In a recent Benchmark Report on Search Marketing, Marketing Sherpa asked business professionals to perform searches in Google and found that shorter URLs appearing directly below longer URLs had 250% more click-through in organic search. Marketing Sherpa suggests that short URLs can be a competitive advantage as long URLs are difficult to decipher and distract searchers from reading your listing title. You can read the excerpt of the report free here.

The observation that searchers do pay attention to URLs and that URLs influence click-through supports the argument for search engine friendly ecommerce software. Relevant keywords in a URL matching a search query will be bolded in search results, reinforcing the relevance of a page to the searcher while giving the page a relevance boost in the eyes of the search engine.

But for ecommerce marketers, URL length is really not the only thing you should be concerned about when it comes to attracting organic search clicks, especially for “long tail” search queries. Searchers are also influenced by:

• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description
• Branding in Title, Description and URL
• Indented Results
• Pricing in Results
• Marketing Messages in Results
• Google Product Result Listings

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I discovered an interesting UK Shopping 2.0 site called the Imagini Gift Finder. It’s kind of like social wishlisting meets Myers-Briggs — you work through a series of “questions” and you get results based on your answers. But the twist is, you choose from a set of images what appeals to you most. The system uses your choices to determine your “Visual DNA” and present you with relevant gifts.

You can get suggestions for your own gifts and build a wishlist that you can send to your friends *hint.* Or, you can invite a “Valentine” to take the quiz and build a wishlist for you so you don’t have to obsess over whether your honey likes a burger with or without a bun.

Here are just a few of the questions and images. If you don’t like any of the pictures, you can click on a gray box to skip.

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What do two billionaire Google guys get up to for Halloween? It’s only appropriate that Larry and Sergey dress up as ‘Ghoul’gle.

Best Caption in the comments wins a $100 gift certificate for Amazon.com
(and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for more ecommerce and online marketing goodness)

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Hats off to Matt at Ecommerce Optimization for posting a thorough list of ecommerce usability, design and checkout best practices complete with screenshots:

If you’re looking for more excellent reading this weekend, you can also check out One Up Web’s “Secrets of Social Marketing Success” study that discusses the forays into social marketing by online retailers like Coach.com, Sephora and Target.

Internet research firm Hitwise launched its US Retail Datacenter which offers a variety of data and trends for ecommerce from over 20,000 online stores across 21 categories:

Top 20 Retail Websites

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Hey ecommerce fans, Halloween’s quickly approaching and in case you haven’t decided on what to be this year, we’ve lined up ten costume ideas from Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Etailers of 2006:

Aberzombie and Fitch

Amazon Woman

Freddy’s of Hollywood

J. Crow

LL Cool Bean

NASCARface

Skullastic

Tiger Woods Direct

Vanilla Ice.com

Frank Zappos

Artwork by Elton Hübner

Available at “Underworld Armour!”

Bones and Noble - First Runner Up
Northern Ghoul - Second Runner Up
Lizard Claiborne - Miss Congeniality

Got your own suggestions for runners up? Drop us a comment!

Subscribe our RSS feed to be the first to know when we post a very special full-color (and funny) Halloween tribute to our favorite search guys on Monday the 29th.

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Following up on previous posts about permission marketing and welcome emails for ecommerce websites, I’d like to share my personal experience registering for 87 accounts with the top online retailers and offer some tips for registration form design.

Your site may have several forms that ask for personal information - for email subscriptions, creating an account, entering billing information, requesting help, general contact, creating a wishlist or order tracking. It’s important to note that in my test I was taking initiative to sign up for an account by clicking “Register” or “My Account”. I did not reach these forms in the middle of a checkout process (required registration).

Popular Form Fields and Frequency

1. Password - 100%

Obviously this is a requirement for all sites, but 100% required users to invent their own passwords rather than sending computer-generated temporary passwords (which are terribly annoying). But Dell and Nieman Marcus failed to mention clearly that their passwords require at least one number until you fail at your first password attempt.

2. Repeat Password Field - 89%

Though it takes a small amount of extra time, this is recommended because it’s easy to make errors when you only see **** as you type. How frustrating for customers when they cannot log in because the password they *thought* they entered is wrong.

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The ever-creative Common Craft squad created another educational viral video that’s fun and feeds off the popularity of Facebook’s Zombies application like the un-dead on your brain:

These are the same folks who brought us the Paperworks Series on Social Media in Plain English. Viva link bait.

While reviewing the registration process of 87 of the top online retailers, I observed 66% of these sites took advantage of the registration form as a way to remind customers to opt in to email marketing programs by including a check box on the form. However, 57% of these retailers pre-checked the opt-in box, which is poor ‘Netiquette when it comes to permission marketing.

Registration with an ecommerce website is NOT opting in to receive future offers via email. Some marketers may intentionally pre-check the box to increase sign ups, knowing that a number of customers don’t notice the box or will forget to un-check it. Although this might build a bigger list, this practice can backfire.

If your customer was unaware he had opted in, all future emails from that website will look like spam, which is a step backward in building trust and long term customer relationships, hurts your corporate image and dilutes your overall email campaign success. Low open and response rates from uninterested people skews your performance metrics.

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Wanna spice up your blog marketing? Bloggers can use this list to gain some relevant backlinks to help SEO and boost your exposure through RSS feed promotion. Or if you’re an ecommerce marketer, check out these sites to find bloggers in your niche.

51 Free Blog Directories That Pass Link Juice

My favorites are in Bold…

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