WebmasterWorld members are sharing their own e-commerce tips and the group is off to a pretty good start so far. If the quality stays high, there’ll be lots of good stuff in there for the small biz retailer.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

WMW Members Share E-Commerce Tips

Let’s start with a couple from one of my favorite topics: Local Search. First, Greg Sterling has an interesting write-up about an interesting search tool called “Palore” that can add a lot of valuable information to local search business listings. It’s worth watching. And second, Paul Jahn noticed Yahoo going out of its way to encourage more user reviews on Yahoo Local. I bet that kind of thing equates to an immediate 10-20% increase in reviews.

Eric Enge has a good checklist post with 17 Poor Quality Signals Your Site May Be Sending. You’ll have to fill-in some of the details yourself on any items you may not understand, but the list is a good place to get yourself started on what not to do.

I’m not sure I agree with “most underrated,” but information architecture is certainly close to the top of the list. Aaron Walls says it’s the most underrated component of effective search marketing.

Comprehensive resource lists make such good linkbait. Here’s one from Daniel S. on the Sponsored Reviews blog: Giant List of Blog Directories.

And speaking of directories… Deb Mastaler lists a few in her SEL column this week about starting your linkbuilding with “foundational links.” The article is Foundational Links Don’t Split, Crack Or Get Dugg Up.

Lastly, here are two pieces that aren’t directly search-related, but still caught my attention: On Small Business Branding, Steve Woodruff writes How to Be Unremarkable. And over on Marketing Profs, Allen Weiss asks Is Price *Really* the Most Important Factor in Consumer Loyalty? He answers it, too.

That’s all for this week. Hope you have a great holiday weekend! See ya next week….

Now playing: “Mr. Jones,” Counting Crows

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

• SES Chicago 06: Flash and Search Engines
• My #1 Pet Peeve is…
• The Best “About Us” Page I’ve Ever Seen
• Small Businesses and the “Wow” Factor
• How to Make Your Web Site (and Yourself) Irrelevant
• “In other words, could you just…trust me?”
• The 4 Most Underrated Pages on Your Web Site
• What’s on your (site) menu?

I’ll do more of these in the future on other topics. And I invite you to add additional Web Design links (from other sources) in the comments!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

SBS Roundup: Small Business Web Design

So, let’s get to the links….

The paid links discussion doesn’t seem to want to end. Couple good posts on the subject this week, starting with Graywolf’s The Paid Link Blog Meme, and followed up quickly by Can You Spot the Paid Link? from Danny S. on Search Engine Land.

My fellow “Small is Beautiful” columnist at SEL, Christine Churchill, has written two super articles about the free web design tools that Google, Yahoo, and MSFT offer to small businesses. The first article covered the tools themselves, and then this week’s follow-up addressed if those tools are SEO friendly or not? Really good stuff.

If you liked my “6 Retail SEO Pitfalls” article, you might also want to have a look at Stephan Spencer’s retail-specific article, Internet retailers’ who blog: doing it right.

A couple good social/viral marketing articles came out this week: One is Lee Odden’s Five Blunders with Social News and Bookmarking, and the other is Cameron Olthuis’ 5 Reasons To Put Viral Content On Mini-Sites.

And the “most clever post of the week” award goes to Stoney DeGeyter for The Seven Word Limit. Love it!

That’s all for this week. Enjoy your weekend. Thanks to all the new feed subscribers and blog readers.

Now playing: SEO Rockstars podcast

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

If you’re trying to learn SEO by yourself, read up on what’s going on at Search Engine College, one of the SEO training classes I reference in my “Big Ideas for Small Sites & Small Budgets” presentations at SES. It’s expanding quite a bit! The article comes from Kim Krause-Berg, one of my new friends from Chicago.

Also in my “Small Biz” presentation at SES is a hearty recommendation for Jennifer Laycock’s e-book, Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing. Jennifer, who’s just back from maternity leave (and has the cutest little baby boy since, well … my son), says an update is coming soon to the SBGtoSEM book.

Marketing on Flickr is another topic I speak about at SES, and my main point is to market while respecting the users and system. Over at Read/Write Web there’s a story about how not to market on Flickr. The company created a fake user profile and was eventually banned.

How long does it take your web site/page to load? According to a recent Jupiter Research/Akamai report, online shoppers will now wait only 4 seconds for a page to load, down from 8 seconds a few years ago. (Found via Peter D. and GA Experts.)

Some interesting data from Mike Blumenthal a couple weeks back…. He dug into Google Maps/Local a bit and came up with a list of online directories Google is using to get local business details. There are some obvious sources, and several I’ve never heard of.

Is Google’s “Quality Score” a concern these days? You might want to check out the AdWords Quality Score presentation from Brad Geddes, as delivered last month at the PubCon conference.

And since I don’t think I mentioned this while I was blogging from Chicago, Danny Sullivan used the SES conference to announce his new conference, Search Marketing Expo, which will launch next June in my adopted hometown of Chicago. Very excited about that, and very impressed by Danny’s cajones re: the timing of that announcement.

Have a great weekend and GO SEAHAWKS!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

Shari Thurow, Grantastic Designs

* for those who must do Flash sites, link development will be crucial
* don’t use hidden text on a Flash page
* Macromedia’s SDK is not the magic solution
- most Flash files don’t have much text
- text in Flash files is usually not useful content
- poor URL structure — URL’s don’t change, so all pages have same page title, etc.

Tips:
- link development counts
- split up pages; create multiple pages with Flash embedded in each
- optimize each Flash movie with appropriate title and content
- think Flash movies, not Flash sites
- of have to do a Flash site, also do an HTML version
- convert your Flash files to HTML and see what a spider sees
— don’t rely on Flash-based navigation

Good reason to use Flash: genuinely useful content
Bad reason: boss thinks Flash is cool

Jonathan Hochman, JE Hochman & Associates

* gonna take a contrary view and say you can use as much Flash as you want and still rank
* big idea: Progressive Enhancement
— basic content and functionality is provided for all users
— CSS, Flash, etc. added to enhance for those who can view these things

Progressive Enhancement
- start with primary HTML content in a DIV with unique ID attribute
- use program such as SWFObject or UFO to detect a Flash player
- when Flash player is installed, use program to identify Flash player and show Flash content

Is this spam/cloaking?
- no; Flash accessibility isn’t spam if the primary content matches the visible Flash
- not cloaking because the same content is served to all visitors
- W3C recommends alternative versions of multimedia content for accessibility
- “Search engines don’t rule the world; do what’s right for your users.”

All-Flash sites
- a Flash movie that simulates web pages isn’t a web site
- better: create separate pages and install Flash movies on each page

(has article on jechochman.com about SEO Friendly Flash)

Gregory Markel, Infuse Creative

Pre-design Phase
- before you get into design, develop the keyword marketing plan
- let the keyword marketing steer your design

* Flash sites are often only 1-2 pages deep, a serious blow against keyword opportunity for ecommerce/business sites
* Have to find a happy medium: Are you trying to succeed in online marketing, or are you trying to win Flash design awards?
* Flash can be a problem for PPC in a Quality Score world — can’t connect the ad keyword to the deep section of the Flash movie

Jim McFadyen, Critical Mass

(last-minute speaker, so no presentation, go through live web site samples instead)

www.scottschiller.com
- follows all rules of SEO optimization
- uses javascript and CSS for presentation

www.rolex.com/en/
- soon to be relaunched in complete Flash in a presentation layer with CSS/Javascript enhancements
- uses noframes and noscript

www.orange-project.com
- uses javascript to allow bookmarking and linking because URLs change

Q&A

Dan Crow, Google
- we don’t like to remove people from the index unless you’re doing something nefarious; the techniques described today, esp. by Jonathan, are the right way to handle Flash; use Flash embedded into HTML rather than all-Flash sites

Shari T.
- users don’t like Flash; they may like it once, but not more than that
- test it with your users; don’t assume that people want it

Jonathan
- there are valid reason to use Flash, but many designers do Flash sites just because they can

Jim
- the bad Flash designers are ruining Flash for the good designers

[Ed. note: We are getting into a very heated discussion here about Flash!! Moderator Detlev Johnson has stepped in to play peacemaker.]

Gregory
- we’re in an industry held accountable by metrics
- the marketing objectives have to determine the design
- if client wants branding, a full rich media site is great

Jim
- Safari has some issues with the deeplinking techniques
- as long as you stay within the site, it should be just fine

Technorati Tags: seschicago06, ses, flash, macromedia, seo

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

SES Chicago 06: Flash and Search Engines

In 2007, your website will need to deliver: Information. Clarity. Truth.
Your website should be a window into the soul of your company:

1. Anticipate your customer’s question.
This is why you must embrace persona-based writing.
2. Answer the question transparently.
Statements that don’t ring true will score against you.
3. Make the answer easy to find.
This is a function of website architecture.

And that’s just one bit. Go read, please. (via …Persuason Architect)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Some things are too good…

Some more good PDF optimization help comes from Duff Johnson at the Adobe Acrobat User Community: Make your PDFs work well with Google (and other search engines). This is a good, and more technical complement to my recent post about Optimizing PDFs for SEO.

Don’t skip this one, even if I did forget to post about it when it was first published: Nick Usborne shares Four tips for writing a home page.

If you’re a designer, read this. If you’re not, tell your designer to read it. Again, not hot off the presses, but great nonetheless: Cameron Moll’s Beginner’s guide from a seasoned CSS designer.

This is hysterical, but it might be a bit too “Inside Baseball” for some SBS readers. Graywolf explains how How PubCon is like Star Wars. Inside knowledge of the SEO industry and personalities is helpful, though not required for maximum laugh factor.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Friday Night Link-o-rama

How about telling me the password has to be 6 characters when I first try to login?

I tried logging in to Digg tonight — first time in about a month, probably. Do I remember my password? Of course not. But why wait until the end to tell me there’s a 6-character minimum? Drives me crazy. Is user-friendly web design so difficult?

Maybe you’re like me — you have several different passwords for different situations. I have my main password, which is 5 characters. I also have a 6-character password, because some sites have decided 5 isn’t enough. And I also have two different 8-character passwords, because some sites require 8, and other sites require 8 — while also demanding it be a mix of letters and numbers. By this time next year, I’m sure I’ll have a password that mixes COBOL and Farsi.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

My #1 Pet Peeve is…

Enter Flash. Flash is what makes all those “cool” animations you see on home pages, and gosh, if you’re a small business owner, having Flash is like having a piece of Hollywood on your home page. Few can resist the temptation….

Flash is not necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of situations where a Flash-based movie file is the right way to go. For example, click the “Interactive Stage Demo” link on the I. Weiss Stage Curtains page. (I. Weiss is a past client of mine from OWT.) This is an example of Flash being used correctly; it’s an educational tool that adds to the user experience. The problem is that Flash is rarely used correctly. The most common mistake — and one that small businesses seem particularly susceptible to — is the creation of a Flash-based home page (or “splash” page).

Here’s a quick rule-of-thumb: If you want to add something to your web site that requires a “Skip This” button, you’re probably making a mistake. But better than that, here’s an old quote from Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, a very well-respected usability expert interviewed by the Marketing Sherpa web site:

“When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

“Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.

“That should give you a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That’s the crux of it.”

Your Flash movie may look cool, but the only lasting “wow” you’ll get will be something like, “Wow, we’re really getting in our customers’ way with this, aren’t we?”

If you’re looking for a “wow” factor, best to look elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: web design, flash, small business, web sites

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Small Businesses and the “Wow” Factor