Ecommerce MAXed

I came across a graphic on elliance.com that does a great job of pointing five important elements that should be part of every product page. I would add a 6th - have a big, obvious "add to cart" button!

 My friend Christine O'Kelly from SEO Content Solutions has put together a couple of great guides for doing SEO Friendly Press Releases.

Why would you want to do a SEO optimized Press Release (PR)?

1. You will get links back to your site. This will help you with in the SERPs.
   
2. The Press Release itself may rank well for your term and bring traffic to your site.
3. There is potential of getting press coverage
   

Keywords are critical for getting your PR done right. WordTracker or SEObook.com's keyword tool will help identify the phrases you want to target. Christine talks about whether or not your headline should be optimized for keywords or clicks and why.

I was surprised by her suggestion but it makes total sense.

The PR should be structured like this:

• Headline
• Summary
• Body
• About the Company
• Press Contact
  

In Christine's follow up slideshow, she takes you step by step through the process of submitting your Press Release to multiple services.

What's great is that most of the services are free and the only one with fees charges $2.99! 

 My friend Jeff did a press release with Christine and got about 40 or so links from it. Not only that, he went from 29 to 8 in google in the next two weeks for his main keyword!

 This process works.

Directories are still very valuable for any ecommerce store but with the changes Google made last year, you have be sure that if you are paying for a directory listing, it’s the right one.

Quality links are essential for success in Google. If you don’t have enough of the right links, it really doesn’t matter what you do on-page – you aren’t going to rank for competitive phrases.

Traditionally, directories were good sources for quality links. In the early days of the web, every entry into a directory was reviewed by a person to ensure that only sites of a certain quality were accepted. Over time, directories started charging a fee for that review.

When some people realized you could charge money for a directory submission, directories for pay started popping up all over the place. And guess what? Quality didn’t matter any more. What matter was that if you had a working credit card, you site was good enough.

As you can imagine, this lead to spam and prompted Google to downgrade hundreds of directories last year.

So, which directories are still good?

Here is a list of directories that still provide valuable links:

DMOZ.org – DMOZ is the best and is free. However, since it’s reviewed volunteers, it may take a while to be accepted.

Directory.yahoo.com - $299/year makes it the most expensive, but worth every penny.

Business.com - $299/year – Google Loves business.com

BOTW.org - $99/year or $249 one-time

Joeant.com - $39 one time

pr.com - $199/year for the Gold Package that also includes 30 free job posting, free press releases and you can choose the anchor text

webworldindex.com - $25 one time

goguides.com - $40 one time

skaffe.com - $45 one time

sptp.com $99/year

4) Repeat Customers are the cornerstone of a successful ecommerce business.

    a. Are you finding ways other than price to compete?

                                 i. Can you customize products?

                                 ii. How can you improve customer service and self-service?

                                 iii. What can you do to be seen more as a trusted resource    

                                        than just a store?

                                 iv. Have you created custom tools?

    b. Word of Mouth works for you or against you. Are you doing reputation management?

    c. Are you using sophisticated email methods or just a “mailing list”?

    d. Are you finding creative ways to build community?

3) How well are you converting traffic and maximizing your profit?

1. How can you increase your Conversions?
   
2. Trust – Are you doing all the basics to show you are trustworthy?
   
3. Is the checkout process easy and re-assuring? Do you have a way to re-engage abandoned carts?
4. Analytics - What’s the score? i. What are you tracking? ii. How are you making it actionable?
5. Optimization – Are you doing multivariate testing for your important/profitable pages (i.e. home, product & checkout)
6. How can you improve the User Experience?
   
1. Information Architecture
   
1. Is your navigation simple and clear? Where are people getting confused?
   
2. Do you offer multiple filtering capabilities?
   
2. Does on site search work really well?
   
3. Are you merchandizing your products in an appealing way?
   
4. Are you using ratings & reviews?
   
5. Are you providing educational guides, product recommendations and customization tools?
   
6. Do you have multi-media? How-To Video’s?
   
7. What are you doing to increase your average order size
   
1. Up Selling
   
2. Cross Selling
   
3. Promotions
   
1. Are you testing which are most profitable?
   
2. Are you getting your vendors to support you?