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As the name implies, Search Engine Optimization is primarily about giving search engine spiders what they want with the goal of placing your site higher in the engines’ organic results. While SEO can do wonders for a store’s rankings, it doesn’t promise actual customer retention. A strong core of returning customers is worth far more than a massive influx of carpetbaggers who might leave your site without ever dropping an item into their carts. In order to convert browsers into oh-so-lucrative repeat customers, a store needs to appear accessible and reputable. Of course, those customers need to find your site before than they can spend.

So what does this have to do with links? Plenty! Links can provide a boost to your appearance in search results and also increase recidivism in your shoppers by providing trust and approval to your store.

Although it may seem as if search engines are advanced enough to interpret the information on your site just like a person might, the fabled ‘Semantic Web’ is still years away. Search engine robots still rely on a mathematical algorithm to match indexed pages with a front-end user’s search query. Search engines retrieve results based on, among other things, freshness (how recent the page is) and relevance (how closely a page is associated to a given search query).

Freshness is pretty easy to determine, but there’s no way that a spider can read your pages for comprehension the way a real person would, so how in the world can a search engine determine if your site is relevant?

Spiders look at links — and their anchor text (the “blue words” that take you to the link target) — as a measure of relevance. Sites linking into yours will increase the bots’ estimation of your own relevance – especially if the anchor text to that link is a meaningful keyword phrase and not simply ‘click here’. For instance, your online pretzel store will benefit from a link from a long-standing and well-trafficked pretzel blog, but their endorsement of ‘Buy your gourmet pretzels here,” will be much more valuable to Google, Yahoo! and the rest if the link to your site from Pretzelblogger is anchored on ‘gourmet pretzels’ instead of ‘here.’

Links are valuable to search engines and each of those links is a potential source of referring traffic. Traffic which may be more inclined to buy pretzels because they trust Pretzelblogger’s opinion.

Thinking about links as a way to maximize rankings potential is sound, but don’t ignore the real way that shoppers interact with the Web – socially. In today’s online landscape, users are increasingly accessing content through RSS feeds and social networks. Yes, search engine traffic is way up, but social media traffic is way, way up.

Being part of the conversation is a good thing. Looking at analytics data from my own website, I might see that while I get roughly equivalent amounts of referred traffic (traffic that enters my site via a link from another site) and search engine traffic, the bounce rate, time spent on site, and number of pageviews per visit are all metrics in which my referred visitors consistently perform better than the search visitors.

A link is a stamp of approval – which is one reason why engines penalize deceptive tactics like paid links, triangular linking and link farming.

There is a difference, however, between link sites and directories (like Best of The Web). These sites are coded as directories and are not usually frowned on by Google. The paid links that count against you are likely to appear on “link farm” sites or down in the footer of the seller’s website (where it’s least likely to be crawled anyway).

Remember during link building that while Google and the gang may be making strides toward giving searchers what they want, shoppers still trust their peers, friends and industry luminaries to point the way to quality.

I often tell clients to think of their e-commerce stores like brick-and-mortar stores when cultivating community, user experience and visibility. That same advice holds true with links. A mention in your town’s newspaper of record is more valuable to your business than a similar mention in a school paper or gossip column. Link building takes serious time because the Internet is full of school papers and gossip columns. While these sites aren’t going to hurt your rankings, they won’t do you as much good as a more authentic link from a trusted, relevant site.

It can happen without any warning.

Right there in the Google rankings, just below (or just above!) your e-commerce site’s listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs), is a defamatory blog post about your company or a dreaded listing on RipoffReport.com. Yes, your site is ranked highly, but bad publicity can be just as harmful as not showing up in the first ten pages.

When I talk to clients about search engine optimization (SEO), I am frequently asked “How do I make them stop?” Sadly, in most cases, you can’t. However, you can do several things to lessen their negative effects.

SEO concentrates on increasing a site’s organic (non-paid) rankings. Good SEO encourages shoppers to click on your listing and come into your store. A results page stacked with negative mentions works against that goal. While you can’t make those mentions disappear, there are several strategies that a savvy e-trepreneur can use to bury these negatives or turn them into a benefit:

‘Vanity’ Searches

Learn who is talking about you. Google your company and if you’re closely associated to the brand, Google yourself. Do it frequently, to keep on top of what the Web is saying about you. Set up a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) for your brand to stay on top of any negative mentions. Google Alerts sends regular e-mail updates of relevant search results with an ‘as-it-happens’ frequency, which lets you respond quickly.

Clean Up Your Act

If you have an embarrassing teenage LiveJournal or regrettable YouTube videos, take the content down, close those accounts and use Google’s Webmaster Tools to request that the pages be deleted from the index (Tools > Remove URLs > New Removal Request).

Respond, Respond, Respond

If you’re the target of a blog post bad-mouthing your service, leave a comment addressing the situation. Explain your position, offer a resolution if necessary and – most of all – apologize if it’s warranted. Take a potential black mark and turn it into good public relations. Even sites like RipoffReport.com allow businesses to submit a rebuttal. RipoffReport won’t publish a retraction, but your efforts could lead to a negative post’s removal or a glowing follow-up about how you treated the customer.
The real benchmark of customer service is not that there are no problems, but how you address them.

Inspire Confidence, Inspire Conversions

A good way to win over the wary is by implementing user-generated content. Customers are more willing to trust their peers, so features like Customer Reviews and Testimonials carry a lot of weight when it comes to evaluating the quality of your store. A fellow shopper is more believable than an ad.

Bury the Competition

Unfortunately, too many searchers view a negative headline and let it register. The only way to prevent this is to move the bad headlines off the page. Crowd
the site with positive mentions that
may keep criticisms buried on a lower page, or give pause to searchers
inclined to move on, by increasing your online visibility.

Fresh Content

Google “queries for freshness,” searching for content that is not only relevant to a search but which is also recent. Maintaining a blog on your store’s domain is a good way to promote fresh content if you can keep it updated 3-5 times a week.

Social Media

Social Media outlets like Digg, Wikipedia, YouTube or even Facebook can all create Web pages with the ability to rank highly in Google results pages. Google seems to love Digg in particular, so developing a presence in its community can be a great way to promote your business. Social media can drive traffic to you through these outlets once you establish yourself as a reputable source of information.

Protect Your Rep

The anonymity of the Internet makes it an ideal sounding board for the dissatisfied, whether they have legitimate gripes with your company or not. And unfortunately, the web never forgets – even ‘facts’ that aren’t true. Customer trust is vital to e-commerce, so promoting your brand, reaching out to customers and keeping potentially damaging search results out of your SERP turf will all help you put your best foot forward when customers come looking for you online.

After you get your store back from your developer, who performed a 100 point QA inspection, what is the first thing you should do? If you said test, test, and then test some more, you are correct. It is a fact that computer code is rendered differently for each browser. It is essential that you test to be sure all of your functions show up on each browser. However, today there are a seemingly unlimited number of browser configurations along with a large array of screen resolutions—testing is a big job and can be a headache. Still, if you aren’t testing on the most popular browsers, you may be segmenting your audience.

Perhaps you’re asking yourself, “Do I really need to run right up to my kids’ room and test my site on their PlayStation Portable?” Probably not. Luckily there are only a handful of popular browsers used by the masses and if you have those covered, you are off to a great start. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are the 3 most popular browsers and 1024×768 reigns supreme for screen resolution. The affordability of flat screen LCD monitors has caused the bulky CRT monitors to become much less prevalent and any PC bought in the last 2 years should be preloaded with IE7. Mac’s native browser, Safari is gaining in popularity, but it is still less than 10% of the market. However, some of you will have the customer who uses Netscape 4 and isn’t afraid to tell you that your site is broken and impossible to order from when using their computer.

If a customer reports an error on your store there are a few pieces of information that you should get from them.

1. Have them explain the error. Often times what your client is describing as an error may be user error. User error that frequently repeats itself should be examined carefully. Any error that is more than an isolated incident should be forwarded to your developer.

2. What page were they on when the error occurred?

3. What actions led up to the error?

4. What Browser were they using?

5. What version of the Browser were they using? Updates are frequent and are often required. (e.g. Firefox 3 had a zero day update that fixed a potential vulnerability. This came less than 24 hours of the initial launch.)

If you can obtain that information, you can get a better understanding of whether you have a true issue on your hands or if the problem is a one off instance. Any customer confusion should be treated seriously, but you shouldn’t hold your web developer accountable for a customer who accessed your store using last century’s technology.

If you only had to worry about 3 browsers and one or two different screen resolutions, what a wonderful world this would be. Sadly, it’s not that simple. Microsoft and Apple are at war for customers and they are fighting it with updated operating systems. As a result, now you need to worry whether your customers are using Windows Vista or Mac OS X Leopard. If you have gotten this far and are feeling so overwhelmed you’re ready to give up, you may want to have someone take on the task of compiling all of these different operating systems, browsers and screen resolutions. Sites like Gomez.com offer “Capture Services” which will allow you to test pages of your site across a long list of combinations.

If all of this browser talk has you ready to run for the hills, don’t let it happen. Testing across a range of browsers is crucial to your business. The bad news is, the number of browsers and configurations is endless and you’ll never test all of them. The good news is, if you cover the major browsers you’ll be ahead of the game - for today…

For more information, visit some of the resources listed below. In addition, don’t forget to check the newly launched Firefox 3 and IE 8 scheduled for release later this year.

References for Browser & Screen Resolution Statistics:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/

Serious e-commerce begins with the holidays and getting ready for the holidays begins now. You know what’s at stake. Verisign reported 2007 internet holiday sales were up 25% over 2006. This year your holiday season is even more important. Still ahead are more increases at the gas pump which will ripple through the economy like a cold shiver. So, plenty of shoppers are looking to the internet instead of heading for the malls. How do you get this crucial market shopping with you?

The following guidelines will help you maximize sales.

Get Inside Your Shopper’s Head

Millions of people are just like me. We know the internet is fast, so we procrastinate and shop late.

How can we market
to this type of consumer?

• Hit the pain. Remind them why they’re online. Display a graphic on your homepage that says:

“Avoid the lines and shop with us online! Check out our money-saving holiday specials…”

• List your offers. Make sure your deals connect with your customers.

• Sell their wallets. Consumers don’t want to pay for gas or shipping costs. Whenever possible, offer free shipping.

• Reassure them. Guarantee delivery if offers are made before a certain date. Guarantee delivery with express delivery options.

• Offer Services. Offer free gift wrapping and cards with a personalized message. This saves last minute shoppers some time and is nearly universally embraced by—men.

• Match prices. If there’s a better bargain, match it.

• Use flash. Flash increases consumer confidence and draws attention through movement. Flash allows you to fit more into a small area without crowding.

Merchandise

Start tracking products and trends now. Find out what the big guys in your industry are doing. Feature the hot items prominently on the homepage. Showcase deals in a holiday-themed section.

• Sell suggestively. Feature gifts for Mom, Dad, Him, Her, etc.

Market!

All roads involve search engines.

• Pay-per-click remains the best way to get people from the search engines to your store. You can control when your ads are displayed, what is displayed and where the visitor lands when clicking the ad.

• Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) such as Google Products (formerly Froogle), Nextag, Shopping.com, etc. are increasingly popular. Feed management tools get your products in the engines and provide ROI analytics at a product level. One example is FeedPerfect by Solid Cactus.

• Affiliate programs are typically pay-for-performance; you only pay if they deliver. Arm these programs with holiday graphics and banners showcasing your specials.

• The best customer is a regular customer. Personalize a special coupon code for “preferred customers.” Giving your regulars an exclusive deal goes a long way.

When mass e-mailing, make sure you have the following:

• E-mail programs maximize delivery. Exact Target, Got Campaigner Pro, etc. block spam. Companies trust the e-mail coming from them and more e-mail will reach your intended recipients.

• Use well-designed HTML e-mail, but don’t make it a mirror image of your homepage.

• Personalize. Start the e-mail with “Dear <first name>, as a valued customer of <your store name>…” then go into your offers, showcased items, gift suggestions, etc.

• Call to action. A sign saying “start shopping” or “don’t wait another minute—click here” often work.

• Be consistent. Touch the pain of shopping offline, tell people why they should shop with you, create urgency and have a call to action. Put this message on every page (remember, more people land on the inner pages than the homepage.)

Be Creative on a Shoestring

• Hold a contest. Have visitors submit names, e-mail and mailing addresses for a chance to win a product (make it valuable!) delivered to them, gift-wrapped, before the holidays.

• Use the list that you just created for holiday shoppers. E-mail everyone if they “Shop now for the holidays—Guaranteed delivery if the order is received by 12/xx Midnight.” Show case your offers and don’t forget the call to action.

Inspire Customer Confidence

Offers and pricing won’t matter if people don’t trust you. Dispel their fears up front.

• Identity theft. Install a “click here”
link to explain your site’s security. Yahoo! Store owners should explain why its encryption is important to consumers. Carry your site design and branding through the shopping cart and carry your security messages through checkout.

• Fly-by-night operations. Your “about us” page should eliminate these concerns by including your mission statement, how long you’ve been in business, your location, your customer service goals, a picture of your building and the people who work there. Let customers see who you are.

• State your policies. Shopping cart abandonment often results from the charges at checkout. Explain shipping and tax charges. Explain your exchange and return policies.

• Bad customer service. Make toll-free numbers and contact information prominent on every page of the site and have enough people on those phones. Some online shoppers still need to place orders by phone. Make sure they can.

• Testimonials. A customer’s words speak loudly—showcase glowing reviews on every page.

• Product reviews. Big guys like Amazon are using product reviews for a reason. Amazon praising a product they’re selling won’t be nearly as convincing as a customer saying the same thing.

Prepare the Team

Higher volumes require more people. Most merchants increase customer service and fulfillment staff 25% during the holidays.

• Get your people now so you won’t have to scramble when you need them. A $50 employee bonus for hooking a friend up with a job is a good incentive.

• Train them well. They should know your shipping and tax policies, your values for customer service and answer product questions. Make sure they have cheat sheets for gift ideas, can handle price matching and know your promotions. Sales through in-bound calls will mirror the knowledge of your customer service staff.

Live chat can cut down on customer service calls and allow reps to handle multiple customers with simultaneous chats.

Get Started Now!

Prepare your website, offers, marketing strategy and customer service now for fewer headaches, unexpected problems and potential disappointments.

I thought I was on a roll at a recent Solid Cactus Boot Camp. I was holding a seminar, extolling the virtues of the “new marketing,” encouraging the attendees to spend less time and money on advertising and more effort on public relations where the advertising is free. Sadly, one person in the audience rained on my parade. She sells aftermarket parts for an auto maker and she was scared because the car manufacturer was initiating its own big push in e-commerce. She assumed the car maker, with its budgets and billions and warehouses full of parts would soon roll right over her. She asked, when the sleeping giants awaken and discover the Internet, how can small companies possibly compete against “the big boys”?

Let me sum up my answer in two words: WITH EASE!

The simple fact is you have a tremendous advantage over the larger, richer, slower brick-and-mortar companies now lumbering into e-commerce. I have worked for big corporations in marketing and advertising. I know what they do well and where they are deficient. They go with what they know. They go with size. Which makes sense, because that’s they’re strength. However, size is no advantage in the nimble world of e-commerce. Your strategy and tactics are just as valuable as theirs and arguably more valuable because in e-commerce, the focus is on small. Trust me; you have nothing to fear from “big.” Below are 7 reasons why smaller is better when it comes to internet marketing and sales.

Reason #1: Now the big boys are playing by YOUR RULES!!!

Never forget the defining law of e-commerce: equality. No matter how rich they are, everyone gets the same one home page. GeneralMotors.com with its international brand gets the same one page in cyberspace as, say, MotorGenerals.com with their home office space. Their billions mean nothing. Their work force means nothing. In that strangely egalitarian world of the Internet, you are exactly equal. Advantage—you.

Reason #2: You are more motivated…

They may have millions, or even billions. Is that an advantage? The larger a company becomes, the more layers they have in their organization. With more layers come more people, each one less invested in the outcome any single process. I’ll explain. Imagine an order comes in to your business and also to a larger one. You have yourself watching every step from the moment the order comes in until a sale goes out. How many people do they have? One for each step of the sales chain? Can that larger process care about the customer as much as you can? Do they have as much invested in a correct order or a happy customer? Can they possibly be as nimble and sensitive as you are? Of course not. They think customers come by the thousands and “someone else” ultimately takes care of them. You know better. They can’t possibly appreciate what they’re doing as much as you appreciate what you’re doing. Advantage—you.

Reason #3: You are more fluid.

Or to put it another way, their bowels are cast in concrete. The larger the organization, the harder it is to get anything done and the longer it takes. Everything requires a meeting and almost nothing gets decided at just one meeting. In large organizations, everyone wants to make sure the “right” people are invited to a meeting or a decision-making moment. Everyone is afraid to proceed because they’re worried to make a step out of place. It’s no surprise that automakers still need years to solve the gas mileage problem. Imagine how many meetings (and how many years) it took to agree there is a problem! You don’t have such worries. At least, you shouldn’t… Advantage—you.

Reason #4:
They never EVER have good ideas.

My father spent his entire life in corporate America. One of his favorite phrases of indictment was: “A camel is a horse, designed by a committee.” In other words, once you start voting and altering and changing, you can screw up almost anything. It happens in advertising every day. I know—I write their ads! Large companies are forever calling me back after an ad submission and they always say, “Kev—we love it. We just want to change two things.” I know before they tell me. They want to “change” the one thing that made the ad interesting and the one thing that made it funny, thereby guaranteeing that it won’t be either interesting or funny. Basically it comes down to this statement.

The majority NEVER makes the right decision, in anything. This gives you and your little autocracy a HUGE advantage over the larger, slower—dumber people you’re competing with.

Reason #5: When someone has a
good idea—they don’t stop until they screw it up.

You don’t have to look very far to see a wonderful advertising idea that has morphed into something grotesque. My current favorite is the AFLAC duck. When the duck first appeared, the quack sounded like the company name and it was brilliant. AFLAC sales soared and the duck became an instant favorite. In that first ad, the duck was in the park, where ducks belong, listening to two guys talk about insurance. The duck quacked “AFLAC!” and the ad worked. How the ads have changed. It’s clever when a duck quacks on cue in a park. It’s something very different when it ends up in your bed, on a roller coaster or behind the wheel of a race car. That isn’t clever, it’s stupid.

As a side point on advertising, you have an advantage there, too. Traditional mass advertising costs vastly more and is less effective than ever. But remember we’re dealing with corporations, where they think BIG. Whom do you think gets the most attention from corporate? The guys spending millions on TV ads using movie star voices or the newcomers, the folks in the basement grinding away on the internet? Advantage—you.

Reason #6: You listen. They don’t.

Think about that. When a customer calls you, it counts. When they complain, you pay attention or you’re out of business in a hurry. But when companies get big, who’s listening then? Or is it more likely that whoever hears a complaint will file a well-meaning report that higher-ups might read in a day, or a week, or never? The speed with which concerns are addressed varies inversely with the size of the company fielding the calls. The bigger the company, the longer and slower the process of seeing and dealing with customer issues… Advantage—you.

Reason #7: You know the Internet shopper better than they do.

Big companies often commission demographic surveys because they have lots of money. But do they bother to read or heed them? This is a serious question. Many large companies think it’s enough just to do the study. Even if they do read the surveys, is it an advantage over what you have? You have a pulse. You can feel your business and the industry beyond. Can’t you? Can’t you feel which promotions are working, which products are selling and which services are more popular? You have that sense because you are smaller. You listen to people more closely and their business counts more to you because you are smaller. You can react quickly and change quickly to profit from mini-spikes in activity because you are smaller. You know the internet at a gut level better than the big boys because you are smaller.

The big boys are playing in your court by your rules. You have the advantage in cyberspace. That’s the good news. The bad news is you can’t use the big boys as an excuse for not winning. They’re not better, just bigger. You have an edge in every other area.