Comertul online creste, in ciuda crizei financiare

Comertul electronic va continua sa creasca in acest an, in ciuda crizei financiare, crede Marius Ghenea, proprietarul magazinului online PCFun.ro.

Potrivit spuselor sale, numerosi jucatori vor iesi de pe piata, relateaza Business Standard.

"Cei care vor rezista pe piata vor realiza probabil cresteri importante. Multi jucatori de pe piata, crescandu-si cifrele de afaceri, nu au facut decat sa isi creasca si pierderile, cel mai important exemplu fiind chiar cel mai mare jucator de pe piata", afirma Ghenea.

Cel mai mare magazin online din Romania este eMag.ro si anunta, pentru sfarsitul anului trecut, vanzari de 110 milioane de euro, in scadere fata de estimarile de 150 milioane de euro. De asemenea, reprezentantii companiei au anuntat ca vor concedia 50 de angajati, ca urmare a evolutiilor negative de pe piata.

O solutie pentru proprietarii de astfel de magazine, ce au probleme financiare, ar fi vanzarea afacerii, sau chiar inchiderea, pentru ca pierderile sa nu creasca si mai mult, crede proprietarul PCFun.ro

"O alta solutie posibila, dar numai pentru site-uri care au o valoare certa, ar fi vanzarea catre investitori care inteleg domeniul si care sunt pregatiti sa investeasca pe termen lung", spune Ghenea.

Omul de afaceri estimeaza un rulaj de 19,5 milioane de euro pentru acest an, in crestere cu 50 de procente fata de 2008. PCFun intentioneaza sa achizitioneze doua site-uri de comert online in 2009. In primele noua luni din anul trecut, compania a inregistrat o cifra de afaceri de 5,5 milioane de euro.
SURSA: http://www.ziare.com/Comertul_online_creste__in_ciuda_crizei_financiare-625066.html

Ne pregatim sa aplicam pentru Seedmoney | Elevator Pitch

Christian The Lion - Reunited - From "The View"

Google Website Optimizer |

Original article

[…] Google posted a video of Colonial Candle’s experience in website testing and landing page optimization, which helped boost their sales by 20% (yes, even in this economy). I know when reading a blog, things like landing page testing can seem very cerebral if you’ve never done it before.

So, check out this video to get a visual sense for what testing can do for your site:

From: http://www.liviutaloi.ro/

Nofollow in ecommerce site

Here : Killer SEO Trick only 1% of Online Retailers Use by Linda Bustos

Stephan Spencer wrote an excellent article for Search Engine Land last week that explains how you can use the rel=nofollow attribute on your internal links to control the flow of “Page Rank” throughout your site. If this is all Greek-geek to you, I’ll explain in a moment what this means. But you should read this post because this is one white-hat SEO tactic that hasn’t been milked to death by all your online retail competitors. Out of Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 online stores, Stephan found only one using this technique, and even that store could go a bit further with it.

Page Rank (think Larry Page) is Google’s way of assigning authority to a web page. Your home page is likely to have the highest Page Rank because it’s linked to more often by other websites than your other pages. Page Rank flows between pages on your own site, flows in from other sites’ links to you and “leaks” through links to other sites. If you need more information on this, check out SEOMoz’ Whiteboard Friday on the subject.

Sculpting Page Rank is really plugging up leaks that don’t need to be there, and controlling the flow of “link juice” within your site, sending more juice to important pages like product pages and cutting off unnecessary pages (that you don’t need to rank in search engines) like contact, view cart, privacy policy, terms and conditions and so on.

When you selectively add rel=”nofollow” to links like “add to cart,” “buy now,” “submit,” for example, you tell search engines not to follow the link as they crawl your site and not to include the link in the overall (and highly complex) Page Rank calculation.

Stephan found that outdoor gear retailer Altrec was the only Hot 100 retailer that uses nofollow on sizes, expanded views, duplicate pages, and hot links which has won Altrec top placement on a number of keywords for category and product pages. Stephan found some product pages with Page Rank of 4, higher than many websites’ home pages! But Stephan suggested Altrec could go a bit further by nofollowing “Today’s Deal” and “Give Us Your Feedback” among others.

Sears, for example, has thousands of product pages. Some of its Web 2.0 goodies use javascript links which don’t pass Page Rank anyway, so not to worry. But it does follow links like “Add to Wishlist” — for every product page! NOT necessary. If you use the site: command in Google (to show you if a page is indexed), the URL for adding a Black Craftsman 4-Drawer Ball-Bearing Griplatch Utility Cart “Add to Wishlist” is indeed indexed. It doesn’t need to be.

site:http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_00959756000P?vName=Tools&cName=Garage+%26+Tool+Storage&sName=Utility+%26+Mechanics+Carts#addToNewWishlist_

You can plug in site:http://www.yourecommercesite.com (use your domain instead here!) to discover what useless pages Google’s found of yours, too.

Here’s a nofollow checklist that is by no means exhaustive:

• Legal Notices
• Privacy Policy
• Order Tracking/Status
• FAQ / Customer Support / Help / Live Help
• Submit Review
• Testimonials
• Contact Us / Feedback
• About
• View Cart
• View All
• Add To Cart
• Add to Wishlist
• Tag This Item
• Click to Verify (VeriSign and HackerSafe seal)
• Register
• My Account / Sign In
• Enlarge Photo / Mulitple Views
• Size Chart
• Shipping Info
• Return Policy
• Careers
• Investor Relations
• Affiliates
• Click to Verify” VeriSign and HackerSafe seals
• Permalink (blog)
• Archive (blog)

It’s important to note that these pages can (and should) still show up for internal searches - customers seeking this information on your site - just not in the major search engines that recognize the nofollow attribute. We know that many online retailers’ internal search already excludes this and users sometimes resort to external search engines to find the information they need, (like “PuppyPalace + international shipping). So if you block off important pages through Page Rank sculpting, be sure they can still be found with internal search.

When you nofollow these types of links, you’ll apply the attribute to the site wide links, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still pass real links to certain pages and get them indexed, either. You can pass real link juice through a site map, or if you have a separate corporate site, you can for example link to your affiliate program page on your ecommerce site from the About Us page on your corporate site.

Though this all sounds complicated, it’s one of the easiest and ways to optimize your site for search engines and can really help you capitalize on long-tail traffic and gives you a competitive advantage.

25 eCommerce (comert online) SEO Tips

25 eCommerce (comert online) SEO Tips

In some ways, it seems search engines have a grudge against eCommerce sites. Often times, I don’t blame them. Many online stores offer little useful content, including dry manufacturer product descriptions, poor internal linking, and no unique, user generated content. Without a doubt eCommerce (comert online) sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Below I’ve gathered 25 tips that I’ve successfully used while optimizing eCommerce sites in the past.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
2. Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
3. Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
4. Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other parameters. If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
5. All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page.
6. Unique Title Tags: While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the value of the rest of the text in the title tag.
7. Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific page they are on.
8. Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
9. Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
10. Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
11. Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don’t tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
12. Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the SE’s to crawl. There are ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spiders without the session ID.
13. Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
14. Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
15. Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.
16. Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that they data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.
17. Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
18. Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.
19. Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Nav: This is useless and very tacky. Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of relevant text.
20. Don’t Use “View” or “More”: On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like “View” or “See more”. Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.
21. Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
22. Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO (comert online seo ). Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
23. Create Brand Landing Pages: If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.
24. Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. (a href="”page.html”">title=”)keywords here”>)) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.
25. Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

Source: http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/25-ecommerce-seo-tips/

Web 2.0 Expo NY: Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library), Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape

A few quick questions with Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: You blogged recently about HomeTips.com. You mentioned the focus on “content for homeowners”. What is the lesson for other potential web site publishers?

Guy Kawaski: The message is that the key to traffic is creating good content. I don’t think the keywords in one’s H1, H2, and H3 headlines is nearly as important. My theory of SEO is this: Create great content and Google will find you because that’s what all those PhDs at Google are making their crawlers do.

Eric Enge: Do you have any opinions on the value of Alexa v.s. Compete v.s. comScore?

Guy Kawaski: Alexa is free but as far as I know doesn’t count Firefox and Macintosh owners, so it’s fundamentally not representative of the world. Compete is also free, and I think has a much more sophisticated algorithm that doesn’t require a download and installation. I usually depend on Compete much more because Alexa’s lack of Macintosh coverage morally offends me.

However, the way I use both Alexa and Compete is this: If I’m “buying,” then I use the one with the lower numbers. If I’m “selling,” then I use the one with higher numbers. It’s my PEO (Price Engine Optimization) strategy.

I never use Comscore because I don’t have a subscription to it. For all I know it’s the best source of info, but it’s not something I’m willing to pay for.

Eric Enge: Then do you believe SEO is bull shiittake?

Guy Kawaski: I truly don’t know. If Neil Patel suggests something for my sites, I do it, but as I said, my focus is on good content and sprinkling holy water on my Google doll.

Eric Enge: What are your plans for promoting Truemors and Alltop?

Guy Kawaski: Truemors will either spread because it has good content or it won’t spread. If you search for the stories that we cover, we are often in the first page of Google results. I wish I could tell you that’s because we’ve figured out how to crack the Google SEO nut. No can do. We find good content, post it, and pray.

Alltop is different. When we launch an Alltop category, we contact every site and blog owner in the category and tell them we included the feed. Most of these folks then write a posting about Alltop. This has generated a lot of inbound links. Also, I am amazed by the number of people who put up Alltop badges. That’s helped a lot too.

I just wish that I could tell you that I planned the success of inbound links and badges. No can do! The Internet gods were just looking out for me.

Eric Enge: You wrote recently about how much you liked Website Grader. Why do you like it?

Guy Kawaski: I like Website Grader because it aggregates many metrics. As you can tell from Alltop, I’m into “aggregation without aggravation.” It’s great to go to one place and get everything done. Everybody with a site should get a Website Grader grade.

Eric Enge: What did you learn from the web communities panel that you moderated and the panel with Internet entrepreneurs?

Guy Kawaski: Both panels taught me that these entrepreneurs created cool things and let it rip. There wasn’t a whole lot of analysis and cogitation. I like this theory very much. It’s probably responsible for more successes than the advice of venture capitalists.

The great thing is that it’s so much cheaper to try stupid ideas these days because of products like MySQL, Rails, PHP, and WordPress. Life is good for an entrepreneur these days.

Eric Enge: Can a company form a committee and create a successful innovation?

Guy Kawaski: It’s possible, but not probable. I can’t think of many examples right off the top of my head. As a company gets more “professional” and has “committees,” it gets harder and harder to innovate especially as more and more clueless people who are out of touch with technology rise to management positions.

Eric Enge: How does this compare to the potential success rate of a very small number of people (maybe even 1) pursuing a personal passion?

Guy Kawaski: If I were a betting man—and in a sense that’s what a venture capitalist does, I would always bet on a small team. That’s why my firm is called “Garage” Technology Ventures not “Commercialization” Technology Ventures.

Published: October 14, 2008

Source:http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-guy-kawasaki.shtml