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“Talking Pictures”
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| By BC |
8/13/2008 5:05:00 PM |
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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
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The Untapped Potential of Coupons
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For consumers, online shopping has benefits such as convenience and comparison. For companies, it gives the advantage of a national reach, builds loyalty and credibility and increases revenue. But how do companies maximize that revenue when it is easy to get lost on the web under the vast number of companies? Well, the easy answer is to become a client of ShopVisible and use our technology to optimize your location on the web, streamline the navigation of your website, effectively promote your products and simplify the check out process. But if you don’t have time for such a large commitment (you should reconsider), you might consider posting coupon codes.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain a bit more about online coupons. Recall the last time you purchased something online. Remember at checkout that box that read “Gift card/Coupon code,” or something along those lines? Did you know that you could search for these codes and get discounts such as free shipping or 20% off your order? Well, you can! And for me, that makes online shopping better because then I don’t worry about the extra cost of shipping.
Now, to the point…Companies should willingly post coupons on the Internet. Not only will this increase the number of in-bound links (which helps your search ranking), it willamplifythe amount of traffic to your site and the number of orders. If you received 20% off, wouldn’t you buy more? Plus, people already try to Google search for coupons and are sometimes successful. If people were aware of your, albeit temporary, competitive advantage it could even increase customer loyalty.
My friends at ShopVisible understand the increase in sales coupon codes offer and have designed the e-commerce platform to easily allow coupon codes and other discounts at checkout. But if you still aren’t ready for a major commitment, try posting a coupon code and see if it increases your traffic and sales.
Be sure to let me know your results!
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Toolbars and Page Ranks
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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.
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Get your Meta in gear
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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.
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