The State of Retailing Online 2009 reports that ecommerce spending will rise 11% to $156 billion this year from $141.3 billion in 2008.

Although many retailers have experienced lower sales, four out of five online retailers surveyed think the web is better suited than other channels to withstand the recession. Furthermore, one-third of the retailers said the downturn has helped them capture greater market share. Retailers report their conversion rates continue to run between 3% and 3.5%, as they have for years.

What can a wholesaler or retailer do to weather the economic downturn? Most businesses are doing more with less by making smart spending decisions and using effective, affordable tactics to grow their businesses.  Search Engine Marketing is ideal because it’s both accountable and cost-effective.

According to comScore, $595 million was spent online on Black Friday 2009, making it the second best shopping day of the year.  With over $10.5 billion spent during the holiday season so far right now is the best time for internet retailers to ensure their websites are getting the traffic they need to help their business grow.

Search Engine Marketing for Wholesalers

The benefits of paid search advertising are many. Directory listings in particular are extremely cost effective. With a small initial investment, you get tons of qualified traffic, unlimited category selection, ample keyword selection, a site description, and options for premium listings, banner ads and more.

Paid search advertising is realistic for every type of business, small or large. It is an excellent way for small businesses to level the playing field and for big businesses to get found. Your listing has a chance of placement right above or below a larger competitor or national chain. A wholesaler can easily be found by retailers looking for its products, and retailers get the benefit of quickly sourcing products.

The beauty of paid search is immediate results; your listing can be up in a matter of days as opposed to the time it takes for natural search listings to materialize. This is not to degrade organic listings, because the best of all worlds is to have both organic and paid listings for conversions and branding galore.

The biggest advantage of directory listings is targeted traffic. While it’s difficult to target your message with traditional media, directory listings zero in on your target audience through your selected keywords. You’ll be pre-qualifying your customers before they land on your site.

Lastly, you get branding with directory listings. Top placement on sites like WholesaleU or OffPriceNetwork is proven to be very effective for promoting your brand.

In closing, let me remind you that the Internet gives you top value for promoting your business and results are accountable. WholesaleU helps wholesalers connect with thousands of resellers looking to order their products online every day. What’s not to like?

With so many options for starting an online retail or sales site, the best way to get your bearings is simply to examine a few. There are some very small, limited options for a new site. If you just want to accept Paypal or Google Checkout, for example, you could simply dump www.fatfreecart.com into your site, blog, or even Myspace page. It handles the cart and checkout process, and is free. Although you can get a long way on such a solution, limiting yourself to Google Checkout and Paypal will slow your growth. Eventually, you’ll probably need to upgrade to a full-fledged hosted retail solution to accommodate continued expansion of your store.

Shopify (www.shopify.com) is one such solution. They’re based on Ruby on Rails, and several other open source projects. That means that there is an active development community behind the features. New features and improvements are added regularly, and they’re all based on an architecture that is inherently easy to scale. Best yet, they have a trial account option. This allows you to dive in, get a feel for what the store has to offer, and even process a few orders. Once you really get started, of course, you’ll have to upgrade to a real plan, but it’s very handy to be able to bring yourself up to speed without paying a dime.

Shopify’s system allows you to edit the site templates directly through their admin tool or run your site locally to allow you to mess with everything in the safety of your own computer. They have tons of tutorials, documentation and help links throughout their admin panel. They have tools that will help even a non-technical person make quick changes to their site. Want to add the price to the product preview? No problem, they give you the code to put in. Want to add a blog to your site? It takes about ten seconds to add a blog to your site.

In addition, all the templates are designed to have excellent SEO. They’ve already built in the HTML tags you’d want to use and you write in a syntax that’s similar to some blogging tools; you don’t need to know how to program a website at all. The CSS is all designed to make your site fast, reliable and the same across all browsers. You can do custom templates from the ground up, of course, but it’s very easy to start from one of their free templates and go from there.

How does Shopify stack up against Yahoo! Store? It’s a very important comparison, as Yahoo is one of the biggest hosted shopping solutions on the internet.

First, if your site becomes fabulously popular, Shopify’s Enterprise level plans have a lower transaction fee than Yahoo! Store. That can mean tens of thousands of dollars saved per year if you’re doing enough business. The downside is, however, that on a small site, the fees are slightly higher than their Yahoo counterpart.

Second, there’s a major difference in the way the site’s pages are generated. Yahoo’s templates are used to generate static pages. This means that dynamic content like up-to-date stock counts are very difficult to have added to your product pages. Shopify is a true dynamic platform and adding such content is usually one line of copy-and-paste code. Also, Shopify built Google Analytics directly into the platform, and it’s fairly easy to add your own third party widgets until your heart’s content.

Third, the pricing is a little different. Yahoo requires a small set up fee to start a new store. Shopify doesn’t, but as I mentioned has slightly higher transaction fees on small sites.

In general, you’ll find Shopify to be an easy-to-customize option. They have their own quirks that some users will like and others may not. However, their free trial makes it easy to prevent making a premature decision. It’s always nice to be familiar with the operation of your store before you have to pay for it, or before your customers start ordering from you! In either case, you can only make sales if you have a site going and most options are fast to implement. Good luck!

So you’ve got a website? Be it blog, retail, wholesale, or landing
page, you need to get people to it! Organic search traffic is both
free, and well targeted. These people are out looking for a site
like yours! It’s imperative that they find you.

It is no secret that rising gold prices made for a difficult jewelry holiday season. We listed in this blog in December how to keyword cope with gold prices that surged from $550 USD per ounce to $850 in three months. Tips included featuring prices in jewelry ads to move lower-priced, in-inventory), and looking to high-demand jewelry holidays (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day) to promote Buy Now Before the Price Increases ad messages for gold jewelry items.

$850 per ounce gold was the Good News. Now, near the end of 1stQuarter 2008, with the subprime mortgage lending crisis and decline of the U.S. dollar against currencies from Euro to Yen, gold tops $1,000 per ounce. The Trends Research Institute marked acceleration in overall wholesale costs to 7.4 percent in Jan 2008 (biggest jump since 1981) and the dollar’s slide against the euro and 6 other currencies to its lowest level since 1973 … ironically, the year Richard Nixon disconnected U.S. currency from the gold standard. This trends research institute predicted gold prices rising to $2,000 per ounce, a prediction made in Nov 2007!

So, what’s a jewelry wholesaler or retailer to do? Climb under the covers? Do weekly fire sales? Or gringe about the good ole days? Maybe not …

Hi-Ho Silver. In February, on reading December’s WholesaleU keywording tips to cope with rising gold prices, a BBJ Bangkok commenter said: “Yes, it was a holiday season that saw wholesale jewelry orders saddled with more silver orders.” And “wholesale gold jewelry will be out of the limelight for some time, (so) buyers might shift to silver jewelry.” BBJ Bangkok qualified the “saddled” as a positive, at least in Asian producer markets. Wholesale silver jewelry at the production end works on higher volume to hit the same margins as the gold trade, or employment boon for developing Asian countries who produce wholesale jewelry.

Trendy Bail-Out. Some fashion sources are predicting a trend for cocktail rings and costume jewelry that is heavy on non-precious metal components: Heavy seed pearl (faux pearl or semi-precious stone) overlays … shaped as flowers; mini enamel or cloisonné charms soldered into designs. For bargain-seekers – under $50 – who demand precious metal in their jewelry, gold- and silver-overlays are squeezing into price points.

Bling Accessories. Remember when DIY (Do It Yourself) became all the rage for home renovators? The increase in home self-renovations came with runaway prices in the real estate bubble. If you can’t sell, or can’t afford to buy at bubble-inflated prices, then you feather the existing nest. While waiting out the run up in gold (it may be a while), you might market other Bling to complete trendy looks, including accessories like designer and licensed scarves; handbags that triple as totes, beach bags and carry-alls; rhinestone and jeweled sweater wraps and glittery belts.

As the high price of gold ripples through holiday jewelry sales, there is still some glitter to be mined in segmenting jewelry keywords, descriptions and ad copy.

First, the bad news: Precious metals prices on world markets started jumping in August, when an ounce of gold went from $680 to almost $850. Gold currently hovers around $800 an ounce. Although the precious metals stock tickers rise and fall in daily dances, the daily market swings don’t affect current jewelry inventory at the wholesale or retail store levels.

But that $200-per-ounce jump from just one quarter ago has increased price tags on the heavy gold chains and necklaces that are perennial gift list favorites this time of year, pricing some golden gifts out of Santa’s Stockings. Existing inventories of reliable wedding jewelry have been re-priced also, putting the squeeze on brides, grooms and wedding planners who are not likely to show up on “Bridezillas” or other unreality TV shows featuring multimillion dollar wedding bashes.

PEOPLE STILL BUY THE BLING

Higher priced gold has crossed some gold jewelry off holiday shopping lists, confirmed by a quick survey of major jewelry retailers and wholesalers from Manhattan’s Diamond District to Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. The good news is that some shoppers don’t care; others know gold prices may go even higher tomorrow, based on oil price and inflation jitters. Some jewelry shoppers refuse precious metals substitutes, even without knowing that replacement platinum ran up about the same $200 increase as gold since mid-August 2007.

Then, there’s the All That Glitters motive, which for some customers means it has got to be gold.

TARGETING AND SEGMENTING THE GOLD MARKET

KEYWORDS: luxury jewelry, luxury gold jewelry.
Targets of luxury goods — however marketers have defined the demographics of well-to-do, wealthy, carriage trade, upper crust or Top One-Half of One Percent Bracket — don’t stop buying gold jewelry at $800 per ounce. Status quo ante.

KEYWORDS: affordable wedding bands, wedding jewelry discounts, budget bands of gold.
Future brides and grooms do not cross gold off their shopping lists, but they do work on budget. Wedding band shoppers are doing more comparison shopping this season: buying smaller rings, searching on and offline for deals and even resorting to Big Box department stores and retailers who can shave prices with bulk, national purchasing power.

KEYWORDS: gold jewelry under $PRICE.
Smaller jewelry retailers are feeling the pinch from $800 per ounce gold, as shoppers in the middle range ($500 to $1,000) simply cross it off their lists after budgeting higher priced gasoline, heating oil and food costs. Some jewelry retailers encounter an impassable $1,000 ceiling among gold hunters who will buy in the $500 to $600 range. Jewelry marketers who still have inventory from pre-surge August price jumps might move it off the shelves at good margins by focusing on price in paid-ad and SEO listed titles.

KEYWORDS: Valentine gold jewelry, gold for Mother’s Day.
High water marks for jewelry sales tend toward the next holidays, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. While some customers are waiting out the price surge in gold, no one can predict if it will stabilize at the current $800 per ounce, much less drop back to the $650 range, due to global jitters over oil prices which started the price run. Priming the marketing pump in advance of the next jewelry-buying holidays — Buy now while gold is still $000 — might be a good strategy by reason of timing, seasonality and cutting through end-of-year holiday clutter.

When dozens of directories and link sites were penalized by Google — dropped from organic page rankings into the “Supplemental” no-index / no-fly zone – bloggers in search marketing expressed themselves.

Some offered tips to stay on Google’s good side to avoid penalties for being too general or irrelevant as directories, still used in SEO linking strategies. Some offered advice on how to avoid being branded as manipulative directories and paid-links sites, looking as if they’re gaming the big search engines’ organic rankings and quality algorithms. Other SEM bloggers hummed children’s ditties in frustration at the abrupt disappearance of certain directories and links sites from the hurdy-gurdy marketplace. (See a roundup article keyed to Link Building by randfish at SEOMoz. “What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones” at http://www.seomoz.org/users/view/63) .

I feel the frustration. Whether or not all those directories dumped from Google’s organic rankings are “bad ones” that obviously broke relevancy rules and scored too low on user experience, aren’t search marketers allowed to get cranky when so many decisions are made behind the wizard’s curtain?

Google’s quality ratings, scoring for page rank and e-SPAM penalties can work in mysterious black box ways. Pay-per-click advertisers see their bids and Sponsored Link results page rank ground up in Quality Score bar graphs. But the exact recipe for the sausage that comes out (closely guarded algorithms that decide minimum bids, page position) are held by the chefs on Google’s SPAM teams. Quality ratings and penalties are not always transparent to search marketing players at the receiving end.

Web sites, links and directories that drop like a stone from Google’s organic results – banished to the seldom-indexed dead zone called the Supplemental – don’t always know what hit them, and they hit many walls trying to climb out of that Penalty Box. The mysterious ways of black-box ratings persist, even if the banished employ all those helpful articles, with lists of tips and tactics to avoid penalties.

Rand Fishkin, who wrote Do’s & Don’t’s of the Good Directory vs. Bad Directory at SEOMOZ, said: “Honestly, I don’t mind the penalties, just the inconsistent way they’re applied.” And, “If the search engines want to get serious about paid links and manipulative directories, they’re going to need to hit a few thousand general directories harshly.”

Okay, it’s transparency and consistency; both would go a long way to restoring confidence in major search engine ratings, scorings and penalties.

I’m an old ice hockey fan. One bad forward from the Philadelphia Flyers started getting mail delivered to him in the Penalty Box. That’s how much time he spent there! The difference is that we all knew why his padded butt was parked in the Penalty Box: high-sticking, gloves down on the ice, excessive roughhousing. If behavior A, then penalty B. We always knew when the penalty box clock ran out, too. Nobody who reforms should stay in the box – or on the Supplement — indefinitely.

By M.E. Marra 

Online video has received a lot of attention in Social Media — social search sites such as MySpace and YouTube (owned by Google) that offer groups, profiles, blogs, video posts and searchable databases through which these online communities locate like-minded members and communicate.  ComScore Networks monitored traffic for online videos at five major sites for one month, October to November 2006, and saw traffic bump up by 19%. And it’s not just music videos anymore: A 2006 Online Media Survey from Piper Jaffray found 51% of online video watchers are viewing news videos; while 26% and 41% watched TV shows or movie previews, respectively. Product & Shopping Search.  So much for the news, information and entertainment consumption of online video, noted above. Comparison shopping engines and product shopping sites were quick to adopt images and videos as “search keywords” to access their products. For example, fashion site Like.com offers celebrity look-alike handbags, hats and accessories, all searchable by photos and video clips of the famously fashionable.  Comparison shopping engines — which aggregate different brands and labels at one shopping site – often feature not only search-by-image capabilities to visitors; but some also offer interactive video features for “virtual try-on,” on-the-fly color changes, or matching up clothing separates into new ensembles. 

Video Mashups.  Now a collaboration among Yahoo! Video, Huffington Post political news site and online magazine Slate offers the tools, video clips and access to users who search, create and edit their own video newscasts. These user-created video mashups are set up to provide individualized Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate Videos. However, the video tools’ application to product marketing, search and e-Commerce is only a matter of time. Salon e-Magazine and Huffington Post web site worked with a long list of user-submitted debate questions for presidential candidates, which were asked and videotaped via TV personalities Charlie Rose and Bill Maher, as multiple Democratic Presidential Candidates answered at length. This front-end production of the video clip information base eliminated middle men typical of TV broadcast debates: No pundits, No moderators, No show producers, and No short time clocks or forced sound-byte answers. Enter Yahoo! Video, which stores the scannable video clips and offers Yahoo’s web-based video editing tool called “Jumpcut.” Site visitors select the questions and issues in which they are most interested; pull video clip answers; and digitally cut-n-paste together their own candidate debate tape, including editing out windbags, rambling and repetitive replies! 

Voila! Personalized debate video mashups. Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling noted that this new video widget from Yahoo! allows people to compare interviews and candidate positions “side-by-side on issues of concern. Sort of like online comparison shopping.”  Outside of informed citizenship and individually edited political debate, there are practical and commercial marketing applications for this video editing tool kit.  Eric Cho, in a recent Search Engine Marketing Hints, tried to prepare for the leap from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 applications. Cho speculated that we finally accepted the “old” Web 2.0 innovations of human editors and the influence of social sites, over what he calls “traditional SEO, where we manipulate keywords, get links, submit to directories, etc.” Then comes the latest Killer App, video, which Cho calls the booming media avenue. Cho’s predictions: We’re watching TV; watching our families, friends and social groups; and communicating online, rather than over telephones (landline, cellular of VoIP). And we’re doing all of this via video fed through one single device.   “There will definitely be a big evolution with video search and Video SEO and PPC in the coming years,” says Eric Cho. Blame it on the next killer app: video.

As with all things in life, SEO pro’s have to start out somewhere.  No one just wakes up one day and knows everything there is to know about SEO.  Mastery takes a lot of time, so those of you new to SEO shouldn’t fret.  That being said, newbies should still take special care not to make certain mistakes that could potentially undermine their own marketing efforts.  While the following list of SEO mistakes is by no means comprehensive, I still feel that it’s a good start. 

Mistake #1: Optimizing For Obscure, Long-tail Keywords
Ok, so you rank fairly high for “best search engine optimization company in Smalltown, USA”, but so what?  If no one actually takes the time to conduct such a search then your optimization for that particular phrase is pretty useless, isn’t it?  The trick is to take advantage of the many research tools that are currently on the market.  These tools can help you discern which keywords people are actually entering into the engine query boxes and therefore give you a better understanding of which words your site should be targeting.  Once you’ve discovered which keywords are most popular for your particular industry, go ahead and focus on those for your site.  That way you’ll actually get decent traffic from your optimization efforts.    

Mistake #2: Focusing Solely On the Homepage
It’s imperative that you don’t neglect your internal pages because more than likely visitors to your site will arrive there not by the homepage, but by one of these internal pages.  You should think of these pages as being just as important as the homepage itself because they are more often than not the gateways to your main site.  Make sure that each page has its own title, headers and content and that each page can stand alone as a good representation of your company and site.  Also, it’s important that each and every page is easily navigable and provides access to your homepage and other pages.  You don’t want your visitors getting lost because that will only frustrate them and cause your click-through rate to go up.

Mistake #3: Too Much Attention To Meta Tags
Once upon a time, long long ago in the magical world of SEO, meta tags were an integral part of any SEO campaign.  However times have changed and that fairytale has long been over.  Meta tags aren’t that important anymore when it comes to optimization because they were abused to death in the past.  They affect rankings very little, if at all, these days.  The only thing they’re really good for in this day and age is showing what a page will be about in the SERPs.  For this reason they should not be disregarded altogether.  But it’s unwise to give meta tags too much attention when there are other more important things to be focusing on.

Mistake #4: Disregarding Bounce-Rate When Looking at Site Traffic
It’s really easy to get over-excited about high volumes of Internet traffic, but if you’re focusing too much on numbers and not enough on analysis, you could be causing problems for yourself.  You can get tons of traffic all day long, but if your visitors aren’t sticking around and checking out your other pages, then what’s the point?  That’s why it’s very important to consider bounce rate when analyzing traffic rates.  Bounce rate tells you how many people are clicking links to your site but aren’t staying around long enough to convert.  If you see that a very high percentage of your visitors are bailing after visiting only one page then there must be something seriously wrong and you should be looking into it right away.  Experiment with ways to keep visitors wanting more.  It’s a lot easier to make site changes that’ll keep visitors lingering and viewing other pages than it is to optimize a site allover again for brand new visitors. 

Mistake #5: Believing That In-bound Links are the End-All, Be-All
Getting in-bound links is important because it helps search engine spiders find your site so that it can be indexed and ranked, but it’s not the only way to optimize your site and it can certainly be overdone.  If you have too many poor-quality, spammy-looking links pointed to your site, you make rank high for a short time, but you’ll ultimately tank in the SERPs.  Make sure you use legal, white-hat linking strategies and that you look at it as a piece of the SEO pie—not the end all. 
 

Much has been written about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques by numerous different search engine experts, so it’s only natural that many of these tenacious myths occur at regular intervals.  Here are 5 misconceptions I have noticed with pretty high frequency:
 
1. Submitting my Website to search engines will bring me visitors.
Submitting your Website to search engines doesn’t automatically bring visitors to your site.  If your Website isn’t optimized for the search engines, chances are that it won’t be listed at all, and if it is, it’s probably somewhere at position 4,379 and beyond. You must make sure that your Website is optimized for your important keywords before submitting it to search engines.  Otherwise, you’re wasting your precious time and money.

2. I must submit my Website to 1,500 search engines.
There are only about 5 important international search engines and the same amount of country specific search engines that will bring you 99% of your search engine visitors.  Therefore, it’s utterly pointless to submit your site to 1,500 “search engines”.  Most of these sites aren’t search engines at all but rather free for all link pages that do nothing more than add your email address to a spam list.  Focus on the major search engines that Web surfers actually frequent.

Apart from that, if your Website has many incoming links, you don’t have to submit it at all.  Search engines are able to find your site automatically through the links and they’ll give it a higher value than a directly submitted page because other people linked to it.

3. META tags will improve my search engine ranking.
Most search engines don’t use the META Keywords tag anymore to determine the ranking of a Website because they’ve been abused too much in the past with the purpose of tricking search engines.  But the META Description tag is still useful because its description will be displayed on the query result page of some search engines.  Adding any other META tags like the META Author tag, the META Copyright tag, or the META Language tag means nothing to the major search engines so it isn’t worth your time.

4. Cloaking or doorway pages will get me a high ranking.
Techniques such as using hidden content, cloaking or doorway pages used to work for some time and some techniques might still work on some engines.  Sooner or later though, all major search engines will recognize these techniques as spam.  As soon as they find out that you’re trying to trick them, your site will likely get in trouble and may possibly be banned for a long, long time.

5. Search engine optimization is not as good as traditional advertising.
Actually, the opposite is true.  People who find your site through search engines are usually active and ready to buy.  Search engine traffic is very qualified because your visitors performed searches with a purpose when they found your site.  Search engine leads can be more targeted and more valuable than traditional media advertising methods. 

If done correctly, optimizing your site for high search engine rankings is perhaps the most cost-effective advertising method for your business.  Therefore it’s essential to make sure that your site is optimized for search engines and that it has many incoming links.
If your Website is good in these two areas, you’ll get many targeted visitors from search engines and other web sites without submitting your site to the search engines even once.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately reading about landing page optimization. What to do, what not to do, various factors, etc. Based on my research, here are a few factors to keep in mind when working on designing and improving your landing pages:

1) Keep Focused on Your Primary Objective
When writing your copy, laying out your landing page and considering multiple call-to-actions, keep your primary objective in mind at all times. You want to avoid placing strong emphasis on any secondary calls-to-action that draw visitor attention away from the primary objective. In addition, multiple call-to-actions (e.g. offers) can confuse visitors and lead to high drop-off rates.

2) Choose a Clear and High Visibility Headline Placement
Not only is it important to carefully craft your headline, it’s also important to select a highly visible location for your headline on the landing page. Always keep the headline relevant to the primary objective and connect the main text and headline to what visitors are specifically seeking. Don’t make it difficult or too metaphorical. Simple typically beats crafty.

3) Present the Call-to-Action Clearly and Vibrantly Right on the Landing Page
If your primary objective involves filling out a registration form or any other information gathering/search-related call-to-action, place the form clearly on the landing page in a prime real estate location. Draw attention to it via color, images and text. The use of white space is critical because you want visitors to feel at ease with completing the form. Don’t make it feel like a burden with long forms and with information fields that don’t appear relevant to the visitor’s main intent for being on the landing page; You can always get other information later on if you really need it.

4) Reduce Navigational Links
In most cases (e-commerce sites may be the main exception) the less navigational links the better. If you do use navigational links they should be call-to-actions that take the visitors to a second page with a new registration form (or related call-to-action) and some additional detail directly related to the alternative call-to-action link. These links keep the visitor on track with fulfilling your primary objective and help provide some research (e.g. customer insight) about what your main landing page content should focus on.

5) Use Crisp, Eye-attracting Images
Creating highly effective landing pages can be time-consuming to design and develop because of the high-quality images they employ. Landing pages that use crisp images, excellent visual hierarchy and strong relevant photos connect quickly with visitors. Relevant means being directly related to the visitors’ reasons for visiting your website in the first place.

These are just a few landing page optimization factors. Just like designing any new creative, it takes time and knowledge to get it right in a way that produces powerful results. Remember, always be sure to test potential factors to see what works best for your visitors in achieving your primary objectives.

Good luck to you on your landing page optimization!