Today kicks off a weekly tradition (though definitely not original) here at Get Elastic. Every Friday I will be posting a Blogger’s Digest that recognizes outstanding content from around the web of interest to ecommerce marketers, managers, bloggers and SEO-types to give you some rainy day reading for the weekend (especially if you’re in Vancouver/Seattle).

Ecommerce News

• Bad news for Yahoo Stores as Cyber Monday traffic crashes the platform and brings down 3 million online shops.

Search Engine Optimization

Creditorweb offers a hack for PPC advertisers who want to make a little money back exploiting credit card loopholes.

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The holiday shopping season is now in full swing, and while there’s still plenty of time for online shoppers to receive their orders by Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa), not receiving an order on time is a concern for consumers. Great online stores ease the fears by providing holiday shipping cutoff dates and making this information easy to find on home pages and product pages. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Bed Bath and Beyond

Tagline: “Holiday Shipping Cutoff Dates”

Bed Bath and Beyond dedicates some central home page real estate to its holiday shipping information:

And it’s not limited to just Christmas, either:

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A collection of ecommerce web designs, logos, and holiday gift card designs from some of the most popular online retailers:

Seasonal Ecommerce Web Designs

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SEO Digger is a free SEO tool that instantly shows you keyword rankings in Google for yours or any other website URL along with Wordtracker keyword counts. This makes it so easy to hone in on the most popular keywords (or products) that you’re ranking for so that you can optimize those pages even better.
Make sure you register so that you are able to see results for your deep pages, not just your home page. Registered users also don’t have a limit on the number of searches you can do in one hour.

How This Works

SEO Digger keeps a database of the top 20 results in Google for over 57 million keywords and keyphrases updated every 2 weeks. When you type in yours or any other URL, you’ll get a chart like this:

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Google Analytics recently introduced an internal site search feature to its already kick-ass free stats program — aptly named “Site Search.”

This tool works with your existing site search and is invaluable to ecommerce marketers as it gives you so much insight into customer intent and your website’s success at delivering results. For example, you can use search log data to discover:

• What keywords people search for - what’s hot and what do they want that you don’t carry
• What search refinements are made, indicating possible “Results Not Found” messages or unsatisfactory results
• What pages the searches were made from, and where users clicked to

The next 30 days is when this information will be crucial. Customers can’t buy what they can’t find. Maybe you only use the term “notebook computer case” and your customers search for “laptop bags.” You can tweak your product pages and search engine for the various ways customers describe your product until the right pages show up when you test your site.

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If low prices are your competitive strength, it makes sense that you want to communicate this to your customer the best way you can on your website. Customers increasingly turn to price comparison sites like Shopping.com and Bizrate which pull up-to-date prices from participating merchant data feeds. But is displaying competitor prices on your own site a good idea?

Last week Zachary, a GetElastic reader from PlumberSurplus.com alerted us that a competitor was showing an incorrect price on a price comparison table on its product page. This was discovered by Plumber Surplus during routine price checks on the competitor’s site.

The competing site in question has since taken down the price comparisons. Plumber Surplus never contacted the competitor about it, the comparison tables just came down on their own. So we don’t know why the site decided to take them down, but I can think of at least three good reasons why ecommerce sites should avoid using price comparison tables:

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Well up here in Canadia we’re working hard, but to all our friends South of the Border, we wish you a very happy Turkey Day. Here are some funny e-commerce / social media videos in lieu of serious content. Gobble, gobble and chuckle, chuckle.

A Few Good Creative Men

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Electronic retail giant Circuit City has turned on to community building with the launch of its CityCenter community - complete with forums, photo galleries and blogs (complete with tagging). The forums are already quite active and give customer service experts a chance to answer questions in a timely manner, creating a rich knowledge base in the following categories:

* Home Entertainment & MP3
* Computers
* Cameras & Camcorders
* Car Electronics
* Gaming
* Movies & Music

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SEO guru Stephan Spencer contributed a great overview on tagging and its virtues for usability and SEO to Search Engine Land last week. Do check out Stephan’s entire article if you’re new to the concept of tagging, tag clouds and folksonomy.

Tags help describe various content. Basically, you can tag a blog post, product or photo with relevant keywords. When you want to check out all the posts, photos or products related to a certain keyword, you can click on the “tag” and voila! Usability-wise, visitors can navigate visually through a “tag cloud” (see the bottom of our page for an example) and even discover tags, whereas in a traditional dropdown menu or even faceted navigation this could get out of hand. Tags are great for SEO too, because your tags generate their own URLs, and each tag is a keyword-rich internal link to that page, reinforced by the tagged items themselves and the sitewide tag cloud, if you have one.

I took a peek at blogs from our list of 75+ blogs from top online retailers to “look who’s tagging” and as I expected, I can easily count them all on one hand. What’s worse, the ones that do are doing it WRONG!

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Every year, Internet Retailer releases its list of stand out retailers. Last year there were 50, this year 100.

Rather than highlighting who’s doing the most volume, the Internet Retailer Hot 100 list focuses on innovators and includes smaller retailers like Bestkiteboarding.com, chains, catalogers, online-only and brands like M&M’s.

The Hot 100 for 2008

Matt over at Ecommerce Optimization categorized the list and added some nifty graphs.

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