September
22, 2004
In
This Issue:
1. Here Come the Holidays
2. In the News - Ask Jeeves Gets Personal & Local
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Why do we rank well in Yahoo and not Google?
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Here Come the Holidays
I walked into a local store over the weekend and within a couple
minutes one of my kids started yelling Santa Claus's name and pointing
off to our left. Sure enough, right there up above the aisles and
displays where everyone could see them from almost any point in
the store: Christmas products on sale. On the second-to-last weekend
in September!
Well, since the holiday season is now upon us (apparently), those
of you with commerce web sites selling widgets to the masses
should be thinking already about what you're doing to make sure
your web
site is ready. E-Commerce grows every year, and the 4th quarter
holiday season is always a major draw for new shoppers to try
online stores. Here are some quick tips/ideas that may help you
grab your
slice of the holiday shopping pie.
1) Make sure your web site is optimized to get good search engine
rankings on the keywords that customers might use to find your
widgets. Not sure if your site is as ready as it could be? Read
our article "Search
Engine Success Checklist" to see
what you might need to work on. And
do it quickly, since any efforts made now may not reap benefits
for a couple months.
2) If it's appropriate, dress up your site design in a holiday
theme. Let those holiday shoppers know that they're welcome and
you're ready for them. This one's probably best done closer to
the holidays - sometime after Halloween would work.
3) Update your content with information that holiday shoppers
will want. Your generic home page text can be replaced with more
specific
material for shoppers, but make sure to still use keyword-rich
copy that search engine spiders like.
4) Give shoppers what they want right away: Help them locate
gifts from your home page; give them shipping information, such
as costs
and delivery times, right away. Let them know what your return/refund
policy is. Answer their questions before they have to ask!
5) Gift cards are one of the hottest gift ideas to come down
the pike in a loooong time. Is a gift card something you can
offer
and sell to online shoppers? If you can, it'll probably be your
most popular seller, or one of them.
6) Holiday shoppers usually have a strict budget in mind. "I
need to get a gift for my niece and I don't want to spend more
than $25." Help online shoppers find gifts for different budgets
-- have a page for "Gifts under $25", another for "Gifts
under $50", etc.
7) Be as detailed as possible about shipping deadlines. Last-minute
shoppers will need to know if it's too late to get your widget
underneath their tree. And, of course, remember that Christmas
isn't the only holiday being celebrated in December.
8) If you need to do any web site upgrades to get ready for
the holidays, let your web developer know as soon as possible.
Many
of us are already swamped and may have a hard time completing
your upgrades if you wait until the last minute!
_________________
In The News
Ask Jeeves Gets Personal & Local
Ask Jeeves is one of the
2nd tier players in the search engine industry, but they're trying
to compete with the
Googles and Yahoos of the web with Tuesday's launch of "My
Jeeves", a service that lets users save past searches and
results and create notes, as well as letting you organize the material
you save into specific "folders". This is actually closer
in format to what Amazon's A9 search engine offers than what either
Google or Yahoo currently offer.
That's not the only new thing happening at Ask; they also launched
Ask Jeeves Local on Tuesday. This service is in much more direct
competition with the local search services Yahoo and Google are
now offering -- services which we've talked about at length in
recent newsletters. All of these services are still at the "beta" (testing)
level.
Ask Jeeves Local
And to wrap it up, Ask's search engine, Teoma, has also been
upgraded. The company says the improvements include: more
pages in its database;
more frequent crawls of selected sites several times a day;
and the ability to crawl and index Flash and PDF files.
Teoma
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
AOL buys into comparison shopping
September 20, 2004 - News.com
Spreading the gospel of Firefox
September 17, 2004 - InternetNews.com
A grass-roots online campaign to get the preview release of Firefox
1.0 in computers is taking hold.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hi Matt,
Our business has had a web site for about two years now. It's
a pretty big web site in terms of how many pages we have. We've
never really gone out of our way to do stuff that would help
the site rank well in the search engines, but we're getting more
interested in this aspect of marketing now. What we've discovered
from looking at Google and Yahoo is that our site does pretty
well in Yahoo for some of our keywords, but we can't be found
at all in Google on any of our search terms. Is there any explanation
for this?
Jim
Hi Jim --
Yes, there is. First, let's make sure your site is even in Google's
database. Go to Google and do a search like this:
site:yourdomain.com
If your web site comes up in the SERPs, at least we know Google
knows you exist.
As for why Yahoo would like your site better than Google,
it's not all that complicated. Yahoo relies more heavily
on "on-page" factors
to rank pages -- factors such as the text of your pages, the words
in the <title> element, keyword density, and things like
that. Google relies more heavily on "off-page" factors
to rank pages -- things such as how many sites link to your site,
the quality of the sites that link to you, the anchor text used
in those links, and things like that.
In other words, it's quite possible (but not guaranteed)
to rank well in Yahoo by building a site with good content
alone. Google
requires
that, but they also require that your site have some amount
of inbound link from other sites. You can learn more about
this
by reading our article, "The
Importance of Links."
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Funny image: http://users.net1plus.com/scottm/HomeComputer.jpg
The picture there is a hoax -- it's actually an old submarine
bridge. Someone used Photoshop to add in the monitor on the wall
and
the printer on the front desk. But it's kinda funny anyway,
and makes we want a steering wheel on my computer!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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