Practical Ecommerce Web Marketing

…and why you don’t need it anyways (since it is has been “removed”)

[Advanced topic]

As you may have heard, Google decided to drop the displaying of “supplemental index” as they improve their search engine. This was a useful tool to many of us, however, there are workarounds, and key points to remembered so that you can live without it.

Most importantly, you should note that the SERPS have not changed, only the fact that the phrase “supplemental index” is not gone. In short, simply look at your bottom pages, and begin to decipher why they might be there. This is the only guide on the web that covers ALL reported aspects of what causes the supplemental index:

1. Insufficient content
   1. Try to have a few paragraphs (50+ words)
2. Duplicate, irrelevant, or long TITLE tags
   1. Each page should have a unique tag that labels that page. Be sure content in title appears on page.
3. Duplicate, irrelevant, or long META tags
   1. Same as previous. This also includes duplicates of keywords within the single tag.
4. Orphaned pages
   1. Create some internal or get some inbound links
5. Long URL’s
   1. Shorten them, otherwise they look spammy
6. Pages that are TOO bloated with keywords
   1. lower your keyword density

Unverified

1. Duplicate content
   1. Need I say more? Don’t have the same content on multiple pages on your site, or copy entire pages from other sites.
2. Links from bad neighborhoods.

Thee funny thing is, none of these individual pieces are really new for many of us, just good practices that you should be following in the first place.

To get out of the supplemental index, you have a few options to try (besides fixing the aforementioned problems):

1. Submit a Google sitemap
2. Get inbound links to those pages, or links from your homepage. “Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index.” Adam – Google rep (from Google webmaster forums).
3. As a last resort, move the pages, using 301 redirects, to new page names—not recommended in mass.
4. You can request that Google remove the pages completely, but re-inclusion for those pages can take 6 months.

”Beware: Once removed from our index, the pages will STAY removed for 6 months and won’t be re-included during that time, so remove carefully
(and only use this tool if absolutely necessary). “ – Adam

I am surprised to see how many sites are stuck in limbo because of common mistakes like these. Supplemental index is history.

I always like to shamelessly promote myself: Veracart, our hosted ecommerce solution, avoids all of these problems by default, assuming you put in sufficient, unique, non-spammy products descriptions. SEO rule #1: Just be natural and inform people well, and stop trying to trick the search engines.

Verango = Satisfactory rating

One of the fastest and easiest ways to find out about a company you plan on doing business with is to check with the local Better Business Bureau (BBB). Too many people end up going with shady companies, losing lots of money and time as a result. We are surprised by how many people do not check a company before doing business with them.

Here are some tips on how you can use the BBB to your best advantage:

Listed-yes/no ?

Obviously if the company has no listing at all, then they are very small and do not have enough feedback for you to know whether they are reputable; or perhaps they are not a real company at all.

Complaints Ratio

While a big company such as Wal-Mart or Honda may have thousands of complaints that may be miniscule compared to the total number of customers they have. Smaller companies will have fewer complaints relatively. Personally, I would not choose a company with worse than a 1% complaint rate. Here, we have a total complaint rate of about 1/10th of 1%, all of which so far have been resolved as satisfactory. Not every transaction is perfect, nor can a company make every client happy. In fact, you may soon discover that some customers will go as far as falsifying information.

Complaints Resolved

Has the company taken the time to resolve complaints? Do they give reasonable answers? How did the customer respond back? This can often be the most thorough way to rate a company.

Overall BBB Rating

There are basically two statuses that the BBB gives to a business: satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Basically if a company attempts to resolve most issues in a professional and legal way, they will have a satisfactory rating. Unsatisfactory ratings indicates lack of response by a company to complaints, unsatisfactory responses, and unusual volume of complaints, recent legal troubles, or scummy sales practices.

Quoting the BBB:

“A business identified in our report as satisfactory has, based on Bureau files, been in business for at least one year, and has voluntarily provided the Bureau with all information requested about the business and its product or service. If any complaints have been received about the business, their number has not been considered by the BBB to be extreme, given the nature of the company’s business and the volume of business transacted. Complaints are also generally typical of what might be expected for this type of business.
A business stated to be satisfactory has not been the subject of any recent law enforcement actions concerning its dealings with the public. If the business has been contacted by the BBB about its advertising or selling claims, it has modified or substantiated its practices to the Bureau’s satisfaction. In addition, the BBB has a clear understanding of the company’s business, and the business is not in an industry which has raised significant marketplace concerns”

“The mention of complaints in a BBB report is not necessarily negative. The finest businesses get complaints. Look for statements about the causes of the complaints and if the complaints are being resolved. When considering complaint information, please take into account the company’s size and volume of transactions, and understand that the nature of complaints and a firm’s responses to them are often more important than the number of complaints.”

While the BBB is the most professional resource for checking out a company, simply using the web may also give you a picture. Again, many of the same rules apply, expect for the fact that in many cases a company cannot defend themselves directly in such cases. I have found it useful in looking for common trends in the types of complaints a company receives, such as “ ‘xyz company’ has a long history locking customers funds in their bank/merchant accounts. “

So the customer is not always right as you will find, especially for those handful that stretch the truth, are mislead, or outright falsify information—in fact, since a company can receive thousands of complaints, all of which can be under public scrutiny, it seems to me that a company would really go out of there way to make a customer happy—the opposite however is not true—there is no database of shoppers/customers, and therefore no incentive for them to submit quality feedback on a company. The exception here is sites like eBay, but you get the idea.

We are proud to support the BBB !

Being CAN-SPAM compliant is only a small piece of the email marketing battle. The rest of it is deliverability, which is often based on things such as reputation (they keep track of the quality of your email over time), and whitelisting (putting you on their safe-list). The problem is, every major ISP out there today has their own such rules for accepting email (including bulk email), and classifying the rest as SPAM. Managing email for anywhere over a few hundred/thousand emails could easily equal a full time job, and of course the cost savings are much greater by outsourcing it to a company that specializes in email marketing with high deliverability.

• The official guide from the FTC
• In depth details, more of a step-by-step guide, on how to actually do it
• Microsoft (Hotmail) for example has their own guidelines here, some of which is pretty deep stuff for a lay-person; but as you may have guessed every major ISP (AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, Gmail, etc..) will have their own set of guidelines. I tend to follow the big few, and hope to solve most deliverability problems with the smaller ones as well

The fact is, no matter how well you setup and maintain your email marketing, it will not all get through. For example, a little over a year ago, Lyris, one of the most expensive (not necessarily the best) email marketing services around, reported that overall, Gmail only accepted 79.1% of commercial email, with another 16% being delivered to the recipients spam box. See the full report here

The funny thing is, some companies out there claim a deliverability rate of 99%+. In an upcoming article, I will discuss the “best in class” email marketing companies out there, based on some detailed research, along with some inside information about these companies, and how not to get ripped off in the process. I will also go into more depth about various do-it-yourself options as well.

A lot of people have written how they doubled, tripled, their sales. But I am going to tell you about one of our customers, the largest harry potter fan site on the web, increased their orders 33-tuple (compared to previous 6 months).

Screenshot of hits (since I can’t show you actual order info)

It was quite simple actually, yet I never knew it could be so dramatic. Their call-to-action was irresistibly urgent. You see, Warner Brothers took them over as of this month. The point is, they announced on their site a couple of months ago that they would no longer be carrying the Harry Potter products because of the acquisition. Like black magic, the orders began to snowball. It makes me wonder how sites like Woot do with their urgent calls.

Whether its a 1-day-sale, or seasonal product, urgency pretty much falls into the fact that something is limited, and therefore scarce:

LIMITED TIME (e.g. Today only)
LIMITED AVAILABILITY : (e.g. Limited to first 100 buyers)
LIMETED OFFER: (e.g. get a free item thrown in)

Combination of the above: “This weekend only, we will be selling 500 edition limited prints.” Maybe throw in a discount too if that helps.

One qualm I have with things like “Limited to first 100 buyers” is all the people that buy thereafter, pay full price, and then want a refund because they didn’t make the deal in time; I believe there are better ways.

My point is, can you find existing ways to drive your shoppers to action? Okay, be genuine, and not be cheesy like “Expire offers today at midnight,” and that message is there every day; and/or other similar tactics. Urgency alone won’t help something people don’t want in the first place. You will just end up with returns.

I would like to hear your story out there about a urgency related, call-to-action (Call-to-action: Your invitation to cause people to want to act upon some specific task) that has resulted in incredible results.

Or in other words, how this site/page can help you best. Maybe this doesn’t sound 100% on topic to this blog, but the reason this is my first article is because I want you to subscribe to my blog in the coolest way possible.

I am always surprised by how many people I run into all the time that are still like “what is RSS ?” And at the same time, so many websites make it difficult to understand. You could just bookmark this page, but how are you going to know when it gets updated with a new article/post? You see, using RSS gives you a lot more power to keep track of things, and maybe even have your reader notify you via email or a pop-up in your computer’s system tray (depending on the reader you are using). Using RSS is very cool and hard to avoid on the web these days–and ultimately it could make your life a tad easier.

How it helps you: Instead of running all over the web for news, updates, etc… you can have the web come to you. It’s sort of your own personal news service. Let’s say, you like to read the New York Times, business section, and you also like to read about high performance car articles from Car and Driver Magazine. Additionally, you like to read a few blogs out there that you are a fan of. So, you just go to your RSS reader, and then you would see all updates from all of those different sites, all on your single page–you see, it’s your own portal to the web. Readers in Internet Explorer and Firefox look just like your bookmarks, except they now update on their own, whenever new info is available.

Here is a screenshot of the RSS reader in Firefox (it’s there by default, no setup required):

As you can see in this example, my bookmarks show the latest news, automatically. If I click on any of those bookmarks, then I will end up at the site so that I can read the full news article.

As you can see, it’s very time sensitive, or time oriented information that RSS really is used for the most. But even sites like Ebay and Amazon often let you subscribe to RSS feeds to watch certain products and product updates.

But how do you setup an RSS reader, or should I say subscribe to an RSS feed ? It’s easy even for most people that are afraid of the internet and other crazy technologies.

If you use Internet Explorer (the blue “E”) to get online and browse the internet, then you can read it here on Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/
In short, any site you are visiting, you should see a little orange symbol in your browsers toolbar somewhere.

If you use Firefox, then try this to get started (they call theirs “Live Bookmarks”):
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html

Most email clients/programs like Outlook (2007), Eudora, and Thunderbird have readers built into them (use their documentation to learn how).

If you use Google Desktop, there is one there that even notifies you, or even your Google/MSN/Yahoo homepage can all be customized to show RSS feeds too–as you can see, plenty of options.

There are also plenty of other free (and commercial) programs out there–unavoidable these days. You can do a Google search, or a search on Download.com for “RSS reader” or “RSS aggregator” or “news aggregator.” But I would really count on most of the ones I mentioned previously, especially the ones that can auto-notify you.

Now, in another blog entry, I will talk about how to setup your own RSS for your own website and such. IF you run a blog using Blogger or any other blogging tool, you will see that it is already built in and ready to go.