Well, 12% of the 11 millions reviews Bazaarvoice has access to contain some form of product suggestions. That’s market research gold. Companies pay agencies regularly to determine what customers want, and these 12% are leaving product opinions freely in their reviews. So for the cost of implementing a reviews feature on your site, you also get the bonus of honest product feedback. Yes it’s visible to all and yes it may not all be complimentary, but it’s valuable and free. So what do customers say about products?

See the full infographic here, along with a cool flash brochure that explains all the data.

Google released 52 algorithm updates and changes in April 2012—1.73 per day. The Panda and Penguin updates received the most attention because they affected the most sites, but 50 other updates impacted search results as well. Most were focused on Google’s crusade to improve the quality of sites that rank the highest in their search results, but others included updates to changes in indexing, spelling, sitelinks, sports scores features and more. Of course, April 1st also brought a new round of Google’s April Fools’ pranks including the super geeky 8-bit Google Maps and Google Australia’s Street Roo instead of the usual Street View.

The most important updates in May, however, focused on site quality and spam prevention. First, Google quietly released the Panda 3.5 algorithm update on April 19. The Panda update, named for the Google engineer who developed it, targets sites with thin content or that repost content found on other sites. This 3.5 update is just the latest of the Panda releases that tend to happen every four to eight weeks.

Sites that create fresh, unique content on a regular basis—such as ecommerce sites that release new products regularly and write their own unique product descriptions—shouldn’t have much trouble with Panda updates. Consumer product sites that feature unique content about their branded products as well as blog posts, Twitter feeds and other sources of unique content should likewise have no Panda problems.

A few days later on April 24, Google released another important algorithm update they codenamed “Penguin” that intensified Google’s war on webspam. Three percent of Google’s search rankings were affected in the U.S. The algorithm update seems to have hit sites that have overoptimized anchor text and low anchor text diversity, as well as a high number of links from topically irrelevant sites.

Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »

For instance, the owner looks at their homepage and sees a beautifully branded design with promotions and marketing messages and navigation and calls to action. But what they don’t consider is that all of that lovely information that may or may not contain valuable keywords is hidden inside of images or other areas that search engines can’t read. For example, from this tag cloud you can easily see why my daughter’s favorite online game site Poptropica won’t be ranking for “online kids games” anytime soon:

Look how few words are available for search engines on www.poptropica.com

Another application for a tag cloud is demonstrating the CSS-styled text on the page that only displays when a user clicks or rolls over an area of the page. At times, this text can outweigh the relevant keywords on the page and dilute the keyword theme for the page. For example, Casual Male XL appears to be targeting [big and tall] and [big and tall men's clothing] on its homepage, but its text-only cache shows a lot of size-based information related to the size profile that displays with JavaScript disabled. Consequently, the tag cloud shows many instances of “size” (11 times on the page) and “XL” (13 times on the page), while “mens” appears zero times and “clothing” appears twice. However, given that they rank in the top 3 in Google for [big and tall], their keyword density obviously isn’t hurting them as much as their keyword prominence (and likely other SEO factors) are helping them.

Casual Male XL's word cloud based on Google's cache

I was using Wordle for a while, but it didn’t have the options I wanted. Then I discovered Tagxedo. Both allow you to enter a block of text or a URL from which to grab text. Both allow you to customize color themes, fonts and orientation. But Tagxedo takes it several steps further to offer different shape options (clouds, star, heart, school bus, and many more), all sorts of word emphasis and filtering options, as well as the opportunity to modify the text in the cloud while you’re creating the cloud. Wordle makes you start over again with a new cloud if you want to change the text or URL the cloud is made of.

For example, here’s the tag cloud I made for the homepage of Web Pierat.

A kitty cat word cloud for Web Pierat's homepage from Tagxedo

First, I do a Google search for the cached version of a page like this: cache:webpierat.com

Google's cached version of webpierat.com

Then click on the “Text Only Version” link in the upper right so you see something like this:

Google's text-only cache of webpierat.com with the site text highlighted to copy

Then just paste the text from the text-only cache into Tagxedo or whatever tool you prefer and fiddle with the settings. Voila! A custom tag cloud of the text Googlebot can index on the site…. Well, minus the title tag since Google’s cache doesn’t display that, but you can add the title tag into the text box as well.

Search engine optimization is all about “signal” and “amplification.” The signal is simply using relevant keywords. Amplification is about how to use those keywords and encourage linking and sharing. Think of the keywords as the voice of a site and the amplification as a megaphone. The site shouting the loudest and most relevant signals at the search engines will win better rankings for a search and potentially win new customers as well.

Keyword research is critical, but keywords are useless until they are used in some way on a website. How those keywords are used to optimize the content makes the keywords either whisper or shout to search engines.

Content Optimization: Unmuting the Keywords

To give keywords a voice, simply place them on a website. Cramming all the keywords onto a single glossary page will make each keyword whisper so softly as to be inaudible to search engines. But placing a single keyword at the beginning of the title tag for the page for which it’s most relevant turns the signal for that page up to polite dinner conversation level.

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

The long tail “refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a “normal” or Gaussian distribution,” according to Wikipedia. Mittens thought that definition was completely incomprehensible. I believe his exact response was “Whaaaaat?”

Basically, the long tail of search refers to the concept that a very few very large keyword phrases (the head) will each drive a very large amount of traffic, while a very large number of phrases will each drive a very small amount of traffic (the tail). When a site is optimized for the long tail, the total volume of search traffic driven by those many phrases that each drive a couple of visits a month (the long tail) can be larger than the volume of traffic driven by the few big trophy terms that each drive high volumes of traffic (the head).

While it’s likely Mittens understood my explanation about the long tail, the only long tail he cared about was on his mousie. And Scooter had long since gotten bored and left to take a nap.

Excerpts from my latest article on Practical eCommerce, “SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business.”

Like Bon Jovi’s song, “You Give Love a Bad Name,” some search engine optimization companies give that profession a bad reputation. Practical eCommerce recently fielded a question from a reader wondering why his site was being penalized for work his SEO company had done on his behalf. It doesn’t seem fair, he complained. He’s right, it doesn’t seem fair when you’ve trusted a company to improve your site’s organic search performance and instead the company makes it worse. Shouldn’t the SEO company be punished instead of the hapless site owner? It just doesn’t work that way, whether it seems fair or not.

Anyone can call himself or herself an SEO professional, just like anyone can call himself or herself a web designer, a landscaper, a chef or any number of other professions. Skill and knowledge levels vary greatly in any industry, as does the professionals’ interest in providing a fair service for a fair price.

Is the company ethical, does it strive to provide the best service possible for every client, or is it just out to make a quick buck? For ecommerce merchants looking to retain an SEO professional, here’s how to tell the difference: SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business.

The video format is interesting but I wonder if it would have gotten more shares as an infographic instead of a video? Or perhaps an HTML5 interactive piece where you could roll over different components and have the data zoom out to the foreground or the sizes of the elements change?

It would be very interesting to do a test of some sort to determine which format was the most effective. But I can’t think of a way to format such a test. If you do it sequentially — first video then static then HTML5 — you risk the latter formats getting less buzz based on saturation of the information from the previous formats. But if you release them simultaneously on different social platforms — say YouTube for video, Pinterest for static and Facebook for HTML5 — you obviously risk the biases introduced by the size of the audiences there.

I suppose you could always do standard A/B testing of the format on your own site, but the most interesting thing is what happens to the information off your site. Where and how it’s shared. Which formats have stronger reach on which social networks. You can make suppositions but what if the data surprised us? What if the sheer volume of Facebook users wiped the floor with YouTube sharing? And would that change if the primary home of the video was a blog post on your site that embedded the YouTube video rather than sending traffic to Facebook or YouTube itself to see the video? So many interesting questions. Too bad I’m an SEO and not a data analyst.

Thanks to Melissa Fach over at SEJ for the post idea.

Google’s much discussed over-optimization penalty turned out to be a moderate evolutionary step in Google’s site quality crusade. Launched April 24, Google wrote in a blog post of its update, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines. This algorithm represents another step in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.” I addressed the over-optimization penalty on Practical eCommerce last month at “Google Plans SEO Over-Optimization Penalty,” and expressed optimism for the impact here at “Cautiously Psyched For Google’s Planned Over-Optimization Penalty.” But it seems the impact will be less than I had hoped. Only time will tell.

According to the Google blog post, an estimated 3.1 percent of U.S. search results will be affected by the algorithm update, while sites in countries like Poland that are more prone to produce webspam could see as high as 5 percent change in rankings. The algorithm will more aggressively penalize webspam tactics like keyword stuffing and irrelevant linking from sites that “spin” content with barely readable content. “Spinning” refers to the practice of scraping content from other sites and then manually or mechanically rearranging the words to create a “new” piece of content.

Read the article, as well as how to determine if your site was hit, in full at Practical eCommerce »

Search engine optimization for multinational sites isn’t all that different than SEO for a single U.S. site. It all boils down to the same three pillars: getting indexed, being relevant by using the most popular keywords and being popular by acquiring links and social mentions. That said, the specifics of those three pillars are different for multinational sites versus a single U.S. site.

Each country has its own language, languages or even dialects within a language. Each country has a different mix of search engines that are popular among its citizens. China has Baidu, Japan still clings to Yahoo and most of the Americas, Europe and Africa prefer Google. In addition, international SEO multiplies the challenge of optimizing a single site by the number of countries targeted. A site for a single country with a host of SEO issues will likely have 10 times the issues or more when multiplied across 10 countries and languages. International SEO is an incredibly complex challenge, but these 10 geotargeting tips will get you started.

1.    Site Structure: Where to host each country’s content is the first critical question. The best option for SEO is a subdirectory such as www.site.com/en-uk/ and www.site.com/fr-ca/. Hosting content on a single domain enables each country to benefit from the links acquired by the other countries and the domain as a whole. Register the ccTLD—the top-level domain for each country—as a defensive measure and for promotion, and redirect that ccTLD to the content at the subdirectory. For example, site.co,uk would redirect to www.site.com/en-uk/. Country content can also be hosted at the ccTLD or a subdomain, but each comes with its own drawbacks.

Nine more geotargeting signals to come! Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »

If you’d like to see a webinar on this topic, head on over to Practical eCommerce for my recent presentaton on International Search Engine Optimization. The archived presentation is free, but you’ll need to log in to Practical eCommerce (also free) to view it. Enjoy!

There are no safe link building shortcuts. Instead I want to warn marketers about deceptive search marketers and the dangers of using “easy” link building tactics. In the latest instance, the search engine optimization community is abuzz with news that Home Depot’s SEO team has attempted to increase its link portfolio by potentially shady means. Last year, J.C. Penney and even Google’s own Chrome browser marketing site were reportedly penalized by Google Search for violating linking guidelines.

The temptation to manipulate rankings by acquiring links through unethical means is easy to understand: Links are the lifeblood of the Internet and a major factor in every major search engine’s ranking algorithms. In theory, more links means better rankings. In reality, the engines compile data across hundreds of factors algorithmically to determine rankings, and links are just one part. We’ll look at some link building tactics as examples of what not to do.

Read the article in full at “SEO: Avoid Link Building Shortcuts.” »