Ecommerce Blog from MightyMerchant

OK, that title is a little misleading, because I don’t advocate writing copy strictly with the intention of it being search-engine friendly. Any decent SEO (search engine optimization) expert worth her salt would tell you, rightly so, to write for your customers. If you write fresh, keyword-rich, engaging advertising copy or product descriptions, the search engines will find it as relevant as your customers will.

But, there is an art to writing copy with key phrases in the form in which people actually search for them, and a somewhat scientific approach to writing copy based on the knowledge of how search engines handle things like punctuation.

Pick three keywords related to your site, such as “soccer, teams, jerseys.” Go to Google and type in these keywords separated by a space. Next, type in the keywords separated by a comma and space. Try it with exclamation points or any other punctuation. The fact that these searches return identical results tells you that search engines ignore punctuation (for the most part). You can use that knowledge to your advantage when writing copy and product descriptions for your website by writing in such a way as to include phrases that would be awkward if written in a sentence.

As an example consider the fact that when searching, people tend to first enter the item they want followed by the location they are looking for, even though in everyday speech it is much more common to say the location first: “Portland soccer teams” rather than “soccer teams Portland”

Writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams Portland” would be nonsense, but writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams. Portland has several teams with colorful jerseys…

Period ignored, awkward search phrase returned! As you do keyword research, (see MightyMerchant’s comparison of free and subscription keyword research tools) keep in mind the fact that search engines ignore punctuation. You just might be able to creatively work in some phrases you previously thought were too unnatural.

Posted on November 5th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Copy Writing, Search | No Comments »

As the fires in Southern California burn down, the storm begun by Fasano and Associates over their ill-thought email is still building. In days past, a marketing or public relations mistake could be forgiven and forgotten about in time, but today’s climate is totally different. With blogs recording events for posterity, and with the growing popularity of email marketing, that email you send today could still be available in cyberspace not just tomorrow but for months, years and maybe even decades later.

Too bad Fasano and Associates didn’t think their latest email through a little bit more before they hit that ’send’ button.

Coming from the well-respected consumer list management firm, this email was a shock: Against a back image of flames, in all yellow capital letters was the line, “What else is burning in Southern California? Check these hot lists out!”

Whoops. Guys, don’t make light of a natural disaster. Don’t ever joke about a disaster, but especially not to promote yourself. At the time this email was sent out, San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium was filled with thousands of evacuees, people were losing their homes by the hour, there was a lengthy and growing list of dead and injured. Unsurprisingly, the email was immediately met with major protest and is circulating all over the Internet as an example of the type of email you should never send.

To her credit, Fasano and Associates founder Patricia Fasano sent an apology email to the same mailing list after she discovered that what she describes as an “overzealous employee” sent the improper email. This is the type of marketing mistake that can kill even a respected and well-established business, and Fasano and Associates executives say they are implementing safeguards to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

So, being that Fasano and Associates is located right in the heart of the California area that burned, this could have been a golden moment for them. They made a donation to the California State Firefighters Association three days before the inappropriate email was sent out, but instead of heart-warming stories about their charitable acts, their tarnished reputation is front and center.

The thing that really stumps me about this is that Fasano and Associates are marketing professionals. They’ve been in the email and list management business for 25 years. They should have known better, and this could have been avoided had Fasano implemented some sort of check-and-balances system to screen any potential emails for insensitive content. Self-promotion is one thing–indeed, all of marketing is built on it–but if there is even any semblance of that promotion coming at the expense of someone else’s misfortune, it should be considered taboo.

It’s a whole lot easier to do damage control before you hit the send button.

Posted on November 2nd, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Email, Marketing and Promotion | No Comments »

Hopefully the misspellings in my title caught “yer” eye!

As a webmaster, you probably rely on people searching for your products or services to find your site. Yahoo reports that 10% to 15% of search terms they receive are misspelled, and MSN recently began offering search results with correctly spelled search terms if they think the original search term was misspelled. Until search engines are smart enough to search based on voice commands (…is this possible yet?), people must manually type a term into a search engine. So, how can you leverage the fact that people are often terrible spellers?

Sometimes I visit the Dogpile SearchSpy to “eavesdrop” on what people are searching for in real time. Dogpile compiles searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask. A recent unscientific sampleing (whoops!) sampling of the misspellings in the unfiltered search list indicated that about one in 25 searches were misspelled. I went on a search myself, looking for up-to-date, total numbers of how many searches were performed on a daily basis. This information is hard to come by, but I did find an April 2006 article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch that calculated the number of searches from Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN) and Ask as 192 million per day, which works out to 2,222 per second [(192,000,000/24)/(60*60)].

At 4 misspelled searches per 100, and 2,222 total searches per second, that’s 22 hundreds per second and 4 per hundred, which is 88 misspelled searches per second. Times 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, times 24 hours in a day…that’s a staggering 7,603,200 misspelled searches per day!

While lurking on Dogpile I saw misspellings for ‘freee,’ ’satalite,’ ‘annaul’ (annual), ‘prision’ (prison), and this one: ‘wich us presadent made thanksgiving a national holaday.’ Now, should that count as one misspelling or three?

To put this into a real-world, ecommerce context, I turned to my trusty Digital Point keyword suggestion tool and looked up ’socer’ rather than ’soccer.’ I found 120 searches for various terms related to ’socer’ using the Wordtracker information.

I’ll avoid making a joke about the intelligence of athletes here ;), and just go on to say that if I sold soccer related items, I’d be capitalizing on that by using this common misspelling in my page titles, keywords tags and possibly some Description meta tags if I could work some misspellings into the text that I wouldn’t mind appearing in the text box on the results page.

You definitely don’t want to pepper your site with gross misspellings in an effort to gather that traffic; you’ll lose credibility and look as silly as those Flat Earth people and no one will want to buy anything from you! But there is room for optimization of one or two commonly misspelled terms if they relate directly to a product you sell.

Respected Googler Matt Cutts has gone on-the-record to say that misspellings are bad SEO practice. Most of the time I don’t doubt Matt’s sage advice, but this time, I’m disinclined to go along, in light of the aforementioned staggering number of misspelled search terms. It just makes sense to optimize for easily misspelled competitive search terms, such as “flamenco, flamanco, flemenco, flimenco, etc” if you sell dancing shoes.

If you are a good speller yourself, it can be tricky to determine what easily misspelled words you could capitalize on. Use this free Typo Generator from SEO Book to type in a word and select typos for skipped letters, doubled letters, reversed letters, skipped spaces, missed keys and inserted keys.

Goof Luck! I mean, Good Luck!

Posted on October 30th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Search | No Comments »

A recent Webmaster World forum thread discusses tips on using AdSense. There was a lot of information in this thread and if you missed it, I urge you to check it out.

Here is some of what I gathered as usable advice from this discussion:

Place all clickable ads above the fold. Avoid placing ads in headers; mixed in with content seems to perform best. Modulate the number of ads you are running so that you don’t appear spammy. The 300×250 block size is most popular. Once you find something that works, leave it alone. And finally, don’t spend all day and night stressing about AdSense!

These tips might be no-news for those of you who have been using AdSense for a while and have found the winning combination, but for those just getting involved, the many different theories on using AdSense can make for a scary proposition.

Case in point: The initiator of this particular thread said he eventually wanted to be able to “think like the AdSense bot” to maximize his investment. That idea was shot down later by someone who said to avoid thinking like the AdSense bot. Someone else suggested removing all but the highest earning pages, others said that was nonsense. In fact, many of the ideas set forth were later disputed as unimportant or unwise. Where do you weigh in on these contradictory ideas?

Posted on October 24th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Marketing and Promotion | No Comments »

There is no shortage of social sites, as we all know. While most of the well-known social networking sites serve niche segments of the population, they do overlap. Sk*rt gears itself to professional women, and Sphinn appeals to Internet and search marketing professionals, for example. So when I happened across Gooruze.com, I was a little skeptical that we needed yet another social site for online marketing professionals. But when I discovered that some of the founding Gooruze were people whose blogs I read regularly, such as Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, Matt McGee at Small Business SEM, and frequent contributor to TechCrunch Duncan Riley, how could I resist? I signed up.

Gooruze isn’t just for online marketers. Anyone who engages in online marketing, like yourself, can benefit from it. A Q&A section allows you to ask questions of members or share your knowledge with others. You can receive updates on the activity of your favorite members or join or create groups that interest you and receive RSS updates of new activity within those groups: Mine are web design and usability; search engine marketing; email marketing; blogging, podcasts and vlogs; tips; and the help group.

Check out Gooruze, and while you’re there, friend me!

Posted on October 22nd, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Marketing and Promotion | 2 Comments »