our ?Insights into Search for Business? blog.

Paid Search Placement and Search Engine Optimization

Paid placement should be an integral part of your online marketing campaign to give your business an increased competitive advantage. Paid placement gives you complete control over where your site will appear in the search engine rankings. This is one of the major advantages of paid placement when compared to organic search engine optimization where the results are determined by the search engine and your site can be left nowhere – which paid placement you get instant high rankings for your search terms in the search engines of your choice.

Paid placement usually takes the form of Pay per Click (PPC). This requires you to pay only when someone clicks through to your site. PPC can be an effective addition to your overall search engine strategy as it can get you off and running quickly.

The main PPC providers, Yahoo!?s and Google Adwords use systems based on bidding. Whoever pays the most gets the highest ranking. Adwords differs from Yahoo in that they also use a click-through-rate which rewards high click through rates with better pricing.

As with ?organic? SEO you will need to define the keywords that your audience will use to find your product. Your keywords are an important part of your sales message. Bear in mind that popular keywords will be more competitive and may have higher bids associated with them. This means that you will have to pay more if you use common keywords or phrases. Remember that if you use the wrong keywords you will get visitors that do not respond to your message.

The great thing about PPC is that you can get information and modify your campaign in real time. You can check the effectiveness of your PPC campaign by using the reporting tools that are offered by your PPC provider. This tells you how much business the campaign is bringing you. You can get immediate return on investment information. You can monitor your PPC ads and if they are not effective you can quickly change them. The key is to watch how much you spend and change the ads if they are not working.

Paid placement can be an important part of your Internet marketing strategy. It is a great way to get it up and running very quickly. It also gives you a good insight into how effective your keywords are and an opportunity to try out different ones. ?Organic? search engine optimization is much more cost effective in the long term. (3 months+) SEO also benefits you by giving your site exposure for a wide variety of keyword phrases across many directories and search engines.

If you use PPC with SEO you will find that approximately 60% of your clicks will come from organic searches and 40% from PPC. Therefore neither option should be ignored especially in the field of e-commerce. The two systems can be used effectively together so that you can make full use of your Internet marketing options over a period of time. This will help your business maximize its online marketing efforts.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising refers to a paid ad that is displayed on site page that contains related information. Yahoo!?s Content Match and Google?s AdSense are the two main programs. This type of advertising is useful in certain situations where your product is closely related to certain types of information. e.g.

Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion refers to services which list your site in the organic listings for a fee. It does not guarantee high rankings however. You pay to be indexed and to have the spiders regularly visit your site. Paid inclusion is useful if you have a site that constantly updates its information.

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Search Engine Friendly 301 Redirect in CFM Coldfusion

If you are finding that the www.sitename.com and sitename.com version of your site are both being indexed by the search engines you could hit an issue with the search engines seeing duplicate content – after all most sites have both site names resolving to the same underlying file structure. This can also be an issue for people with parked domains – if you’ve brought multiple domains with the common misspellings of your company name (for example), if the search engines index the parked domain you could have a duplicate content issue. Another issue is having links pointing to the various site names dilutes their value, but pointing them all at just one domain name you’ve got a better chance of higher rankings.

One of the best ways around this issue is to redirect all traffic destined for the domains you don’t want to get indexed to the site name you do want to get indexed. By using a 301 redirect the value of the links will also be redirected to the main site name.

Coldfusion CFM 301 Code

Place the following code into the header of any CFM document and it will redirect the page access to the correct site name. while preserving the script name and the query arguments.

<!-- If the server name is not www.sitename.com we can do the redirect to www.sitename.com.
  ' The only time we can is if the method is a GET
  ' (no way to pass along the POST arguments) and its on port 80 (don't want to redirect the SSL).
-->
<cfif CompareNoCase(  CGI.SERVER_NAME , "sitename.com") is 0 AND
	CGI.SERVER_PORT is 80 AND
	CompareNoCase(  CGI.REQUEST_METHOD , "get") is 0 >
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<cfif CGI.QUERY_STRING IS NOT "" >
		<cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.sitename.com#CGI.SCRIPT_NAME#?#CGI.QUERY_STRING#">
<cfelse>
		<cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.sitename.com#CGI.SCRIPT_NAME#">
	</cfif>
</cfif>

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Dump of PHP Predefined Variables

Not dumped below are $_SESSION, $_ENV, $_FILES, $GLOBAL, $_SESSION.

For more information on the variables use see here.

$_SERVER

1

$_REQUEST

$_COOKIE

$_GET

$_POST

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Search Engine Friendly 301 Redirect in PHP

If you are finding that the www.sitename.com and sitename.com version of your site are both being indexed by the search engines you could hit an issue with the search engines seeing duplicate content – after all most sites have both site names resolving to the same underlying file structure. This can also be an issue for people with parked domains – if you’ve brought multiple domains with the common misspellings of your company name (for example), if the search engines index the parked domain you could have a duplicate content issue. Another issue is having links pointing to the various site names dilutes their value, but pointing them all at just one domain name you’ve got a better chance of higher rankings.

One of the best ways around this issue is to redirect all traffic destined for the domains you don’t want to get indexed to the site name you do want to get indexed. By using a 301 redirect the value of the links will also be redirected to the main site name.

PHP 301 Code

Place the following code into the header of any php document and it will redirect the page access to the correct site name. while preserving the script name and the query arguments.

// If the server name is not www.sitename.com we can do the redirect to www.sitename.com.
// The only time we can is if the method is a GET
// (no way to pass along the POST arguments) and its on port 80 (don't want to redirect the SSL).
if ( strcmp( strtolower( $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ) , "www.sitename.com" ) != 0 &&
	strcmp( strtolower( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] ) , "get" ) == 0 &&
	$_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] == 80 )
{
	header("Location: http://www.sitename.com" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] );
	header("HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently");
	exit ;
}

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Search Engine Friendly 301 Redirect in ASP

If you are finding that the www.sitename.com and sitename.com version of your site are both being indexed by the search engines you could hit an issue with the search engines seeing duplicate content – after all most sites have both site names resolving to the same underlying file structure. This can also be an issue for people with parked domains – if you’ve brought multiple domains with the common misspellings of your company name (for example), if the search engines index the parked domain you could have a duplicate content issue. Another issue is having links pointing to the various site names dilutes their value, but pointing them all at just one domain name you’ve got a better chance of higher rankings.

One of the best ways around this issue is to redirect all traffic destined for the domains you don’t want to get indexed to the site name you do want to get indexed. By using a 301 redirect the value of the links will also be redirected to the main site name.

ASP 301 Code

Place the following code into the header of any asp document and it will redirect the page access to the correct site name while preserving the script name and the query arguments.

<%
  ' If the server name is not www.sitename.com we can do the redirect to www.sitename.com.
  ' The only time we can is if the method is a GET
  ' (no way to pass along the POST arguments) and its on port 80 (don't want to redirect the SSL).
if ( strcomp( lcase( Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME") ) , "www.sitename.com", 1 ) <> 0 _
    AND Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_PORT") = 80 _
    AND strcomp( lcase( Request.ServerVariables("REQUEST_METHOD") ) , "get" , 1 ) = 0 _
) then
    URL = "http://www.sitename.com" & Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
    if len ( request.servervariables("QUERY_STRING" ) ) > 0 then
        URL = URL + "?" + request.servervariables("QUERY_STRING" )
    end if
    Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
    Response.AddHeader "Location", URL
    Response.End
end if
%>

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Authority Websites

Traditional search engine optimization will continue to be part of your efforts excepting for our methodology will change. You will continue to work on link exchanges, keywords, descriptions, titles, headlines, image alt descriptions, comments, and content. Now you will focus your keywords to be very specific and watch you density. Your descriptions will not be as long, but concentrate on more concise descriptions. You will want to watch your HTML coding to make the process easier for the search engine spiders. Try using fewer tables and consider Cascading Style Sheets. The link exchanges will have to be more specific to your industry and with websites that are authoritative in nature. <-->

Authoritative websites is the direction to consider for 2006. Not only making your website an authority for your target market, but to exchange links with other websites that are authoritative for that same target market. What are authoritative websites to link with? Basically there are is a relatively small set of websites that can be trusted as authority, or expert websites. Government sites, university websites, well-recognized news sources, and recognized industry news sources are all examples of sites that can be considered as ?expert? websites. These sites, unlike the average website on the Internet, can be trusted to ?link honestly?.

Take the following example. I recently went to Google, MSN and Yahoo and searched on the term “internet marketing consultants” and the result on the first page for all three search engines were somewhat surprising. Instead of finding a page full of businesses that provide internet marketing services over 75% of the results were websites that were resources for internet marketing. A careful review of each of these websites revealed all of them to be content rich in their field of internet marketing. They did not provide any services other than information for others to use about internet marketing. For the purpose of this writing these results indicate (1) that making your site an authority for your field and industry is very important to achieve top ranking, and (2) you want to seek out these types of websites to create inbound links if possible and feasible. Otherwise engage a reciprocal link exchange.

Getting noticed by authority websites can be difficult, but with some creativity it can be done. If you make your business newsworthy, news outlets within your industry and without will pickup your news story and hopefully link over to your website. Traditional marketing and public relations requires you to make your company known as an authority within your industry. You should want your clients to know that you are the best source for whatever it is you sell, and that they should trust you. You gain this trust by being visible, not just through your website, but through the websites of other trusted sources such as news outlets. These types of marketing methods would include engaging in public relations, networking, attending trade shows, and talking to news sources both within your industry and outside of your industry.

Your website is a business. No different than a retail brick-and-mortar store you will spend as much time working your website as a regular any regular business. Do not believe that the comfort of your home or that you are working with computers and technology you are able to run your business any easier. The only thing that has changed is the venue, everything else is the same. You have to provide quality content, engage in activities that make your website known, and make your website the absolute best in your target market.

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OnPage Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search Engine Optimization is the art of designing your web pages to be ranked high by search engines for keywords that you target. There are several methods and they vary from Search Engine to Search Engine. One aspect of Search Engine Optimization relays heavily on the Onpage Optimization.

Onpage Optimization deals with the placement of keywords on the page, the header tags, the appearance of the keywords and the use of keywords in the meta and alt tags on the page. Below are some tips on OnPage optimization that I have picked up and used in my own web sites.

Step1: Select a page title that only includes your keywords.

Step 2: Use Header Tags to emphasize the keywords you have selected. Use your number 1 keyword in the {H1} tag and secondary keywords in your {H2} header tags.

Step 3: Write solid content that naturally includes your main and your secondary keywords throughout the text. If possible use your first keyword as near the top of the content and as close to the bottom of the content as possible.

Step 4: Once the content is complete go through and randomly bold, italicize and underline the main and secondary keywords.

Step 5: Be sure to use your keywords in the alt tags of your images.

As a guide you might do a search for you main keyword in Google. View the page and the source code of the page to see what OnPage Optimization that webmaster did to get a top rank.

While OnPage Optimization can be a significant reason why your web site ranks well in the search engine there are several other key factors like, page content, link popularity, site indexing and competition.

Search Engine Optimization is an equal opportunity marketing practice. If you are diligent you can create a flood of prime targeted.

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