How Google Lists Search Results

Matt Cutt's from Google's webspam team talks about the anatomy of a search result and gives some useful tips on how you can help improve how your site appears in Google's results pages.

This talk covers everything you'll see in a search result, including page title, page description, and sitelinks, and explains those other elements that can appear, such as stock quotes, cached pages links, and more.

Matt uses Starbuck's Coffee website as an example.



The sound quality is a little fuzzy to begin with but stick with it for some useful tips and advice. More information can be found on the Google Webmaster Blog.

Google Webmaster Tools

We have all heard of Google Webmaster Tools, a great resource from Google that helps drive traffic to your website.

Google Webmaster Tools is a one stop shop for webmaster resources helps you enhance and increase traffic to your website and connect you with your visitors. You can:

• Improve website traffic
• Submit your content to Google
• Check out the Webmaster Central Blog
• Learn more about your site
• Enhance your site's functionality
• Get Help From Webmasters Help Centre
  

Webmaster Tools can have a positive impact on visitor numbers and sales on your website. For example, you can find out:

• Crawl info - View URLs that Google may have trouble crawling and fix any problem accordingly.
• Robots.txt file validation: See if Google is having trouble with your file and carry out any test before changing it.
• Website content: View the top web pages from your site and see the words that other sites use to link to them.
• Top keyword searches : Find the top queries that drive traffic to your site and where your site is included in the search results. This will allow you to learn how users are finding your site.
• Indexed information: See how often your website is indexed and which of your pages are included in the index.

The Keyword search tool is one of the most valuable features in webmaster tools. It allows you to see and what search terms are driving traffic to your website and also highlights the position of your webpages on the search engines as this example indicates.

We do use webmaster tools on behalf of clients and have to admit that it does help in maximising the potential of their websites online through increased traffic, sales and ROI.

Another reason to drop by Google Webmaster Tools is the price. Its free!

Site Search Reporting & Event Tracking - New From Google Analytics

The Google Analytics team has just announced recent updates to their software that will be rolled out over the next few months.

Two of the new Google Analytics features include:

1. Site Search Reporting
2. Event Tracking

Site Search Reporting
Google Analytics currently offers you the opportunity to track what your visitors are searching for and where these searches lead. The new Site Search Reports will offer even more information and will be located under the content section of Google Analytics reporting software.

They will:

• Identify the keywords and search refinement keywords visitors use within your website.
• Highlight the website pages from which visitors begin and end their searches on your website.
• See how search on your website affects areas such as site usage, conversion rates and e-commerce activity.

This will be useful information to know, as the findings will allow you to update and change your website to be much more visitor or consumer focused.

If you don’t have a search facility on your website then have a look at Google Custom Search. Custom Search allows you to host a Google search box on your own website - follow this link to find out more – Google Custom Search

Event Tracking
The Event tracking reports will help website owners understand how visitors use and interact with multimedia aspects of their websites i.e. areas such as flash, java scripts, Ajax and video.

This again will allow you to find out whether theses types of applications offer value to your visitors, whether you need them or if indeed your visitors to notice of them at all.

The Event Tracking application has a new tracking module called ‘ga.js’ which will have to be installed on your website. The event tracking addition is still being tested and available only to visitors who attended the recent eMetrics Summit.

More information on these and other changes can be found on the Google Analytics Blog.

Make Way for the Google Gadget!

Google has embarked on its next paid for advertising program and launched today the Google Ad Gadget.

Google Gadget Ads take the form of ‘mini’ websites that allow companies to market and promote their products or services on the Google Content Network. These ads offer an alternative to what Google already has in place and will compete with other ad formats such as text, image and video ads offers.

Advertisers will have the opportunity of two payment models - Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per A Thousand Impressions (CPM) and will bid for keywords to place their gadget ads within Google’s network in the same way they do for Google AdWords and Google Website Targeting.

What is the Google Gadget?

The Google Gadget is a widget that allows advertisers the opportunity to display videos or trailers to tell a story and include RSS feeds that can be continually updated.

Visitors will have the opportunity to download the widget to their desktop or add them to other websites such as blogs. That in essence virally markets the widget for the advertisers i.e. free advertising. Also, you do not even have to visit the advertiser’s website and can read and watch everything within the Gadget itself!

In the example below, a user can watch the trailer directly within the gadget and at the bottom of the gadget, there are links entitled 'Chain of Events' that allow the user to read up on how events transpired and led on from one another. There is also a link to an RSS feed on selected stories concerning the advertiser.

All of this can be updated by the advertiser so your gadget can always be kept up to date and you only pay for your advertising costs and not your update costs. Obviously there are clear benefits for advertisers and marketers as the minute they update the media that makes up the gadget, these changes are immediately available to consumers on the advertising platforms you are using.

Click on the links at the top and the bottom as they appear:

The Google Gadget is currently still being tested and is not available to all Google AdWords Advertisers as it is currently in beta. However, Google did many test in the summer with a number of selected AdWords advertisers so the tool should be here soon for everyone.

This is an excellent new tool for marketers and something that big businesses will no doubt be embracing. The Google Gadget website has lots of interesting information on how to get started, tutorials and a Google Gadget Editor (a development tool that helps you build test and validate your ads).

For more information, please visit Google Gadget Ads

Google AdWords - Does The Highest Bidder Win?

Google AdWords provides each of your keyword phrases within your accounts a unique ‘quality score’.

This quality score is assigned to each keyword phrase and is calculated by a number of deciding factors including:

• your keywords phrase
• the bid amounts (cost per click)
• the relevancy to the ad group and if it is aligned to a users search.

The quality score for each of you keywords can be viewed by selecting customise columns on your relevant Google AdWords account. Select quality score from the drop down menu, example below.

The quality score is important as according to Google, it actively influences and determines your Ads position on Google's search networks. Therefore, it makes sense to consider the quality score guidelines from Google and follow them accordingly as the higher your score, the more prominent your ad position will be.

This is an interesting concept that has been introduced by Google and logically it makes sense. Ads with a good quality score along with other ‘relevant’ ads will appear on Google and its search partner network that are clearly attributed to what the searcher is looking for. Pay Per Click ads that are the most relevant will tend to achieve a higher position and be clicked on more often as a result of this initiative from Google.

Quality Score Criteria
Google AdWords uses a number of criteria to assign your quality score the main components of quality score are listed below (provided by Google AdWords) for information.

For calculating a keyword's minimum bid:

• The keyword's click-through rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
• The relevance of the keyword to its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
  

For calculating a keyword-targeted ad's position on a search result page:

• The matched keyword's CTR on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
• The relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query

For calculating a keyword-targeted ad's eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad's position on that site:

• The ad's past performance on this and similar sites
• The quality of your landing page

For determining if a site-targeted ad will appear on a particular site:

• The quality of your landing page
  

Google AdWords will use this information to position your ads accordingly. So with this information in mind, its not just about being the highest bidder any longer. it is about doing a little homework to ensure that your keyword phrases, adverts and landing pages are all relevant to the product or service you are trying to promote to your consumer base.

Or is it?

Google AdWords Quality Score - Improvement to the Top Ad Placement Formula
To confuse us all a little further, Google will be changing and in theory improving how ‘high quality’ ads are picked for the top position in the sponsored search results. These changes will take place in a few week time and they are designed to improve the ‘quality’ of ads even further and to provide us with more control in our attempts to achieve the top positions.

Much of the criteria we have already mentioned will remain; however, Google will introduce new 'formula' that will look at ‘price’ i.e. your actual Cost Per Click. Google will now consider your maximum per click bid which you set at the outset of your campaign i.e. Information From Google :

Actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers below you. This means that your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. By considering your ad’s maximum CPC, a value you set, you will have more control over achieving top ad placement

Therefore, in theory, according to Google, if you have a quality written advert and increase your maximum Cost Per Click, you will have more control in achieving the top positions for desired key word phrases. However, you will only pay the minimum price and not you’re maximum price for these top spots.

Sounds a little to good to be true if you ask me? I still think that the high bidders out there and the firms with a little more money than you or i will still rank the highest. Quality Scores and ads are all very well but Google is a business at the end of the day and will want its pound of flesh!

Maybe this is just the cynic in me but hey, hopefully i will be wrong. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Calling all High Bidders..................

Ten Secrets for Pay Per Click Success

Have you been frustrated by the performance of your pay per click campaigns? Here are ten tips to consider to get real results – cutting down unnecessary costs and still reaching your target audience.

1. Consider ALL popular search engines. Yes, Google is by far the most popular in the UK but because of this it is the most competitive. Yahoo and MSN still have their share of UK internet users and are less competitive. Give these a try too.
2. Consider regional advertising rather than national for Google. If you have a product that will appeal to specific regions of the country or if you have a very limited budget then select only one town or county. Your cost per click will be much lower.
3. Include the relevant keywords in your ads. Make sure your ads closely match what the searcher is looking for by creating targeted ad groups. Yes, Google looks at the amount you are willing to pay for top placement, but it also looks at quality. An advertiser can pay less and still get to the top position just because their ad more closely matches what the searcher is looking for.
4. Analyse. Analyse. Closely monitor pay per click campaigns using the free reporting tools available within Google Adsense, MSN, and Yahoo. Also consider an analytics package such as Google Analytics so that you can track which campaigns are generating sales.
5. Choose keywords carefully. Consider choosing the less competitive keyword phrases that really describe your product. There are plenty of free keyword tools out there so take advantage of them.
6. Use appropriate landing pages, rather than the home page. You want to give the potential customer the product or service they want immediately, rather than make them search around your website.
7. Use the advanced tools provided by Google including phrase match, exact match, and negative keywords to eliminate unnecessary clicks. There are excellent online tutorials available if you are unfamiliar with these tools.
8. Have a unique selling point? Display it in your listing to ensure that you stand out over your competitors. Give your customers a reason to click on your ad instead of the others. However, be careful about lying or making grandiose statements, as customers won’t buy if you make promises you can’t keep.
9. Tweak. Tweak. Tweak. Analyse your reports and try some the following:
   1. change the ads that aren’t performing
   2. Remove keywords that are generating traffic, but not sales.
   3. Try a few new keywords.
   4. Ensure that you keep a record of any changes and their impact
10. Focus your campaign. If you have hundreds of products concentrate your pay per click marketing on just a few products rather than adopting a blanket approach. A small campaign is much easier to manage at the start.

Increase Sales Through MySpace?

Want to tap into the myspace community and create your own company page? This social marketing site should certainly be considered as part of the Internet Marketing mix for companies wishing to build relationships with young consumers. However, winning friends in this community can be difficult especially for traditional companies that may be thought of as “uncool” by the young myspace crowd.

Musicians, artists, and celebrities all gather huge numbers of friends on myspace, as their talents can easily be showcased using the website, but how does a more traditional, less sexy company get in on the action?

There are certain types of companies that seem to be a more natural fit in the myspace community. Trendy brands like Redbull, or Mini appeal to the young myspace community and are likely to win friends. Popular nightclubs, shops, and restaurants would all easily have success. Charities have lots of young supporters who will be happy to provide their backing through myspace.

The key to success on myspace is to write good content. This content should be creative, unusual – off the wall – anything to get people talking about your company.

This content should provide either (a) some information that the myspace community would find useful or (b) just simply entertain them by providing unusual videos or animated games for example. Offering friends on myspace some sort of discount or promotion is another way of getting noticed.

Companies that currently use informative and entertaining content to win friends on myspace include:

*
Apple – the company created 3 separate Myspace pages to market the IPOD Nano range – green, blue, and pink. Apple has been using social networking effectively to market itself on other sites, including Facebook, where the company offered 10 million free itunes samplers to friends on the site.
*
Wendy’s – the American fast food chain created a character called “Smart” for the Myspace community. Smart is a 28 year old male from New York who is “square”. He likes all things square and “has no hair”. Smart has 67055 friends on Myspace. Check out http://www.myspace.com/wendysquare
*
Proctor and Gamble – the company tries to be more subtle about promoting their “Secret Body Spray” by focusing their myspace page on pop star, Rihanna and peppering the text with references to the “Secret Body Spray” tour. Rihanna mentions her favourite scent of body spray – Vanilla and also promotes their full range of scents from Peach Shimmer to Tropical Radiance. Secret body spray has over 31,000 friends in the Myspace community.

Objections have been voiced by consumer groups because it is difficult to tell the difference between a genuine member and a marketer. Fooling potential customers may win you friends in the short term, but consumers value honesty and it is best for companies to come clean about who they are and what they are promoting.

Creating a simple ugly page with basic company information on myspace won’t do your company any favours. If you are willing to put in some time and effort however myspace offers a tremendous marketing opportunity that your company can’t ignore.

Myspace is not right for everyone – especially businesses that sell to the B2B market. For the business to business market you may want to consider other social marketing sites where the focus is more on business relationships. For example www.linkedin.com is a popular medium for business networks amongst others.

Help the Search Engines Index Your Website Site Maps

We can now make it even easier for search engines to index our webpages through our website site maps by adding a simple line of text to the robots txt file within our code. You can now specify the location of the sitemap using the robots.txt file by simply adding the following line to it:

Search engines supporting the sitemap protocol will be able to retrieve the sitemap and process the web pages you want indexed accordingly. Search engines that currently use this process include Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.

Site Map Creation Tool
Visit the following website to access a free online website site map tool that creates a txt, xml or html site map for you for free (restricted to 500 urls) - XML-Sitemaps

All protocols regarding website sitemaps can be found at the following location – Sitemaps.org

For information - follow this link to read what we said about website site maps in December of last year - Website Sitemaps - Google, Yahoo & MSN

Online Marketing Budgets Set to Increase by 25%.

The Online Marketing 2007 Survey has predicted clear growth in online marketing with online budgets set to increase by 25%.

Online and Digital Marketing continues to grow with online budgets increasing by up to 25% in the coming year. One in five respondents from the survey said that they now spend more than half their total marketing budget online and agencies look set to benefit with 47% of respondents saying they plan to hire a digital agency in the next year, up 7% on last years results.

Growth Areas
With the traditional areas of search, banner advertising and email dominating the majority of online spend over the past twelve months you could be forgiven for thinking that some of the innovation of the online channel had slipped away. However, the survey found that 44% of respondents cited social media as a growth area, 42% cited the mobile arena and 36% said that SEO was going to be the growth channel of the next twelve months.

The growth of social media marketing is particularly strong in the travel and public sectors with 66% and 60% of respondents in those areas naming it as the biggest growth sector. Marketing agencies have got their eye on the mobile market with 65% citing mobile as the biggest growth area for them, but the financial sector still sees its strength in traditional areas with 47% of respondents naming search and 41% naming email as key growth areas.

This information contained in this article was taking from Online Marketing 07 Survey Results. To read the article in full, please follow this link - Online Marketing 07 Survey

View Your Website Through The Eyes of Your Customers

We have all heard of the saying that web page content is king and its true to say that having quality and new content on your web pages does help you achieve better rankings in the search engines. However, its better to go a step further by making sure you optimise page content and imagery to tie into how your website visitors actually scan your web pages for information.

Increase conversions by putting content or images in the places where the visitors are most likely to see it. Visitors’ eyes normally work from the left side of the page to the centre, following a predictable pattern. Meeting your clients browsing expectations by placing information where they expect to see it will turn them into ‘buyers’ as opposed to ‘browsers’.

For example, below is an image that highlights how most visitors to a website view a specific page when browsing. As you can see, the areas that are in yellow and red are the key areas that they may notice, while the blue colours are the sections that the human eye tends to ignore.

This is interesting in itself and should highlight the need for you test your website to find out if the important information is where your potential customers will find it.

Google Website Optimiser

Help is at hand with a new product from Google that aims to help you increase conversion rate and improve the overall visitor experience. The Google Website Optimizer allows you to test different versions of your site content so that you may determine what will best attract users and lead them to buy on your site.

You will need a Google AdWords account to use the Google webpage optimiser but the actual tracking software scripts are available free from Google.

So to summarise, by testing different versions of your site content, you can determine what will best attract users and lead them to buy from your site. Something for all of us to consider.

The image used in this article was supplied by Marketing Sherpa with Eyetools, Ecommerce Eye Tool Year 2, Internal Search & Navigation Study – January 2007

Women are taking control of the web

A recent study by Nielsen/NetRatings has revealed that women are embracing the Internet at an even faster rate than their male counterparts. Young women in the 18 - 34 age group are now the most dominant group of Internet users – comprising 18% of all the users online in Britain. They also spend 27% more time online than their male counterparts.

This study will encourage online retailers who are selling products aimed at this age group and also encourage others to offer products that appeal to this young female market.

Further studies have even more key information that may help online businesses tap into this important consumer group. In a report by eMarketer, they state that women have been traditionally more cautious than males when it comes to buying products online. However web retailers have been working to alleviate these concerns by offering more flexible return policies and offering better images of the merchandise and this is having a large impact on increasing sales from women buyers.

In a shopsmart online poll of US women they found that there were certain items that women were hesitant to buy online. Food topped the list with 17% of women unwilling to buy these items online, followed by clothing (14%), shoes (8%), and jewellery (7%). However this does not mean that these products are destined for failure. It just means that online retailers of jewellery for example will need to ensure that their website is designed in such a way that allays the fears of women and provides a shopping experience that is appealing to this customer group.

In fact, clothing and jewellery are among a list of the fastest growing retail categories so there is evidence to suggest that online retailers have learned their lessons and have designed websites that appeal to these clients.

So, when trying to appeal to this large base of women buyers what should you keep in mind?

Women and men prefer different web design styles: Researchers at the UK's University of Glamorgan have identified many differences in the website design preferences of men and women.

Men prefer:

* Straight lines and shapes

* Simpler and darker colour schemes

* Formal or expert language with few abbreviations

* Images featuring motion

Women prefer:

* Rounded forms

* Brighter and more complex colour schemes

* Casual language and tone

* Informal photographs

University of Glamorgan also identified that female web designers were more likely to design a website that appealed to women than their male counterparts. It may be controversial, but if you really want a website that is appealing to women the University study shows that you should get a woman to design it.

In another interesting article, Gender Marketing Web Design Differences, Joseph Carrabis discusses a few more gender differences. He says that women want to know more initially than a man does and this should have an impact on the way a site is designed. The home page and other popular landing pages of a website should catch a woman’s attention right away or she will not consider looking further. Men are more willing to explore the whole website if the information is not provided immediately.

Retailers should keep in mind these differences if they truly want to succeed online.

For further information on gender differences online read the following articles:

Gender Marketing Web Design Differences
University of Glamorgan – Key website research highlights gender bias
BBC – Young women dominate UK net scene

What's New In Google Analytics?

Google has recently updated its excellent free web analytics package to provide us with even more useful measures and reporting for our websites. The new set-up and interface is great and is an improvement to what we had previously, which was already very useful. The new interface however is much more intuitive, with easy to understand graphical images and help screens. We recommend Google Analytics to anyone that requires in depth reporting on their website and the new version is very user friendly.

Report Changes
There have been a few changes to the export reporting function that are worth a look. These include the ability to now export reports in PDF Format, which show not only the figures, but the graphical representation of information. Users now have the choice to report in PDF, XML, CSV or TSV formats.

Receive Reports by Email
Users can set-up reports to be emailed to colleagues and clients on daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly manner and in whatever format they want i.e. PDF, XML, CSV or TSV.

To check out an example of the new Analytics reporting, please click on the link below to be taken to a graphical PDF report of Com.Motion's website traffic sources for the month of May 2007 - Com.Motion Traffic Report.

All in all an excellent upgrade that takes your analytical measurements to the next level. At the moment, the new Google Analytics interface is running alongside the previous one so you will be able to continue to use the older version until July 18th 2007.

For more information on Google Analytics, follow this link - Google Analytics Blog

Let Com.Motion help you with your Analytics, follow this link to find out more - Analytics

To EBay Or Not To EBay – That is the Question!

To EBay Or Not To EBay – That is the Question!
It’s funny. Everyone has heard of eBay and has probably used the website to buy or sell something but not many businesses have really considered its true potential for them. Everyday millions of pounds are made by budding e-bayers selling products online to a global audience, however it is amazing to think that most SMEs and big businesses have not considering eBay as a component of their online sales strategy.

Ebay is a relatively new phenomenon, but the company has taken the web world by storm in a short time. Here are some brief stats:

1. eBay was founded in 1995
2. eBay has a global customer base of 181 million
3. eBay has a global presence in 33 markets including the UK and USA
4. eBay UK was Launched in 1999
5. eBay in the UK’s number one ecommerce website
6. eBay UK has 3 million items listed at any given time
7. eBay UK accounts for 10% of all the time UK users spend on the internet

We could go on and on discussing the merits and stats of eBay, but the one that sticks out for me is number 5: eBay in the UK’s number one ecommerce website!

All ecommerce websites endeavour to get customers through online marketing activity like search engine optimisation and paid for marketing without ever considering a mechanism that is already in place to help them – eBay!

There is a misconception within many businesses that eBay is not for them. However, they should consider these startling statistics:

• Profitable since its launch, eBay net revenues totalled $1.329 billion in Q4-05 and $4.552 billion in 2005.
• eBay International achieved net revenues of $604.1 million in Q4-05 and $2.081 billion in 2005.
• In Q4-05, gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of all successfully closed items on eBay's trading platforms, was $12.0 billion. In 2005, eBay's GMV totalled $44.3 billion.
• eBay users worldwide trade more than $1,511 worth of goods on the site every second.
• There were 546.4 million new listings added to eBay worldwide in Q4-05. At any given time, there are approximately 78 million listings worldwide, and approximately 6 million listings are added per day. eBay users trade in more than 50,000 categories.
• Based on Q4-05 GMV, the following categories delivered $1 billion or more in worldwide annualized GMV: eBay Motors at 13.0 billion; Consumer Electronics at $4.4 billion; Clothing & Accessories at $3.9 billion; Computers at $3.4 billion; Books / Music / Movies at $2.8 billion; Home & Garden at $2.7 billion; Collectibles at $2.6 billion; Sports at $2.2 billion; Toys at $2.1 billion; Jewellery & Watches at $1.9 billion; Business & Industrial at $1.6 billion; Cameras & Photo at $1.5 billion; and Antiques & Art at $1.2 billion.
• While eBay is well-known for its auction format, users can also buy and sell in fixed-price formats, which accounted for 34% of total GMV during Q4-05.
• At the end of Q4-05, eBay hosted approximately 383,000 stores worldwide, with approximately 212,000 stores hosted on the U.S. site and 171,000 stores hosted on eBay's international sites.
• More than 724,000 professional sellers in the U.S. use eBay as a primary or secondary source of income. In addition, 1.5 million individuals sell on eBay to supplement their incomes. (Source: ACNielsen International Research, July 2005)
• As of December 2005, eBay members worldwide have left more than four billion feedback comments for one another regarding their eBay transactions.
• The most expensive item sold on eBay to date is a private business jet for $4.9 million.

Makes interesting reading and begs the question are online product based businesses missing a trick? In our opinion the answer is yes and it about time businesses cottoned on to this fact and started embracing the eBay concept with open arms.

How do you take advantage of eBay?
Millions of listings on eBay more or less look the same and say the same thing. However, by delving a little deeper, you start to unearth some gems that are excellent benchmarks for you or any business to follow. Listed below are 2 eBay considerations:

1. Selling Manager Pro
Selling Manager Pro is an online selling tool to help you create listings, manage post-sale activities and manage your inventory. If you are a volume seller who wants a robust, web-based eBay tool then this is the one for you. It’s cost - £4.99 per month. It will.

• Automatically list and re-list items for you
• Inform buyers by auto notification
• Let you know when payment has been received
• Tell you what items you have shipped
• Provide Auto feedback upon buyer payment
• Allow the scheduling of items
• Offer Reporting
• Allows you to Design Professional Listings
• Restock alerts

This is a fantastic eBay tool that automates much of the information for you and helps you engage and interact with your eBay clients. Everything is controlled from one area and is generally easy to use once you get the hang of it.

The best things about this facility is that it allows you to create professional and business like listings that when displayed on eBay provide a look and feel that can be similar to your company’s website. For example, our client the Funky Group is currently using this facility to list all products with a branded and professional look and feel that mimics the company’s actual website. This has resulted in well over 4 figure sales with over 300 products sold within the first month of going live!

Our tip for this facility is to brand it as your business and to produce something that uniquely reflects you and allows you to stand out from the crowd and at the same time maintain very professional image. Granted there are eBay fees and costs but these are reduced once you start to receive higher volumes of sales. The more you sell the less you pay!

2. EBay Shops
Creating a successful eBay Shop involves four basic steps: building and customising your shop; managing your listings and sales; promoting your Shop; and tracking your shop traffic and sales.

An eBay shop allows you to

• Set up, brand, and customise your shop to maximise success.
• Save time with powerful tools to manage your listings and sales.
• Drive traffic to your shop and trigger repeat purchases from your customers.
• Optimise your sales strategy with advanced reporting tools.

An excellent benchmark for a company that does this well and takes eBay shopping to a new level is online shoe retailer Schuh http://www.schuh.co.uk. This eBay shop is an excellent example of how to do it right and is worth a visit at http://stores.eBay.co.uk/Schuh-Branded-Shoes-Online.

Why is Schuh such a good example? Well for starters, the eBay shop is branded with the Schuh logo and includes professional graphically designed images. Additionally, the eBay shop is very similar to the official Schuh retail website. eBay acts as a tool to promote the Schuh brand, even increasing sales activity on their own official website.

Each individual pair of shoes has 6 images of it taken from varying angles that help highlight and sell the shoes to potential consumers. The Schuh eBay shop works just like a well designed ecommerce website should- with simple navigation to the product of your choice with the main difference being you can bid on the product first before you buy it.

Consider

• eBay hosts approximately 380,000 stores worldwide (2005), with approximately 212,000 stores hosted on the U.S. site and 171,000 stores hosted on eBay's international sites.
• More than 724,000 professional sellers in the U.S. use eBay as a primary or secondary source of income. In addition, 1.5 million individuals sell on eBay to supplement their incomes. (Source: ACNielsen International Research, July 2005)

Still not convinced? We do agree that eBay has certain pitfalls for business and individuals to consider together with some expensive fees that can be off putting. However, in our opinion it does make sense to consider eBay. Put it this way, your target market may be already using eBay and you could use it to reach these customers that you have never engaged with before – increasing sales and turnover.

Additionally, having an eBay presence can lend itself to search engine optimisation because – eBay listings appear in Google and Yahoo for consumer searches! Consider Schuh – try a Google search for some of their products!

So to summarise - is eBay an opportunity or is it something to be dismissed? We think that it is something that every business that is selling online should consider as part of a range of online marketing activities.

Com.Motion would like to thank EBay, Nielsen//NetRatings and Econsultancy for the statistics in this article.

The Secrets of a Great Website

I have been thinking about the question, what makes a website great? Why are some websites destined for greatness and others heading towards online mediocrity?

Last night I attended an event that brought me some way towards answering my question. I had the pleasure of hearing Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist speak. For those of you in the UK who don’t know Craigslist, you will be surprised to hear that it is the seventh largest English language website in the world. Craigslist is one of the survivors of the first dotcom bubble - founded in San Francisco 12 years ago - and currently operates in 50 countries around the world, with 15 million unique users.

Craigslist is basically an online community bulletin board where users can post almost anything they want to for free. There is nothing glitzy about this site as, shock horror, they don’t even have a logo! Most of the company’s £16 million a year in revenues comes from charging companies to post job adverts in 7 American cities. Your everyday Joe gets to use the site for free.

The Craigslist ethos has remained the same from the start – only do what the customer wants. Jim Buckmaster said in his talk that his customers want a simple site. They want local information that is easy to access and they want this for free. They don’t want pop up advertising or fancy designs. Craiglist’s changes and improvements over the past 12 years have been made as a result of customer feedback. They didn’t set out to dominate the world, as they only set up on cities where the customers wanted the service.

So, in summary, the secrets to a great website are:

1. Aim to completely satisfy your customer base.
2. Stick to your company values.
3. Don’t start out promising that you will do one thing and then let your customer down.
4. Take every opportunity that you can to ask for feedback. Listen to what your customer thinks and do what you can to please them.

As an online marketer I always tell my clients that I can increase traffic to their websites, but I can’t guarantee that people will buy. It’s all about the customer at the end of the day and if they don’t like your website or if they don’t trust you as an online business, then they won’t bother. This is especially important in 2007, with web users conversing and interacting in the world of Web 2.0.

About the Author
Kate Little is the Director of Com.Motion, a leading Internet Marketing Company. Visit Com.Motion to discuss how we can help your company increase its online sales through our comprehensive Online Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation programme.

Discover Your Google Links

Google has recently updated Google webmasters central with an excellent tool that allows you to discover who is linking to you. You can now use web master tools to view a greater selection of links to you web pages.

The information provided is more detailed and it can be downloaded to a spreadsheet to allow you to analyse accordingly. The Google webmaster team have split the links into 2 categories to make it easier for you; these are - external and internal. The official Google Blog has clear descriptions to what this means and can be found at this location - Google Blog.

All you have to do is verify ownership of your Google web master account to access this information. Click on this link - Com.Motion's Links page to see a snapshot of our links on Google webmasters central.

Search engine Optimisation Part 2 – Why Linking Does Matter!

Links, or more importantly links that come to your website (inbound links), play a significant part in the overall visibility of your website and they are a factor that you must consider when planning your search engine optimisation strategy.

Linking is important because the World Wide Web is essentially made up of hyperlinks that allow people to move quickly from one source of information to another. When considered from a business perspective, this offers a fantastic opportunity to help deliver your business objectives by linking to the appropriate websites within your market sector.

Main benefits of linking:

• Web browsers are naturally curious and they will follow links. If a website that they visit often suggests a link to consider then they are more likely to follow it, as it is possibly a link that will benefit them and it has come from a trusted source. This backs up the claim that the more quality inbound links your company has, the more potential customers will value and trust the products or services you sell on your website.

• Search engines like inbound links to websites and will potentially give your website a higher ranking and placement because of these links.

• If you are able to attract top websites in a linking exchange initiative, visitors are more likely to pay attention to your website, buy your product or digest what you have to say as they will trust the content more because of the links.

Website Linking Strategy

Link popularity refers to the number and ‘quality’ of links to your website. The top search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN - consider quality inbound links very important as they assume that if other websites link to yours, you offer valuable content to web browsers and users.

In essence, these inbound links work similarly to client testimonials, as the more links to your website the more support you have from other companies and clients for your business. It should be noted here that search engines such as Google are striving for quality content on websites. Links that appear to add no value to a customers visit will not actively improve your search engine ranking, which is why it is so important to evaluate and think about your linking exchanges.

Like every other aspect of business development or project management, clear focus and planning must be considered when determining your linking strategy. Consider your own website, which should be content rich so that it will appeal to the person that you want to obtain a link from. What information on your website will make up part of your outbound links and how that appeal to other websites and encourage them to want to participate in a linking exchange?

In the first article, we discussed the importance of webpage optimisation and more importantly keyword research. Keyword research is important here as it will highlight a range of potentially content relevant websites that might lend themselves to your marketplace and target audience. Additionally, consider which of these websites are highly ranked by search engines such as Google.

Google does offer a tool bar (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/index.html) for Internet Explorer or Firefox that tells you the popularity or score of the webpage you are on. For example, the homepage score of our website, www.com-motionuk.com, is 4/10 (getting there) and looks like this.








Potentially, websites with a higher rank are valued more highly so it makes sense for you to target higher and better-ranked websites for your linking campaign. However, page rank is purely a guide and should not be the determining factor in your choice of links. If you feel that a website would add value to your visitors or customers experience on line then go for it!

Requesting Links

After you have researched and made a list of companies to approach for links it is important to consider how you will approach them. Will you email or phone?

One of the most efficient ways to request a link is first to find out who the most appropriate person in the company is to contact: i.e. the managing director or the individual who looks after the website. Thereafter, a personal email introducing you, your company and the benefits of linking to each other is key to initiate a response. People receive lots of junk email on a daily basis so doing the research first and sending a relevant personal email will more likely be looked at and responded to.

Sometimes it helps if you have already linked to their website and you can highlight this in your email to the company you are targeting.

Anchor Text

How your inbound links are made up is also important. Creating the correct ‘anchor text’ (the text that the webpage uses to link to your site) is important as this will allow search engines to pick up on popular keyword searches from someone else’s website. If we use one of our clients, Foundationz as an example, we can include anchor text that uses keywords that their customers might type in to find them.

For example, they might use keywords within their anchor text that reflect the products and services they offer as a business i.e. Afro and Black Hair Care Specialists:

Foundationz – Afro & Curly Haircare Specialists

Foundationz – Articles & Advice on Dreadlock, Afro, Curly Haircare Styles

Landing Pages

Your website’s landing pages are also important. As shown in the Foundationz example above, both of these links go to different pages on the Foundationz website (different landing pages). Each one of your web pages is potentially discussing something different and as a result, each should have different inbound and outbound links. Don’t send all your inbound links to your homepage, as your homepage will have its own theme.

Appropriate landing pages are something to consider as all of this linking activity can be measured through analytical tracking or statistics.

Summary

Having a website linking strategy can be a large undertaking and this article briefly highlights the main areas for you to consider. Most SEO firms or experts agree that link building will over time enhance your website listing in the search engines and to achieve dramatic results you need actively monitor and increase your links on an ongoing basis.

Keeping your website content up to date and changing it will add to any users visit and they will value the experience. This organic approach and linking to relevant websites can only enhance your website and attract the correct type of customer over time. As your website ages, you will build up relevant quality links from other websites that add value and keep your customers coming back for more.

Consider

• Who links to your competitors
• Who links to you
• The benefits of link building
• Why someone should link to you
• Is your website content appealing and interesting
• How will you request links
• What landing pages will have inbound links
• What anchor text will the links use

There are some great online websites with lots of free reports listed below for your consideration:

www.linkpopularity.com

www.linkingmatters.com

www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com

Google

To find out in Google who links to you, put this in the search box – link:www.yourwebsite.co.uk

Should you wish to discuss any aspects of this article or if you would like to discuss developing a link strategy in more detail then please contact Com.Motion directly.

The Impact Of Social Media On Business

Social media is taking the web by storm and is creating a buzz in 2007. Social Media allows people to highlight and discuss issues and offer opinions on areas of interest or expertise. The idea of social media is not new, however from a business point of view social media is increasingly important.

Blogs
Blogs are just one example of social media. These online discussion portals offer a fantastic opportunity for businesses to engage with their clients by inviting comment or discussing relevant issues or just highlighting some useful information that might be relevant for their customers and their market place.

Blogs are not a place for the hard sell; these online portals should be used to communicate with customers in a ‘social’ way that encourages interaction. Com.Motion have our own blog were we update our clients and any visitors on what is happening in the Internet marketing world.

Always remember, as a business, you are the expert and facilities like blogs offer a free and fantastic way for you to communicate and engage with clients on the topics of the day. Remember, if you offer something that is of value, the likelyhood is that someone will tell someone else about you who just might be interested in your products or services.

Free Blog - Blogger.com

Other Social Medium Considerations
There are a number of fantastic website to look up and potentially contribute to. The idea is to create a profile on these websites that singles you out as an expert in your chosen field. Start contributing or highlighting useful websites that have value to you and others or give your opinions or thoughts on areas of interest.

Consider these Website Links Below:

• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Furl

Other social areas of interest to consider are:

• RSS
• Video
• My space
• Online PR

Social Media is definitely here and it is something that should be considered for any online marketing strategy. As a race, we are a social bunch and love to converse and talk to each other – why should that be any different online.