October
12, 2005
In This Issue:
1. Holidays are Here
2. In the News - Yahoo's Been Busy
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Multiple domains?
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Holidays are Here
On Tuesday I was reading the latest edition of
Nick Usborne's Excess
Voice newsletter, which you've seen me plug
a few times before. The feature article was another
good one -- "Three
Things You Should Achieve with a Thank You Email."
It got me thinking about the upcoming holiday shopping
season, particularly because that's the one time
of year I typically find myself making a purchase
or two from some online store I've never bought
from in the past. And so, just as Nick discusses
with regard to "thank you" emails after
a purchase, it's the time of year when your online
store will be exposed to more visitors than usual,
and hopefully more new customers. The trick to
building your business, though, is to make sure
these new customers don't fade away, never to
buy from you again.
And that reminded me that I wanted to update a
bit I wrote about last year in this newsletter
right about this time of year. It was called "Here
Come the Holidays," and I offered eight tips
for making your online store more holiday-ready.
On re-reading it today, I'm pleased to discover
that the article doesn't need any updating, and
all eight tips are still valuable. So if you missed
it the first time, or just need a reminder, here
it is.
Newsletter #28: Here
Come the Holidays
_________________
In The News
Yahoo's Been Busy
Lots of news coming out of Sunnyvale recently,
starting with this week's news that Yahoo has
integrated blog search and Flickr photos into
its regular News Search tool. As a news junkie,
I love it ... and there are also some business
implications I'll get to in a moment. To see the
new display, do a search on Yahoo News Search,
like this one for [Yankees].
Blog search results appear on the right, and if
you click on "More Blog results" at
the end of that short list the next page adds
Flickr photos to the right column.
Business implications? If you're a business owner,
this means blogs are a step closer to mainstream
(Flickr, too) and so when people do news searches
about your company, or the products you sell,
they may discover blog posts about your company
or products from your customers. Just give that
some thought for a second.... Do you know what
bloggers are saying about the stuff you sell?
If you want to get in on that conversation, why
not (finally) start your own company blog -- something
Net Gains has been suggesting for a while now.
More Yahoo news: They've also introduced a podcast
search tool. The business implications are
less here, because podcasting today is about where
blogging was about two years ago. But keep an
eye on this space, because podcasting is also
going more mainstream with each passing week and
may impact how you do business on the web.
Still more Yahoo news: They've also introduced
Yahoo
Site Explorer, which you -- the business owner
or webmaster -- will find the most useful of everything
mentioned here. Put your URL in and Site Explorer
will list all the pages Yahoo has indexed, and
it provides an "Inlink" button to see
what pages link to your site. You can also see
the "cached" version of each page, which
is the version of the page Yahoo has stored in
its database. And you can export all these results
into a tab-delimited document. All of which adds
up to a very nice tool for the business / web
site owner.
Enough Yahoo news for one week, don't ya think?
_________________
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.
Study:
Men prefer coupons, women prefer sale items
October 07, 2005 - DM News
Consumers favor free shipping above all other
money-saving options when shopping online, but
men favor coupons over sale items while women
prefer sale items over coupons.
New
features at AOL Search
October 05, 2005 - Search Engine Watch
Google
Tests 'Advertise' Link, Landing Page
September 30, 2005 - ClickZ.com
Google is testing a link and landing page combination
that lets advertisers click to buy ads on individual
AdSense publishers' sites.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Matt,
What's the current outlook with search engines
as far as web sites that use more than one domain?
We're thinking it might help to grab some new
domains that would be used on our main web site.
Will it?
Thanks,
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Search engines don't want to have the same site
appearing in their SERPs with different domains
- it lessens the quality for the searcher. So
if you use multiple domains for the same site,
you'll want to do a 301 redirect (ask your webmaster
or your hosting company for help) so that anyone
trying to reach the 2nd, 3rd, etc., domain will
be redirected to the main domain. You don't want
to have all these extras domains reachable --
they should send people to the main domain.
So at this point, the only reasons to own multiple
domains for one web site are:
1. To register domains with misspellings of your
main domain, so that people typing in your domain
with a misspelling can still get where they want
to go.
2. To grab "type-in" traffic from people
who may not know your main domain, but assume
a site can be found at bluewidgets.com or something
like that.
3. To make sure others don't register and open
web sites with domains that are too similar to
yours.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
This is good, and I bet deep down you'll think,
"There's some truth in there."
New York Times cartoon: Google
2084
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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