Web PieRat

On our vacation this week to the hinterlands of northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper peninsula, First Mate Brian and I stopped by Lake Superior to take in the sunset. As I hunted the shoreline for treasure and arty photo opportunities, Brian drew me a lovely effigy. I knew he was up to something because I paused now and then to capture the sunset’s progress and his silhouette. I’m a lucky girl.

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

The quickest path to earning more from an ecommerce site’s organic search traffic is to convert more consumers who already go there. So many SEO strategies focus on driving more visitors, but what use is driving more searchers to a site that can’t convert them? ZenithOptimedia, a large advertising and marketing firm, predicted in 2010 that “$56.8 billion will be spent this year on generating website traffic, but only 2%-3% of visitors will actually convert.” Given, that’s across all marketing channels, but the typical ecommerce site’s organic search conversion rates tend to hover around that same 2 percent to 3 percent.

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My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

Search engine optimization typically focuses on the trophy terms, the high-volume keyword phrases, because marketers need to drive the highest value with the lowest effort. Unfortunately, those juicy trophy terms are great for brand recognition and customers’ initial awareness, but they typically don’t convert as well as the less commonly searched long tail phrases. But optimizing a site manually for the millions of phrases that could drive converting customers to a site just isn’t scalable or possible with limited resources. User generated content such as reviews and question-and-answer sections can solve the problem by outsourcing long tail optimization to your own customers.

User generated content — UGC — is great for SEO for a couple of reasons. First, when customers write reviews or ask and answer questions about a site’s products, they use different words than marketers use. Customers tend to use the same words that other customers and searchers use. Enabling UGC on a site, therefore, ensures the best of both worlds: The product descriptions and category level content will be written by marketers using the brand voice, and the UGC will be written by customers using the voice of the customer.

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I was underwhelmed by Google’s Thanksgiving doodle … UNTIL I played with the personalization animations. Very cool, Google! Did you know that if you click the wing you get a slot-machine-esque changing of features that settles into a random configuration. And for the first time there’s a link to share your doodle to G+ (nice move, makes perfect sense) as well as a button to get the link to share to your other favorite social network or email around or scribble it on a slip of paper and stash it in the hidden drawer where you keep your toenail clippings. Hey, I’m not judging, everyone has their thing. I love the push pins in the corner of the doodle, too, because who among us doesn’t remember making a turkey from the tracing of your hand and decorating it? Of course, my favorite turkey doodle is a pirate! Check out my Pierat pirate turkey, make your own favorite version, and have a fabulous Thanksgiving!

UPDATE: Ohmigod I’m so excited! An anonymous commenter tipped me off to the all-black-feathers trick! Make all the feathers black and you get a KABOOM full-blown pirate with five extra accessories and a flapping beak: a parrot, captain’s hat, hook, treasure chest and giant black beard! SO Happy! Thanks for commenting, “Me!”

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

When ecommerce companies think about content syndication, they typically consider acquiring content that others have written to beef up their own sites. Depending on the goal, placing content from other sites onto your own can be beneficial from a branding, partnership, or reference point of view, but rarely for search engine optimization.

By its nature, content syndication tends to create duplicate content — I addressed that topic here previously, at “SEO: There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty” — because one site creates content and one or more sites post that content to their own sites. But it doesn’t have to be duplicate content.

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OK, so this isn’t link stalking, it’s a battle over a box. Cats love boxes. Cricket controls the box, but Mittens is definitely interested in acquiring the box for his own uses. And because he’s aggressive, Mittens does indeed become king of the box.

Link stalking is much the same. It’s about determining which links your competitors have that you might fancy having yourself. Unlike Mittens, your reign will not usually be supreme — the typical successful result is that both you and your competitor now have similar links. If this is the only tactic in your link building arsenal, you’ll likely get closer to your competitors’ results but this alone will not beat your competitor. That’s not surprising since there is no single SEO tactic that will beat your competitor, but it’s worth repeating anyway.

Learn more about the link stalking by reading “Link Stalking with Link Diagnosis.”

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5447259648.

On Friday 11-11-11, my geeky love Brian R. Brown proposed, the digital way. The Web Pierat well soon have a most seaworthy First Mate.

We were having a casual diner at one of our favorite local restaurants, Williams Street Public House, the first place we ate when we moved to Crystal Lake, IL. At the end of our meal, Brian took a picture of me and daughter Hazel with our gorgeous dessert to post to Facebook, and asked me to check my phone to make sure that it had uploaded to Facebook OK.

Instead of the photo, he had posted this amazingly eloquent and moving note asking me to marry him. Naturally, after reading with some slight disbelief and happy shock, I said yes. Emphatically. Of course we didn’t get a photo of ourselves in all the hubbub, so a photo of the ring will have to do. It’s beautifully simple and classic with a squared-off bottom so it won’t spin. He did very well.

Even better than the quality of the gorgeous ring, which he built himself online from scads of loose stones and settings on BlueNile.com, is that it is 1.01 carats. And guess what a 101 server header status signifies?

101 Switching Protocols
The server understands and is willing to comply with the client’s request, via the Upgrade message header field for a change in the application protocol being used on this connection. The server will switch protocols to those defined by the response’s Upgrade header field immediately after the empty line which terminates the 101 response.
– http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

So basically, our engagement is a change in protocol. Perfect!

I had been hoping for a geeky proposal some day, and Brian delivered in spades. I’m the luckiest woman, to have found my geeky soul mate and to know that I am his. He’s my knight in shining armor and the smile on my face.

Cricket, the most neurotic of the Web Piecats, is not hiding. No, she’s spying, and was none too pleased that I was jeopardizing her cover. I tried to tell her that there are much more effective ways to conduct competitive research for organic search, but she wanted to do it her way.

Here are a couple of effective and free ways to spy on your competitors’ SEO tactics, all of which work much better than hiding under paper packing paper:

• How about looking at their site for starters, silly kitty. What keywords are they targeting in the title tags and navigation?
• Crawl their site to collect all the title tags and linking patterns quickly. See 8 SEO Reasons to Crawl Your Sites for more on using crawlers for SEO.
• Check out SpyFu.com to see what terms they’re bidding on and winning in paid and organic search.
• Scope their link portfolio with tools like Link Diagnosis or Open Site Explorer.

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5423868928.

My latest article at Ecommerce Developer, read it in full here.

The first thing I do when working with a new site is set my favorite crawler on it. This gets me acquainted with all the URLs, site sections, interlinkings, forgotten pockets, scars and warts. A good crawler offers a wealth of data useful not just to search engine optimization, but also to site maintenance in general.

Luckily, some great crawlers are free. You’ll find pages of options just by Googling “web crawler” or a similar term. Xenu Link Sleuth is my favorite for the price — it’s free — and for the broad assortment of data collected on every URL it crawls. GSite Crawler is another good, free alternative. It’s focused mainly on creating XML sitemaps and feeds, but it’s good for other uses as well.

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I love Android. Obsessively, vocally, and without a trace of remorse. It fits me perfectly. I admit iOS has it’s place and is the best choice for some. In fact, we have 2 Android devices, 2 iOS devices and a Blackberry in our household. I plan to write a buying guide soon for those who want to know which will be best for them.

But this post isn’t a balanced review of the pros and cons of each. This post is dedicated purely to the glory that is Android.
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