We recently had the pleasure of working on a seasonal site, in a hectic business! What a fast pace, and then after their peak season, BOOM all traffic falls off, I am still recovering from the mental anguish and long nights but it was a BLAST, now that I can dust myself off a bit, I’d like to share some things that I learned after an automated SEO tool was installed.

What was interesting is that for this client they had an automated SEO tool installed after we did regular SEO to the main e-commerce site with tens of thousands of pages. So I got to see just how these tools perform head to head.

For those of you who are going up against a competitor with an automated SEO tool here’s how to kick that things’ ass, we did it, and will share with you too:

1 – INVEST in re-developing your site to be SEO friendly, any good SEO company will be able to help here. Some basic things to consider in the re-programming of your e-commerce site from an SEO perspective:

The SEO company working on your e-commerce site needs to understand how to find the fine line between what terms need REAL day to day love and which ones can be done with the right template. This is done by evaluating the competitiveness of individual terms (short and long tail) to understand which can be hit with template-based, scalable SEO best practices. Developing the right site hierarchy is critical here!

Leave space for copy in your templates.

Give yourself control over page titles, meta descriptions, and section headers, so you can overwrite automated copy here if you need to because of competitiveness.

Create search engine friendly URLs (use Mod re-write or ASAPI).

BEWARE: This is the hardest part, I have seen re-developments run in the low 6 figures for highly customized old carts. If you can NOT do this, then call up an automated SEO company to help, but expect that your competitors will eventually make these investments and will likely beat your tail (and I do mean the long tail).

Do not fall for the “do you want to change you programming to keep up with the algorithms” sales pitch. Any good SEO company, with experience in e-commerce SEO, will help you develop a search engine friendly architecture that should stand the test of time.

If you have the resources to re-develop your site, or if it is already SEO friendly according to the few basic requirements above proceed to step 2.

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Ok folks, I have been a bit MIA on the blogging front, in the effort to get the biggest baddest most link baity, sphinn-induced post I can think of, and as a result I’ve been somewhat quiet on here sharpening every post to be PERFECT. Well tonight I’ve decided to be less perfect and just start sharing more stuff that is in my head, ok?

Going forward you can expect:

• A Much higher frequency of posts
• More type-os
• Run on sentences (or paragraphs)
• Misspellings (OK I’ll try to limit these)
• Brain dumps and videos on things I’d like to share with you, the people who have subscribed to the feed and stop by to read and say hello from time to time.

If reading a post with a long sentence or punctuation in the wrong place, or incomplete thoughts bothers you, let me know, I’ll look to improve the next one. But I can tell you this, I have about 10 blog posts that I have not refined to just the “right ” angle, and I’d rather just get them out and let you guys help me work it through, ok?

Good, so lets start having some fun!
I hope to see some of you at Pubcon in Vegas, if so, you’ll get to meet a bunch of us! It should be a real hoot!! I’ll be speaking on a panel related to developing keywords.

Hope to see some of you there!!

It’s that time of year again — the kiddies are all headed back to school. Now that I’m headed back to school too (MBA = T minus 2 years), it makes me reminisce about all those things I loved about college – the excitement of a new year, catching up with old friends you hadn’t seen all summer, the first night in a new dorm room, the first weekend of parties (when it really still felt like summer camp & not like school), flipping through textbooks ($500 for 2 books – WHAAAAT?!?!) and thinking “This class might actually be interesting” (then leaving the book under the bed until 3 days before finals)… Sometimes I have weird trains of thought, but I was also recently thinking about all the things that I enjoyed discovering in college and how they sort of parallel the recent online developments that I enjoy discovering every day. And one thing I learned in school (and at home): it’s always nice to share. =)

On the horizon, Compete is going to be launching Search Analytics on September 12th with a Pay-as-You-Go pricing model. This service will provide a new level of competitive research accessible for all sizes and types of companies. Compete Search Analytics will provide companies with access to keyword and site referral data so one can compare a site to its competitors and uncover ways to improve a search marketing strategy.

The second development I want to share is a widget. Yes, it seems everyone is widget-crazy these days, but this widget doesn’t apply to the masses — Due Maternity has found a great way to use a widget to connect to their niche. The first of our friends just had their first baby three weeks ago. I’m married to a second-year associate at a law firm and, as I mentioned, I’m about to start back at school for my MBA, so starting our family is a ways off (much to my in-laws disappointment). But my friend’s pregnancy was — and new baby Matthew is — really exciting for us (now, if they didn’t live in Ohio…). If only I had discovered Due Maternity’s desktop widget earlier, I could have shared it with the mommy-to-be. I love it, not only because it’s cute, but because it’s a brilliant marketing idea; Due Maternity has found an alternative marketing avenue to stay in touch with their target audience, and it has a measurable ROI!

“During the first 45 days after launch, the application was downloaded around 10,000 times—customers were enticed with a 10% discount on select purchases—and sales directly attributable to click-throughs from the application to the e-commerce site hit $7,500. The cost? $600.” -Internet Retailer, August 20, 2007

Often companies want to develop a widget just for the sake of having a widget (or because “everyone else is doing it”). The Due Maternity widget really emphasizes thinking about your target audience, the format of your widget, and widget tie-ins that will entice the downloader to return to your site.

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Back in February, Laura wrote about 10 tools she cannot live without.

I’d like to write about one tool that has changed how we produce work at SEER. SEO audience beware, this has less to do with search and more to do with common problems we all deal with when sharing files between people in an office setting.

If you have more than two authors on your word, excel, or PDF documents, you know how troublesome it can be to control efforts between people. Which is the newest version? Did I remember to email Jane my newest copy?

I almost cannot remember dealing with those problems after using subversion–also known as SVN–for the past few months.

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