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The Pre-Cyber Monday Shakedown: Is Your Ecommerce Strategy Optimized For The Holiday Rush?

by on Nov 03, 2008 (0) Comments

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.

Another Intro to Sitecore

by on Oct 29, 2008 (0) Comments

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.

Getting Your Site to Play Well With All Browsers

by on Oct 24, 2008 (0) Comments

A customer is visiting your e-commerce Web site. She’s decided to do more online shopping this holiday season to save on gasoline and find the lowest prices. She’s using a Mac running Safari, but your site is optimized for Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and your development budget is mainly focused on preparing for IE 8. She selects a few products and heads for the shopping cart, but the “checkout” button isn’t available. Frustrated, she’s off to another site. You’ve lost the sale.

IT managers are now working feverishly to avoid this type of incident, which underscores a current fact of life for Web site designers, Web application developers and your entire IT department: Web pages can look and perform differently from one browser to another.

7 Recession Strategies For B2B SEO

by on Oct 22, 2008 (0) Comments

Many people have a “set it and forget it” approach when it comes to SEO. But if you have a good site (in terms of organic search), you should be taking advantage of it—especially during these tough economic times.

SEO remains one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, especially over the long haul. If your site and the pages on it have historically responded well to desired search terms, you should be tweaking your site to speak to the changing market. Here are seven inexpensive strategies to help you win during these challenging times.

SEO Tips for Developing Authority Websites

by on Oct 12, 2008 (0) Comments

There are some things that really work in tandem withSEO there are other components that just scratch the surface when it comes to overall effectiveness.

We know that timing and layers all play their role, but knowing when to do something and how are the true qualifications of developing results that transcend just being a part that ultimately serve the whole. Building and leveraging website authority is on of such things which is why we encourage you to follow the links to these posts from the past for further elaboration on the topic.

Intro to Sitecore

by on Oct 10, 2008 (2) Comments

Unlike many content management systems which maintain content in a haphazard manner, Sitecore maintains data in a structured content tree.

Data is represented as items. These items of different types are combined in a tree structure such that an item can have a parent and child items.

Templates are like Object Oriented Classes. A template contains fields that contain the actual content for an item. An item is an instance of a template just as an Object is an instance of a class. A template can have a “Master” which is used to create an item of a template. A master plays the same role as an Object Oriented Constructor. Masters can be configured to specify default values for fields and can specify sub-items that should be created when an item is first created. Templates can be based on other templates and inherit their fields, much like Object Oriented inheritance.

Personalize Your Link Building

by on Oct 07, 2008 (0) Comments

The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas