Multi-lingual SEO

Glass for a new iPhone 3GS = $200

Tim Gill — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:37:42 PDT

Wow, I learned yesterday that if you sit down in just the right way with your 50 day old iphone 3Gs in your back pocket you can actually crack the glass screen and Apple won’t cover it because they don’t see it as a hard ware defect and should not be covered by their 90 day warranty.

Between this and disabling all of my old items from charging my iphone I’m realizing that Apple, as wired magazin already noticed, truly is evil genius.

The affront of charging people the price of the phone for just the glass is simply unconscionable. I just had windows installed in my home and they were $200

If I remember correctly the subsidized price of the iphone was $199 so to sell a replacement glass for the same price seems like quite the gouge. I have an appointment tonight with the Apple store. Now let’s see if they will do the right thing! To be continued . . .

Twitter is down this morning and analytics is confusing

Tim Gill — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:47:27 PDT

How will people get their information? Well, I guess I will have to resort to long form writing and updates. I recently did a survey with Jennine over at independent fashion bloggers as part of a panel on What companies look for in a blog. Lindsay Kordik and Jennifer Plantz from Parish PR and Echo Design were also surveyed. There was a discussion around analytics metrics which gets very confusing as web traffic analysis is a young industry and many people use a variety of terms to refer to different or the same things.

Here is a great listing to demystify some of those terms:

http://empoweryou.ca/2007/04/22/google-web-analytics-glossary/

Amazon buys Zappos

Tim Gill — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:01:22 PDT

Amazon announced just now that it buying Zappos. This is incredible news! Zappos is a very dynamic company and had a great presence at the last SMX Advanced. They have come along way in search in the last 2 years.

New Shopbop site

Tim Gill — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:11:43 PDT

A new Shopbop.com site is live with lots of new features to enhance the user experience. Shopbop now makes it easy to see all the Shopbop fashion designers on one page. The new site also allows users to sort by price and quickly find their favorite designers in the best size for the customer. We have also setup a mini boutique to help users to shop a style that fits them. There is also now a dedicated section to breast cancer awareness.

Ray Ban ecommerce site launch

Tim Gill — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:13:59 PDT

On July 15th Ray ban recently launched their ecommerce site over at www.ray-ban.com. What I fail to understand is why any modern day ecommerce site would launch a new site exclusively in Flash without an html version. That said their brand is making a comeback among fashionistas. In particalar the ray ban wayfarer is taking off among celebrities. There are even coloring kits to customize your own wayfarers. I personally like the ray ban aviator sunglasses better. So back to the ecommerce store, it is a very nice design and colorful to match the wayfarer style. However this site is very challenging for Google to index because of all of its whiz-bang flashiness. See the screen shot below. I do like the pacing Chameleon along the bottom though : )

Google OS: just don’t call it Chrome.

Tim Gill — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:02:40 PDT

A new Google operating system based on Chrome for netbooks sounds fantastic. They should be able to monetize it easily through search. This means that a Google netbook should be about $15 cheaper than a XP netbook. A thin computing device is the perfect complement to Google’s software offerings. But I don’t think the name Chrome really cuts the mustard. It could use a four to five letter word with 1 vowel. Isn’t that the rule for new product names in the tech sphere. Or take some inspiration from the world of fashion. In the fashion world there are great naming conventions. See brands like Dsquared2, or the colorfully descriptive brand Dirty Librarian Chains. You could also go the non-descript route like blank denim. Then there’s the fairy tail route of Golden goose. If the world of fashion can pull it off I think Google should be able to as well. Please just don’t call it Chrome it will only create confusion amongst the blogosphere and IT departments everywhere

Profiles, which is your favorite?

Tim Gill — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:34:57 PDT

It’s interesting that Google doesn’t allow you to make a custom URL for your profile the way that Linkedin does. Instead it forces you to be more unique by automatically inserting your middle initial. while this dramatically reduces the quantity of duplicates, I wonder how Google will deal with additional TimJGill’s will the rest feature a long string of numbers?

http://www.google.com/profiles/timjgill

http://www.linkedin.com/in/timgill

True Religion and site architecture

Tim Gill — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:08:18 PDT

As I am becoming a burgeoning fashionista and learning about fashion and search I was shocked to see that TrueReligionjeans.com is one of the hotter trends in denim fashion completely fails at so many basic elements of SEO. While they are a public company (TRLG) and should have the resources to improve their website they have not considered SEO in their site design or architecture. While they do haver an interesting layout and are than just a flash micro site. They have some sophisticated ecommerce elements. Their failure occurs at the URL level. Because they only have one URL indexed in Google. This is because someone made the decision to not have the URL change at all ever within the site, this is perhaps an unexpected consequence of doing a frameset for the entire site. Subsequently Google has only crawled one of their pages. This could be alleviated perhaps with a sitemap or a spiderable path that allows Google to discover all the great content at this site. They have accomplished this at truereligionbrandjeans.com. I don’t quite understand why they wouldn’t just redirect the former home page to the latter homepage. However Until then most user will probably end up buing true religion jeans, skirts, and shorts elsewhere. There is a great true religion denim video showcasing how to these jeans fit. It is a great peice for fashionista noobs like me!

Socially Engaging Brands

Tim Gill — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:18:19 PST

Several months ago Stephan Spencer and I co-authored an article on social discourse for multi-channel merchant. It has been picked up by catalogue age and archived in factiva as well. Here is a link to the social discourse pdf.

While search engine optimization encompasses social media through the creation of links caused by popularity, or “link bait”, social media marketing has attributes and effects that go beyond the boundaries of SEO. This includes direct traffic (typed in to the browser, bookmarked, and e-mail campaigns), online reputation, and brand community building.

Book Review:”Always be testing”

Tim Gill — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:02:18 PST

Over the Thanksgiving weekend rather than shopping I thought I would read about Multivariate Testing so I picked up ‘Always be Testing, The complete guide to Google Website Optimizer’. It is one of the first books published on Google’s product and written by the fine people at FutureNow Inc who were among the pioneers of multivariate testing. In its 337 pages of optimization goodness the book provides more than 250 testing ideas for your ecommerce website. The book starts off going over fairly basic concepts but you won’t make it through the last portion without an adequate understanding of scripts and math. They do explain quite well how to implement Google Website Optimizer on a wordpress blog.

The book analyzes dives into the marketing side of ecommerce and analyzes the buying process and the steps to a purchasing decision.

‘Always be testing‘ reminds SEOs/web designers that when people buy, they basically go through a very linear process:

1. Problem recognition.
2. Information search.
3. Evaluation of alternatives.
4. Purchase decision.
5. Purchase completion.
6. Was the problem solved?

This is an often forgotten process that many don’t implement in their ecommerce designs. The idea of being a resource to evaluate alternatives scares many websites however when I see a product / benefit / competitor matrix I often move forward with my purchase with confidence.