“There’s no shortage of information telling online marketers what they should be doing. After all, everyone wants to be at the top of their game and best practice stuff really helps – but I rarely ever see a list of some of the DON’Ts.

So I made one. It should hopefully help you continue to steer clear of the online marketing taboos… If you are doing any of this, then shame on you.”

-Paul

BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. – Social media sites certainly have helped all of us be more, cyber social. Keeping up with everyone you have ever known, posting a song, it’s been fun.

But for those who want to speak to their customers, or find some new ones, social media has also become a great tool.

Surly Beer was founded in 2006 by Omar Ansari.

The start up brewer in Brooklyn Center didn’t, and doesn’t, have an advertising budget, so, he opted for the next best things and signed up for accounts on Twitter and Facebook.

“I never knew that would happen that people would start drinking our beer because they saw it on Facebook,” Ansari said.

And so the marketing department of Surly beer was born.

On our quest to making eCommerce better for our customers, we’d also like to help other non-customers get better at the web. The primary reason – we’re online shoppers and we hate bad eCommerce. So this posting is the first of a series on how to improve your eCommerce site. Of course, you can also call/email/tweet/facebook friend us if you have questions

-Andy

1.) Basic Site Improvements.

The following suggestions, while rather basic, are critical to any search engine strategy.

Meta Keywords and Title. While meta keywords and description tags are no longer the main factor deciding search engine rank, they are still a must for every page on your site. Each meta keyword tag should be a brief list (no more than 10 keywords) of the most important words on the page. The meta description tag should be a brief summary of the related page’s content. Both types of meta tags were incorporated as a standard to make the web easier to navigate. Unfortunately, over the years the rewards resulting from abuse of meta tags were so great that webmasters couldn’t help themselves but abuse these little guys. Now they are a must have but not going to win you the ranking you want. Perhaps your next question is how can I figure out what I should have for my meta tags? That, however, is going to have to be saved for another article.

Keyword Density. This is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a single web page divided by the total number of words on the page. Keyword Density is typically calculated as a percentage. Why this is important for search engine optimization is that many top search engines use keyword density as a significant factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a search for a keyword or keyword phrase.

To be sure, as webmasters have exploited keyword density over the last 10 years, this has lost some of its former luster in terms of getting your site ranked highly. However, much like meta tags, it is a must have these days as every little bit of SEO counts towards whether its you or your competitor in the top slot. To be sure, search engines today give priority to factors that are difficult for webmasters to control such as inbound links.  Also, you should be careful because overloading a page with keywords will actually penalize your ranking (this practice is called “stuffing”) and should be avoided. As a general guide, most SEO experts consider optimal keyword density to be 1 to 3 percent. Also, when you’re trying to calculate your keyword density, you should ignore html tags and other embedded tags which will not actually appear in the text of the published page.

Clean URLs First let’s define what we mean by “clean” URLs.

A typical URL is like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.iml?mdl=subPage/view.mdl&PAGE_ID=30289A

“clean” URL is one that is structured like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/products/category/singleproduct.html

There are a couple of important reasons to rewrite your URLs. The first, which also happens to be our topic, is SEO. After some time, it seems to have become widely known among SEO experts that search engines have an easier time crawling and indexing clean URLs. The result – clean URLs will get you better SEO. With clean URLs, a search engine can understand category structures on your website more easily. But how do you get clean URLs if you have “dirty” ones you ask? Well there are a couple of ways. The first of course is you can engage us and we’ll help you out. The second is to do it yourself… which you’re probably going to want to look into either buying or finding an open source tool to modify the htaccess file on your apache server (hopefully you’re running apache!) Whatever you do, don’t touch your production environment if you’re not sure what you’re doing. URL rewriting will make ALL of the links on your site not work if it is done incorrectly.

2.) Directory Listings

The name of the game in SEO is inbound links. This is the #1 way most search engines decide rank these days. Directory listing sites are sites that will list (or link to) your site sometimes even for free. So if you can get free inbound links from directories, it’s going to help your rank. How much it helps your rank depends on how important the directory. Below I’ve listed what are arguably considered to be the two most important directories and have separated them into the two categories of directory listings (paid vs. unpaid).

DMOZ, and other free listings. Other free listing sites aside, DMOZ is the authority on directory listings. They have more links to them from educational and governmental websites (which are extremely valuable) than any other directory out there. Also, they’re free. So what’s the catch you ask? Well the categories are managed by volunteers so your submission can take “an eternity” to get in. Many sites are not even accepted. There are tons of other free listing sites, but most aren’t going to provide significant inbound link value. As such, investigate how much search “authority” the relevant directory has before wasting time trying to get a listing with them.

Yahoo, and other paid listings. Yahoo costs $300 / year for a listing, but the quality of this inbound link is arguably worth it. I don’t think there’s a single SEO firm out there who would say otherwise. In fact, if you have a SEO firm and they haven’t submitted you to Yahoo’s directory, you might want to look into finding a new SEO firm. Yes, it is that important. There are a handful of other good paid listing sites, probably most notably Business.com. I wouldn’t go too crazy with this though because some of the paid sites out there are not going to provide the SEO benefits versus the cost tradeoff in which case you might be better off spending those precious dollars on search engine marketing or another form of advertising.

3.) Blogging and Link “juice”

What kind of juice is that? Can you drink it? Link juice is the trendy term for the quality of a Web site’s link power, as in page rank, number of link votes, etc.

Blogging and social media. If you haven’t heard of blogging… well that’s a little scary BUT don’t worry! You’re reading a blog right now! So you may have been reading blogs all along and just not known the terminology. In fact, a study was conducted a few years ago (2005) that showed that 1/3 americans had read a blog in the last 30 days. So to say the least, there’s a good chance you’ve read a blog before. Why is it important for SEO? Blogging creates a lot of content. Search Engines love good content. Thus if you create good content (that hopefully is keyword rich as described above in our Keyword Density discussion) then you should see some good SEO effects. People come and read the articles you’ve written, and then hopefully will browse into the rest of your site after being impressed by your genius. There are a plethora of reasons to blog beyond just SEO as well, but we’ll have to discuss those next time as it is a bit beyond the scope of this article.

So the other thing blogging does is it gives other webmasters (such as bloggers) a reason to link to your site. After all, people aren’t going to link to your  site just because you’re a nice person!  You need high quality content if you want to get high quality sites linking to your every word. So if you haven’t started blogging yet… you might want to think about it. The major problem most people have with blogging is the time commitment, so if that’s a problem for you, maybe we can help (yes I really did shamelessly plug us one more time).

Till next time,

-Andy

Amazon has been slowly expanding beyond books, used books, and into all retail products. Wal-mart, while usually a boon for manufacturers that win their business, their tactics and need to be the price-leader has yielded mixed results at best.

Amazon recently purchased Zappos.com, essentially laying down the gauntlet for all other retailers that Amazon plans on dominating online shopping – all online shopping. Amazon even offers to assist retailers by creating online storefronts for those retailers – for a fee…with limited capabilities, and they’ll have access to your customers, and control the user experience, and control the placement of that storefront in search results, among other restrictions.

It sounds like Wal-mart for the online world, except worse.

While these two behemoths duke it out for customer dollars this holiday season, they’re slowly laying waste to the smaller retailers and manufacturers trying to compete. Not to make idle accusations, but would Wal-mart continuing buying products from a manufacturer when they could lower their costs by finding a source elsewhere? Would Amazon continue to offer and support storefronts that are more expensive than a lower-cost alternative somewhere else in the world?

Andy at eTurms here. We’re really excited about launching our new blog. eTurms has gone from a concept to a living entity in the last 6 months, helping companies build out their online sales. So we thought it was high time that we started building out our own online sales presence. This blog is just one part of our overall social media presence so look for us on your favorite sites from Twitter to Facebook in the coming weeks.

In our blog posts to come, we’ll be covering hot tips on social media marketing, ways to improve conversion on your e-commerce sites, exciting happenings here at eTurms, and other happenings in the wild west of eCommerce. So stay tuned and feel free to chime in!

Andy