Yesterday I read a post on another blogger’s site and immediately knew I had quite a bit to add to the discussion. This morning, I read a post that is so complete and so important, the best I can do is say “Awesome Post!” and encourage you to check it out.

The topic is “Google’s Indexation Cap“. The author is Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.

Rand’s post dives into the nitty gritty of why Google does not index all the pages on a site. This is a vexing question for many of our customers. As Rand’s post indicates, Google is becoming smarter and smarter about what makes a high-value site and raising the bar for what you need to do to build authority.

SEO is out of the Dark Ages and into the Middle Ages. Google is smarter. And you need to be smarter, too.

Have a look at what Rand has to say: Google’s Indexation Cap

I just read an article over at http://www.problogger.com from Darren Rowse about what to do when your Google traffic disappears. Darren made some good points, as he always does, but I thought there were some more details to add to the discussion. Here is my view on the actions you should take when you wake up one morning to discover you traffic is gone.

1. Review Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google is great. They tell you in no uncertain terms what their recommendations are. Take a few minutes to review the latest version of Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google sets the rules. You need to play by them.

2. Install Necessary Tools. In order to fully analyze/diagnose what is going on with your site, you NEED to be using Google Webmaster Tools. Installation is free and easy. Just do it. I will mention in a moment what to do with Webmaster Tools. You also need an industrial strength web traffic analysis package. Google Analytics is the obvious choice, but there are many others out there to do the job. The main point, is to move beyond gut feelings about what is gong on with your site and wild theories about what might have caused your demise. You need to be working with some hard, cold numbers.

3. Do Competitive Analysis. Create a list of your top ten phrases and look closely at the other sites that are coming up ahead of you. It is important to determine whether you have completely disappeared from Google or if you have just dropped off your previously stellar listings. If you have completely disappeared you need to start looking at whether you have been penalized or banned. Maybe Google has been unable to reach your site. But, the other, more likely situation is that your competitors have gotten better at SEO and you have done nothing in the five years since you gained #1 status for your coveted terms. You might need to do some work to regain your mojo!

4. Analyze Traffic and Indexing Patterns. Now it is time to jump into Google Webmaster Tools. Under the Diagnostics area you can see how often GoogleBot (Google’s indexing spider) is visiting your site. Ideally, it should be every few days. You can also see what errors Google is reporting and how many pages are being indexed. These valuable statistics give you a baseline for taking action.

If you have been banned, it will be clear that Google is not indexing any of your pages. Time to jump back to the Webmaster Guidelines and learn about the steps you need to take.

5. Evaluate your Incoming Links. More so than ever, Google rankings are about the link authority that your site has. In other words, who is linking to you, how they are linking, and the trust that Google puts in those sites are all important factors. If you have done nothing over time to fortify your incoming links you will start to  suffer (because you have competitors out there who are working hard). It is possible that Google has done a recent update that devalued your site because your incoming links are on the decline.

6. Look at a Broad Range of Keywords. Is your conclusion that Google has dumped you in the dog house due to a drop-off on one term or is there an across-the-board decline? Before you panic, take a look at a range of phrases. If you are suffering with just a few terms, some focused work on your home page could get you back in the game. If your whole site is suffering, it is back to Webmaster Guidelines to do a point-by-point review of where you falling short of Google’s expectations, or, where your competitors are trumping you.

7. Assess All Changes. This recommendation is huge! Make sure you review whether you, your web designer, or your CMS (if you have a hosted CMS) have made any recent changes. It is possible that significant changes have happened on your site that you are unaware of. As an example: we worked with someone who unwittingly turned off their SEO-friendly urls in WordPress, which completely changed their internal linking on the their website. Or, it is possible your Ecommerce provider has done a major update that has changed all your page titles. Talk to the people you are working with and see if they can give you any insights. You can also look at Google’s cache to compare your current page with a recent version, or, possibly use a service like http://www.archive.org to do some comparison of the current version of your site with past versions to see if the html has changed.

8. See If You Are Alone. Here is another pre-panic step: do some Googling to find out if your case is an isolated issue or if many others are reporting issues. Your change in rankings could be a result of a sea-change on Google’s end. This doesn’t mean you need to sit idly by and fret, but your approach will be significantly different than if your ranking drop-off is isolated.

9. Set up Google Analytics Intelligence. Google Analytics has a brand new feature (as of 11/09) that is awesome. Analytics Intelligence lets you set up custom alarms so you can receive an email notification if there are anomalies in your traffic. Although this tool won’t help you go back in time and address past problems, it will be a great aid as you move forward with a more scientific approach to controlling your rankings and traffic.

10. Be Systematic. Our overarching recommendation is to be systematic in tackling your SEO decline. You need to identify the list of factors and then analyze and address them one-by-one.

There are no shortcuts to working with Google, but if you play by their rules and pay attention to every detail, you can likely be successful in regaining your Google rankings and traffic.

If you are a student of SEO, you know the importance of building incoming links from high-trust sites.

In addition to obtaining links you also want your incoming links to reinforce the relevance of your site. Two key ways to improve the quality of your incoming links are to be specific about the link text relevancy and target page selection.

1. Link Text Relevancy. The actual link text used to link to your site is an important factor in the value of a link. If you are selling Chlorine-Free Pool Chemicals, it would be much better for a link from another site to read:

Check out the huge selection of Chlorine-Free Pool Chemicals

than something like this:

Check out pool chemicals from JoeysHiQualityPools.com

The ideal scenario is for the link text to include your keyword phrase. If all of your incoming links simply include your domain name, the search engines will not reward you for your relevancy for specific keywords (unless, of course, those keywords are in your domain name).

2. Target Page Selection. It is hard to be too picky about incoming links, but the optimal situation is if incoming links go directly to the interior pages of your site. Ths is called deep linking. If you have a page on your site about chlorine-free pool chemicals you will want incoming links with with that link text to go directly to a page on your site about chlorine free-chemicals.

If every link into your site goes to the home page, the search engines will likely not value your site as highly as if you have a range of links going to content-specific pages on your site.

So how do you obtain links that are structured the way you want? You ask! Use every opportunity to make it easy for others to link to you.

Here is an example of a link request page you can put on your site:

Sample Link Request Page

You can similarly email the link text to others that you would want them to use when they link to your site. Let the recipient know they can just copy and paste the snippet you have provided for them.

Whenever you create an inbound link to your site from another website, be sure you are using best practices, such as those described in this post.

If you are curious what your current incoming link text looks like in Google’s eyes, Google Webmaster Tools has such a report for doing a quick scan of incoming link text at:

Your site on the web -> Links to your site -> Anchor Text

Don’t sell yourself short by settling for generic incoming links. At every opportunity, request for those links to be built in a way that will give you the greatest SEO boost.

We all know how important it is for our sites to rank highly for the right terms in the search engines – particularly Google. And, if you are new to marketing your business online, you have likely been overwhelmed by the range of theories, ideas, and “scams” for getting your site to the top of SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

My suggestion for newbies getting started in doing their own optimization: focus on just one phrase.

This is not a long term strategy for maximum search engine exposure for your business, but a way to get yourself into the game. It is a first step which will give you an opportunity to experience some success and learn your techniques, which you can build on to launch a comprehensive keyword campaign, using an extensive set of keywords.

Top spots on Google are extremely competitive for highly-searched keyword phrases. With so many factors coming into play (here is an SEO factors list) it really takes some time, experience, and feel for how to make modifications to your site, build links, and take other actions that will improve your results.

Here are the steps I suggest:

1. Select a phrase that is important to your business, but not super competitive.
2. Pick a page on your site that you will optimize for this phrase.
3. Do an initial analysis of your position on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
4. Develop a list of SEO factors (you can use our SEO factor list or roll your own from various sources) and start to implement the various factors.
5. Systematically adjust various factors and monitor your placement for your keyword phrase on a weekly basis.

If you have a new site it can take some time – even many months – for your site to gain visibility and traction. Certainly, if you have the time or can afford to hire professionals, it makes sense to go for maximum exposure across all your important keyword phrases. There are many tools and services available to help you with your efforts.

But, if you are like most small business people and have at least 186 other tasks to take care of each day, focusing on one phrase can be a good way to get started and figure out how to start experiencing some search engine success.

You might even be pleasantly surprised and find that your focused efforts to develop good practices related to one term will have a positive ripple effect on your placement for a whole range of phrases.

If you get 1000 site visitors a day and have a conversion rate of 2.00%  you  are going to get 20 orders each day. Understanding this simple Total Order equation will get you on the road to planning your ecommerce strategy.

Pushing (and monitoring) either of those key numbers is a great place to put your attention and will help you toward meeting your website revenue goals.

Analytics Data is Your Friend

If you don’t know the details of the traffic flowing into your site you are pretty much hunting in the dark. There are quite a few analytics packages out there. Google Analytics is free, easy to install, and quite accurate.

To take the Total Order equation a step further, if you can track and analyze the sources of your site visitors  you can get more specific in your approach than just wistfully thinking you would love to have another 250 visitors next week.

Here is the Top Traffic Sources table from Google Analytics for a sample ecommerce site:

Now that you see the breakdown of the sources of traffic you can formulate some intelligent questions and dig deeper into your data.

1. The example site above is getting a high percentage from organic traffic. On your own site, are the search terms driving organic traffic the ones that will result in orders or are you seeing a lot of “soft” traffic from irrelevant searches?

2. Are you already putting a bunch of effort into search optimization or another source like Google Product Feed? If so, are you seeing any measurable changes in the traffic level from that source? Ecommerce sites should really be able to capitalize on Google Product Feed and other comparison shopping engines at this point in time.

3. Do you have a high flow from a particular referral source? In the graphic above, traffic is coming from ecomall.com. Have you checked out the listing on the referring site and made sure that it stands out on the page and goes to the best location on your site? Perhaps, since the one referral source is working for you there are other similar opportunities, either free or paid, that will really help boost your traffic.

4. Is Google organic traffic your first or second source? If not, this could mean you are radically underperforming with your search optimization. If you have a new site, you might need to be a patient, but if your site is more than six months old, you likely want to assess your search optimization efforts and incoming links.

5. Direct traffic is comprised of visitors who directly type your url in the browser, have created a bookmark, or come from some other source that Google can’t recognize the referrer. If you have a high percentage of direct traffic, it is worth considering whether this is coming from offline advertising. If so, we recommend adjusting your ad urls so you can track that traffic more closely. If the offline advertising is generating sales, that is a great piece of information to know as you will want to consider budgeting money for effective advertising venues.

The more specific you can get about looking at your analytics data the more effectively you can decide where to put your efforts and resources for driving more high-quality traffic.

We love to talk analytics. Let us know if you have any insights to offer.

Some online retailers have marketing campaigns that run on autopilot all year. Surely, you don’t count yourself in that group (nudge, nudge).

If you aren’t tuning and tweaking for key seasonal holidays, your campaigns are likely underperforming. As we head into the holiday shopping season, which is just moments away, it is a good time to assess your big three of SEM: Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click, and Comparison Shopping Engines. Do you have your titles, descriptions, and ads tweaked to give you maximum exposure?

For an overview of our recommendations, please head over to our HEROweb Marketing & Design article archive and take a look at Q4 SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Pointers.

If you have products in Google Base or manage product feeds you have likely seen a trend in the past several weeks: top listings tend to be going to the Amazons, Office Depots and Petcos of the world.

For those of us lower on the Internet food chain this is disturbing news. I just saw a thread on the Google Merchant Center discussion board related to this topic:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/base/thread?tid=425b500e40cfcd89&hl=en

As many merchants are beginning to rely on the power of Google Product Search to drive traffic, here are a few thoughts:

1. This is not a case of some sort of evil collusion. Google appears to be giving more weight to sites with significant product reviews. To assert your claim on the top positions you want to consider participating in the some of the shopping engines that will provide the reviews that Google pays attention to.

2. If you see genuine cases of other merchants spamming Google Base or violating policies, Google provides a means for you to report abuse. Google tends to be reasonable and responsive.

http://google.com/support/merchants/bin/request.py?contact_type=policy

3. You have ongoing work to do, to keep your products at the top of the Google Product listings. This game ain’t easy. Keep on tuning your product feed listings – including product names, descriptions, and the product-type taxonomy. Pay close attention to what the competition is doing – including Amazon. As with Organic SEO, your listings do count.

If you have any other ideas on Google Product Feed success, please chime in!

Yesterday Yahoo and Microsoft announced a major partnership between their respective search marketing departments.   This deal ended a long rumored courtship of Yahoo by Microsoft with several attempts of either partnership or out-right purchase by Microsoft.  In the simplest terms,

“Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.”

Bing will now power the core technologies behind Yahoo’s search engine, while Yahoo can continue to build upon Bing and control their own user experience.  The Bing engine itself will also be allowed to integrate Yahoo’s search technologies on it’s own site.  From the official press release, here are a few of the key terms:

• The term of the agreement is 10 years;
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

There were many more details announced at the press conference including some of the basic financial terms, so we suggest checking out the rest of the press release.  But in regards to the actual search engines, what does this mean for the small business owner running an ecommerce site?  How will this effect the ability of users to find your site?

Small Business Implications

There is no reason to panic right now about where your website traffic will be coming from.  The deal will take at around 24 month to complete the full global transition of Yahoo! Powered by Bing.  It will start with federal approval, which should take about 3-6 months.  Reports are that once it’s all complete, Bing will have about a 28% share of the market.   It’s still a far cry from Google’s market share, but two heads are always better than one, and the partnership should keep Google on their feet and push further innovation.  But this move definitely signals the end of Yahoo in the search business.   At one time Yahoo search was even powered by Google, but that partnership ended in 2004.

For your website, optimizing for Bing will become very important.  We have talked before about some tips for using Bing effectively for ecommerce.  Registering your local listings, using Webmaster Central, and/or advertising through AdCenter will become even more important within the next year.  SEOmoz also has a great post today about the impact of this deal on SEO.

It was a pretty big announcement yesterday (even if it’s all about the #2 spot in the search industry) and we will certainly see much more details and news about “Bingahoo” over the course of the next months.  If you want even more information, there are certainly enough coverage to go around: TechCrunch, Mashable, and Marketing Pilgrim.

A few years back we added RSS output capability to MightyMerchant. We were pretty jazzed, given all the potential uses for RSS. Surprisingly adoption of RSS went nowhere with our customer base. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was just difficult enough  that people didn’t get it.

With the explosion of this social media, web 2.0-ish Internet world we live in, RSS remains relevant, and then some.

If you are not familiar with the concept of RSS, it  is a simple structured way to describe data. Here is an example of what an entry from an RSS feed looks like:

<item>
<title>Metric Drill Bits – .18 MM</title>
<link>http://www.biscotoolsupply.com/home/bis/page_776_17/metric_drill_bits_-_.18_mm.html</link>
</item>

While there is nothing so earth shattering about that snippet of code, it is a simple and widely accepted data format that is used by many web-based services. RSS opens up the possibility that you can pass your data around in a structured way to a multitude of sites, people, and services who can then display your data and share it with others. Sharing is a good thing!

RSS has been prevalent across the Internet for several years. Common uses included product feeds, sitemaps for services like Google and Yahoo, distribution of news items. As a practical use of RSS, if I am interested in purchasing a certain type of product on Craig’s list, I can “subscribe” to an RSS feed that will alert me when such an item is posted. Perhaps your customers would like to receive similar alerts from your website.

With the rise of Social Media, there are some interesting ways to use RSS that relate to Ecommerce:

1. Flow announcements from your website into your Facebook page.

2. Automatically stream new products or sale items to your Twitter account.

3. If you have multiple websites or a website and a blog, you can cross-post articles from one to the other.

If you are working to manage all of your social media assets, RSS presents an efficient and effective way to communicate with your audience across many platforms.

The SMX Advanced 2009 Conference has been running in Seattle this week.

Ok. Ok. I didn’t make it to the conference. I was down here in little ‘ol Springfield, Oregon working away. But due to the wonders of social media I was able to at least get a pretty immediate glimpse of the action.

This blog post, from the folks over at AimClear: “Is Everything you know about SEO Wrong?“  intrigued me. The post covers a session that included several of the top-guns in the SEO biz giving their takes on the current state of SEO.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz led off by looking at the traditional list of SEO ranking factors and how the mix is evolving. You can see the SEO Factor List we are currently tracking. According to the SMX Advanced session it looks like the ingredients might not really be changing too much but the recipe has been tweaked quite a bit.

Some interesting highlights:

(Note: Rand was making his statements based on a survey SEOMOZ recently sent out to 100 top SEOs.)

1. Seems SEOs are saying H1 tags are not nearly as important as they used to be. Maybe the Engines have perceived them as the next fertile ground for abuse, after meta keywords, which are now summarily ignored.

2. Significance of keywords in the domain/sub-domain appears to be on the rise. I agree.

3. As many other news reports have been indicating lately, Google Toolbar page rank is a poor indicator of just about anything. It looks pretty. Not worth much.

4. There is quite a bit of  importance to the somewhat nebulous non-link factors, such as freshness and uniqueness of content. Create great content, folks, and you will be rewarded. There is nothing surprising about the need for good content. But over time, the importance of fresh, relevant content seems to be growing.

5. With incoming links, Domain Trust is a biggy. No surprise there. The up-and-coming factors – particularly in regard to social media exposure and the authority that you derive from that, in SEO terms, is still sketchy.

The session went on with presentations by AimClear’s Marty Weintraub and Yahoo’s (yes, they still exist) Laura Lippay. I recommend checking out the entire post over at AimClear’s blog. It is a good read.