November 3,
2004
In
This Issue:
1. Solve Shipping Issues Now
2. In the News - Bizrate.com Study
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Copywriting - too many keywords?
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Solve Shipping Issues Now
Back in September in Newsletter #28 I wrote about the need to
gear up for the holidays, and this encouragement is similar to
that. If you run a web business that involves the shipping of products
to customers who have ordered online, hopefully by now you've established
your plan for the coming (current?) holiday shopping season --
you should have all your shipping costs and options displayed clearly
on your site so that customers can see this info. before they start
to place an order, you should display your shipping deadlines for
those last-minute shoppers, etc.
We should also talk about shipping lead time for a minute, because
I read an interesting message recently on a webmaster-related
forum from a retailer who was having trouble with lead time. As
the person
explained it, they typically get online orders shipped within
24-48 hours and they state this on their web site. But during a
period
of high-demand, they changed the site to indicate that orders
would be shipped within a week. Get this: After the switch, the
person
says their sales dropped by 80%. Thinking that it might only
be a blip, they didn't change the site for two weeks. All other
factors
remained the same, and after two weeks of sales being 80% lower
than normal, they switched back to 24-48 hour lead time on the
site and sales picked right back up.
That's something to think about for those of you who ship products
after selling online. Have your shipping ducks in a row so you
can ship as quickly as possible because unless you have an incredibly
unique product the customer won't want to wait for you to send
it.
_________________
In The News
It's been a fairly quiet week in the world of web development
and search engines. (The world of politics, of course, has more
than made up for the quiet in our neck of the woods!)
One interesting article last week came from Clickz.com and reported
some stats from a study done by Bizrate.com, a major shopping "search
and compare" web site. The study suggests that both local
search and shopping search are growing. Some key numbers:
- 37 of respondents are familiar with shopping search sites
- respondents said 27 percent of their searches were for local
information
- only 35 to 40 percent of small businesses have a web site,
and only 24 percent of small businesses advertise online
All of which suggests that there are plenty of opportunities
online for small businesses to find targeted customers.
Clickz.com: Local and Shopping Search Grow
_________________
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.
Jump-start your link building (without getting sandboxed)
November 03, 2004 - ISEDB.com
Local search: Missing pieces falling into place
November 02, 2004 - Search Engine Watch
Some pundits claim that the paid search market has peaked, but
new research tells a different story, suggesting that local
search is emerging as an important and powerful driver for the
paid
search market.
How paid SEM helps organic search engine optimization
October 29, 2004 - ClickZ.com
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
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This Week's Q&A
Matt,
We're rewriting some of the pages on our web site to make them
more "search engine friendly" as you call it. As we
put our keywords and phrases into the copy, we're wondering how
many times we should mention each word or phrase? Is there such
a thing as too much in using keywords like this?
Oscar
Hi Oscar --
Yes, there is definitely such thing as "too much" when
it comes to writing search engine friendly copy for your web site.
It's real tricky -- you have to make sure your keywords and phrases
are mentioned in the text of the web page for the search engine
crawler's benefit, but you also have to make sure your copy is
readable and understandable for the human visitor's benefit.
There's no hard and fast rule for how much is too much in terms
of keyword density. If you only have one paragraph of text
on a web page, you don't need to mention the keywords and phrases
3-4
times each. Bad idea. More likely, you'll have 3-4 paragraphs
of text on the page, and in that scenario you probably can
mention
that pages keywords and phrases 3-4 times. If you go overboard,
your page becomes less readable, and you may set off an "alarm" with
the search engines that you're trying to spam them with keyword
stuffing. You have to be careful. (Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
You have to see Dan Noe's web site: http://www.noedesign.com/
He's a web designer. The site is all-Flash, and so not at all
search engine friendly, but you can't argue with the creativity! Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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