We live in a digital age where it is easier to log on to the web to browse the coolest new gear than it is to trek out to the mall. But for the longest time the retail space on the web was dominated by large companies which had invested heavily in brand image and real brick and mortar stores. Often time’s smaller companies would struggle to gain a foothold on the web since consumers would invariably choose to purchase from the larger retail outfit.

The reason consumers choose larger retail outfits is pretty easy to explain. When the web was fresh and new stores like BestBuy and Sears had already built a reputation as being reliable merchants, an image which consumers carried over when they shopped on the web. Consumers felt more comfortable giving a credit card number to a large company they already knew and did business with than a small internet retailer. Brands like Amazon and Ebay advertised fairly heavily in traditional media to establish that brand image, giving them credibility with consumers. This led to a few large online outlets for retail sales but still left the smaller retailers fighting for scraps.

But the internet has changed and grown dramatically since then. Services like PayPal and Google Checkout have given consumers peace of mind when dealing with online merchants. Online merchants may not have a massive distribution network but they don’t have to, they can use any number of shipping options. Online merchants can also operate the cost of maintaining a physical retail store, increasing margins.

To be fair, two years ago I would not have bought anything online unless it came from a large brand which I knew. Now I have both Google Checkout and PayPal accounts and I feel comfortable shopping anywhere on the web that offers those forms of payment during the checkout process.  Buying online is often cheaper for me than actually traveling to the store to purchase a product. I never have to spend on gas, I can compare various retailers side by side instantly, and I can do it all while watching reruns of M*A*S*H.

I may only be twenty but I still remember struggling to view sites while on a dial up modem. Web pages took forever to load and I truly hated sites that used fancy images and videos in place of content, sure they looked pretty but it would take me five minutes just to load one page.

But that was then, the darker days of the internet, now with broadband widely available and download speeds increasing exponentially there is no reason not to get a little creative with your site. Nice clean hi-res images will make you site look professional and sites like YouTube are more than willing to host the video you want to place on your site. Now this is not to say that you should stop using text for content, which would just kill your search engine placement, instead use videos to augment the written content on your page. There are some major sites that do this very well, one of them is Cnet. Cnet is a website devoted to reviews of the latest technology gadgets and gear and for a long time these reviews and articles were long pages of text with a few interspaced images. Now with broadband being so available Cnet has begun to include video reviews alongside their traditional reviews. The video reviews often paraphrase the written review but tend to be far more engaging as the viewer can actually see the gadget in question and watch as the reviewer walks them through the things they liked or disliked about any particular device.  An example of this would be the review on this Nikon Digital SLR, there at the top of the page is a video review of the product and directly bellow it is the longer written review of the same product. Visitors to this page can read the full review but the video version offers viewers a chance to see exactly what the reviewer is talking about in a way text never could.

One of ShopVisible’s newest sites Don L Leasing has begun to embed videos directly on their homepage. Visitors have a chance to see some of their distinguished clientele and to receive a guided tour around parts of Don L Leasing. The video itself is hosted by YouTube and embedded into the Don L Leasing site, a simple and easy process that will allow any site to have rich multimedia content.

Nowadays when I am curious about the latest bit of info on some new tech product I don’t read the long two page article on the web, instead I just watch the video which gives me a more visual understanding of the product I am interested in. Watching the video is not really quicker than reading the article, it’s just more entertaining and in today’s world of YouTube and twenty second clips on CNN a short video can be an effective sales tool.

Keep on rockin’

BC

 I’ve always been interested in television and the Nielsen ratings. But keeping track of a large populations television viewing habits can be a difficult and non-precise. Nielsen ratings rely polling and user feedback amongst other reporting tools.  

The internet, on the other hand, is much easier to track. That’s why Google and other search engines use Alexa. Anyone can download the add-on to a browser and it tracks which sites you visit. Thus, Google uses this data as part of its algorithm when determining natural search rankings.

Now think about it…who goes to your website more than you do? No one…

Download Alexa and you are bound to increase your page’s ranking! 

Another cool tool by Google is Page Rank. This works similarly to Alexa and tracks traffic to the site and the number of links. To quickly get a Google Page Rank on any website just install the Google toolbar. Page Rank is one of the original core features of Google, one of the reasons why Google search results contained more relevant information. Page Rank ranks web pages based on inbound links weighs but not all inbound links are equal. And inbound link from a small website such as the Marietta Journal does not contribute as much to a Page Rank as a link coming from a large site such as CNN or the New York Times. Therefore, pay attention to this number, any number greater than four is awesome, when joining sites and directories. Remember: quality NOT quantity! 

By using tools such as Alexa’s tool bar and the Google Toolbar you can gauge the quality of your inbound links and work to build a stronger network of websites that link to your store. But there is one caveat to this Page Rank is not the sole tool Google uses to place sites in search results, relevant content is also important. A link from the New York Times may give your site a large boost but if someone is searching locally for restaurants in Marietta a link from the Marietta Journal, a local newspaper, could be just as important. 

Keywords, descriptions, and robots. All three are bits of Meta information that should be at the top of each page of your site to help search engines classify your site. Meta information helps search engines figure out what's on your webpage when they spider you. Proper Meta information can help boost search results and increase the number of people who click on a link to your site, bad Meta data can tank your search results and make it hard for customers to find you. Now I don’t intend to talk about the gritty HTML coding side of Meta data, though really Meta information is probably one of the easiest things to code. Instead I plan to talk about what's important when it comes to Meta data and what you should be sure to avoid.

Let’s start with keywords, now keywords used to be a great way for search engines to quickly figure out what kind of content a page might have and in the 90’s search engines like AltaVista used them to great effect.  However unscrupulous website owners often stuffed misdirecting or false keywords that would often drive search engine results to spam sites. So by the turn of the century search engines started to discount keywords as something they ranked sites on in search terms. Keywords may or may not still influence search results but don’t lose any sleep trying to figure out the perfect two word description for the page, content is far more important. While writing keywords keep a few things in mind first keywords can be words or short phrases, ‘e-commerce’ and ‘complete e-commerce solution’ are both valid types of keywords.  Second is to separate your list of keywords by commas i.e. ‘e-commerce, e-commerce provider, integrated e-commerce’. Also be sure never to pack or ‘stuff’ too many keywords because while search engines may not weigh keywords heavily it is considered black hat, or bad practice, to put more than ten to fifteen keyword phrases into the tag.

Now let’s talk about description tags. Description tags serve a dual purpose, the first is to help search engine spiders figure out what your page is all about. The second and more important purpose is that the content in a description tag will often be used by a search engine on the search results page. Those little blurbs you see under links in search results, those are often times Meta descriptions. Sometimes a search engine might pull those little blurbs from the content of your site but it is always good to have a useful description in your Meta data. The key to good Meta data is to keep it short and sweet, try to keep it to about 200 characters as that is generally about the space you will have for a blurb on a search engine. Also start your Meta description with the most important thing about the description. If you are selling widgets try a phrase like “widgets designed to save you money” instead of a phrase like “save money when you buy our widgets”, search engines like Google prioritize the information in descriptions based on the order they appear the first word is considered the most important with each successive word being a little less important to your site.

And now it time to talk about the final and oft overlooked bit of Meta data you should be concerned about. The robots tag, the robots tag tells a search engine whether or not it is allowed to index a certain page, follow the links on the page or archive the page on its servers. As a general rule you should allow search engines to index your page and follow the links on your page unless there is content on there that you deem to be sensitive, after all to build a good search engine result you are going to want points for links and page content. Now archiving pages is a different matter, archived pages are those pages that appear in under a Google search result and are often called ‘cached’ it could be useful for you to allow a search engine to cache your page or it could be a determent to you. It all depends on how often you update your site and the kind of content you have on your site. A cached or archived page will not be the most current version of you site and if a visitor clicks on a cached link they might get outdated content. However if your site ever experiences any down time a visitor can simply visit the cached version of your site to gather the information they need, that is of course if Google has decided to cache the page they cannot after all make duplicates of everything on the internet. To get a search engine to index your page, follow all the links on your page and not cache your page you would write in the content field “index, follow, noarchive”. To learn how to code your own meta tags visit this useful site.

Well that’s about it for meta information. I know it got a little heavy near the end there but I hope it was all helpful and you find this information useful in maximizing your search rankings. But don’t forget Meta data is important but never place more value on it than the content of your site.

Bharat C.