jamesburrow.com

Many e-commerce companies have felt the effects of the recession and the pressure is on for search marketers to keep the traffic coming in while staying on budget. Traffic is flat, conversions are tanking, what is an SEO guy (or gal) to do? Assuming you have already squeezed every bit you can out of your PPC campaigns, I would like to discuss a few low cost ways to keep the SEO momentum going and hopefully improve those conversions in the process.

Review your keyword list

Time to hit the analytics and find those low bounce, high converting long tail terms that you have been ignoring. You will not get the same traffic as you do with your big money terms, but you can certainly move up the SERPs a lot quicker and easier and they tend to convert better.

Get back to the page

Even if you don’t have money to pay for links or to hire content writers, you can certainly freshen up those boiler plate product pages that you have been meaning to re-write for months. Take the long-tail variants from your keyword review and start working them naturally into those deep pages. Just having a unique sentence or two for each of your products will give you an SEO advantage over your competitors using boiler plate descriptions provided by the manufacturer.

Look closely at your calls-to-action

Go ahead and use this opportunity to reinforce your calls to action in the text of your product descriptions. This can be as simple as linking back to your contact page or to your sale or overstock page.

Add some new content

This can be product guides, how-to’s, testimonials, anything really. Just get some fresh pages added. Every time you add content to your site Google tends to notice and we all know Google loves that fresh content. Again, if this is something your competitors are not doing then it is one more SEO advantage that you can have without spending a ton of dough.

Reach out to your affiliates

If you have an affiliate program in place, time to reach out to your partners and let them know you appreciate their referrals. Nothing says thank you like a bump in commissions. I like to offer an additional percentage for 30 days and then give my affiliates some promo codes that they can sprinkle around on twitter and facebook. Still haven’t got that affiliate program off the ground? No point in waiting any longer. It can take months or even years to build up a stable of reliably producing affiliates. I firmly believe that any e-commerce site can benefit from affiliate marketing and that the return far outweighs the investment.

Well, hope these little pointers help. In a future post I will try to go into more depth on things you can do off-page for little or no money that can have a measurable impact on your rankings.

The more time I spend in the SEO game, the more fascinated I become with semantics. Semantics is the study of how people and machines use and interpret words. A significant portion of my job (or any SEO’s) is looking at products on websites and then researching key words that customers are likely to use when searching for those products. That may seem pretty easy but it is truly amazing how many different words people use to convey the same meaning. It is even more amazing that search engines are getting so damn good at knowing what we really mean when we search for something. Knowing how both people and search engines refer to your products is the most important part of any SEM or SEO strategy.

If you sell blue widgets and want to show up on the term “blue widget” then you would include “blue widget” in the content of your site and maybe get links from other sites using that term as the anchor text. This is all well and good and your boss or client will be thrilled when you are #1 on Google for blue widget but where do you go from there? You can start by using stemming variants or variants that are based on the same root word. This can be as simple as using the plural form (blue widgets) or maybe even different prefixes or suffixes.

The next step is to determine as many synonyms as you can for your target term. Search engines provide suggestion tools to help with this (and there is always the thesaurus) but you also want to talk with key personnel in your organization who deal with customers. This is especially important if you are in a niche market where the search data maybe lacking. This is when you find out that customers in the Northeast call blue widgets blue bobbits.

Once you have a healthy list of variants and synonyms, you will need to prioritize according to popularity. There are many tools to help with this. Google Insights is one of my favorite free ones. If you participate in any paid search advertising then you likely have some good data of your own as well.

Google has been making some great strides in semantic search and specifically in parsing synonyms. Recently Google engineer Steven Baker wrote a great post about synonyms in search and for the first time actually gave some stats on how good Google is at extracting synonyms from their vast amounts of search data.

… our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

Steven is not one of the more public Googlers (see Matt Cutts) but I definitely look forward to reading future posts from this guy.

This weekend I was perusing some of the more popular SEO sites looking for material to prepare some sort of lesson plan for my new SEO/SEM guy. I thought that since the new guy is a college student, then the best way to train him would be to stick with what he is used to, ie: having him read a lot of boring material and testing him on it. Since I myself am way to busy and important to make both a lesson plan and a quiz, I let Google do the work for me. Looks like the folks at seomoz.org have made an almost perfect seo quiz, and I don’t just say that because I scored a 97%. The questions are a nice mix of basic best practices and more advance stuff thrown in. Anyway, here is my SEO Dark Lord graphic/link bait:

SEO Dark Lord – 97%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Here are some truly tasteless items I came across at the Dollar Tree this weekend.

I think the packaging says it all:

emmm, chocolate faith

And, of course you need edible praying hands to go with your chocolate cross:

I Pray for More Chocolate

I looked all all over for a chocolate Jesus but apparently eating your actual savior would be too tacky.

A few weekends ago I came across this disturbing stock photo in a picture frame at Kirklands:

The resemblance to the real McVeigh is frightening. Hard to believe that this would be the photo that was chosen to be displayed in who knows how many picture frames across the country. Although I have to admit they make a cute couple.

Here is the real deal for comparison:

You should get a free pass if you ass end this guy:

Worst addon ever

Just when I thought that I had seen all of the cool Easter Eggs from Google Street View, those crazy Googlers give us some more blog bait. Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley teamed up with the Google Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side to put on an avant-garde performance for the street view cameras. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to drive through a marching band or a marathon, here you go:

View Larger Map

You can check out some behind the scenes video and pics from the full cast at http://www.streetwithaview.com.

If you are in search marketing or search engine optimization then you know what a wealth of data that Googles Insights for Search can provide. I probably use Insights at least a dozen times a day and this morning I came across the Google Insights Bookmarklet. This is a clever little bit of javascript that works like this; simply copy the bookmark onto your Firefox toolbar and after you have entered a search on Google or Yahoo you simply click the bookmark and it opens up the Insights page with your query already populated.

This keeps me from having to open a new tab and then go to the insights page and copy and paste my query, all of which takes about 4 seconds to complete. Mutliply that by, say, 10 x a day x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year and I have effectively saved myself 167 minutes a year that I can use to find other ways to save time.

Well it was bound to happen eventually. My coworker across the pond, Erik Rasmussen, has an awesome blog that people actually read and comment on and stuff. He had a post today that was especially interesting and though provoking, Agnosticism vs. Atheism. Well, apparently Mr. Rasmussen really pissed off god because later in the day he shut down that sacrilegious abomination.

No, not really. It actually was so engaging that the Digg community voted it up in a matter of hours and basically brought down the server on which his blog resides. Unfortunately that server has a lesser function that involves hosting ecommerce sites or some silly nonsense.

Luckily, we all gathered in a prayer circle and laid hands on the ailing server and revived it through sheer power of faith.

No, not really. Alan saved the day by redirecting the digg traffic to Google’s cache of the page. Thanks Alan!

I have to say, it is a great post demonstrating how agnostics are bunch of pussies that just need to step up and admit that there is no fucking god.

No, not really. He is just trying to explain the difference between believing that god does not exist and not believing that god exists. Yeah, I know it makes my head hurt too.

I think that I am going to start calling myself a pragmatic agnostic or pragnostic. Think on that one and get back to me.

I cannot express in words the frustration I have felt recently while trying to influence the results of Google Base. These feelings reached the boiling point last Friday when I placed a product search for a key term that one of my clients is adamant about ranking highly on. Here is a pic of the results:

As you can see, one site dominates the listings. This occurred sometime Thursday night and as of this Monday the results are still the same. Traditionally Google Base results are fairly spread out amongst competitors provided the proper key term is in the title and description. This is the first instance where I have seen this behavior on a highly competitive term.

Now, why could this be occurring? I can really only think of two reasons:

1) Google Base is temporarily insane and will eventually correct itself.

2) Google Base is undergoing some sort of change and this is simply a side effect.

3) This competitor’s feed has some sort of mojo that no other competitor has.

I think that it may be a combination of all three. Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the initial teaser results on the term do not reflect the same as the first page of product listings:

For many SEO’s and SEM’s the coveted .edu and .gov links are the holy grail of back links. For the most part these links are hard to obtain because these sites are considered authorities and are of course very picky about who they link out to. Just emailing and requesting a link to you blog is probably not going to get you anywhere. You can forget about buying them as well. Other than maybe getting a link on a student blog you are probably out of luck.

So what is an ambitious Search Marketer to do?

Do your research. Look at the edu’s that have linked to your competition and find out why. Depending on your industry, there could be a variety of reasons why a school, professor, or student may link to your competition and if they link to your competition then they likely will be open to linking to your site.

Job Postings. Most every school has a place for job postings somewhere on their site. My attitude is that every business that has employees is always hiring, or at least reviewing resume’s. So, get busy on Google and start searching using a query like inurl:.edu “job postings” and you will see thousands of school job posting pages ripe for the picking. And who knows, maybe you can get a hot intern out of it.

Open Your Wallet. If theres anything that both schools and students love and need, its money. If you or your client belong to a relatively large company, then you can probably afford to contribute something to some department or organization affiliated with a school. Start with a local school and find out what they need. Not only will you likely get a link from the .edu, but you will likely get some additional publicity out of it. If not, you can always crank out your own press releases praising your altruism.

Well, that’s 3 ideas that should be good for some .edu’s to any site that is actually worth linking to. Good hunting!