This holiday season I was searching in Google for Jawbone bluetooth headsets on sale. Tigerdirect.ca had an enticing Ad.

TigerDirect.ca PPC ad

Clicked on it expecting sales promotion on Jawbone head sets. But I was directed to home page with nothing related to Jawbone or Bluetooth headset promotions.

TigerDirect Homepage

I tried to search their Bluetooth section and found that they don’t have any Jawbone products at all. Not sure why would they specifically mention Aliph Jawbone, which is an actual product of Jawbone and not have any Jawbone products.

TigerDirect.ca promoted Jawbone headsets but didn't have them on their website

TigerDirect.ca is failing in many areas. Google AdWords policy clearly states that

• advertiser should honor the deals and offers promoted on their ads
• user should be able to find what the ad promises (discounts/free offers) within 1-2 clicks of the landing page

Further TigerDirect.ca is paying more per click because the ad has very low relevance to the landing page leading to poor quality score. You can check the Google AdWords policies from the below links:

AdWords landing Page policy on finding products within 1-2 clicks

AdWords landing page policy on honoring the offers made on the ads

AdWords Quality score

You can also check the video from Google AdWords on Landing page and site quality:

I hope this helps you understand the importance of selecting the right keywords, ads and landing pages to promote your website. If you are an e-commerce advertiser, ensure that your landing pages are relevant to the keywords and the ads you advertise. Further honor any sales promotions/discounts for you are not just losing advertising dollars but disgruntled buyers, potential new sales, business revenue and brand reputation.

e-Commerce Landing Page PPC Blooper is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Match Search Engine’s Search Query with Landing Page Content
2. Search Results Relevancy Blooper – www.futureshop.ca
3. 6 e-Commerce Email Capturing Techniques

Looking for a laptop support today, I reached ikea.ca’s page and added 3 of them to the cart.

Surprise, for a $4.99 item the shipping fee is $34.55. Would you buy online from someone who’s charging that much? Hell, no!

$4.99 for the product , $34.99 for shipping? Good by IKEA!

You can do all the remarketing in the world, I am not going to buy this product online from IKEA.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as landing page testing services and conversion rate optimization services. Our A/B and multivariate tests have helped companies increase conversion rates by as much as 75%. Let us increase your conversion rates, too!

Who Wouldn’t Abandon This Shopping Cart? is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Which Call to Action, Add to Cart or Buy Now?
2. Google Does Usability Mistakes Too
3. LG.com’s Internal Search Gone Wrong

An internal analysis by Google, found that over 90% of their web properties could have improved their SEO simply by optimizing the TITLE tag format and length.

Titles are one the first things searchers see after performing a search query, so it will determine whether or not they will click on your listing and visit your site. It is also one of the most important on-page SEO factors. Also, when others link to your pages, they tend to use the page title as anchor text.

Ironically, the tag came last on my alphabetically-sorted list of tags when I started The Definitive HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization series, but it got the entire deserved attention. I hope you will find the article useful either you are new to SEO or an experienced search engine optimization professional, or a marketing manager educating himself.

We know that <TITLE> is not really a HTML tag (it’s an element), but since everybody calls it a tag, we will use that term, to grab some search engine attention and, hopefully, some rankings/traffic for related terms ;)

There are tons of tips later within the article, but let’s start by debunking a popular myth and answer one of the most common questions about TITLE tag.

Myth: most of the knowledgeable webmasters and even advanced SEO professionals think that the content of the TITLE tag is the only piece Google uses to display the blue page titles within the search result pages (in the sample below the color is violate since it’s a visited URL):

Most of the times the content of the TITLE tag is displayed in SERPs

Fact: The content of the TITLE tag is part of the snippet equation but it’s not the entire part. To display page titles within SERPs Google uses relevancy rather than blindly following your TITLE’s tag content. If your title is not relevant to the user query, but the page content is, Google will use other sources to display a relevant page title.

This brings us to one of the most frequent questions of Google Webmaster Help forum:

Question: Why is Google changing/rewriting/not indexing my TITLE tag properly?

Answer: As mentioned before, Google’s mission is relevancy. To accomplish it, they use various sources and signals, which can be onpage signals (relevant parts from body content and headings, for example) or external sources (DMOZ or Yahoo! directory) to match user query with relevant search results.

There are cases when search engines need to modify the displayed titles, such as missing:

- malformed tag

- too short or too long titles

- URL is blocked by robots.txt but has lots of backlinks and they still decide to show it to users.

Watch the video below from Matt Cutts to hear it from the horse’s mouth, if you don’t believe me.

It is not that Google doesn’t index your titles correctly, it’s just that relevancy comes before whatever you put within the TITLE tag.

TITLE tag tips

When writing TITLE tags there are 3 masters to serve: SEO(rankings), CTR (clicks) and ROI(revenue). Order them any way you want, all of them are important and should play a role when crafting the perfect title. Most of the tips listed here are for SEO (rankings) and not CTR or ROI oriented.

Below is a list of recommendations that one should take into consideration when writing with SEO in mind.

Non HTML documents

The title for non HTML documents (such as .pdf or .doc files) is taken from the anchor texts pointing to the document, or from the document’s properties.

Social CTR metrics

The same way AdWords titles have the largest impact on CRT, titles within search results pages greatly influence click-through rates on search result listings. CTR is one of the social metrics used by Google to rank websites; therefore better CTR equals better rankings. If you can create enticing titles, while following other tips presented here, you’ll get a “double double” effect.

Hx matching

One method to reinforce the relevance of a document is by matching heading(s) on the page with the TITLE tag. If you can do an exact match between H1 and the title of the page, it will add more weight to the document outline. Since the exact match between the two is not always possible you should aim at least at having the keyword from the TITLE tag repeated within other headings (H2 or H3).

Remember, the words in the title of the page should reflect the content of that page and should be present within the content, otherwise search engines may not display your original title in the search results pages.

Keyword significance consolidation

This is a great tip that will help you increase your site keywords’ significance, which in return will create more “authority” around the targeted keyword:

1) on the home page, place the most top-level generalized keyword for your website at the very beginning of the TITLE tag

2) repeat that keyword on ALL other internal pages at the end of the title tag (after the brand name, if it’s the case, even if the title is going to be longer than 65 chars).Ideally, the reinforced keyword should come after the 65 char limit

3) make sure that keyword shows at least twice per hundred words copy on each page of the website

4) consolidate anchor texts from internal pages to point to the home page using the keyword used the beginning of the title tag on home page

On our own website, see how nicely the most significant keywords are floating around optimization, marketing and search:

The number of occurrences dictates the keyword significance

Geo-targeting

If you’re targeting a specific region/city/province, it’s advisable to mention it in the TITLE tag in order to show up for a local search query such as “Vancouver SEO“. This approach is great when you’re a start up and can compete on low to medium difficulty keywords only. Once you grow and support your rankings with external backlinks, you can revise the targeted keywords and geo-targeting options.

Ecommerce sites should build unique pages for each retail store in their chain. The address (at least city and state/province, should be placed in the TITLE tag and the pages should support and reinforce the address with addresses and geo tagged images (link to image tag).

Holiday Specific Titles

You will love this technique, but you’ll hate me for making you work harder.

User behaviour is changing around holidays (boxing day, mother’s day, Halloween, etc) and so is the way they search. If you’re an online retailer (or if you know that your audience might be searching for specific events related keywords) you should be able to change your titles easily to accommodate that behaviour change. Around Christmas, it’s much more enticing for users to see and click on “Christmas Gifts for Him. All Items on Sale & FREE Shipping” than “Gifts for Him. All Items on Sale & FREE Shipping“.

The titles are changed to match user behavior during Christmas

For more information on this please read the article holiday-specific titles.

Char count

This is another very misunderstood concept. Google doesn’t index only 65 chars (or close). It only displays 65-70 chars, cropping the complete words if they run over this limit, but it indexes as much as 250 chars per some tests (I’ve read about 1000 chars being entirely indexed). Knowing this it opens doors to new opportunities, such as thinking your titles in blocks rather than a one piece. It may worth testing a bit:

1) First block, the first 65 characters, where you would craft your perfect title (keywords, branding and call to action). This will be the title seen by people on search engines.

2) Second block, second-tier keywords, plurals, synonyms or other strategies. On pages other than the home page you can repeat the top most important keyword for your website, at the very end of the title.

Branded titles

If some SEO experts are advising you to remove the brand name from your titles, they could be wrong. You should know better than them the goal of your organic traffic campaign and should act accordingly:

- if you have a well established brand (i.e. Amazon) you may want to have the brand at the beginning of the title;

- if you are trying to build a brand and your efforts are sustained by SEO, brand name will be the first word

- If your brand has some recognition you can still place and your campaign goal is to drive unbranded traffic, the brand name can be placed at the end of the tag.

- If you’re company name is not well known, or if you don’t care about branding, don’t put your brand name in the title at all

Big brands like Amazon are branding their page titles right at the beginning of the tag

Keyword prominence

The main targeted keyword should be at the beginning of the TITLE tag. Period!

Keyword proximity

If you target keywords with more than two words, they better be one next to each other, i.e. if you target “marketing services” you should not have anything in between the two words.

Modifiers

Modifiers are those words that can be placed before or after your targeted keyword, to address a specific segment of the market. Keywords can be generally categorized into 3 main categories informational/educational, transactional/purchase intent and navigational/geo-location.

Depending on the pages you write titles for, you can add a transactional modifier (buy, sale, discount, cheap) for product pages, directional/geo (Vancouver, BC or Seattle, WA) on store locations page or educational/informational (learn, discover, read, find) for your white papers or case studies/success stories.

Keywords order

In many cases you will find that there’s a different search volume for the same 2-word combinations. For example “Vancouver SEO” has a different search volume compared with “SEO Vancouver“. Obviously, you should focus on the keyword with highest demand. You can compensate the other keyword with internal anchor support and/or by including it within your description, headings and main body content.

The two keywords have different search volumes

Singular or plural? Or both?

Google doesn’t recommend repeating the same word more than twice in a TITLE tag. But is the plural considered a repetition of the singular? Given the way search engines interpret content (by bringing the word to their root form) I would tend to say, yes, it is a repetition. But you will be fine if you use the keyword no more than twice, once in singular and once in plural. This strategy may have some impact on ecommerce stores, where people may search for “dell laptops” or “dell laptop”. Another option is to write your perfect title in blocks, within the first 65-70 displayed chars and repeat the keywords in a plural/singular variation at the end.

Stop words

Words such as and, or, the, in or for are called stop words. Search engines will most of the time filter them out when computing page relevance. After all, no one cares how many times you’ve use the word “I” or “WE” on a page. You should aim to use as few of them as possible, since you SERPs title space is limited. As a good practice you should remove them from URLs too. In case you’re interested here’s txt file with more stop words.

Separators

The most used separator is the pipe sign “|” but others are acceptable too, such as hyphens and commas. Do not use underscores or use any of the following special characters in title text: ‘ ” < > { } [ ] ( ).

Some websites are using catchy titles that use a lot of non alphabet symbols, such as ~~~!FREE iPODS!~~~ to grab attention and possibly higher CTRs. Keep in mind that use of special symbols may get you better CTR but also might rise spam penalties.

Char savers

If you need to squeeze more text you can replace word like “and” with & symbol, “or” with / or “copyrights” with ©. Remember to implement special chars using HTML entities (& with &amp; © with &copy; and so on).

Other space savers are abbreviations (i.e. instead of search engine optimization you could use SEO) or shorter synonyms for the word, or variations of your chosen key terms, tee-shirt and T-shirt.

The decision on which version should be used, has to be based on the search volume for those keywords and even be based on the content targeted on the page. For example, if your content targets mid stage customers, using the jargon “onsite SEO” in the title might be ok, since they might already be familiar with it, but it may not be used by early stage prospects.

Call to action (CTA)

Your page titles act like headlines within SERPs and a compelling call to action can actually generate more clicks for the page listed #2 than a poor title listed #1. One of the most important element tested in advertising, and conversion rate optimization, are headlines.

Usually, CTA are strong verbs, strong unique selling propositions (USP) or promotional words. Sometimes store/inventory-wide promotions can affect CTR also. An example of a promotional title can look like “All Digital Cameras 60% OFF ……”. There’s an interesting thread on this subject here.

Exact match

If a three/four-word phrase such as “internet marketing services” drives qualified traffic, it’s best to have that exact phrase as opposed to having those words appear out of order, such as “Internet services: marketing and web hosting“.

Capitalization

One or two words can be in uppercase, but an entire title written with caps lock on will raise spam flags, so don’t do it. Keep this in mind when you add document properties for non HTML documents. Capitalizing each first letter of the word is acceptable.

Competitive differentiators

If you know that your target market is sensitive to a particular feature or benefits which is part of your unique selling proposition(lowest price guarantee) or competitive edge(i.e. the only retailer for a product) you can use it to attract more clicks on your listings and differentiate from others (which can generate better conversion rates)

Apart from the entire list of tips, here are some basic, boring things about titles (you already know this stuff, right?):

- Each page should have a TITLE tag (muhahahah)

- TITLE tag should not be empty

- Each page should have only one TITLE tag

- The TITLE tag belongs inside the HEAD section of a web page

- The content of the TITLE tag should be different from the contents of the META description tag

- The TITLE tag of each page should be unique and distinct from the TITLE tags of other pages in a site.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

TITLE Tag SEO – The Definitive HTML Reference Guide for Search Engine Optimization is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. META Tags and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
2. LINK Tag, REL attribute and SEO – The Complete HTML Guide for Search Engine Optimization
3. List Items and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Blog networks is a fancy name for something that already existed since long ago: satellite websites, or web rings if you like.

Creating a blog network to drive traffic to your ecommerce site can still be a viable strategy, even post Panda update, as long as the purpose of such a network is to genuinely provide great information to visitors. As a positive side effect, the network may also provide limited PR juice by back linking to your ecommerce site.

But let’s be clear from the beginning. If your goal is to actually increase the number of backlinks with a blog network, I don’t recommend this tactic. I call blog networks whose sole purpose is backlinking, blog farms. Just like any other types of “web farms” they are not in compliance with search engines’ guidelines.

This is a sample of how blog farms could look like

Also, remember that the single most important SEO factor when considering a blog network (for ecommerce or other purposes) is, you guessed, quality content.

There are several things to consider even before going into technical setups.

• Your entire network should focus on your ecommerce niche solely. If you sell car accessories, do not start a blog about oil paintings
• For each blog in the network you need to write great, original content. Do not copy from other websites, PLR (private label rights) articles or automatically spin articles. Remember, compelling content is the key to avoid Panda-like penalties
• Each blog in your network should focus on a single topic, usually targeting subcategory or category keywords
• Start small, with 2-3 blogs to warm up and understand the challenges of maintaining such a network
• Choose WordPress as your CMS platform (you may even want to consider WP multiple install version)
• 20 blogs in your network will not raise any spam flags if you interlink them. More than 50 will surely do
• It is important to also have a blog on your ecommerce site too, where you write the masterpieces and link internally to home page, categories and product pages with the correct anchor texts
• Don’t stuff the blogs within your network with ads. Remember, the purpose of the network is to educate and impress with quality content

Important Note

There are lots of companies out there which created blog networks for the sole purpose of selling links to their clients and SEO agencies. We don’t use them nor for us or our clients.

One of the many emails we receive for joining blog farms

The problem is that they are not able to sustain the network with quality content and most of the time their blogs will not focus on a single theme. You will find the same blog (or even worse, the same article) linking to adult or gambling sites and rogue pharmacies. This will hurt your backlinking efforts more than it will help.

And, did you know that once you stop paying them off, your links are disappearing? Considering only this, you’re better with AdWords than with paid links.

We recommend staying away from such blog farms and do your hard work (content writing) which will pay off down the bumpy SOE road.

Another piece of advice is to ask your SEO services provider if they are using blog networks to build links to your ecommerce site. If they do, RUN. That’s a time bomb which can blow you out of Google’s index for good.

Now, let’s get into more specific details

Domain names

Ideally, your blog domain names should match the targeted keywords and they should end in dot com.

As you can see Google still give higher importance to keyword in domain matches

That is not possible nowadays, so here’s some workarounds:

• You should prioritize domain names the same way you prioritized your ecommerce information architecture:
  • Your ecommerce home page should target the single most important keyword for your industry; don’t target that keyword with a blog within your network.
  • Blogs targeting your ecommerce categories, sub categories and even products can also have other TLD than dot com
  • If you don’t find the exact match for a keyword and domain name, you can try to add suffixes or prefixes, whichever sounds better for you target language, i.e. for car accessories you can try the domain name interiorcaraccessories.com – use Google Keyword tool to find some of the most search phrases
• Register each domain with different names, on different dates and make them private (Google is a registrar and has access to your names even if you put them on private). You can use the same credit card, no one (ideally) will not have access to it.

Hosting

It is much easier to handle the entire network within the same hosting account/company. By doing so it will allow one update for all plug-ins and for the CMS platform, easy access to all domain names hosted there. But if Page Rank is what you’re after, there’s very less of it if you host everything on the same account (the only exception is if you can buy different C class IPs).

If you want to see some back linking benefits you need to consider the following:

• go with a different hosting for each domain name so you get different class-C IP addresses for each blog
• buy dedicated IP addresses for each blog, don’t go with shared IPs

Sometimes you can negotiate with the hosting company, and if they can offer different C-class IPs , you can host on the same account.

Sometime you can find web hosts that sell different C Class IPs

You may be tempted to go with hosts that offer preinstalled WP blogs, but that will not serve you well if you plan on customizing each blog.

Also, starting on different hosting account is a good idea since you will be able to test the performance and stability of their systems, then choose the best one.

CMS platform

There’s no other platform I would recommend for a blog network, than WordPress. There are a good number of SEO plugins that can help you with onsite SEO and there’s a huge community around it, making troubleshooting issues quite easy.

There's no better CMS platform for blog networks than WordPress

Additionally, you could consider WordPress Multisite, but that will not serve you well if you want to get some PR juice from your blog network.

Choose a unique (preferably professional ones) theme for each blog in the network and work on unique, original About Us pages. If you don’t care about hiding from search engine, your contact details can be same as the ones on your ecommerce website, but on the About Us page you should focus more on the author (even if you use a “stage name” for your authors).

Interlinking architecture

The interlinking architecture should be conceptualized based on the blog network’s goal. If your goal is to generate traffic and awareness about the products you sell with the ecommerce site then you can interlink the blogs in any way you like. In case your goal is just Page Rank flow (which I don’t recommend) then you have to think of a flat architecture, similarly to how a website architecture will look like, only that you will link from bottom to top.

Usually the less competitive keywords (i.e. product keywords) will support more competitive keywords (i.e. branded products or sub categories)

If you’re going after PR and try to hide your network form the search engines, your product blogs should link to subcategory blogs only, then subcategory blogs should link to categories blog, categories blog should link to categories pages on your ecommerce website.

Keep in mind that if you think that search engines are not able to map out linking schemes, you are wrong.

For black hat aspirers

If you want to stay unindider the Google’s radar you will need to:

• Use unique data for everything related to your blog network: whois data for domain names, hosting, IP addresses but also contact info on your blog. Never share the same AdWords, AdSense, Google Analytics or any other Google properties on websites.
• Uninstall Google toolbar and other software from Google or Google’s partners
• Access your blogs only using transparent proxies
• Don’t use Google Chrome as your browser
• Hide yourself from search engines, which probably mean not accepting or blocking cookies.

Lastly, but not less important, you have to balance the efforts and budget for managing tens of blogs and weight against other opportunities (such as guest blogging, sponsored posts) for getting backlinks for your ecommerce site.

One final caution, would you rather get 1000 links pointing to you main ecommerce site or have 50 links pointing to 20 different domains names? I would choose the first option.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Rate this post!

SEO Best Practices for eCommerce Blog Networks is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Ecommerce SEO – 10 SEO Tips to Optimize Product Descriptions
2. Discover Your Competitors Blog Engagement Rate
3. AdWords Tips – Parked Domains and Error Pages

Your email lists are valuable assets and this is something all online marketers will agree upon. Once you have an email address and permission to contact the owner you can start cross selling, up selling and recover abandoned shopping carts.

Capturing an email address should be a Goal within your web analytics tool and it should be properly setup. Additionally you should associate a valued to each email captured and derive it’s importance to your business. This way you can properly allocate budget and prioritize change requests or new features on your website.

So, let’s take a look at several uncommon techniques that you can use to capture email addresses on ecommerce sites, others than the old school Subscribe to our newsletter thing.

1. “email to a friend” links/buttons on the product page

BigW tries to capture the email address of both, you and your friend. Smart

Once you click on the link, a modal window pops up:

This nice modal window doesn't take away the users from the product page

The same strategy can be found on channel5 website

This "Email to a friend" on the product page can be used to capture your email

again, on click, a modal windows pops:

This time the modal windows has a CAPTCHA system to prevent bots from autofilling

2. Email capturing banners at the top of each page and promote free shipping (or something else) in exchange of their email address

Here’s a sample from womanwithin.com:

The promotional banner at the top has 2 purposes: it grabs your email addresses and it make the free shipping campaign

The emails are captured directly in the banner, no other page/window is needed.

3. Add a “save cart” button/link on the shopping cart and take users to a page where they are giving the email address

You might save shopping carts for a later visit anyways, but why not give your visitors the opportunity to do that themselves? HP and Amazon have a Save Cart feature too:

Save Cart feature on amazon.com allows users to save their carts by registering with an email address

If you need more time to decide, you can save your cart for later

4. Expandable bottom bars

Floating toolbars like wibiya.com have increasingly become more present on websites. You can design your own floatable, expandable (open by default) toolbar where you ask for email addresses in exchange of giving something for free (shipping, bogo promotions, etc). Here’s what I mean by expandable bottom bars:

This toolbar's purpose is to get social, but you can add your custom code to capture email addresses

5. Catfish banner which ask for email address for promotions

The difference between the catfish banners and expandable toolbar is that catfish banners have a  [x] close button and once clicked, the banner should completely disappear and not displayed again during the same session. The expandable toolbars are persisten, they just minimize to a small icon at the bottom of the page. I prefer the expandable toolbars.

There’s a tutorial on sitepoint.com on how to create one, but once you understand the principle you can have your team develop something custom:

A floating catfish banner at the bottom of the page can ask visitors to give their email addresses

6. CSS overlays (popups)

Darn, these popups are annoying, but considering marketingexperiments.com is doing it (other big names too, i.e.  HP ) it could mean the benefits are greater than the costs (bounces). Make sure to setup a set of rules for displaying them per session (usually 1) and a daily/monthly frequency cap.

marketingexperiments.com and others are using these popups even if there'strong annoyance generated by them

I would suggest testing this technique for a limited portion of your website traffic and keep an eye on the metrics that matters for you.

That’s all marketers!

Note: Site exit popups (from your product pages for example) might be another technique to consider, but my opinion is that once someone wants to leave your site they are most likely not willing to share the email address with your. However, if you can customize the user experience to a level where you can send personalized emails with price drops for the visited products, you could bug those who exit with such an offer. It may work

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as landing page testing services and conversion rate optimization services. Our A/B and multivariate tests have helped companies increase conversion rates by as much as 75%. Let us increase your conversion rates, too!

Rate this post!

6 e-Commerce Email Capturing Techniques is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Email Subject Lines Are Not SEO Titles
2. Fake Features May Help You Save Money
3. Could This Be The Best Checkout Button?

HTML lists are semantic structures by definition and they can play an important role when a web document is analyzed for its relevancy against a search query. Since relevancy – along with page popularity (backlinks) and social signals – is strongly related to search engine rankings, it is important to understand how search engines analyze their content.

Lists can contain unordered information (UL), ordered information (OL) and definitions (DL, DD, DT tags). In HTML code this is how an ordered list might look like:

<ul>

<li>Unordered information

<li>Ordered information

<li>Definitions

</ul>

There have always been discussions if lists can actually influence the semantics of a web page and therefore rankings. Yes, they actually do.

Before exemplifying how a good optimized list items would look like, I have to mention about one of the existing Google patents, which relates to HTML lists. The patent, called Document Ranking Based On Semantic Distance Between Terms In A Document specifically refers to HTML lists when describing how the distance between words can influence rankings.

This image is used in the patent documentation. As you can see there’s a list and a list head (Saturn Facts)

Saturn Facts is considered a heading because of larger text formatting

The patent gives us the following rules about headings and list items, when it comes to the distance between words appearing within them:

- If both terms appear in the same list item, the terms are considered close to one another;

- If one term appears in a list item and the other term appears in header, this pair of terms may be considered to be approximately equally distant to another pair of terms that appear in header and in another of the list items;

- Pairs of terms appearing in different list items may be considered to be farther apart than the pairs of terms falling under 1 and 2.

So, in the Saturn example above, the words “Saturn” (from the heading of the list) and “Distance” (from the last list item) are considered closer together than the words “Days” and “Rotation” even though “Days” is the last word of the first list item and “Rotation” is the first word of the second list item.

The above is an excerpt from Bill Slawski’s blog, who has a more detailed analysis of the patent. Many thanks to Bill again for illustrating the paragraph above with an image:

A different kind of keyword proximity

What the images shows is that the gap between Days and Rotation is considered bigger that Saturn and Distance but also

• the word in the header, Saturn, can used as base reference (position 0, let’s say) for other words in the list
• the distance between Saturn and other words is computed against each LI tag from the list. So Saturn is zero words away from words One, Rotation, Mass and Volume. But, Saturn is 6 words away from Days (including stop words)

This means that if someone would search for Saturn Volume, this document would have higher chances of rankings than if someone would search for Saturn Earth.

The approach described in the patent comes to a bit of change for the definition of keyword proximity. The method keyword proximity is computed within lists seems to be a bit different than the classic definition, which derives it based on the actual distance between the words, as they appear in the source code.

If we were to compute the classic keyword proximity, the word Rotation will be 8 words away from Saturn (facts, one, orbit, of, sun, is, 10,759.2, days). However, within lists and list headings, the distance is zero.

If you care of keyword proximity when you list items on your content, you need to take into consideration that keyword proximity is computed differently.

Briefly, here’s how an optimized code will look like, for a good HTML list:

<div>Here is some useful info on</div>

<h3>Search Engine Optimization</h3>

<ul title=”SEO resources for advanced users”>

<li>Tutorial for advanced users</li>

<li>Cost and ROI of SEO</li>

<li>Experts sharing their opinions on SEO</li>

<ul>

The words Tutorial, Costs and Experts were taken from Google Keywords Suggestion Tool and can be a part of your secondary or tertiary keywords, for which you may want to have a dedicated page targeting only them.

You can find some keyword suggestions with Google's Keyword Tool

Keep in mind that linking the word Tutorial will make the linked page more relevant towards that word. When you link inside lists, be careful not only about the proximity of the words relating to the nearest heading above (for same page relevancy) but also about the anchor text used to link to other dedicated pages (for outbound page relevancy). You want to have a mix of both. I would rather not link within the list with the anchor text Tutorial, but rather link within the body content with the anchor search engine optimization tutorial.

Now, suddenly list items are not as easy to deal with as you were used to. Sorry about that. However, remember the most important rule for on page SEO: write for humans, not for search engines.

Some particular cases of lists are navigation menus and breadcrumbs. While it seems logic to have your left navigation for an ecommerce site as list items, you need to make sure that sections such as drop down menus, or expandable facets are actually getting indexed by search engines. This means you need to implement menus and breadcrumbs in such a way that search engine bots can read the text and the links inside them with JavaScript turned off. Otherwise your site might get into indexing issues, not pass Page Rank to the important pages or other issues you don’t want to get into.

Here is a sample script for creating pure CSS drop down menu or here for a simple UL LI CSS SEO friendly horizontal menu.

Approach this kind of implementation carefully.

Now let’s look very briefly at other types of lists, the definition tags, DD, DT and DL

<dd> – definition description (also can be used for speaker’s words in dialogs)

This tag is used to describe an item in a definition list. The text within the <dd> tag will influence the overall page’s theme, and the semantic of the entire definition, but there isn’t much you can do to alter your rankings by playing with the <dd> tag attributes, except of course, writing good content within it.

While there are arguments that you can use <dd>,<dl> and <dt> tags to bring your site on the search results for “define:word” type of results, I’ve seen no proof until date. If you want to have page with better semantics, use them. It seems to somehow help with dictionary-type pages or glossaries.

<dl> – definition list – this tag is used with <dd> and <dt> to define lists

Use it mostly when you create definition types of lists, like glossary pages, FAQs

<dt> – definition term (also can be used for speaker in dialogs)

See the <dl> and <dd> tags above and read this document and this one.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

List Items and SEO – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Acronym Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
2. ABBR Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
3. big and small Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Almost all SEO professionals admit that the IMG element is important for search engines, at least to a certain degree. If your website is selling image stocks, then it’s crucial. But since almost all web sites depend more or less on images,  optimizing them for search engines (and humans) seems logic.

The purpose of this article is to describe some SEO techniques that can be used to improve image crawling, indexing and ranking.

We’ll start with a very minimalistic sample IMG element, as seen below, and at the end of the article we’ll end up with a highly SEO friendly tag. Bear with me, it’s a long (but useful too, I hope) article.

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” />

Unfortunately lots of designers and/or programmers stop with the minimum implementation of this tag.

How do search engine understand images?

Here are some signals used by search engines to read, understand, categorize and rank images:

- Colors, size and image resolution

- Image “bucketing”: is the image a face, photo, drawing or a clip art?

- Weighting text by its distance from an image and extracting context from text around them

- Overall theme of the website (i.e. adult websites will have all images labeled as “adult” and filtered)

- ALT attribute (alt content influences rankings) and TITLE attribute (doesn’t influence rankings, but provide additional context)

- Image file names

- Total number of thumbnail images that are located on the same webpage as the ranked image

- image tagging on third party photo sharing websites like panoramio.com or flickr.com

- Possible OCR of the web pages (see article Google Instant Previews, OCR, Page Segmentation and SEO)

As you can see there’s plenty of things search engines have to take into consideration when crawling images, and the above is not even the complete list.

A Microsoft patent that describes how images are ranked can be found here.

So, let’s go into the real tips, starting with the well known ALT attribute, and then continuing with more advanced stuff, like image EXIF meta data or dedicated landing pages for each image.

Always add the ALT attribute to the IMG tag

Just by simply adding the ALT text you will provide search engines more information about the content of the image and improve your chances of that image being indexed in Google Images:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt” />

The only attribute that get’s indexed by search engines for the IMG tag is the ALT attribute.

Image placeholders are filled with IMG's alt attribute when images are disabled

The ALT attribute should also be keyword rich, not just a list of keywords. When writing you alternative text, try to think of how you would describe the image to a blind person in less than 25 words (150 chars or fewer). That sentence will be your ALT attribute.

Spacer images, 1px gifs or other images used just for programming or spacing purpose should still have an ALT attribute, but it should be empty, alt=”". All images that visually depict something important to visitors should have a descriptive, keyword rich alternative text.

Microsoft recommends: “Place relevant text near the beginning of the alt attribute to enable search engines to better correlate the keywords with the image. A copyright symbol or other copyright notice at the beginning of the alt attribute will indicate to the search engines that most search-relevant aspect of the image is the copyright, rather than what the image actually depicts. If you require a copyright notice, consider moving it to the end of the alt attribute text”. More recommendations for the ALT attribute from Microsoft can be found here.

Also, don’t repeat the same alt text with different images, especially images on the same page and try to use the same alternative text on images that appear multiple times throughout the site.

Advanced stuff: more and more websites started using a technique called CSS spriting to reduce the number of HTTP requests made to a server and thus improve page load times. While this is a great technique, the implementation makes impossible the usage of standard IMG elements with ALT attributes, which raises usability and SEO concerns. To address such issues please read this article.

Use the TITLE attribute

The TITLE attribute is not getting indexed by search engine bots and it will not improve your rankings, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. The TITLE attribute is displayed as a tooltip on mouse hover in many browsers and can provide additional information to users.

Title attributes are showing as tool tips on mouse over images

So, anywhere you have images which are appropriate to have alternative texts, you should add a TITLE attribute also. The TITLE shouldn’t be a copy of the ALT text, rather it should complement it. Keep the TITLE attribute below 25 words (150 chars) and don’t just list your keywords in it, create a meaningful sentence.

Our initial sample can now be improved to:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt”/>

Don’t underestimate the TITLE attribute just because it doesn’t influence search engine rankings. Read this article’s further, at section on providing the right context to your images to understand more.

Specify the width and the height of the IMG tag

Let’s improve our example a bit, this time with some non SEO related attributes, for better browser rendering (page load speed) into:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″/>

It is a best practice to define the IMG width and height on the tag or on the style for better page load speed.

IMG tag complemented with HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes

Advanced stuff: for heavy, long vertical pages defer loading images until users scroll down and images are visibile in their browsers (search this on Google for more info)

Use keyword rich file names

You’ve probably noticed the unfriendly file name used in the previous examples: 0012adsds.gif. This type of names don’t help search engines understand the image at all and should be avoided.

Proper usage of image file naming

There’s really no information search engine bots could extract from that file name. Instead your file names should describe the image a bit. If appropriate, you could add your targeted keywords to the file name.

We can easily optimize our example to:

<img src=”yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″/>

For ecommerce sites, you should enforce some image naming rules, otherwise things will get messy pretty fast. For example, you can add an image ID to the file names, i.e. yellow-t-shirt–0012.gif. That is still much better than just 0012adsds.gif

If you’re not convinced about renaming your image files, Matt Cutts has a video where he discusses the importance of proper image file naming.

Advanced stuff: permanently redirect the old file name to the new ones, at server level (.htaccess).

Use relevant anchor texts to link to images

Wherever you link to an image (i.e. you link a larger size of the image) or you link to a standalone landing page for the image, use a relevant, descriptive and useful anchor text to point to that page/image.

For our example, if you have a dedicated landing page for the t-shirt page, the anchor text would be something similar to “Rate the new yellow t-shirt from {$manufacturer}”.

The above accomplishes two things: first, it provides useful information to visitors; second, it gives relevant, keyword rich data to search engine bots.

Provide good context for your images

Previously, I mentioned that the TITLE attribute is not going to improve your search engine rankings. The content of this attribute doesn’t get cached by search engines. However, this tag can provide context to search engines and that is important. Image captions or the texts surrounding the image do the same thing, provide context to search engines.

The description below the images provide context to search engines

Here are some things that you can do to provide better context for your images:

- Make sure that the content around the image provide search engines relevant information about it

- The text above the image should be an introduction to the image

- Add a caption to the image if possible

- Try to add an image-related sentence just below the image, as close as possible to the image, both as text or html code. the best is to use image captions

Here’s how our IMG element can be improved even further by adding a caption:

<h6><img src=”yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection </br> Yellow T-Shirt<h6>

<h6> has been used here as a sample implementation technique for image captions, but your implementation might be different. What’s more important is to have relevant, related text very close to the image.

Create standalone landing pages for each image

The above recommendation may not apply for most websites nor for every images. For sites that sale stock images for example, it is recommended to create dedicated landing pages for each image.

Clean, useful landing page dedicated to a single image. Source pixmac.com

Additionally, you can allow users to comment, share or rate each picture and encourage user generated content.

In case the same image appears on multiple pages, it is good to have unique captions on each page but keep the same alternative text for the image.

Create image site maps

You can edit your sitemap files to include information about your images.

XML sitemap file with supplemental image information

To submit your images into a sitemap read this article from Google. You will be able to specify information such as image caption, geo location, title attribute and license.

Add EXIF data to your images

This technique requires specialized software that can be used to edit images’ meta data. One can be found here.

While Google or other search engines haven’t confirmed if they use EXIF data or not, more and more photo shooting devices are adding data such as geo tagging, owner of the picture or orientation to the EXIF data. So, if a picture is telling search engines information about the location, orientation, and focus could they eventually guess what’s in the picture background? Not very far in the future, they will.

Editing meta data such as User Comment can be a good place to reinforce your image’s title or alt text (maybe with some small changes). Other meta data that can come useful are Artist, Copyright or Image Description.

You can use EXIF editors to change images meta data

Google Picasa already uses EXIF data, so it might worth testing how modified images are behaving in search engines. Also, keep in mind that some image optimization software can remove “unnecessary” EXIF data to reduce the size of the file.

Group Similar Images into Folders

If possible and appropriate, all images which can be logically grouped around a similar theme should be grouped into folders.

The t-shirt image is located under the /t-shirt/ directory that contains similar images of various tees

The advantage of doing so is that you will be able to add another keyword to the image URL and provide clues to users too. Not to mention that Google and other search engines look at the URL structure:

In our example you can put the image under /t-shirts/ directory. Now the IMG element becomes:

<h6><img src=”/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection </br> Yellow T-Shirt<h6>

Note: you should place your adult (or other sensitive images) into separated directories.

Use absolute paths rather than relative

While the referencing type doesn’t influence search engine rankings per se, it is recommended to use absolute paths to avoid problems with crawling, broken links and 404 errors.

As a good programming practice you should use configuration files where you define your website root and other frequently used directories. In your scripting files use config paths to reference other documents.

Adding the absolute path, our example transforms to:

<h6><img src=”http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection </br> Yellow T-Shirt<h6>

Note: verify that URL paths aren’t blocked by robots.txt and/or other search engine bots blocking obstacles (see below).

Images accessible through plain HTML

Don’t put your slide shows, zooming or other fancy features in Flash or pure JavaScript implementation. When using Flash, always provide alternative images with static URLs in GIF, JPEG and/or PNG format otherwise Google won’t be able to crawl them easily and they might not get displayed in SERPs.

Google rewards high quality images rather than crappy ones so try to keep his res images crawlable with JavaScript disabled. Most search engines bots can’t execute JavaScript and if the only way to reach those images is with JavaScript enable, the image URLs will not be followed.

When creating sliders, your image URLs (and all the text content in general) should be accessible to search engines in plain HTML.

Note: try to place your big size images above the fold. A good rule to define “big” is to allocate 2/3 of the visible screen for the big image. Below there’s a very interesting video on how Google defines quality images:

Don’t Forget the Favicon

A particular case of images is the favicon.ico file. It’s the small icon present on your browser address bar or bookmarks and unfortunately, even if you don’t care about it, browsers are still requesting it. If you don’t have one, your web server will return a 404 code.

Favicon files are requested when browsers load a page

Place this file on your website root and make it cachable. Check this article on Yahoo! Developer for more information.

Overlay text on web buttons

One powerful SEO technique for improving your document relevancy (and page load speed) is the usage CSS text buttons. The principle is simple: create simple web call to action buttons with plain color fill, without any text embedded in the image, and then overlay the targeted keywords as plain text.

Here’s how an implementation looks like on Google Docs home page:

The background of the button is an image, the text is plain HTML

The text “Try Google Docs Now” is actually plain HTML overlaid on the button (see how chars are selectable).

The opposite of this technique is what I call noise words reduction. You take “noise” text (which doesn’t contain your keywords) and embed it in images. For example, if you have an FDA warning at the bottom of the each page of your website, you could embed it into an image, so it’s not diluting your page theme with “unwanted text”:

Keep in mind that the noise words reduction is a technique used by spammers to pass email filters and it can be flagged as spam on web pages too. Use it at your own risk.

Include related images

Whenever appropriate, you should use related/similar images, such as thumbnails that link to the bigger version on the images (eventually image dedicated landing pages), crawlable CSS sliders, collapse and expand or other techniques you like.

See pixmac.com’s implementation:

The related and similar pictures will help search engines create relationships between images

They even have a dedicated landing page for related and similar pictures. That’s great food for search engine spiders.

If you’re linking to larger version of the thumbnail-ed image, here’s how the IMG element is going to change to:

<h6><a href=http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt-big.gif><img src=”http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection</br> Yellow T-Shirt</a><h6>

Add Snippets and Social Sharing

Provide a snippet for each large size image (2/3 of the screen size maybe) so others can use to copy and paste your images on their websites. This way you still get the attribution as original source for that image. Since you can control the alt text, which is the anchor text of an image, you will get more benefits if someone is simply hotlinking to your images.

Additionally, you can provide social sharing options, such as twitter, facebook likes or Google +1.

Take a look at how Flickr is integrating both, the snippet and the social sharing:

So, we’ve started with this:

<img src=”0012adsds.gif” />

And we’ve ended up with this optimized version:

<h6><a href=http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt-big.gif><img src=”http://www.domain.com/t-shirts/yellow-t-shirt.gif” alt=”yellow t-shirt on a model” title=”athletic women wearing a yellow tee shirt while running” height=”250″ weight=”100″ />Adidas 2011 Summer Collection</br> Yellow T-Shirt</a><h6>

Now it’s time to go and optimize those images of yours! If I forgot something or if you have questions, let me know.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

IMG Tag SEO and Image Optimization – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Caption Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
2. AREA Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
3. Form Tags and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

This is a guest post by Andrew Davis, the Marketing Director for CPC Strategy, a full service shopping feed management agency. He is the co-author of the first-ever Merchant Comparison Shopping Handbook, a free ebook that helps merchants optimize shopping feeds and comparison shopping merchant accounts. The author’s views/comments are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Pitstop Media Inc.

1.  Designate hot products in Become

If you have products on sale, high in stock, or that are converting favorably on Become.com, mark them as Hot in your Stock Status column. Become lets merchants mark up to 100 products with Hot in the Stock Status column and then favors these products in search results when it can.

Hot Products in Become

2.  Strikethrough price in Shopping.com

Increase conversions by using Shopping.com’s strike through price. Check out how much this listing stands out from the competition:

Strikethrough Price in Shopping.com

Getting the strike through price on your products is really easy.

All you need to do is add another column to your shopping feed titled Original Price. In this column insert your products’ MSRP. Note that consumers are smart- if the item’s price is $10.00 and you mark the original price as $1,000.00 (99% off!) they’ll think something’s up.

After you populate your column, upload your fresh shopping feed and log into your Merchant Account Center. To let Shopping.com process your new feed correctly, you need to direct its system to read the new column you inserted. To do that, go here:

Add or Update Products in Shopping.com

After you click on Add or update products, confirm your submission data (feed file name, FTP information) and click continue. On the next screen you’ll tell Shopping.com which column is the original price and which is current price:

Assign Original and Current Price

Click continue and your new listings will have a strike through price within 48 hours.

3.  Product_type column in Google Product Search

We’ve seen traffic increases of over 100% with an optimized product_type column. Results like that aren’t typical, but the traffic increase that comes from optimizing this column is substantial.

If you’re new to the product_type category, it’s basically the category column for Google Product Search. If you have your own categories you can use them, but we only recommend this if you have detailed specific categories for each of your products.

If you see that the categories assigned to your products are not as detailed as they can be in product_type taxonomy here you should revisit and update the data with the most specific information possible.

Use top level and bottom level categories.

For example, Furniture > Office Furniture > Desks > Cherry Desks is better than just Cherry Desk.

4.  Special offers in Shopzilla

Utilize Shopzilla’s Special Offers section to increase conversions.

The Special Offers section is used to create coupons or add marketing messages on Bizrate and is found in the Manage Listings section of Shopzilla’s merchant dashboard.

Special Offers in Shopzilla

The coupon functionality is still being rolled out on Shopzilla.

Once you click on the link you’re able to review and edit current special offers and make new special offers.

Coupons Management in Shopzilla

From experience, the best coupons that work are straight % off coupons. Make them exclusive to Bizrate and Shopzilla by creating a custom coupon code, like ZILLA or BIZPON.

Where does the special offer show up?

When you scroll through the search results in Bizrate, each listing has an i that pops up between the picture and product listing details. If you click on that i, you receive information on the product, any coupons that are being offered, and more info.

Info Icons for Coupons

It also shows up on Bizrate’s product comparison pages under the merchant name:

Bizrate Product Comparison

5.  Stock description column in Shopping.com

This column is your space to display additional promotional text about your products, brand, or webstore. This section appears on-site under the Product Name in bold text. Use the space wisely, there’s a 100 character limit.

Stock Description Limit

If you add this column, make sure you follow the instructions in trick #2 to let Shopping.com read your new column.

6.  Fixed vs max bids in Nextag

Try testing Fixed vs. Max bids.

Nextag gives you the option of changing from a fixed CPC to a Max CPC in the Manage Bids By Product and Manage Bids By Category sections.

Fixed is a set CPC you’ll pay per click, while Max is the max you’ll pay for a click. Do some bid tests and see if you can optimize your ROI by changing the type of bid.

For example, a $0.50 Max bid could only result in a $0.32 cost per click (CPC) if the next highest bid is $0.31. The $0.50 Fixed bid will always be $0.50 CPC and would also increase Nextag’s margin on that click, enabling Nextag to increase the visibility of your product on search engines like Google and on cobrands.

7.  Suppress products on paid shopping engines

What’s profitable for you on the CSEs? If you spend $100 in clicks, how much do you need back to break even or make a profit? $300? $500? $1000? Be realistic and don’t forget the supplemental value of CSE campaigns. The customers that purchase products on your webstore can be remarketed to and can come back direct. That’s value you should consider.

After you establish what’s profitable, you can look into what products don’t fit that criteria.

Here’s an example:
You need a 3 to 1 return from Pricegrabber to break even. Right now your ratio of spend is $100 and revenue is $250. To optimize that ROI, look at the top 10 – 20 products that are getting a lot of clicks, but no sales. They may have 30, 40, or even over 100 clicks and no sales. That’s a pretty clear indication that for some reason or another, those products don’t work on Pricegrabber and you need to remove them from your data feed. They’re wasting spend with lots of click costs, but they’re not doing anything sales wise.

This is an important point – you’re not doing anything wrong, but some of your products just won’t work on the shopping engines. Don’t spend time on fixing how those products match up against your competitors, this will create a huge scaling issue. Instead, remove them from the feed. Then when you make changes to your products, landing pages, or website in general, you can re-add the products to the data feed and let them have a another go.

Note:

Product level suppression is not possible without product level tracking. Make sure you have an analytics solution in place before you start your CSE campaigns. Throwing all of your products on the CSEs without product level tracking is a recipe for failure.

About the author

Andrew Davis is the Marketing Director for CPC Strategy, a full service shopping feed management agency. He is the co-author of the first-ever Merchant Comparison Shopping Handbook, a free ebook that helps merchants optimize shopping feeds and comparison shopping merchant accounts.

In addition Andrew is Chief Blogger for the CPC Strategy blog that aims to help merchants optimize shopping feeds.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

7 Optimization Tricks for Comparison Shopping Merchant Accounts and Shopping Feeds is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Submit Feeds to Comparison Shopping Engines
2. LG.com’s Internal Search Gone Wrong
3. Google Does Usability Mistakes Too

Here are some guidelines to write better product descriptions for higher rankings in search engines – feel free to contribute with your thoughts:

1. First and most important, write for the users (appealing, provocative language) but try to write at least 250 words for your product descriptions, to feed the search engine bots too
2. Second, but still important, don’t use manufacturer’s descriptions – they’re probably on other 100 sites. Write your own, starting with the products with the highest a) visits, b) conversion rate, c) page views d) demand
3. Review the product descriptions and make sure you mention the product name at least once for each 100 words of the copy, or couple of times for each 150. In terms of SEO this  is called keyword density and is measured as percentage of total indexable text and the occurrences of a certain word. I call it  common sense copy writing and advise you not to get obsessed with this. In case you want to know a good keyword density, go around 2%-2.5%
4. Each description should contain the single most important keyword for your site/business and link it to the home page. One instance per product description is  more than enough. If possible make that keyword the first link of the product description – Google gives more importance to the first link within the body text
5. In your copy try to use some keywords from your breadcrumbs (home > category > subcategory > product name). Again, these links have to link to the respective pages – don’t abuse by repeating all of them. One should be enough.



6. You can mention other categories to which the product is related to can be related to. The ideal place to do so is within your copy, but it may work as ending sentence of the product description
7. If the product is known by other names, you should include them too – see #6
8. If your product description are extensive (hundreds/thousands of words) you can use tabbed navigation to minimize the vertical space and expand/collapse. In this case make sure the implementation is SEO friendly (based on CSS and accessible to search engine bots). If you apply this technique, make sure the tabbed content gets indexed by bots (look at the cached version of your pages, once bots have crawled it).
9. If your product has genuine reviews, try to incorporate them within your body copy and link to the review section on the page, something like more product-name reviews
10. Additionally, your copy should contain I’ll take the word seater as example:

• the root form of the keyword – seat
• variations – seating
• synonyms – chair
• related words – the wonder wheel from google can provide great insights.

I know it’s not easy to write to convince humans and search engine robots, but that’s the way to higher rankings. Of course, you should link to your internal pages from some external sites – take a look at this comprehensive list of link building strategies.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

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Ecommerce SEO – 10 SEO Tips to Optimize Product Descriptions is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

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1. The Anchor Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
2. Internal Linking Strategy and Guidelines
3. Tips to Optimize AdWords PPC Campaigns Using Impression Share

Sometimes is not easy to change your checkout process to go from registration required to guest checkout. This article describes how you could forecast how much you’re losing if you don’t offer a guest checkout option. The method is an approximate but can help you with the number$ needed when making the case for the guest checkout to your boss. The concept behind it is to forecast how many people will not proceed further to the next pages from the shopping cart page, because of the registration requirements.

It will not be easy to gather all the metrics below but I would recommended knowing them anyways, not only for the purpose of computing this opportunity loss, but generally to improve the shopping cart experience and analyze your website performance. Here are the data you need:

1. visitors to the shopping cart page

2. percentage of new and existing customers (account holder) who reached the shopping cart page

3. unique clicks on forgot password link

4. average order value (AOV)

Here are the  supportive research for this method:

a. Forrester Research reports that 23 percent of online users do not buy online because they have to register with a site before purchasing. So, you could immediately deduct 23% of the site exits from the shopping cart page immediately.

b. Around 82% of people have forgotten a password used on a Web site

c. 75% of the people requested forgotten passwords never tried to complete the purchase once requested

Based on the above research here’s a possible flowchart of the process:

Opportunity Cost Analysis for Online Shopping Carts

If a $458.550 loss doesn’t make sense to your boss, you must be working with company generation billions from online sales.

To simplify your work, here’s a excel file you could use to compute your loss. Please keep in mind that this forecasting model is a very simplistic one and it should be used only after analyzing the analytics data on from your account. The only way to accurately derive the loss is to actually run a split test, with and without registration requirements. Enjoy testing!

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services such as landing page testing services and conversion rate optimization services. Our A/B and multivariate tests have helped companies increase conversion rates by as much as 75%. Let us increase your conversion rates, too!

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Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 3 of 3 is a post from Search Engine Marketing Pros
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We've helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we've reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. Let us rank your website on the first page, too!

Related posts:

1. Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 2 of 3
2. Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 1 of 3
3. Which Call to Action, Add to Cart or Buy Now?