The Pre-Cyber Monday Shakedown: Is Your Ecommerce Strategy Optimized For The Holiday Rush?
Across the globe, retailers are bracing for a challenging holiday shopping season. If you run an ecommerce site, what can you do to be sure to get the most out of “Cyber Monday” (the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States which falls on Dec. 1 this year) and beyond? At Agency.com we have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s strongest online retail brands, all of which are as concerned as mom-and-pop retailers about how they will fare during this holiday shopping season.
In anticipation of Cyber Monday and in preparation for the few weeks of consumer frenzy that follow, here are some of the global brand marketers strategies for making sure that ecommerce environments are ready to make the most out of the smaller opportunities that this season will inevitably afford.
Holiday specials content: launch it now. Although I cringe every time I get hit before Halloween by an ad for holiday shopping, now is the time to be launching your seasonal content. It is important to get your calls to action properly indexed and ranking in search results in anticipation of the interests of potential shoppers. Look back over last year’s analytics to see the seasonal search phrases that were driving high-conversion traffic to the site and build content to target that behavior. Get ready with your “holiday gift ideas” and plan ahead for people seeking “last minute holiday gifts” or looking for “gift ideas for mom.” Get this content featured on your home page so that you can contribute maximum link popularity to these specials as quickly as you can.
Election Night TV: Networks Aim to Dazzle With Gadgetry
It's election night, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer is in New York talking to an Obama campaign strategist in Chicago.
But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.
"Everyone is doing something virtual this election year," says CNN Senior Vice President David Bohrman, the guy who pushed the technology. But Bohrman believes CNN is going where no network has gone before by employing Hollywood-style effects. "Virtual elements in a real set look so much better than a real person in a virtual set," he says.
How To Create a Self Sufficient SEO Site
Managing an SEO campaign boils down to measuring and managing key performance indicators. Rather than focusing on one keyword for example, optimize an entire array of related keywords.
Rather than looking for links obsessively, focus on capping the link flow and internal linking within your own site to seal up any hemorrhages your website may have. By doing this, your pages become less dependent on external links (granted they have authority).
Create Authority:
Naturally the next question is what is authority, to put it simply, an authority website has a great foundation of useful content. By the merit of the content it attracts a steady base of readers or new visitors.
Create Popularity:
Website popularity toggles authority and trust, so without igniting the proper metrics, you can have solid internal links and great content, but without traffic to endorse your site or a few backlinks from the right places, the time it take to gain authority and trust will take longer.
Is Your Keyword Research Methodology Up To Scratch?
There’s no avoiding how fundamental keyword research is to the natural search marketing process. Without it how will you know if your site is sending the right relevance signals to search engines? Without them how will you measure your performance? (Admittedly ranking reports are rapidly becoming less and less relevant though they still have a place in most clients KPIs) How will you know you’re looking at the right competitors when carrying out back link analysis?
Another Intro to Sitecore
Content Management Systems are everywhere. Marketing analysts, subject matter experts and website administrators are all switching over to CMSs in unison for a lucid separation of presentation from content on their website and/or web service, with more control on the latter. This in turn facilitates reduced IT expenditures for your organization, ensures steady yet consistent content life cycle management and streamlines the target audience to desired areas. Sitecore is one such flexible CMS that seems to fit the above requirements.
Sitecore is based on the .NET technology. Setting up and deploying Sitecore is quite straightforward and you can get started with creating your new website rightaway. Sitecore is totally committed to the .NET framework and hence provides regular stable releases and updates thus complimenting the latest releases of .NET, Visual Studio, SQL server and Windows server.
Intro to Umbraco
With a plethora of Content Management Systems available today, it becomes very difficult to choose form one of them. As a matter of fact, the CMS that you would choose would also depend on the architecture or the platform where you would deploy your project. Having discussed on the Joomla CMS which is based on PHP and MySql, it is now time to review the Umbraco CMS that is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology. Well, this one is for the .NET fans. The entire source of the CMS has been written in C# and is available for the developers to download and modify for free. Yes, Umbraco is open source.
You do not require beforehand knowledge of Microsoft’s .NET framework or C# in particular, to get started with the Umbraco CMS. All you would need is Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) server, where you would host and deploy your website.
SEO Diagnosis: User-Generated Duplicate Content
The Problem: You run a website that allows for user-generated content like job listings, rental properties, classified ads, personals or even UGC products (think eBay or Etsy). Thoughtless users, thinking only of themselves and the time they're going to save, wreck your SEO by posting the same content they've put up on ten of your competitor's sites. This creates duplicate content issues for you instead of that dream of Web 2.0 SEOs - free, unique content. It can definitely be frustrating.
The Symptoms: The search engines start by simply not listing your pages, but sometimes it gets more severe and whole subsections of your domain go unspidered or unindexed because the engines' algos have determined that you're a clearing house for material they've already seen and don't need again. In rare cases, this might even cause completely unique, valuable material to be excluded from the visible SERPs.
