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October 2010 Archives
Ten Must-Do Items This Holiday Season
It's September and the holiday season has already begun for merchants and shoppers. In a recent Practical eCommerce webinar entitled "Ten Ecommerce Strategies for Holiday Success," Make-a-Store Chief Marketing Officer Derek Stringfellow offered 10 tips merchants can apply now for more sales this holiday season. His suggestions are based on annual Make-a-Store observations of strategies used by Make-a-Store customers, as well as market leaders like Zappos, QVC, Netflix, and Amazon. The tips have been presented in a David Letterman "10 to 1"-like format, although their rankings do not necessarily reflect their respective importance.10: Have an Infrastructure That Can Scale DynamicallyYou can expect more traffic during the holiday season. Before launching marketing campaigns that cause traffic spikes, understand whether the infrastructure you have can support the increased load. If you are not sure, if you've experienced service interrupts when traffic has spiked, or you'd like to better understand what your options...
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Why Directories Still Have SEO Benefits
Web directories have been around since the beginning of the World Wide Web in the early 1990's and are still recognized as an important channel for advertising businesses online. People often get web directories and search engines mixed up. The difference between a search engine like Google and web directories is that Google uses a web crawler to automatically index websites to show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), while a web directory organizes links under various categories and sub-categories.How Can Submitting to Directoríes Help Your Website?Here are some tips: Get Indexed Quicker in the Search EnginesWhen search engines crawl directory websites any new entries within those directories also get crawled and indexed. Directories that are deemed authoritative by search engines like Google are crawled regularly, finding new website links to index which are then ranked to appear in the search results. If you are launching a new website,...
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Website Speed Penalty - Google is Testing Your Load Time!
After Google started using website speed as a parameter in their ranking algorithms every webmaster has a good reason to keep an eye on the page load speed of their website. Google's bending over backwards to spread the word about this new speed penalty is proof in itself since big G is usually very secretive about pending algorithm changes.From the announcement we learn that the speed penalty was introduced following experiments by Google that revealed the impact website speed has on Internet users.But the results of the experiment come as no surprise even for someone that has started to use the Internet recently; users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites. However, the search engine giant has been careful to state that even though website speed is now a factor, it is not the primary parameter for determining results. The quality and relevance...
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Blogging and How to Inspire Interaction
As you sit down to write a blog you need to ask yourself - who is going to be reading this and how can I help them? As I have mentioned in several of my blog posts the trick is not to create something with the intent to "make" it go viral. The trick is to create a blog that contains valuable information and is well written and then it will go viral. This same principle applies when looking to add to your readers' interaction. Interaction increases continued readership.Target Your AudienceI have a good fríend who owns a helicopter flight school and when he sits down to blog he is communicating to an entirely different audience than you or I may be intending to communicate with. With this in mind make sure that you are targeting the correct audience. If your blog is geared toward an audience looking for information...
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Social Networking and the Overshare Generation
There have been a lot of stories in the media lately about cyber-stalking and privacy issues on the Internet. It seems to be a knee jerk reaction to the tsunami of social networking that has occurred in the past few years. Or is it? Are the media over-reacting? Or have we forgotten what privacy is in the age of the World Wide Web?The Rise of OversharingBack in the late 1990's, many people didn't even use their real names on the Internet. Email addresses were usually aliases or nicknames in an attempt to retain as much privacy as possible. But with the rise in popularity of social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace has come a rise in online confidence.The new Internet generation doesn't seem to have the privacy hang ups or suspicions their parents had about sharing information with strangers over the net. In fact, this younger generation...
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