E-commerce site owners often complain, that inspite of having tons of products in their catalogue it is often just the front page that ranks for keywords.

I have come across several internet marketing managers who have engages services of SEO firms but haven’t been successful at getting their entire catalogues indexed.

The reason in most cases is the same – The SEO firms have created landing pages for their popular products/categories and linked them from the front page. The result – The site starts ranking for some keywords related to these products.

The ideal solution to optimizing an e-commerce website or making a search engine friendly shopping cart is to modify the URL structure of the shopping cart so that it automatically churns out static SEO friendly URLs. Going a step further, optimization logic needs to be included in the titles, meta tags and other content and the URLs need to be linked intelligently so as to create an optimized mesh structure.

All this will lead to a majority of the shopping cart pages getting indexed by search engines and thus enable you to target the long tail, which can increase your traffic several times.

Or something like it! I remember watching Bill Gates’ interview long back (Dec, 2005), where he was asked about Google’s business model and about free software and he answered, ” I think, when you use a free search engine (like Google), if somebody is making a lot of money from advertisers, they ought to share it with you.” So I concluded that the day Microsoft decides to go all out against other search engines, it would launch a search engine that would change search marketing dynamics and actually share the revenue from advertisers with users. And I thought, could they actually make that happen?

From the looks of it, seems like Microsoft is close. I believe here is a test version. And they’ll announce a new search advertising model at Advance 08 Conference in Bellevue, Washington today!

Would microsoft go for a pay-per-acquisition model rather than google’s pay-per-click (where users still burn a lot of cash)? Will they really share revenue with visitors? What would the market dynamics be then? And surely Yahoo! would fit in somewhere. Mr. Kevin Johnson (President, MSFT Platforms & Services), we’re waiting for your presentation!

- Archit

In line with my expectations (ref. to my blog post on May 4th 2008 – Microsoft walks away from Yahoo deal) that walking away from the deal was just a temporary ploy adopted by Microsoft, major news papers have today reported that Yahoo and Microsoft have resumed talks in the wake of a shareholder rebellion launched by billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

However, this time the discussions are focusing on a deal short of outright acquisition. Microsoft announced the discussions in a brief statement that it made on Sunday.

The press reported that Microsoft was proposing an arrangement focused only on Yahoo’s search advertising business.

Makes sense doesn’t it? They need to compete with Google and its Adwords program and Microsoft’s Adcenter isn’t really doing too well.

Well, I guess it promises to be a long, exciting and complicated battle, but I still week Microsoft may get Yahoo in the end.

I have been asked hundreds of times as to what exactly is SEO and I have answered a million times that it is the art of placing one’s website near the top of search engine result pages for a specific group of keywords related to their business.

That is the text book definition of search engine optimization, but what exactly is it? Some believe it is playing around with code, others wonder if it is tricking search engines while there are still other people who believe that it is magic and ask for overnight rankings for their “soon to be launched” websites.

Well SEO isn’t tricking any search engines… neither is it magic. It is a process, that if done correctly can help leverage the intrinsic value of your website and maximize its chances of ranking high up on the search engines.

Now, what do I mean by the intrinsic value of a website?

Imagine your site has 100 pages of unique content. On-page SEO or website optimization helps leverage these 1000 pages of content so that they’re indexed well and search engines see the right titles and metas and internal link structure and do not encounter any difficulty in spidering these pages. Off-page optimization will help increase the popularity of this site by informing other sites of its presence and having related websites link to this useful content.

As you will notice the above example assumes that the site already has a 100 pages of unique content. Now, assume that we have another site with just 1 page of content and a form. Can SEO help you rank this site at the top of the same set of competitive keywords that we targeted in the first example?

No IT CANNOT.

Conclusion – SEO is NOT magic. It is simply leveraging the intrinsic value of the website to help it rank the best it can on search engines for a specific set of keywords.

There are a lot of sites out there that get tons of good traffic through search engines but don’t get their fair share of leads or sales.
Most visitors search, land up on the site and just leave.

I often get asked if it is even possible to get better conversions on a site? Or all you can do is work on getting more visitors by investing in SEO, PPC and all the other forms of internet marketing.

Well, it is important to keep working on the internet marketing campaigns that you’re running but it is definitely possible to improve conversions.

Some simple mistakes that I often see on sites is -

1 – No clear message -

If you’re offering a service or product build your website around it. Don’t confuse a visitor by offering him tons of irrelevant data.
2 – Passive Goal Marketing -

You want the visitor to fill up a form, or click on the Buy button? Well, actively tell them to do that. Don’t hide your contact or buy buttons and hope that people will notice and click. Be extremely clear about what you want the user to do and then make it easy for him to do it.

3 – Trust Elements -

Everyone thinks twice before giving out their payment and personal information. Tell them that it’s safe. Use those trust elements like the Verisign secure certificate, Anti-Hack symbol, etc that you may have purchased to re-assure potential buyers.

4 – Browser Compatibility -

Check your site with the popular browsers. Often, designers don’t bother to do that and it can affect conversions. No one is going to purchase stuff from a site that they can’t view in their browser.

5 – Use soothing Colors -

A professional website cannot be bright red and black. You may be fond of these colors, but if it is a professional service you offer stick to the safe blues and whites or a color that’s associated with your professional service.

I hope these tips help you. You can check out the articles’ section at Convonix for more detailed articles on website usability and internet marketing.

Was just chatting the other day with a close friend and her tag line said, “When in doubt Google”.  I gave this a decent thought and came to the conclusion that Google actually runs our life. We query Google for every small thing, from finding information on a travel destination to looking for that perfect recipe which will make your dinner a class apart.

Surprisingly though, Google always finds a way to give the right results. You can also make an argument that we believe Google is right because we follow it and do not turn to other search engines like Yahoo, Live, Netscape (yes, they do exist) to cross check the results thrown in by Google.

This gave me a thought and I was curious to know how much of the world market does Google dominate. Not surprisingly, I “Googled” for this too. Anyways here are some results as per the Market Share stats

Google is making a killing with almost 78% of the market share (was shocked to know this).  Yahoo is second with 12.21% and MSN is third with just 3.27%.

If this trend continues then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would have to be soon re-coined as Google Optimization or may be as one of my colleague puts it – Googlization. Think about it???

With Microsoft announcing that it no longer wishes to persue the acquisition of Yahoo, what promised to be the year’s most talked about blockbuster deal may have ended in a little more than a whimper. But… has it really ended or is it a ploy by Microsoft to wait till the Yahoo stock plunges and then rebid at a lower price?

If major newswires are to be believed, at Yahoo, Jerry Yang is most likely to face several angry share holders who believed that he should have accepted Microsoft’s offer. On his part, Jerry Yang has been quoted as saying, “with the distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history”. I wonder what that transition is?

From a paid search advertising perspective one only hopes that they improve their own offering instead of selling out to Google’s Adwords program. If they do decide to tie up with Google, then Google Adwords will have a virtual monopoly in the paid search advertising space and that would be quite sad.

Whatever it is that ultimately happens… the future promises to be interesting!!!