Posted February 28th, 2011
by Pablo
To build a solid search engine optimization strategy, you must develop the two major components of any SEO campaign: Content & Link Building. One, for the most part, will not be successful without the other. If you’re in an uncompetitive niche, your content may just do enough to get you the rankings you need, but if you are in a competitive niche, link building is crucial to gain rankings in the search engines.
Below, you’ll find a list of 5 ecommerce link building tips you may not be doing as they aren’t the usual tips you’ll find.
5 eCommerce Link Building Tips
1) Blog Guest Post: Find blogs in your niche that talk about products you sell or something very related to it. Bloggers are always looking to add fresh unique content to their blogs and most will welcome a guest blog post. Not only will this help you in the link building process but it will also give you credibility as an authority in your niche. Some blogs in your niche may have a lot of authority with the search engines and can be a great source for links.
2) Create Best Resource in The Niche: This one may be hard to do but it may very well pay off with some real good organic links. Build a page in your website with a good amount of solid content talking about the products that can be super informative to consumers. This should get picked up by websites that want to link to the best resources about the products.
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Posted in SEO for eCommerce
Posted February 25th, 2011
by Pablo
While some of you may have been been impacted by this Google algorithm change, some of you may not be seeing any difference in the search results for your keywords. Nevertheless, it’s official. Google has drastically taken measures to try and combat content farms to be able and provide the best search results possible for the end-user.
If you’re concerned about this change, I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless you have someone doing your SEO which you may not be too familiar with what they are doing in order to boost rankings. Basically, the one content farm pointed out in the discussion so far is Demand Media which owns properties such as AnswerBag.com, LiveStrong.com, Cracked.com and many others such as eHow.com. These are all properties who depend on UGC (User-Generated Content) and all these properties link back to each other. Even so, a lot of these properties have good weight in the search engines and many use it as link building tools.
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Tags: google algorithm change, google search ranking change Posted in SEO for eCommerce
Posted February 25th, 2011
by Roger McGershen
Q: I have a small budget for online marketing but want to submit my products to about two or three comparison shopping engines to increase my sales. What are the best converting comparison shopping engines or best ones to submit to or start?
A: There’s no real data which suggest which comparison shopping engine yields the best conversion rates for internet retailers. I’m sure across the board the different shopping engines perform differently for every merchant. For this reason, it’s very important that you have conversion tracking set up when you are using comparison engines to know which one is giving you the best return on investment. Usually, these shopping engines all have conversion tracking codes you can use to figure out which one is converting best for you.
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Posted in Q&A
Posted February 24th, 2011
by Pablo
If there is one thing we know online shoppers love and constantly do when shopping online is comparison shopping. Websites like Bizrate and Nextag have become what they are because people love to go compare prices before they buy anything online. How many times have you had a customer on the phone or live chat letting you know they’ll be back or call later. Much of this attitude or action taken by the consumer is because they want to make sure they are getting the best deal and they keep comparing online before they make their final decision.
There is currently a company called WinBuyer that sets up a free widget on your website and with its own smart technology knows what product is on the product pages and compares it to other big websites that carries that same product (list about 4 companies) and does the comparison shopping for you. While this may drive traffic away from your website, WinBuyer reports that it is most certainly increasing conversion rates for internet retailers using their widget.
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Tags: ecommerce comparison shopping, ecommerce increase conversions, onsite comparison shopping Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted February 23rd, 2011
by Roger McGershen
Source: e-nor.com
We all know how video is evolving on the web and how consumers are engaging with video online. Youtube is one of the most visited website in the world (top 5) and has had a great impact on internet retailers because of the nature of how Google is also using video in its search index in the organic rankings.
The latest case study reported by InternetRetailer.com gives us a good insight on the impact of video on your product pages and how consumers engage with video. eParty Unlimited, a website that sells party supplies and other products is reporting that consumers who watch a video have a 43% higher conversion rate than other shoppers.
What a product video can do is:
1.      Give more credibility to your website.
2.      Provide consumers with more product information
3.      Better showcase of the actual product
InternetRetailer.com reports, “…That’s important, says Weng, because Google rewards sites that post original video content by boosting their rankings. “It’s very powerful,” he says. “Within less than a week all of our videos were indexed by Google, getting us to the first pages of organic search results for many popular search queries.”
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Tags: ecommerce product videos, product videos ecommerce, video organic rankings Posted in Online Video
Posted February 22nd, 2011
by Pablo
If there is one thing internet retailers constantly have to look at and think about is how their websites and products are being talked about. Many wonder where are the best places to get reviews from? Is it from Facebook friends and fans? Consumers tweeting about their websites or products?
The social landscape of the internet is changing rapidly and influence is a big deal for online marketers. That is probably the best way to describe what recommendation will have the biggest impact…the influence of the source to consumers.
eMarketer reports, “…But the human element remains key to engendering trust. Internet users worldwide reported a nearly 50% increase in their trust of social network contacts giving product recommendations, and a 21% increase for microblog contacts. Even though many of those contacts are likely sharing some professional content with or alongside their personal recommendations, professional sources of information like newspapers and TV barely gained any trust over the same period.”
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Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips
Posted February 21st, 2011
by Roger McGershen
If you keep up with the world of search engine optimization, you know that about a week ago, JCPenny was penalized by Google due to their SEO practices which were the big buzz of the industry due to a New York Times article that explained how JCPenny was dominating search results for many keywords.
Internet Retailers invest a lot of money or time (or both) in search engine optimization. The last thing you want is to be penalized by the search engine for bad link building practices which can cost kick your website out of the Google index and poof….there goes your eCommerce business.
HOW TO AVOID GOOGLE PENALTIES
Basically, Googles guidelines state that if you’re engaging in link buying practices, then you are engaging in bad link practices and can be penalized by the search engine.
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Tags: buying links, link building google penalties, link building penalties Posted in SEO for eCommerce
Posted February 18th, 2011
by Roger McGershen
If you keep up with the world of online marketing and follow our blog, you know and understand how big online video is to get exposure and how it should definitely be in your online marketing strategy. The amount of videos being watched online per second is unbelievable and if you’re not getting any exposure with video, it’s time you start making online video part of your ecommerce online marketing strategy.
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Tags: submit your videos, top video websites Posted in Online Video
Posted February 18th, 2011
by Pablo
Q: I want to start my own eCommerce website but I am a bit worried about jumping in to a market where there are very large competitors such as Amazon and other large internet retailers selling at lower prices than I can. How can I compete with these larger eCommerce websites?
A: The concern of competing against the “big fish” in the eCommerce world of the web, or just the web in general, is a big concern for many of those just going into business online. It’s not easy to compete on the web, but we’re still in a time where competing is also very viable for start-ups. The web is a very big place and the truth is many of your competitors really aren’t EVERYWHERE they probably could be and there is always something you can do that they may not be doing in order to compete at any level against the largest internet retailers.
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Tags: compete ecommerce, ecommerce competition Posted in Q&A
Posted February 17th, 2011
by Pablo
Maybe you don’t even know it yet, but your blog can be your websites best friend and may very well be the largest driver of traffic to your website. If you know how to leverage and use your blog to drive traffic and also use it to gain search engine rankings for the long-tail keywords, you’re on a fast track to eCommerce success.
What most people don’t understand about blogging is that if you truly want to start seeing traffic from your blog at first, you’ll need to create content on a daily basis. Make sure you write at least 1-2 blog post per day and they are for keywords you want to bring in traffic for.
There are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your websites blog and to try do a few of these and you should start seeing traffic increase little by little.
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Tags: drive traffic to blog, how to drive traffic to blog Posted in Blogging for Ecommerce
