Rob Snell Gives the Scoop on SMX Advanced

Today’s Y!Store blog is yet another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who has sold dog training collars on his Yahoo! Store since 1997. Rob also blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Starting a Yahoo! Store For Dummies.

Just back from Seattle & SMX Advanced

Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is one of Danny Sullivan’s many search marketing shows. The Seattle show, SMX Advanced, is labeled that way so the speakers can dive off pretty deep into some pretty heavy topics without worrying about leaving the new folks behind. This show, like PUBCON, is for the heavy search geeks!

The programming at SMX Advanced was so intense, I couldn’t justify partying like a rock star and risk missing some new important nugget or idea. This was the first search conference EVER where I went to every single class. I only slept in through the keynote.

SMX Advanced is also a 2-day show, but I took 79+ pages of notes in my little black Moleskine notebook. More than half of my notes were ideas for getting links, or increasing conversions, or other marketing ideas triggered by something someone said in a presentation or during a bar conversation. Some of my SEO friends tease me about my little black notebook, but it’s ironic that they’re the first ones to call me to get copies of my notes!

Nothing is radically new this year

I’ve been going to search marketing shows since 2001, and the more I go to, the fewer brand new things I tend to pick up. For me, the major advantage of attending is seeing the same information in a somewhat different light, meeting like-minded folks at meals and in between sessions, and catching up with old friends. Search marketing shows are also great for getting out of your daily routine, letting your mind wander, and figuring out what you want to do next, marketing-wise!

A buddy of mine was bellyaching that “he paid $3500 for flight, hotel and tuition, and he didn’t learn anything radically new.” Did he get any ideas? “Yes, tons.” Great. Now he also knows his SEO chops are completely current.

In 2009, SEO is still all about TITLE TAGS and LINKS

As you probably know, on every page you want your best keywords for that page in a descriptive TITLE Tag. Yahoo! Stores are SEO-friendly right out of the box because TITLES are generated by the NAME field, or PAGE-TITLE field.

You also want the same keywords you want to rank for in the anchor text of links pointing to that page. These links should be both from your Yahoo! Store (navigation, breadcrumbs, links in CAPTION fields, and thumbnails/text links on category pages) as well as from lots of other sites. For more info check out some earlier posts of mine: Converting Keywords, Southern-Fried SEO, and How to Get Vendor Links.

What IS new in SEO for 2009?

Link diversity

Link diversity (having links from different domains and different IP ranges) is somewhat more important for SEO than it has been in the past. For example, 20 links from one site isn’t as good as 20 links from 20 different sites on different domains.

Want to see how many unique domains link to you? Check out SEOBook.com’s Aaron Wall’s tool here: http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php.

Want to see Ystoreblog.com’s backlinks? (May take a bit to load!)

I show 1 Unique Government Domain (*.gov, *.mil) with 1 Unique C Block Addresses and 74 Unique Commerical Domains (*.com, *.net, etc) with 59 Unique C Block Addresses.

One of the SEO superheroes, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ.org, discussed the upcoming release of his 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors report, which is coming out this July (here’s the last one). Every year or so, Rand surveys top SEOs and compares their opinions with real data from reverse engineering top-ranking sites for hundreds of popular keywords. This year, “Everything’s the same + link diversity” sums up my notes. Rand said he believes that even "nofollowed" links (links that don’t pass PageRank or anchor text) DO count towards domain diversity.

Nofollowed links are links that have the attribute “rel=nofollow”, which was something the search engines invented to stop blog spammers. Nofollowed links really don’t give you any SEO benefit because they don’t send PageRank (link popularity) or anchor text. For example, all the links in comments on this blog are nofollowed.

Duplicate content and the Canonical Tag

One new thing Google and the other search engines came up with earlier this year to help ecommerce sites battle same site duplicate content problems was to come up with the Canonical tag. Matt Cutts has a great post on everything you need to know about the canonical tag right here.

Ironically, Yahoo! Stores don’t need canonical tags because we have SEO-friendly static URLs (like www.storedomain.com/page.html), so our stores don’t have the problems that a lot of other carts do like dealing with dynamic URLS with all these parameters.

Also, you should consolidate all your pages into one domain using the Store Manager’s 301 settings. This permanently redirects all store URLs and your non-www URLs to a single domain, which consolidates your link popularity. Read this helpful Domain Redirect Setting help file for more info.

Oh, yeah! One possible Yahoo! Store use for the canonical tag is so you get SEO credit for links tagged with parameters like links from some affiliate programs, click track, internal campaigns, or even tagged banners.

For example, search engines would see a link to http://www.storedomain.com?s=affiliate&id=8675309 as a completely different link than http://www.storedomain.com. I have some SEO tests running right now, and I’ll report back if/when we find something.

PageRank Sculpting (Just say no!)

In the “you shouldn’t play with fire” category, was the PageRank Sculpting controversy. Sculpting PageRank is the practice of using NOFOLLOW tags to squeeze PageRank around on your site to maximize your link popularity on only your most important products and pages. That sounds like a good thing, right?

Nope! 99.9% of Yahoo! Store owners shouldn’t even think of messing around with PageRank sculpting because it’s not unlike like shaving with a chainsaw. Horrible things can happen if you do something wrong. The best way to control what pages get the PageRank on your Yahoo! Store is to put links to your most valuable products and categories right on your homepage. That’s so easy!

Google still hates paid links

Matt Cutts, Google’s Search Quality Engineer and the voice of Google to most SEOs, repeated that buying links to manipulate the search engine rankings is still a high-risk activity. He said anything sponsored should use a rel=nofollow tag or it’s high-risk. Any consideration (i.e., free products for links) to get keyword rich anchor text links with the intent to manipulate rankings is high-risk. Matt said you’re free to do as you wish with your sites and your links, but so is The Google.

Google also says they won’t penalize you for anything someone else could do to your site, only things that you do ON your site. Google can be pretty cryptic about what will and won’t get you in trouble! For example, if buying paid links got you banned from Google (or even penalized), all a competitor would have to do is buy paid links for YOUR site, report you, and then you would suffer and probably not know why.

My experience with buying paid links (from long, long ago!) was that the site that gets caught SELLING (not buying) paid links gets in trouble. Google most likely quietly turns off that site from any SEO benefits of passing PR and anchor text. Buying links from that site then is a waste of money, and you also run the risk of having your domain flagged as a possible spammer. This may lead to a manual review which is when a Google Quality inspector puts your site under the microscope to see if you’re doing anything else you shouldn’t be doing and gets to assess penalties if applicable.

(Now my dog is hiding under the bed, whimpering like it’s the middle of a Mississippi thunderstorm. It’s okay. Matt Cutts isn’t going to eat you!)

My own personal rule for SEO? I pretend Matt Cutts knows who I am, and knows all my domains and client sites. If you assume the Spam Cops are watching everything, keep your nose clean, and you should be fine.

Anytime I try to keep anything on the down low, it’s to hide things that work from my distinguished competition rather than trying to get anything past the PhDs in Mountain View.

I still have 73 more pages of notes I didn’t get to, so hopefully the Merchant Solutions gang will let me have another guest post pretty soon! Appreciate the forum, folks!

Until then, keep building great content and collecting links!

P.S. Here are some other posts: Pimping Your Product Page, SES NYC 2007, Free Conversion Rate Chapter.

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

The Twitter Train of Social Ecommerce

All aboard! If you aren’t twittering yet, you’d better start thinking about how to integrate Twitter into your business soon. I think this one is here to stay. Dell has already proven that Twitter works for them, after producing over $1M on sale alerts and now offering exclusive deals to their 11,000+ followers.

Sure, Dell is a big name brand… but Twitter is a level playing field. Just as people sign up for your email newsletters today, they can start following you on Twitter too. But here’s the big difference — consumers like to stay in control. As soon as they turn over their email address, they lose that control. With Twitter, consumers stay in total control with the "follow" button, and they can choose to dump you (ok, "not follow") anytime they want.

Here is an example from Yahoo! merchant WineGlobe.com, an online wine retailer:

And it gets better. The open nature of the Twitter platform allows others to build cool applications, opening the door for you to create Twitter Coupons to begin your social media marketing campaigns, right now. The best part? The cost is your time, for now at least.

We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with Twitter as a social ecommerce channel, so please share your comments with the Yahoo! merchant community.

Special thanks to @shawnafennell and @ecommerce for calling out these cool new tools, re-tweets and all. If you couldn’t tell already, this got me excited!

Tweet you later.

Michael Ober
Yahoo! Small Business
Follow me on Twitter

Rob Snell Went to Vegas and Gave Us His PubCon Slides

Today’s Y! Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the almost three year-old book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies that is still somewhat current. Rob is recovering from the frenzy of the Festivus shopping season in an undisclosed location somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

"My marketing consultant went to Las Vegas, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Howdy! I would say I’m just back from Vegas, but PubCon was last year! PubCon in Las Vegas is the show of the year for me. I dare say it’s the best Internet marketing conference because of who speaks, what they say, how much they give away, and who attends. I love to "network" with some of the smartest retailers and Internet marketers on the planet, and being a speaker gets me on the guest list for some of the really cool parties, too!

As promised, here is my full presentation with 77 PowerPoint slides. This year we have audio, and I hope you enjoy my new theme song, too!

If you’d rather read it than listen to it, take a gander at an expanded transcription of my PubCon PowerPoint slides with additional info.

Here are some highlights:

• Skip to Slide 6 for Tip #1. You might want to skip three minutes on my marketing background and life story.

• One change in our company philosophy increased our conversion rate almost instantly by 20%. What did we do? We told folks what to buy.

• Buyer’s Guides work! With buyer’s guides we have had a 50% increase in conversions when buyer’s guide pages were used as entry pages. When folks would come into our site from a search engine organically, if they come in on the buyer’s guide page, they are 50% more likely to convert. For example, here’s our dog training collars buyer’s guide.

• Write unique product descriptions. It is good for your customers to show that you are an expert and you know what you are doing, and The Google loves unique product descriptions.

• Write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price. Now I just made that up. Write what makes sense to you, but that is a good rule of thumb for creating content. You say, "Gosh. That is a $600 product. You mean I have to write 60 paragraphs about the dang Garmin Astro?" Yep.

• Play 20 questions with every single product. Start at the top with your best selling products and work your way down. Ask yourself what customers have in their mind when they are looking to buy something. Customers want to know if this product is going to work for them. I literally have over 200 questions that I can ask about any product.

• Capture killer content in any which way you can. Like I said, I lock my brother up in a room and pull it out of him. Record everything. Audio. Video. Still pictures. I mean, everything. When I don’t want to carry a professional digital camera, I have a little FLIP (video) camera over here I carry everywhere I go. I can get my brother to jabber on about some product about why this manufacturer should do this, blah, blah, blah and I have great info for the Yahoo! Store.

• Blog to build content and attract links. I do a much better job of this as an e-commerce consultant and a speaker than I do with the dog stuff or our other stores. We take email questions that my brother has answered, his content, and we stick it on the Web. I got over 1,000 pages in a Word document from a year’s worth of Steve’s sent emails.

• Make your suppliers link to you. I finally have everybody in the company used to the fact that when we buy something from somebody, they are going to link to us. Or else! Linking to us is almost a condition for doing business with us.

• Romance your suppliers for additional links and free content. Example: Steve took a supplier out bird hunting on one of his fancy Texas quail leases. He gets to be good buddies with folks he needs to have a good relationship with and we ended up getting a link out of it, which is really nice.

• Add keyword modifiers to page text. I have over 600 modifiers that I have identified that generate revenue for different businesses, and I use those where they make sense in the text on the Web page. Ask me later. I’ve got some good secrets that I can’t share over the microphone on how to do.

• Survey your customers. One of the best things we ever did was install 4Q, the free customer survey software, on our website. What 4Q does is it asks your customers four questions. "What are you here to do? Did you accomplish it? How satisfied were you with the website, and why?"

Why I heart PubCon the way I do

PubCon is always hard on my ever-present notebook. I always fill up that little black book with takeaways or ideas generated from presentations. Speakers at PubCon tend to give away real-world, actionable advice. I know it’s going to be a good show when there are multiple sessions where I can’t make up my mind which class to attend. PubCon is the opposite of the worst kind of conferences or trade shows where the sessions are bought and paid for, and the speakers pitch you all day for their company’s products and services. Personally, I’d rather sit at home and watch Vince of ShamWow infomercial fame.

I get to speak at PubCon, too! For me, it’s a chance to give back a little to the search marketing community that I’ve learned so much from over the past 12 years. The high caliber of the other speakers makes the pressure to perform really intense. My friends make fun of me for over-thinking my speech. Instead of partying and going to all the sessions, I always seem to get stuck in my room tweaking my slides the day before my session.

And I tend to spill my guts, too. Sometimes I give away too much! I figure people spend a lot of money going to conferences, and I want to make sure they get their money’s worth for the whole show from my 20 minutes in the spotlight. One thing I always tell myself is that no matter what I give away, at least the good stuff is available only to the folks who spent a couple thousand bucks or so and showed up for my panel. They may archive my PowerPoint, but all the really good stuff is hidden in the stories between the slides.

Well, not anymore…

Keep capturing killer content!

I get somewhat obsessive about getting my retailers to capture content, and this blog post is a pretty good example of what I recommend fellow retailers do all the time. You have so much product info in your retail brain. Get it out! How? When you’re talking about stuff your customers are interested in, you need to record it, whether video or audio, and then get someone to transcribe it. Edit the transcription and insert relevant links. Finally, insert that keyword rich text in your Yahoo! Store where it makes sense, like in the CAPTION fields of relevant products. If it makes sense, edit some video footage together to make a little demo for your Yahoo! Store.

In the spirit of taking my own advice, this year I taped my session at PubCon mainly so I could see what I really ended up saying. I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m going to talk about, but I always throw stuff in I didn’t plan on sharing! Doh! I ripped the audio, sent it to a guy who transcribes stuff for me and 3 hours later I had a 10 page Word document. Did I really say all that?

Wrapping things up, I hope you enjoyed the info, and your feedback is always appreciated, so please post comments or drop me a line. Before I put all this together, I got the blessing of PubCon owner and WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke, so this post is authorized and official and all that. I don’t get paid to say this, but if you want to make more money, I suggest you attend the next show, PubCon South in Austin, TX, March 11-13, 2009. Your competitors will be there…

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Feature Highlight: Customer Ratings

Recently, Yahoo! merchant Bob Shirilla — owner of Keepsakes, Etc. and Simply Bags — took the time to write us about the Customer Ratings feature, and how useful he’s found it for understanding his customers and their experiences with his store. He noted, "Many people will only call us when their expectations were not met. The Customer Ratings survey encourages clients to provide comments on products, pricing, delivery, ease of purchase, and general customer service. We’ve gained valuable information and changed internal processes from the comments left by customers."

While Customer Ratings is not a new feature, Bob’s note is a good reminder for merchants not using this feature to enable it in checkout, as the information that’s collected from customers can serve your business well. For merchants who aren’t familiar with this feature, Customer Ratings provides an easy, automated way to collect feedback from your customers about shopping and post-order experiences. When this feature is enabled in checkout, customers can choose to have Yahoo! send them an email, asking them to rate the merchant. Customers who choose this option will be sent an email with a link to a ratings form several weeks after completing their transaction.

If you belong to Yahoo! Shopping, ratings will let shoppers see how customers have ranked you. Good ratings can help you gain customer confidence, can play a key part in shoppers choosing to buy from you rather than from your competition, and may improve your ranking in shopping search results.

The screen shot above comes from Yahoo! Shopping product search results. On the right, underneath the price listing and business name, Keepsakes Etc.’s rating is displayed to potential customers. I asked Bob if he could tell me a bit about how he’s used Customer Ratings feedback to improve his business and maintain a five-star rating, and to share some advice for new merchants also looking to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction and good ratings.

What’s the most valuable feedback you’ve received from customers, through their use of Customer Ratings?

Learning the importance our customer places on fast shipment of their purchase, and how much our customers appreciate us communicating the status of an order throughout the delivery process.

What changes have you made as a result of feedback from customers who provide ratings?

At first, we tried to drop-ship but found that just did not give the level of service required to retain customers. Now, we warehouse almost all of our products on-site. At Keepsakes Etc., we also implemented an order management system to ensure accuracy and timeliness of our products and service.

Can you share some examples of things your stores do that help you achieve "Excellent" ratings and repeat business?

At both Keepsakes Etc. and Simply Bags we go beyond the basics to give customers more than they expect. For example, our free gift bag and gift card make for a personalized gift and a striking presentation. Just because a client makes an Internet purchase, doesn’t mean they want a gift in a plain paper wrapper. (Good point, and one that we can’t emphasize enough. You can also read a previous post to the blog for more “beyond the basics” ideas. — Jennifer)

We also focus on exceeding the stated availability and delivery of our products. By keeping popular products (such as our throw blankets) in stock, we can ship almost all of our orders on the same day our order was placed. We’ve read numerous comments from customers stating that they can’t believe how fast they received their purchase and because of this, they plan to purchase again.

Do you have any customer service tips or advice for new merchants, that can also help them achieve good ratings?

For new merchants looking to achieve good ratings and repeat business, I recommend:

• Having a real person answer the phone every time it rings.
• Being knowledgeable about your product.
• Ensuring your website accurately represents your product.
• Finding a way to deliver more than the customer expects.

Thank you for your tips, Bob, and for taking the time to write us about your use of this feature.

If you’d like to learn how to enable Customer Ratings for your store, please see our online help. And if you have a store feature you’d like to see highlighted, please let us know!

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business