Craigslist has been a go-to resource for apartment hunters. But long gone are the golden days of an easy find without paying a fee, says Kevin Schumm, an independent real estate broker in Chicago.

Overposting by aggressive brokers has become a “frustrating” problem for renters, making it more difficult to find an apartment on Craigslist, Schumm says. But good deals can still be found, and in most parts of the country it’s still possible to avoid paying a broker’s fee.

Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of your Craigslist apartment hunt.

Get serious about your search

If you’re serious about finding a place, you need to “treat the search like it’s your job,” says Lizzie Souza, a marketing and PR coordinator for a staffing firm in Chicago.

Souza estimates that she spent 10 hours a week for six weeks before she found her apartment in Lincoln Park. She used a Craigslist app on her smartphone to streamline the search and compiled contact information in a Microsoft Word document.

“I organized it by landlord’s name, contact info, price, amenities, appointment time, and I always included the link so I could refer back,” Souza says. “If I went to a showing and didn’t like the place, I just deleted the Word entry.”

Refine your search

Renters can customize their results. Craigslist recommends setting up an RSS feed, which can automatically push new postings to a renter’s news aggregator.

Keyword searches on Craigslist are critical, says Alaia Williams, the owner of One Organized Business, a Los Angeles consultancy. “I search manually, but I also use a list of keywords to find the results that are most likely to fit my needs.”

Williams, who has found all of her places on Craigslist, advises renters to search for terms such as “pool” rather than subjective words such as “charming.”
Timing is everything

When you see a promising listing in a crowded rental market, jump on it.

“If a phone number was listed, I would immediately call,” says Souza. “If both a number and email address were included, I would do both.”

Listings can also ebb and flow with the season.

“Timing can be key,” Schumm says. “Searches during the peak months of May, September and October result in more competition for the same properties. The weather in the winter months can slow the rental search for many and offer the determined a distinct advantage.”

There are also monthly cycles, and renters who search around the first and 15th of the month — when tenants usually give notice — tend to get a larger selection.
No pictures, no problem?

Craigslist searchers can request to see only results with pictures. But skipping ads without photos could filter out the best listings, Schumm says.

“Promising listings are often those with the fewest pictures and some of the most limited details,” Schumm says. “Too many renters naively rely on pictures as screening criteria. Many landlords with terrific vintage properties are often the most likely not to include pictures because they never have in the past. It’s not necessarily an indicator of a problem. In many cases, it’s precisely the diamond in the rough.”

Regardless of whether you see pictures, it’s critical to ask questions “to clarify price, utilities, if pets were allowed, laundry in building, dishwasher in unit, when the lease started, etc.,” Souza says.

Avoid a scam

Watch out for scams, because they come with the territory, according to Mia Melle, president of RentToday.us, a Chino, Calif.-based property management firm that lists on Craigslist.

“Our homes get relisted almost just as often (as we list ourselves) by scammers who have no affiliation with us whatsoever,” Melle says. The scammers post low rental prices. Victims pay hefty deposits, and then they discover the duplicate listing was a scam.

Jennifer A. Chiongbian, an associate broker with Rutenberg Realty in New York City, says a renter can avoid a Craigslist scam by exercising common sense.

“Don’t waste your time following up with an ad that promises an apartment that seems to have way too many amenities for the asking price,” Chiongbian says.

Chiongbian recommends other basic security rules to avoid a scam: Don’t wire money to strangers, never give out your financial information over the phone or via email, and deal locally with landlords and building managers you can meet face to face.

Article source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2012/04/27/guide-to-finding-apartment-on-craigslist-709784345/

Ever wish you could indulge in your Web browsing addiction during a connection-less train ride? Pocket, the app formerly known as Read It Later, is a lightweight utility that lets you save Web content for offline consumption on a variety of devices. Previously I saved URLs in a draft email in Gmail, but Pocket version 4.0.1 (free) is more straightforward. In April, developer Read It Later renamed its eponymous cult app ‘Pocket’ and improved the interface to look less dated and sterile.

Although Pocket says you can save audio/video clips, you won’t be able to access them when you’re offline (I knew it was too good to be true).

Add Content to Your ‘Pocket’
Once you’ve installed Pocket and created an account, you can start adding Web content to your “pocket.” There are three sources from which you can save material: from within your apps and mobile browsers, from your desktop browsers, or through email. Pocket syncs your content across multiple platforms: desktop, iOS, Android.

You can add Web pages, emails, images, videos, and audio clips to your Pocket, as long as the application you’re using to consume this content is supported by Pocket. Mostly likely, it will be. Pocket isn’t as ubiquitous as Instapaper, but it supports basics like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Opera, Dolphin, stock Android browser, Kindle Fire’s Silk Browser, and a few more.

Pocket offers a fair amount of granularity in content clipping, as well. I think the two most important options you can tweak in Settings are switching user agents (which optimizes content for mobile or desktop viewing) and restricting downloads to Wi-Fi.

Slick Interface
As you add content, the app builds a list of previews of each Web page you fetch. I added 10 items: a YouTube video, a photo from Instagram, several articles, and a link I emailed. The list format organization is refreshingly simple, especially compared to Evernote. Tap an item to open it up in full.

There’s a search box up top which lets you search d your save items by title or URL; it’d be better if you could search by keyword too. You can also organize content by video, image, or article.   

In April Pocket’s interface underwent a revamp (perhaps to differentiate it from Read It Later) that made it much simpler. I really liked a feature that lets you optimize content to your taste: a slider lets you change font sizes, fonts, brightness, etc.

Pocket Versus Instapaper
Pocket’s closest competitor is undoubtedly Instapaper, a cult favorite for years. Feature-wise they are nearly identical, but Pocket lets you “star” items to add to a list of Favorites, or add them to an archive (which feels redundant to me). You can also tag items with key words, for future searches. Personally, I prefer Pocket’s simpler UI.

If you’re looking for a full-fledged organizational app that not only saves Web content for offline reading, but stores documents, checklists, and more, check out Evernote, an Editors’ Choice pick for note-taking apps. But if you’re an Internet junkie who likes quick and simple apps, go with Pocket. Combining a clean user interface with an essential function—reading Web content offline— Pocket version 4.0.2 for Android simply makes Web browsing more efficient   

For more Android Software, see:
•   Pocket 4.0.2 (for Android)
•   Onavo Extend version 1.0 (for Android)
•   TrustGo Antivirus and Mobile Security 1.0.6 (for Android)
•   Skifta (for Android)
•   Facebook 1.9 (for Android)
•  more

Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403738,00.asp

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Google Places is free, simple to optimize and can lead to huge results. Less than two percent of people that use Google ever click on the second page of returns. For local businesses, when someone searches for your products or services, you want to ensure your business ranks on the first page.

The first step is making sure you have either created a Google Places page or claimed your Google Places page. Before you create a page, enter your city and state, the word Places and your business name in the Google search box with quotes around your business name. It should look like this example: “Touchstone group” Chicago IL Places

This step is important because you should only have one Google Places listing per business location. Having two listings will be detrimental to your rankings.

Here are the six simple steps you can take to optimize your Google Places page:

1. Add photos: To go one-step further, take the photos with a GPS-enabled camera, load them onto a website like Picasa and use that image URL to add the picture. Remember to create a keyword-rich name for the photo. An example would be “Our real-estate office here in Chicago IL”
2. Include your business categories: This helps Google know exactly what your business is about.
3. Include your URL: The information on your website’s homepage should match the description and categories that you have on your Google Places page.
4. Add a YouTube video: This doesn’t have to be a studio-quality video.
5. Create a description: This should be simple and sound like something a normal person would say, not an SEO expert.
6. Get reviews: You should never have reviews written from the same computer or create fake reviews. Invite past clients and current clients to leave you a review on your Google Places page. Once you have five or more reviews, the little stars will start to appear in Google’s search returns.

Follow these simple steps and you will be on the right path to getting your business ranked higher in Google’s local search.

Jabez LeBret is the author of the Amazon No. 1 bestselling law office marketing book How to Turn Clicks Into Clients. As a partner at Get Noticed Get Found, a legal marketing agency, over the last nine years he has delivered over 800 keynote addresses in six countries. His main area of expertise is managing Gen Y in the workplace, advanced Facebook strategies, LinkedIn strategies, Google+, SEO, local directory optimization, and online marketing.

Article source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/inc-well/How-to-Optimize-Your-Google-Local-Places-Page-149419835.html

Google has an AdWords engineer named Tanmay A Arora who has been giving tips on AdWords topics in the Google AdWords Help forums.

First Tanmay explained the “Ingredients” In AdWords Quality Score.

The latest give by Tanmay was named the “perfect Quality Score sauce.” Tanmay goes through what the steps you can use to achieve that perfect quality score. Here they are:

(1) Add Keywords

Take an existing campaign and add more keywords to it after having a look at your ‘See search terms’ report. As I mentioned before, Google takes into account the Exact match Click through rate (CTR) for the keyword, It is important to look at this report and keep adding new keywords to your keyword list, which will exactly match the search query, irrespective of the match type they are in.

(2) Add Negative Keywords

It is also recommended that you add negative keywords after looking at the ‘See search terms’ report, this will help you to avoid getting impressions for irrelevant search terms and help in improving the CTR.

P.S. This is a very important resource and you should regularly add keywords and negative keywords on the basis of this report to assure optimum account performance.

(3) Pause Keywords

‘Low search volume’ keywords and keywords with a lot of impressions but very few clicks i.e. ones having a very poor CTR, have an impact on the overall performance of the account and hence you should consider pausing these keywords.

(4) Set The Right Parameters Perfectly (Temperature)

Make sure that you are bidding competitively. The better your ad position, higher the chances of improving CTR for the display URL and keyword. At the least, try to make sure that your max CPC is in line with the estimated first page bid. And for the real competitive edge, switch to manual bidding and go all out.

(5) Garnishing

You know the value of your products and services, its time others know what you have to offer. This is where the presentation of the dish makes the cut.

Make sure you create ads that are more attractive, having call to actions phrases and also include more USPs about your company and services, so that the user finds them attractive. Here are some call-to-action words that you may want to consider using: Buy, Sell, Order, Browse, Find, Sign up, Get a Quote. Also, don’t forget on the inter capitalization in your ad text.

Those are the tips by Google for Google AdWords advertisers.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

Image credit to ShutterStock for sauces spices

Article source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-quality-score-sauce-15078.html

Many who are eager to “get ahead” with their search engine optimization (SEO) program are typically consumed with the latest and greatest SEO techniques, how they are sure to work as well as fantasizing over their list of targeted keyword terms.

Competitive analysis should also take a position of high importance. Don’t get me wrong, proper keyword research, the predecessor to competitive analysis, is important. We know where we want to rank and we know who is ranking there, but how will we get there?

At the onset of your dive into SEO competitive analysis, it’s important you segment your analysis into three areas: content, authority, and opportunity.

Content

Content is king, right? You betcha, and the more you or a competitor have the more likely it is to have enhanced visibility in search engines.

The starting point is your keyword target list. Find the most important terms to your company/site theme and review the search results.

Who comes up consistently in organic results? You may find that your online competition may be quite different than your brick-and-mortar competitors.

Once you’ve found the top 3-5 regularly appearing sites, review their results to identify if they have a keen grasp on title tags, meta description, and URL naming convention best practices. Are they obviously targeting the terms they are showing up for?

Utilize a tool such as SEMRush or Spyfu Kombat to assess what other terms they rank for and that drive traffic. Are these terms also on your targeted keyword list?

Next, take a deeper look at their online presence as there is much more than just the organic SERP. Are they supplementing their SERP presence with PPC? Perform site:www.competitorname.com queries in Google Images, Video, News, Places.

Content isn’t just text. Have they optimized these digital/local/press contextual elements to take advantage of universal search?

Don’t forget channel coverage. Take a look at their social profiles (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and assess for presence, content delivery, engagement, and their fan base. Since citations are an algorithmic factor there is more now to the process than simply feeding the engines.

Authority

Your competitor has tons of content, but let’s see if it’s good content that gets links and shares, and if it has authority via inbound links.

This is also an important stage as we have to decipher competitor engagement with link building. A tool here is Open Site Explorer simply because you can easily review several competitors across multiple trust/authority factors.

Compare the domain authority of the competitors’ sites as well as the page authority of top pages. Also consider the amount of links coming to the site and the number of unique linking domains.

Is the content on the site shared, tweeted, etc.? Is there an overabundance of a certain anchor text phrase or a dominance in any one type of linking site, directories, forums, news, etc.?

Judging these metrics closely is going to tell you what types of content you may need, how well you need to push your content, and where you may need to make up any ground between you and the competitors.

Moving forward you can use a tool such as the SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder to find potential linking options to help even the score.

Opportunity

This is basically an on-site review. This is an opportunity to assess the structure of the site to see where improvement is needed.

Look at on-page keyword targeting of site pages in areas such as titles, copy, heading, alt tags and internal link anchor text. What is the overall hierarchy of content on the site? Is this an advantageous information architecture? Do they utilize sitemaps to deliver content to search engines and are they using up to date techniques such as HTML5 and schema markups?

To gauge their SEO savviness it may also help to review their robots.txt to see if they are withholding certain content accidently or making other flubs such as duplicate content. This can be a good indicator of how in touch they are with SEO and their site.

Moving Forward

The elements of review for competitive analysis can vary from marketer to marketer based on how deep they want to analyze competitors. The areas above are a good way to not skimp on competitive insight but to not exceed a few hours.

It will be imperative moving forward that you continue to monitor your competitors. This provides content topics and channel ideas as well as a way to stay ahead of the game. It can help to decipher content by type gaps whether they are digital or textual, blogging, articles, how-to’s, etc.

You should use competitive link tools as mentioned above, but also utilize tools such as Linkdex that can monitor changes in your competitors’ rankings and traffic estimations.

If you’re extremely strapped for time, spend 30 seconds and set up a Google Alert for your competitor’s name. You may find that Google is noticing them more than you think, showing you that you need to spend more time on the offensive.

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2171188/3-Pillars-of-SEO-Competitive-Analysis

Back in 2009 (was it really that long ago?!) Rand wrote a post titled Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization, which is one of the most popular blog posts on SEOmoz. It is still referenced as much today as it was back in 2009. The core principles haven’t changed that much, but there are some new additions to an SEO’s toolkit when it comes to on-page optimization. Today I want to focus on what these new additions are in relation to eCommerce websites.

Elements of the page you should work on

I made the following mockup to try and visualise clearly all the elements of an eCommerce product page that are important for on-page optimization.

Let’s get into more detail on each of these elements and see what we can do to take advantage and optimise for them, starting with the new additions since Rand’s post in 2009. I’ve related the numbers in the mockups to the sections below; some sections do not have numbers because they are not visible on the page, for example META description.

 Customer Reviews

If you run an eCommerce website and are not collecting customer reviews, you are seriously missing out. Not only is this great feedback that you need to have to improve your business, but it is also an amazing source of unique content. Better yet, it is very scalable across large websites, which means you can get lots of content onto lots of pages.

Quick tips for collecting and using customer reviews:

• Build or buy a system to automatically email customers a few weeks after purchasing and ask for a review
• When getting off the ground and trying to get volume, offer incentives such as a discount on their next purchase in exchange for a review
• Don’t worry about publishing negative reviews, customers aren’t silly and can tell when reviews are a bit too positive

Also, if you are worried about things like this having a negative effect on conversion rates:

See if you can customise your review system to not show this message on products that do not have reviews. Set a threshold so that when a couple of reviews are received, reviews are shown on the product page.

Added benefit: microdata

You also need to make sure you are marking up these reviews with relevant microdata. This will give Google more context about your content, as well as giving you the chance to improve click-through-rates from search results like what we see in this example:

The use of review microformats is increasing all the time so there is an argument that you are not standing out anymore if all the other results have the same type of markup. You could even argue that to stand out you should take them away  

 Product Videos

I’ll admit that this is a tough one to execute, but it is one that I feel is very worthwhile for eCommerce sites. There are many websites already adding videos to their product pages, but they are not always doing it in the most optimal way. A great example of the right way to do this is Zappos who now have over 50,000 product videos.

There are a few benefits to having videos on a product page. One of which is helping make your product pages more link worthy and rich in content. Good quality videos demonstrating use cases of products could also help conversion rates (particularly for high-end, technical products) but I can’t provide evidence for that unfortunately.

Another added benefit as you’ll see from the screenshot above is how your search results for product pages can stand out from competitors. I’ve seen loads of eCommerce stores who have videos on the page but are not embedding or marking them up in the correct way.

By far the best system I know to embed and optimise your videos properly is Wistia, which SEOmoz use for Whiteboard Fridays. These guys have a great system and are always improving how things work and adding new features. We’ve used them on a test site or two at Distilled and got video snippets showing very quickly.

I could talk more about using videos to aid SEO but Phil did a great post that covers pretty much everything you need to know here. He also did a presentation on video SEO and you can see the slides over on Slideshare.

Rel=”next”, Rel=”prev” and view all

One of the problems that always crops up on large eCommerce sites is how to efficiently deal with pagination. You can have product categories that contain thousands of products that span many pages. You want to make sure that all of these products are indexed and regularly crawled, but at the same time you don’t care too much about the paginated pages ranking or having too much link equity.

Since Rand’s post of 2009, we’ve been given an additional way of handling pagination. Namely the rel=”next”, rel=”prev” and “view all” attributes. This markup can help Google better understand pagination and pass link equity to key pages. Google gave some good instructions on how to implement these attributes here and here which you can take a look at.

There are a few other ways to handle pagination, which Adam Audette explains very well in this post on Search Engine Land.

Microdata markup and Schema.org

Another new tool that is available to us now is the use of microdata and the support of the Schema.org vocabulary by the major search engines. That announcement back in June 2011 was quite exciting but didn’t really live up to expectations and Google seemed pretty slow in showing this support in their search results. However this seems to have changed and we are seeing more and more examples of Google using this data now.

Bringing this back to eCommerce, there are a few types of markup you can use on a product page which you can see documentation on here. This page also contains details of review markup that I talked about above. Not all of the properties on this page will be applicable to you, but here are some tips on how to use this:

• Only choose the properties that are relevant to the product attributes you have
• Take development time to integrate these properties into templated elements of your page, so that when you add new products, they are automatically marked up
• Add notes to your analytics package when you put these changes live so you can monitor any improvements

 QA Content

Another big opportunity for eCommerce websites is the integration of question and answer content focused on products. As mentioned above, eCommerce websites have always had the problem of getting unique content onto product pages on scale. Question and answer content can help solve this problem and gives you great scope to get user generated content onto lots of your product pages.

There are a few benefits to integrating this type of system:

• Scalable, user-generated content published onto product pages
• Improving ranking for long-tail terms and question driven keywords if the content is crawlable
• Possible improvement in conversion rate if customer concerns are addressed in the answers
• Possibility of encouraging brand evangelists and even bringing in some gamification principles to help motivate users

Here is a live example from Jessops:

I personally feel like there is an opportunity for Quora here if they wanted to explore this space. Many retailers will be looking for this type of system and Quora may be able to offer something that helps them reach the critical mass of content they’d need.

 Social sharing buttons

I’m a little skeptical about whether social sharing buttons on product pages are a good idea. The goal of a product page is to get someone to buy, not to get them to tweet or like the page. Sure these social signals can help, but personally I’d rather not distract people from buying my product. For me, social sharing should be encouraged at different points in the buying process:

• After the point of purchase on a thank you / confirmation type page
• Email follow up and correspondence – follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook etc
• After a review has been published – give the reviewer the option to share their review

There is an alternative use of social buttons, which I haven’t seen or been able to test on a client site yet. But I wanted to share it anyway. It builds upon the code that Tom Anthony talked about here which allows you to detect if a user is logged into Twitter, Facebook or Google+ whilst they are viewing your website.

If you can use the code that Tom created to detect if a user is logged into Facebook for example, you could show that user a custom message. This could be anything you want but it could be something as simple as encouraging them to like your page in exchange for a discount. This not only gets you the like but also increases the chances of the user converting after giving them a discount.

Tom quickly tested this theory on a test site which you can see a screenshot from here:

You can put whatever message you want in here, this is to demonstrate what could be done if you think a little out of the box and not just put social share buttons on a page because that is what everyone else does.

Page Speed

Again, this is something that has become more of a focus since Rand’s blog post. Speed has always been important but SEOs sat up and took a lot more notice when Google confirmed it was a factor in the algorithm, albeit a small one.

For me, an eCommerce site should care about site speed because of its effect on conversion rate rather than rankings. A user is not going to hang around waiting for your product pages to load and there have been some good studies that show the positive effect a fast loading page has on conversion rates.

Bottom line is that you should care about site speed for your users rather than SEO. Here is a good guide for improving site speed written by Craig at Distilled.

Open graph tags

Another new addition that you can add to your eCommerce pages is the open graph tags. These tags allow you to be much more specific with how your content is shared on Facebook. As Facebook is such a huge platform with a lot of potential for traffic, you need to make sure that you are doing all you can to optimise for it and specify how your content should be shared.

They are also pretty easy for you or a developer to setup and put live. The tags sit inside your header so you will need a flexible CMS or a good developer to make these additions for you. On an eCommerce site with lots of products you’ll probably need a developer to setup the tags so they scale across all of your products and use the correct elements of the page.

Here are some more articles that help with the use and optimisation of the open graph tags:

• Facebook open graph protocol in WordPress
• Web developers cheatsheet for open graph tags
• How to optimise Facebook open graph tags

 Search options

Ideally, a user should never need to use a search box on your website because they will be able to find their way around using your navigation. But there are going to be times when this doesn’t happen and there are users who will just prefer to search. I think that a search box on an eCommerce website is essential and you should use the data that it gives you to improve your website and customer experience.

Here are some tips for using a search box:

• Make sure you are tracking searches using your CMS or this feature of Google Analytics
• Monitor how many people who search and then leave the site straight away – try to lower this number
• Check your search results actually return good results
• Make sure your search function still works when you try singular and plural keywords – particularly with an eCommerce site this is important
• Pull in special offers and discounts related to the searched for keyword
• Pull in product images next to search results, I like how Apple do this:

 Clear call to action

Essential for any eCommerce website. Your ultimate goal is to sell a product so you need to make the call to action as clear as possible. Make sure you are running experiments on your product pages to test and improve conversion rates. Many eCommerce stores focus a bit too much on getting more traffic via SEO and PPC, whilst a quicker way to get more revenue is to get more out of the traffic you already have by improving conversion rates.

Even if you are not actively doing conversion rate optimisation, you should at least be measuring as much data as you can from your site, in particular your product pages which are ultimately the most important pages for an eCommerce website.

Tools you can use to measure and improve calls to action:

• Crazy Egg
• ClickTale
• Google Analytics event tracking

Just get one or two of these tools setup and start gathering the data, once you start gathering the data, you are in a much better position to start caring about it and setting targets against it.

 Trust signals

You are asking people to enter their credit card details on your website. They need to be able to trust that you are a genuine company and that their personal details are secure. You can do this on the product page and enforce it again throughout the checkout process. These are the types of trust signals you should be trying to incorporate into your product pages:

Also make sure these link to secure certificates where possible so that users can go and verify what you are saying. Be sure to check regularly that these links still work – the last thing you want is this link being broken or expired!

 Breadcrumbs

These are underestimated in my opinion, both in terms of customer experience and with SEO. They can be a great way of helping the customer navigate around your website and really help your internal linking.

On an eCommerce site, breadcrumbs can be a bit complicated because there are often multiple ways of getting to the same product page. So the potential breadcrumb trail on a product page could look different depending on which categories and sub-categories you navigate through. For me, the benefits of doing anything too fancy are not big enough to warrant the time. So I’d recommend using one breadcrumb trail and sticking to it. If you are concerned about user experience, you could make the users breadcrumb trail cookie based. But this isn’t always worth the development time so you should assess how valuable it is for your customer experience.

 Images

Crisp, clean, high quality images are necessary for any eCommerce website. The users engage with what they can see and will often be put off if the images are very bad. Here is a great post from Kissmetrics that gives some examples of how to optimise images for conversion.

Something I’d highly recommend for an eCommerce website is showing use cases of the product within the images and not just the product itself against a plan background. As much as I like IKEA, I don’t like the plainness of their images sometimes:

I’d much prefer to see products like this shown how I may use them if I buy them and in the setting of a living room for example.

From a pure SEO perspective, you’ll want to make sure you are doing basic image optimization to capture traffic from Google image search where possible. Here are a few tips for this:

• If possible, use descriptive filename e.g. wooden-oak-table-12345.png instead of 12345.png
• Add ALT text to all product images – it is quite easy to make ALT text the same as the product name automatically in the CMS
• Create and submit an image sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

 META Title

I shouldn’t have to go into much detail here as to the importance of this. Something to bear in mind for eCommerce websites is that you are generating META titles for potentially thousands of product pages. It just isn’t feasible to customise each and every one of these, so you should have these auto-generated by your developers based on a template that you give them. For product pages, this is probably just going to be the product name followed by a small call to action or USP. For example including something like “Free Delivery” could work well for improving click-throughs from search. The key really is to try and avoid masses of duplicate META data.

Top tip - an eCommerce website is usually driven by some kind of database which will have various attributes (fields) for each product. A good developer will be able to use these fields to populate other parts of the page dynamically, for example a META title or description. Bear this in mind when writing your META data templates and use these fields if they are available to you.

META Description

Whilst the META description has minimal effect on rankings, you should be optimising this for improving click-throughs from search results. Ecommerce sites are in the perfect position to include lots of information, calls to actions and USPs into the META description. As mentioned above, the META description could be auto-generated based on a template that you provide to a developer. This could include database fields such as categories and sub-categories.

 Product description

In a post-Panda world, it is very important to make your product descriptions unique. Taking descriptions straight from manufacturers or product feeds does not differentiate you at all from the hundreds of other retailers who sell the same product. Spend the time and resource making these unique and engaging and make sure you include the USPs of your offering – such as free delivery or lowest prices.

 Page URL

Again, this is pretty basic SEO but there is one key thing to remember with eCommerce sites. You should not include categories or sub-categories in product URLs, especially if there is more than one way to find a product, for example if it is in more than one category. This can lead to duplicate product pages. You can fix this with rel=”canonical” tags but it isn’t really ideal.

Best practice is to just use product name and a code as the URL, for example – www.example.com/product-name-12345. The reason for the addition of a number in the URL is to cover yourself against similar product names – not usually a problem but worth trying to prevent.

 H1 tags

It is debatable how much H1 tags matter anymore and some studies from SEOmoz have shown that they do not have a lot of impact on rankings. However I feel that for the time it takes to optimise this, it is worth doing and certainly isn’t going to hurt you. It is also good to have clean markup of the page so that if for some reason someone browses a page with CSS turned off, the page still has a logical structure.

For an eCommerce product page, I’d recommend coding your page template so that the product name automatically becomes the default H1 tag for a page. This should help to eliminate duplicate H1 tags across the website and will automatically optimise each page you publish.

 Phone number

If you can provide a phone number, do it. Not only to help in terms of customer support, but also as another trust signal. If we think back to what Panda was trying to achieve, one of the questions was “would you trust this website with your credit card?” and one factor that certainly helps inspire trust is a phone number.

A pro tip here for eCommerce websites – if you have a customer support team. Keep track of your abandoned baskets in the checkout process and if you have captured the customer’s phone number, take some time to get your support team to phone and see if they can see what went wrong. This not only gives you a chance to get the sale, but you can also get feedback on your checkout process and see what barriers to conversion there may be.

 Company details

Particularly relevant for companies who target local markets, giving Google more signals of your location can help rankings for those types of keywords. You can also use a few bits of Schema.org markup to give some extra context to the content. It is also another trust signal for Google and users to look at.

Conclusion

Well that is about it, I hope that has given you enough to work on to try and improve your eCommerce product pages. To wrap up, here are some more great articles on eCommerce SEO, many of which are from this curated list of eCommerce resources by Everett Sizemore:

• Building Deep Links into Product Pages
• 65 Ways to Improve Online Sales
• 24 Ecommerce Development Tips

As always, I’d love to hear your comments and feedback or ping me on Twitter to ask more questions.

Article source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-onpage-optimization-for-ecommerce-websites

Although it seems counter-intuitive, the better PPC campaigns are managed, the more they actually reveal about the company’s inside information. Those individuals who effectively manage these campaigns, at first glance, seem like they are doing great things for their companies. In all actuality, they are unknowingly releasing a world of practical, usable data to their direct competitors, but only if competitors know how to find it.

Let’s pose a hypothetical to illustrate exactly how a singular piece of datum from one company can yield multiple pieces of usable, practical information for its direct competitors. Take large credit card company like Capital One, who has numerous competitors that exist in the same market and have roughly comparable numbers in terms of responses to direct mailers. The more comparable the businesses, the more accurate the estimates will be.

All of these companies use the same type of direct mail, which includes three separate options to apply for the credit card: online, phone, or snail mail. So, Capital One includes the URL of “application.capitalone.com,” on the mailer which customers can reach by either typing the given URL into the address bar at the top of the screen, or typing the URL into a Google search.

Let’s imagine we are Chase, a competitor of Capital One. We know that our data is comparable to Capital One’s data. Thus, at Chase, we can apply our own data to each method of response for a direct mailer: online yields 70 percent of the referrals, phone bank calls yield 20 percent, and the remaining 10 percent of the referrals are snail mail. These numbers would be ubiquitous throughout comparable companies in the credit card industry.

Given that Chase has about the same information in terms of responses, we can utilize Google Keyword Tool to find out exactly how many potential Capital One customers used a Google search to locate the URL in the direct mailer.

By performing a search for the keyword “application.capitalone.com” it reveals that approximately 18,100 people in a given month reached Capital One’s page by typing the URL into Google’s search bar. Being that we have comparable companies, we can apply the 18,100 customers to Chase’s internal company data that approximately 40 percent of our customers reached our application URL by using a Google search and that roughly 70 percent of respondents to Chase’s direct mail use the online option to apply.

Let’s do some math: 18,100 divided by 40 percent divided again by 70 percent = an estimated 64,642 applicants responded to Capital One’s Direct Mailer in all three methods (online, phone, and traditional mail). With this example, we see one piece of seemingly innocuous datum has given a competitor a window into Capital One’s closely guarded information. Despite Capital One’s best efforts, their well managed direct mail campaign allows for their competitors who analyzing the available PPC data to make more prudent decisions about their own direct mail strategies.

This type of research driven decision making is not just applicable to multimillion dollar corporations. For example, let’s suppose you own a small online business that sells body piercing jewelry and you have a competitor who has a business comparable to yours, but they have recently ventured into selling piercing tools in addition to body jewelry. You have considered moving into selling the tools like your competitor, but you are unsure if this is a sound business decision.

It’s definitely time to roll out the heavy artillery and use a site like SEMrush, SpyFu, or KeywordSpy (disclosure: I am COO of SEMRush). Using one of these tools, we extract the relevant data and make an informed decision: Should I or shouldn’t I start selling piercing tools?

If you knew how much of their advertising budget your competitor was allocating for their new advertising campaign over a series of months, couldn’t you then make the decision to enter the market or just stick to selling just the jewelry? With one of these services, you can look at the proportional increase or decrease of the advertising budget that your competitor is allocating for their new line of piercing tools.

Suppose that in one month your competitor allotted 7 percent of their advertising budget to selling the tools, next month they move to 15 percent, and 20 percent the following month. Keep in mind; the money being put towards the piercing tools campaign is also money that is not being put into advertising the jewelry side of their business.

Moving away from one product line and investing more in another is a huge decision on their part and should be a clear indicator to you as a business owner. An indicator of what though?

Excluding the possibility that they’re an eccentric millionaire and enjoy throwing their money away on unsuccessful advertising, it’s much more likely that your competitor is expending more of their budget on the piercing tools side of the business and less on the jewelry because it’s yielding positive results for them. By looking at the data for their advertising of piercing tools, we can see that this campaign is clearly making them very happy because they are steadily increasing the amount of money allocated to it every month. Also, according to the data, they are only getting happier with each passing month that you aren’t in the market, but they won’t tell you that.

So, these companies who desperately try to guard inside information, unintentionally reveal their inside information and are really only left with two choices: begrudgingly accept that your competitors will eventually know your secrets, or drop their online component. Companies, both small and large, can choose to jump headfirst into the unknown, or make an informed, data driven decision for less than a $100/month that gives them access to immediate, usable information with openly available tools.

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2171186/How-Well-Run-PPC-Campaigns-Reveal-Valuable-Inside-Information-to-Competitors

Illustration: Harry Afentoglou

Picture this. You’ve created a Facebook page for your business, you’re building a following and they are very engaged. They promote your business on their “walls” and “like” your posts. Or maybe you’ve developed a strong community on Twitter and this is driving traffic to your website and converting prospects into sales.

Then the unthinkable happens.

Your page gets shut down. A bug wipes all your followers and deletes those you are following. You’ve lost all this valuable data and you’re going to have a tough time getting it back. Or it will take a long time to  rebuild the community that you’ve taken years to build.

Or perhaps you don’t suffer from something so dramatic. Maybe, for legal reasons, you need to find a Twitter exchange between you and another person from way back in 2008. Or you just want to find a photo that you Tweeted five months ago. And what about all those snaps you’ve loaded on to Instagram? Is there a quick and easy way to suck them all out so you can use them elsewhere? Do you have a decent backup system for your social media?

We’ve all been indoctrinated into how important it is to backup our computer files and other data. Our IT advisers tell us to schedule regular backups not only on one external hard drive but two. Just in case.

But with more small businesses taking their activity online – from customer interactions and promotion of products – are you backing up your data, messages and interactions on social media?

There are various ways you can do this. But sometimes it can be a boring manual process where you’re trawling through pages and pages of old data in order to find what you want. There are various options to overcome this:

Backupify will back up everything from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and Flickr. Starting at US$4.99 per month (A$4.80) for five accounts.

BackUpMyTweets, as the name suggests, backs up your Tweets. It’s free if you Tweet about it (and your data will remain in the cloud). However, if you pay US$12 (A$11.60) a year, you can download the data to analyse and manipulate yourself.  

TweetBackup, is a similar service and is powered by Backupify. It runs a daily backup and asks that you follow @tweetbackup on Twitter

For Facebook, you can download a copy of your Facebook data by going to to your profile, click on “Account settings”, and then click on “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. This will reflect your data at that particular point in time.

Basically, there is no shortage of many different social media backup services to choose from, all offering didn’t levels of service. Some are easy to use, others more unwieldy. One of the most popular is Backupify.

However, one that has flown under the radar is SocialSafe.

I have been using SocialSafe for five weeks now and have been very impressed.

Please note that I have no affiliation with SocialSafe.

I became aware of the service at I attended the South by South West Interactive Festival in March and decided to try it out.

However, unlike many platforms that I subscribe to, which then fall by the wayside, I find that I’m using SocialSafe more every week. While there is a free version, the Pro version is only US$6.99 (A$6.75) for the whole year. And, quite frankly, if your business uses social media and you are not currently backing up your activity, you’re mad not to do it.

Backing up
At minimum, it can back up Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and all your photos on Instagram. Importantly, it will also back up your Facebook business pages. This is vital if you want to keep a record of your interactions and messages. It will backup wall posts, notes, active fans and so on.

The backup is done automatically and while some backup services will only backup activity from the point at which you subscribe to the service, SocialSafe will retrieve and backup data as far back as the Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Google+/Instagram API will allow. I can retrieve activity from my first post on Facebook in 2007.

Easy to use interface
I have also been impressed with the search functionality on SocialSafe. Not only can you search by keyword, you can search by date, person, photos or wall post. If you remember that you posted a useful link somewhere back in 2010, you can retrieve it by typing in  keywords. There is also no huge lag while the application searches, it appears within seconds.

Exporting data
The feature that I find most useful is the ability to export data as a .csv file (Excel). For example, you can export a list of your Twitter followers and this will contain everything from their name, Twitter handle, when they joined Twitter, where they are based, how many followers they have, how many people they are following, whether you follow them back and how many times they’ve tweeted since they joined.

This data is immensely valuable. It means you can easily identify your most influential followers, to sort them by geography, level of activity and even timezone (in case you want to determine whether it’s worthwhile to schedule Tweets while you are asleep for followers in another part of the world).

Like I said, there are various services available to backup your social media – all of which do a good job and all of which have merit. However, SocialSafe is certainly my pick in terms of ease of use, value for money and the ability to export meaningful data.

Article source: http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/should-you-backup-your-social-media-activity-20120429-1xsjk.html