Interview on the latest in link building strategies to help retail SEO with Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts from the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.
See More IRCE 2008 Interviews…
We conducted 16 interviews with various ecommerce vendors at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.
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!
The report inspected the Top 100 online retailers and reviewed for 23 tactics commonly used in Checkout. The results attempt to begin a dialog in order to answer questions like: Does a shorter checkout process really decrease shopping cart abandonment? Should you use an order confirmation screen? Does live chat improve conversions? Study samples included a variety of vertical market groups including apparel and accessories, computers and electronics, and both high and low ticket value product retailers.
Webinar featuring useful tips, tools and best practices for optimizing your ecommerce site for search engine rankings presented by Elastic Path Ecommerce Software’s Jason Billingsley and Founder of SEO firm Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer.
Note: This is a live blog post to go along with the “Secrets of SEO” Webinar to share links, miscellanea and hints along the way and manage the questions and comments which pop up in the back channel. And yes, the webinar will be available “on-demand” after the live event (we’re working on it).
A: Jason says, “An example of a branded search is someone searching for “Levi’s” (or “levis”) or “Levi’s men’s jeans” rather than just “men’s jeans” or “men’s demin jeans” which are not branded searches (call these “unbranded” searches).”
Q: Is a URL like this SE safe? www.domain.com/index.php/seo/interestingdata
A: Jason says, “It’s safe but not optimal. Ideally the “index.php” would be removed and “interesting” and “data” would be separated by a hyphen (not an underscore) and ended with a trailing slash (which denotes a category or subdirectory to search engines).”
Q: Can you name the companies just mentioned again for URL rewriting?
Gravitystream is “a turn-key solution that makes dynamic websites search engine crawler-friendly”
Note: At the risk of self-promotion, … Elastic Path allows customized URL rewriting by default for all pages (including faceted navigation pages).
Apache mod_rewrite “This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. But all this functionality and flexibility has its drawback: complexity. So don’t expect to understand this entire module in just one day.”
Q: What are inbound links? Are inbound links similar to backtracks? Reciprocal links - could you please provide a definition for this?
Jason says, “Inbound links are instances of another (external) site linking to your site. Reciprocal links are links exchanged between your site and another (again external) site. Backtracks (or Trackbacks) are (usually automatically generated) links created by blogs to acknowledge a referenced blog.”
Link bait campaigns refer to posted content designed to attract many links by being extra funny, universally appealing, particularly interesting, somewhat surprising or fantastically useful. This barrage of links results in (theoretically) increased page rank and marketing buzz. Examples include Get Elastic’s 107 Add to Cart buttons or Netconcepts’ Word Press SEO plug-in. More from Matt Cutts, Google Engineer and Wikipedia on Link bait.
A: Yes. This (and many others like it e.g. Million Dollar Homepage etc.) sell “ad-space” by the pixel. The massive dilution causes the links to be worth basically nothing while making the site owner a few bucks.
Q: Do we get to choose IP range?
A: IP addresses (Internet Protocol address) are specific numbers (usually expressed in four-part dot-decimal notation) used by routers to exchange data on the Internet. IP range is assigned by your ISP who obtains IP addresses from ARIN or an upstream provider. When hosting multiple sites at one ISP (or internal corporate server), the content is all served from the same IP neighborhood and is (likely) discounted by search engines as they are considered affiliated. Be wary of ISP’s who host ’spammy’ sites or sites with questionable integrity.
More: Find IP of a Website + ‘Old Skool’ Internet users know they can use Ping and Tracert commands
Webinar Recap
10:04 - Heading to Q&A mode, there are about 35 questions so we’ll tackle a few of them straightaway
Key indicators to track are search-fueled sales, orders delivered by keywords, conversions - Ergo: hits are NOT the critical metric
9:56 - Secret #6 - Influence the click decision
Make sure description entices click, people only look at first couple of words and listing, first page is implied endorsement - use heat maps to view where folks are looking - have Call To Action in beginning of snippet
9:54 - make multiple copies (canonical sites) of sites - e.g.: with/without “www” - multiple URLs, https version,
9:50 - Secret #5 - Make your URLs optimal
Hints:
Multiple parameters and complex urls are not good, weakens internal page rage flow
session ids are very bad
hyphens are cool, underlines are not
rewrite URLs using keyword (use proxy if needed or ecommerce which allows this (like Elastic Path ;-))
9:48 - Secret #4 - Rejig your site structure
Tag clouds are awesome! passes page ranks between pages - spend it wisely with relevant links, use faceted internal navigation and site search and rewrite URLs
Use blogs (multiple, groups, employees, customers, more …)
Spend as much time commenting to a-list blogs as you do posting
9:43 - Matt Cutts Google Engineer [mattcutts.com/blog] blogs about building page rank by link bait (funny, useful, interesting content with mass appeal) to encourage many to link to build page rank (and buzz). e.g. Netconcepts gives out at Word Press SEO plug-in
9:40 - Use caution with internal links, reciprocal links, footer links, site-wide links which are likely to be discounted (use “nofollow” as needed to not dilute page rank)
9:38 - Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods” + link farms, free for all
Netconcepts uses a database with millions of sites and page rank, category, title to show sites which are good to link back and forth too. Note: .edu and .gov have higher authority and result in better page rank
9:36 - Find link targets, Anchor text is very important, use Netconcepts’ Link Popularity Checker - Offer link-worthy content, Use an RSS feed (Note: Dave O loves RSS)
9:32 - Google Webmaster guidelines say less than 100 links. Fewer links weight each more strongly. Lots of tools to measure link popularity Yahoo, Google Webmaster & Toolbar, SEO Chat, SEOBook (Firefox plugin)
Not all links are created equal! Links from popular and authoritative sites are worth more - each page in site might have different page rank - not just about quantity, quality is also key
9:26 - Title tag is numero uno important! Home page is most important! - Have at least 200-250 words per page (Quality Content rules!)
Also key are:
Header Tags are useful (H1, H2)
Contextual links (make the keyword the anchor) e.g. use “men’s clothing” as link anchor rather than just “men’s”
Graphical links get less search spider love (be sure to use image “alt” tag to describe
meta keyword tags don’t help improve ranking (be wary of using duplicate meta tags on multiple pages - give secrets to competitors and flags as ’spammy’ site)
meta description helps determine what gets displayed in results
9:25 - Jason advises avoiding tables and using CSS for layout (”where it belongs,” says Stephan + great for user experience as well as search engines)
9:23 - CSSZenGarden.com - Learn Cascading Style Sheets to keep text and code separate and clean
9:21 - Secret #2 - Make your pages sing to the search engine
With keyword focus per page in html (search spiders don’t care if it’s pretty - keywords must be high up in the code, call this keyword prominence)
9:18 - KEI score = Keyword Effectiveness Indicator - higher the KEI , the more attractive the term is to your audience
9:06 - Neopetsfanatic.com is Stephan’s daughter’s site making her $30/day from AdSense
9:05 - Plentyoffish.com is a Vancouver-based dating site which drives massive income from Google Adsense
9:00 - we are underway with Jason and Stephan - be sure to ask questions in the Webinar Q&A section
8:55 - Hello All, Dave O here, … just getting fired up and online.
Questions? Comments? Fire away either in the GotoMeeting chat window or in the comment section below and I’ll ask the esteemed panelists, Jason and Stephan, to chime-in.
I blogged about your contest--love your site! Thanks for all you guys do.
I would really love to go to Online Market World in SF.
http://worldofusability.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/win-full-conference-passes-to-e-commerce-conferences/…
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