E-Commerce Blog

A relatively simple SEO linking strategy can improve how well and how often your store’s product pages are indexed and displayed in organic search engine results.

This linking technique goes by several names. Bruce Clay Inc., an Internet business consultancy, refers to it as “siloing.” SEOmoz uses the term “PageRank sculpting.” And the Search Engine Roundtable called it “bot herding” in a recent discussion. While these names and practitioners claim subtle differences in meaning and application, the general technique seeks to concentrate PageRank on a site’s most important landing and product pages, improving how those pages perform in search engine results.

Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding

Bot herding or siloing can be divided into t…

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Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding, A SEO Internal Linking Tactic

Online business analyst eMarketer reported that Canadian retailers would sell an estimated $15.5 billion Canadian worth of goods and services in 2008, up some 12.4 percent from 2007’s total of C$13.8 billion.

By 2012, Canadian ecommerce sales should reach C$22.8 billion, including travel sales, digital tickets, and digital products like software. In spite of this projected growth, Canadian’s still trail their U.S. consumers in terms of purchasing online, according to a new study from eMarketer.

“Consumers in Canada are avid online product researchers, on par with their US counterparts. But they are much more likely to make a subsequent purchase in-store rather than on a Website,” said eMarketer on its website.

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Chart of the Week: Canadians are Spending More Online

Having good content on a website is always important because it is that content upon which both search engines and customers make decisions about your website. The better it is – with regards to focused keywords, information, and style – the more likely a website is to draw search users from search engines and convert them to customers.

Blog content is equally important. The more fresh and relevant blog content is, the more likely it is to attract both customers and inbound links. One of the biggest gripes I hear from clients about blogs, though, is the process of creating regular and ongoing posts to a website. Understandably, they don’t have time; they don’t have enough ideas; and/or they just plain can’t get in the habit of writing f…

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Voice Recognition Software: Just “Talk It Out”

Blog titles play an important role in how search engines index blog posts. Bloggers that want to get the most web traffic possible seed post titles with important keywords and make interesting promises about the content.

Many online retailers use blogs to both communicate with consumers and add search-engine friendly content in the hope of attracting more web traffic. The strategy is a good one. According to an October 2008 study from BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch, 27 percent of Internet users read blogs and nearly one in five consumers are influenced by blogs when they are considering a purchase—so there is little doubt that blogs are effective.

But blogging is not any merchant’s regular job, so it is easy to overlook one of the most …

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PeC Traffic Report: Use Blog Titles that Reflect Keywords and Content

Editor’s Note: This is part three in our special report on “Video for Ecommerce,” where we describe real stories of online merchants creatively using video to drive sales and grow their brands. Previous installments are linked in the “Related articles” section, below.

Practical eCommerce brings you the following “cheat sheet” for putting together professional-looking on-site videos that are easy to get off the ground and inexpensive to produce.

PowerPoint and Camtasia

Poker software reviewer Marty Smith uses the standard PowerPoint software along with a $299 software called Camtasia Studio for his online poker instructional videos.

“When I record, it’s in two stages: I record the actual visual interaction — what happens in my onlin…

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Video in a Snap: Easy Video Creation Techniques