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Is your company blogging yet? With the soaring cost of postage and pay-per-click advertising, blogging offers catalogers a powerful channel to get their message to prospects and customers worldwide. The cost is low. The impact is high. Here are 11 steps to get you started. 1. READ LOTS OF BLOGS. Before you start your own blog, spend at least two weeks voraciously reading. Choose an RSS reader; I recommend Google Reader. Get familiar with blog search engines, such as Technorati. Find bloggers writing about niches related to your company, products, industry, customers, etc. Add bloggers you like to your RSS reader. Follow

During a session at the recent e-Tail conference in Washington, D.C., Vernon Wyatt, director of customer experience at Tealeaf, an online customer experience management solutions provider, pointed to four causes, cases and situations in which e-commerce customer service-related problems are related to technical issues. These include the following: 1. 80 percent of the total time it takes to solve a problem is spent identifying the problem, he noted. Just 20 percent is spent implementing the change. 2. In his experience, Wyatt said that 300 to 400 of the issues reported to technical support last year were rejected due to “unable to reproduce” the

If you’re not using Google’s Webmaster Central, you should start. Google Webmaster Central is a great bundle of free Google tools to help you understand how Google indexes your site. It’s essential to ranking well in Google’s natural rankings. And as a bonus of sorts, by fixing problems revealed by Webmaster Central, you often can improve your positioning on secondary engines, too. For starters, you need a Google account. Go to: https://www.google.com/accounts/newaccount. Next, go to (and bookmark) the Google Webmaster Central homepage: www.google.com/webmasters. The Help Center, blog and forums are worth monitoring. These resources provide valuable advice from Google and outsiders for successful

Wouldn’t it be great if all the whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), widgets, Flash, RSS feeds, podcasts, video blogs and so forth were all search engine optimized? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In fact, many of these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement, you’d better read on or you’ll end up missing the boat when it comes to better search engine rankings. The discipline of search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving to better meet the challenges presented by a

After considering visitors’ words, I visit The Webmaster Central Page Analysis tab to review my words. Page Analysis reveals the key phrases Google believes characterize your content. For this characterization, it studies the words on your site and the words in external links pointing into your site (“anchor text”). For example, suppose you’re a widget cataloger who can’t figure out why Google doesn’t display your site for “widget” searches. The Webmaster Central Page Analysis tab can help you see your site as Google does — the first step to making improvements. Page Analysis shows that my site scores highly for “rimmkaufman” and “rimm-kaufman”

Speed is an often-overlooked component of Web site usability. Users perceive faster sites as more functional. Usable Web sites sell more. If a site responds quickly, users are less likely to abandon ship if they get confused. Case closed. Read on! Best-of-class organizations, such as Google, Craigslist and Amazon.com, deliberately strive for site speed. Regardless of your size, your Web team can and should do the same. There’s no “magic bullet” to speed up your site, however. Speed comes from implementing many simple changes. Here are four broad strategies and 24 tactics to speed up your site. Strategy 1: Manage for Speed

In the intensive session I led during the ACCM in Boston on May 21, the overriding theme was that search engines judge a site’s worth on its inbound links. Translation: No links = no rankings. Blogs, meanwhile, are great at attracting links from the blogosphere, because bloggers are rather cliquish and mostly tend to link to each other. So you’ll earn links as a blog that you wouldn’t normally earn otherwise. Nonetheless, intentionally work to boost your link popularity; don’t just expect links to your blog to come on their own. One of the best ways to do this is by building relationships with

Test the following: 1. the title tag 2. the headline (H1) tag 3. the placement of the body copy in the HTML 4. the words in the body copy 5. your keyword prominence 6. the keyword density 7. your anchor text or internal links to that page 8. your anchor text or inbound links to that page from sites that you have influence over 9. the URL structure, including occurrences of keywords in the URL, number of directories om the URL and complexity of the URL (i.e., number of parameters in the query string) Then measure the following: 1. traffic to the page being tested 2. traffic to the site overall 3. backlinks to the page being

Catalogers and other search advertisers are justly concerned about click fraud. Click fraud is when a person (or computer) imitates a legitimate user clicking on a pay-per-click ad, without actual interest in the ad’s target. Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it” — click fraud escapes precise definition. To know when a click is fraudulent, one needs to know the clicker’s internal motivation for clicking or be able to prove the clicker was an automated ’bot. Most experts agree that few individual clicks are “good” or “bad.” Instead, investigators assign quality scores that indicate the probability

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an art as well as a science. As with any scientific discipline, it requires rigor. The results need to be reproducible, and you have to take an experimental approach — so not too many variables are changed at once. Otherwise, you won’t be able to tell which changes were responsible for the results. You can glean a lot about SEO best practices, latest trends and tactics from SEO blogs, forums and e-books. But it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, to know with any degree of certainty that a claim will hold true. That’s where