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SEO: Unique Content Good for Search Engines, Good for Consumers

Unique, valuable content is a critical part of a successful SEO strategy. That is especially the case for ecommerce sites that utilize non-unique stock product descriptions from the manufacturer’s database. But, I’m often asked if there’s a faster, cheaper, free way to generate content. No Shortcuts for Unique Content The short answer is "no." SEO can’t produce gold from straw. SEO performance is based on valuable content that attracts valuable links. Copying and pasting another site’s quality content into a new template with no additional unique commentary or content will not achieve lasting results. Neither will mashing the quality content from several sources into a template with no additional unique commentary or content. If an ec...

Conversion Tip: Put Facebook 'Like' on Product Detail Pages

Editor's Note: Charles Nicholls is an ecommerce conversion expert and the founder and chief technical officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. The "Conversion Tip" below continues our series from Nicholls on his ideas to convert more ecommerce visitors to buyers. More than 100,000 sites had implemented the Facebook "Like" button within six weeks of its launch. With Like, Facebook is set to challenge Google. Like is rapidly becoming an index of content on the web, where the index is built based on mass popularity, as opposed to an arbitrary Google algorithm. The impact of this cannot be underestimated. Facebook is the number one website in the world by page views, and it already refers more than twice the traffic t...

Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for September 2010

Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders each month to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the September 2010 installment of "Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas." Correctly Evaluate Your Conversion Rate “The conversion rate is the ratio between the number of visitors who are likely to perform an action you desire and the ones that actually do. It's not related to the whole website traffic. Eliminate from your analysis those visitors who don’t have the slightest intention to convert, but can skew your reports. For instance, when calculating your sales conversion rate, exclude all visitors who are referred by organic search keywords that are not related to your offer. You’l...

Social Media to Change Ecommerce?

"Social commerce" is the merging of ecommerce with social media sites, such as Facebook. It could change the way consumers buy, and retailers sell. In an upcoming webinar entitled "500 Million People and Growing: The Facebook Conversation Turns to Commerce," we will help merchants understand the social commerce landscape and prepare them for what lies ahead. Attendees will learn: Why online merchants should consider selling within Facebook; Options for social commerce; Why social commerce is not about shopping; The unique dynamics of selling within Facebook. Join Paul Chaney, Practical Ecommerce's social media director, and David Raycroft, co-founder and vice president of product management at Milyoni, a Facebook social-commerce a...

Ask an Expert: Does the Magento Platform Create SEO Obstacles?

"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, Andrew Casey of 877MyJuicer.com asks about search engine optimization and the Magento platform. For the answer, we turn to our own senior contributing editor, Armando Roggio. He's a Magento expert and, in addition to his work for Practical eCommerce, he's also an ecommerce merchant, a seasoned Magento developer, and the site director for Ecommerce Developer, our companion site for developers and designers. To submit a question, email Kate Monteith, staff writer, at kate@practicalecommerce.co&...

August 2010 Top Ten: Our Most Popular Posts

Each month, we compile a list of the ten most popular articles we published at Practical eCommerce that month, based on the number of page views. Here are our ten most popular articles for August 2010. Top 10 Converting Websites: The Similarities and Differences We compared ten top-converting websites to determine what they have in common, and how they differ. When the ten examples are held up against each other and against Amazon some clear patterns begin to emerge. Facebook Fan Page Changes Coming Next Week Facebook made some changes in August to its tab pages on profiles and Fan pages that will affect just about anyone who has custom tabs. Paul Chaney, our social media director, blogs about the Facebook changes and what they cou...

Four Apps to Create Facebook 'Welcome' Pages

Thousands of ecommerce businesses have Facebook Fan pages. But making those pages stand out from competitors' pages is a challenge. One of the ways to distinguish yours is through the use of a custom landing page, also known as a Welcome tab. In the past, to create a landing page you would need to know Facebook markup language, HTML, and staticFBML. Now, there are several apps that make page creation easier to do. In this article, we review four of them. TabSite TabSite uses a simple visual editor to create landing pages. If you are familiar with Microsoft Word or blog software such as WordPress, you will be comfortable in this editing environment. You simply give the page a title, such as "Welcome," put on your thinking cap ...

Overseas Expansion: Tips from a Global Exec

Once merchants are successful in domestic markets, many of them weigh the benefits of expanding their operations abroad. The many challenges accompanying overseas expansion, including language optimization, SEO, taxation and credit card processing, can seem daunting. We asked Jim McGeever, chief operating officer of NetSuite, a publicly-traded ecommerce and management platform, about his company’s experiences in overseas expansion and how ecommerce merchants can learn from them. Practical eCommerce: Please tell us about NetSuite’s efforts to facilitate overseas expansion efforts. Jim McGeever: "Our OneWorld product allows people to operate in multiple countries around the world. A company with a headquarters in the U.S. could hav...

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Six Metrics that Drive Performance

Editor's Note: We welcome Scott Smigler as our new pay-per-click advertising contributor. Smigler is a pay-per-click expert, and he's the president of Exclusive Concepts, a prominent pay-per-click, search-engine-optimization and ecommerce-conversion consultancy. If you are committed to scaling your pay-per-click advertising campaigns to the peak of both revenue and profitability, you will need to dig deeper than "return on ad spend" (ROAS). You’ll want to become familiar with a variety of metrics that drive PPC performance. Why is this? Optimization based on the following metrics, and more, will help you to scale up your best performing campaigns. At the same time, you will be able to transform many of your worst performing campaigns i...

The PEC Review: Fontspring, the Typographical Fountain

The very letters and words on a web page can help build a brand and engage customers. Thanks to better browser support and several new services, the Internet is being filled with rich and diverse fonts even now. For years, so-called web safe fonts—meaning the most common fonts supported by nearly all Internet users—have seemingly held web page design captive. Not that these web safe fonts are bad. Rather, they are limited and sometimes, because of this lack of typographical diversity, they make it more difficult to differentiate a website or brand. With the wide acceptance of embedded web fonts, the state of web fonts and typography is changing. In fact, author and designer Jason Cranford Teague suggested in his blog last year that 201...

Ecommerce News Around the Web for August 27, 2010

"Ecommerce News Around the Web" is our weekly review of articles, blog posts and other news items that could interest ecommerce merchants. Keep Them Coming Back - Michael Gray Graywolf's SEO Blog Once a shopper has made a purchase from your website, how do you keep that customer coming back for more? Here are some sensible tips for courting and cultivating repeat business. When to Hire a Social Media Expert - MarketingVOX It takes a lot of time to keep up with an active social media campaign, yet 90 percent of Internet businesses are doing social media on their own, according to a survey by HubSpot, King Fish Media, and Junta42. This article has some ideas about when it is time to hire a full-time social media director. New Goog...

Holiday Tips for 2010, Part 5

The 2010 holiday season is nearly here. With that in mind, we are publishing a few good holiday-selling tips, from experienced ecommerce professionals, each week. Our fifth, and final, installment is below. Anticipate Microsoft, Yahoo! PPC Integration "Build out and optimize your Microsoft AdCenter campaigns immediately. "Microsoft will begin powering Yahoo!'s paid search results as early as October. If the transition happens on time, Microsoft's AdCenter could influence a large percentage of online shoppers this holiday season. "Be careful, though. Transitions like these often get delayed. You should continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing Campaign up until the point that Microsoft AdCenter officially takes over." Scott S...

New Firefox Release: Faster, Better Video, Different Look

Last week, the Mozilla Foundation released a new version of its Firefox 4 web browser. The new version offers better performance, improved tab management, more HTML5 video support, synchronization, and a significantly different look. There are also indications that "the people's browser" will no longer support pre-Intel Macs. This most recent release is the fourth beta version of Firefox 4 that Mozilla, which seeks to benefit the public by creating free, open source Internet solutions, has produced this year. (Note that a "beta" version refers to an application that not fully complete.) At the time of this writing, beta five of Firefox 4, could be released at anytime, and version six of the beta, which should include all of the features...

Lessons Learned: Candle Retailer Regrets Custom Shopping Cart

“Lessons Learned” is a series where we ask ecommerce business owners to share their experiences. For this installment, we visited with Logan Suttman, CEO of Black & Light Co., which sells candles that glow from top to bottom when lit. Suttman's mother started the business in 2007, having retired early from a long teaching career. The business is small and Suttman is its principal employee. Gross sales in 2008, the first full year, were $30,000. Sales grew to $45,000 in 2009 and, according to Suttman, 2010 sales are on track to double 2009 levels. Black & Light's headquarters are in Northern Michigan. It maintains an inventory of roughly 100 SKUs. "If Black & Light Co. were ever profitable enough to become a primary ...

Conversion Tip: Reduce Abandonment by Publishing Voucher Codes

Editor's Note: We continue our "Conversion Tip" series from Charles Nicholls, the founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. For this week's installment, Nicholls addresses consumers who abandon shopping carts to search for coupon codes. The widespread nature of discount voucher and coupon sites is encouraging visitors to abandon purchases to look for voucher codes. In response, Macy’s, for example, now publishes its own "special offer" site that lists Macy’s own voucher and coupon codes. By creating its own voucher site, called "Online Deals and Promotions," Macy’s not only avoids the affiliate fees of aggregate coupon sites, but also keeps control of its own promotions. Macy’s has pre...

Comparison Shopping Engines: Strategies for Smaller Merchants

Comparison shopping engines can drive traffic to an ecommerce site. But there are over 120 such engines, and how to decide which of them to use and whether to use them at all are questions many merchants have. We spoke with Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, a leading ecommerce software and services provider, about the use of comparison shopping engines for small to mid-size ecommerce firms. Wingo is an expert in comparison shopping engines and an innovator and pioneer in ecommerce generally. PEC: How many shopping engines are there, how much do they cost, and how should smaller merchants be looking at comparison shopping engines as we roll into the holiday season? Scot Wingo: “Comparison shopping engines [CSEs] have been arou...

APIs: What Online Merchants Need to Know

Editor's Note: In our "Need to Know" series, we explain complex web topics on an executive-level, "need to know" basis. For this installment, Contributing Editor Armando Roggio explains application programming interfaces. The "Need to Know" Series Five Web Design Concepts Ecommerce Merchants Need to Know Five Handy HTML Tags To Help Your Ecommerce Business Website Compatibility Testing Made Simple Image Formats: What's the Difference Between JPG, GIF, PNG? What Is HTML 5? Databases: What Online Merchants Need to Know Application Programming Interfaces An application programming interface (API) allows one web-based application to interact with another application. Online merchants can use APIs from vendors or free se...

Facebook 'Places' Helps Local Businesses

Facebook recently rolled out "Places," a location-based sharing application popularized by such startups as Foursquare and Gowalla. Much has been written about Places, but in this article I'll review the possible business uses for it. When a user arrives at a given location–a physical retail store, for example–he "checks in" to share the location via Facebook and to see which of his friends may be in close proximity or who have also checked in at the same location. When someone checks in, the information is shared on the user's Wall, friends' news feeds and on the Place's page. In order to take advantage of Places, the user must have either a web-enabled smartphone that can access Facebook's mobile site and supports geo-location, or t...

Language Translation: Test Product Names before Entering New Countries

A product’s name, for all intents and purposes, is the product. It’s what consumers grow to trust and identify with. The name is vital in building a brand’s identity over time. But with international markets, there is an added complexity, as the message represented by words and symbols can vary significantly between countries and cultures. What works in one country won’t necessarily work in another. Tastes Like Crap? You may or may not have heard of some of the classic brand name faux pas, such as Irish Mist, a golden whiskey liqueur produced in Dublin, Ireland. While the beverage has a lovely sounding name in English, when the C & C Group tried to launch it in Germany, they were mystified as to why sales weren’t going too well. "...

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