I often have conversations with clients about the importance of good internal linking and anchor text, and recently I saw a great example of the power of both these things.
Category Archives: E-commerce
Power of anchor text and internal linking
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Cloaking As It Stands Today From Google Viewpoint
Hi everyone,
The idea for posts this week stems from an interview between Eric Enge and John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Zurich. It is an eye opener in many ways. The dynamic nature of the search engine optimisation field keeps practitioners on their toes all the time. Let us visit the concepts of cloaking as it stands today.
Marine Electronics Case Study
“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”
In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.
With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.
Tim Norton, PlanHQ, Using Blogging To Influence Mainstream Media
Even though it is early days for Tim Norton’s PlanHQ, his team are making quite a bit of traction with their web based business plan software. Below is an iJump interview (thanks Simon!) with Tim in regards to his approach to marketing of PlanHQ using the blogging world as their main driver of referral traffic to their site. I highly recommend to OnlineMarketer.co.nz subscribers that this interview is well worth the watch. The main points of the interview are:
- PlanHQ participate in the blogger community to drive traffic to their site.
- They focus on bloggers who will influence main media
- The data that is generated within their website and software application by its users helps with decision making on future product developments
- Tim uses PlanHQ himself for their business
- Finding existing communities to participate online is easier than starting your own community
- The first phase of marketing PlanHQ was to get people talking about the product which is a “pull” marketing strategy. Tim will now go into “push” mode.
- Tim typically blogs every 2 days.
- The main benefits of blogging for PlanHQ are: increasing traffic to the site, high quality engagement with their target market, the ability to test ideas and get immediate feedback and to gain trust.
Tim Norton is speaking at the Interactive Marketing Summit next Monday, 26th May. Netconcepts will also be at the conference. It will be a great day mixing with some of the leaders in the online space in New Zealand.
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Oxfam Unwrapped – I love my chickens
A colleague just bought me a couple of live chickens for Christmas and I was thinking where on earth I was going to put them. My landlord doesn’t allow pets! I then realised that they weren’t exactly for me, but rather for a small farming village in Samoa. It’s Christmas time and instead of companies giving hefty priced throw-away gifts for clients, some are opting for the charity kind. It’s not like we need another squeezy ball with someone’s logo blazed across it.
Oxfam sent me an email with the subject heading “A gift From Oxfam Unwrapped”. If it wasn’t for the email brand value of Oxfam, I would not have opened that email as it suspiciously looked like spam for a split second.
Oxfam’s email stated “A gift has been bought and sent to you by a friend”. Which friend? If this is for real, wouldn’t they display my friend’s name at least? This email initially felt like an e-card sent from a random stranger, but with a lure of a “gift”, curiosity got the better of me and I had to click further to find out what it was.
I was confused when I first arrived at the Oxfam page. It had all the right visual clues that it was a trustworthy message with the use of Oxfam New Zealand branding, but my first reaction was “huh?, what is this?”.
In typical web browsing style, I scanned the page looking for key words to learn more about it. Two headings stood out “I’ve bought you a pair of chickens…” (despite there being 3 chickens on the page) and “It’s time to start a coop”. The rest of the writing above the scroll line was quite small and didn’t entice me to read further. It was difficult to read.
I scrolled down the page and saw that there was a personal message, although I scanned it several times to realise it was from one of Netconcepts’ business partners Anna Curnow from Copy Ant.
Unfortunately the Oxfam message did not keep its formatting and for a copy writer such as Anna, it may have disappointed her to see her message displayed like that.
Click here to view the Oxfam Unwrapped Message
Despite this campaign not being optimised to its full potential, it was a wonderful gift to receive and Netconcepts really appreciates values based organisations and team members.
Well done to Oxfam New Zealand for undertaking such a campaign to raise funds for such a worthwhile cause. With a few more tweaks here and there, the experience of the campaign for the end user would have been seamless. Remember to undergo user testing with real people before fully launching campaigns to uncover any unseen obstacles.
Most of all, I love my chickens and I’m sure that the family who receives them will get much use from them. Thank you Anna for a wonderful gift!
How SEO, SEM & SMO Help Your Website to Become a Real Killer – Part 1 (SEO)
Bond & Bond has rolled out a campaign about 3 months ago on its website – “This Week’s Top 10 Killer Deals” along with a campaign site – KillerDeals.co.nz. It is a fantastic idea to engage customers and attract returning visitors to the site. For a company like Bond & Bond who has very good brand awareness in New Zealand, plus some really good deals, the campaign site should go very well. However, is it a real killer yet? Can it be even more killing? Let’s find out.
First of all, let’s look at some figures of the campaign site – www.killerdeals.co.nz.
- PageRank – 0/10
- No. of indexed pages on Google – 2
- No. of indexed pages on Yahoo! – 1
- No. of indexed pages on Live Search – 1
- External backlinks reported by Google – 0
- External backlinks reported by Yahoo! – 80 (70 of them are from Bond & Bond website)
- Blog mentions – 0
- Social bookmarks – 0
By having lots of 0s and near 0 numbers, the campaign is definitely not doing its full potential. There are huge opportunities sitting behind. What can they do to make it fly? Of course, online marketing is the answer. But I’ll dig into the solutions by looking at three important online marketing aspects – SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SMO (Social Media Optimisation).
SEO
You may be wondering why the search engine index is so bad for killerdeals.co.nz. Simple answer, the entire site is a Flash file. There is no single live letter on the site. Search engines cannot read all other contents very well except plain text. So the site has been missing a lot of traffic opportunities from search engines. Nowadays, no one can afford to leave out the search engine traffic, cannot we?
Google can read Flash files at certain extent but very poorly. The above example is how Google reads the Flash file of killerdeal.co.nz. By having lots of “click Me” and “Buy Me” shown, it looks a little bit spammy, isn’t it?
I admit the Flash they built is kind of cool with all the mouse-over actions. But again, the whole site cannot be a single Flash. They need to change the site structure to a normal HTML site with real headings (especially H1), text copies and text links etc. They can still keep the Flash for each item instead of the normal product image, but with product descriptions in plain text.
Search engines love permanent text copy to determine the theme of the page and fresh content to keep the site live, like humans do. Each week’s top 10 is the prefect live content. An introductory copy will also be essential. They can also archive the expired specials with current prices and group them by categories and link back to Bond & Bond site. The category pages can be used as a place to introduce category level specials and/or vouchers.
From SEO’s point of view, we don’t want the campaign site to compete with the Bond & Bond site for search traffic. It will need to position itself as a heavy promotion site which is not the primary focus of the original Bond & Bond site. Good use of page titles, headings, keywords, unique content etc. will help them to achieve the goal.
You may want to argue that it’s a micro-site that doesn’t need to look and function like a normal website. It’s right, for a normal short life micro-site, we won’t need to worry much about SEO. But for a site like killerdeals.co.nz, it desires to act well and live forever. If Bond & Bond can optimise the site well, they’ll build up a real deal site and community over time and enjoy the free and unlimited search traffic day by day. Then they’ll be one step closer to be a real killer.
Of course, the real action won’t be as simple as I described above. It requires lots of detailed planning and twisting to make it shine. Feel free to leave your comments here or contact us for more discussions.
In the next posts, I’ll continue discussing the other killer weapons – SEM and SMO.