Don’t Be Invisible
Bringing in the Customers
Getting from New to Noticed
Maybe your site has just recently gone public, possibly for the first time, possibly after a redesign. You have the site, the content, all the searches and forms and images in place. And the world is not flocking to your virtual door. Something must be wrong. Is there something else you need to do?
If you already also have a physical store, this is not a new problem. And you know that advertising – some method to get noticed, to be visible, to stand out – is the missing piece. Internet-based commerce makes this age-old problem both harder and easier.
You are one fish in a much larger sea of vendors/suppliers/competitors online than in a physical store, no matter what your product or market. Your potential online audience is also far larger than you might expect to find walking through your physical doors. The challenge to get seen is greater and so is the potential payoff.
E-commerce “feels” different from a regular store. New buzzwords and services abound. One buzzword you can’t escape is SEO (search engine optimization).
The premise for SEO is that search engines are the way folks find you on the internet. So “marketing” directly to the search engines to get your site noticed is desireable. How to do that effectively is a moving target. The search engines grow, evolve and compete. User expectations change.
Folks who specialize in SEO range from knowledgeable consultants savvy in advertising to folks offering less reputable bags of tricks. As with any advertising medium, it is possible to spend really large sums of money on a regular basis to advertise on the internet. And it is also possible to do lower-cost less far-reaching things to enhance your visibility to your target audience.
Google is not the only search engine. It is one of the best known/widely used ones. It is reasonably open about how to work well with the crawlers and the algorithms that determine Google site ranking or placement on search results pages. Google also offers paid placements of various types, including AdWords campaigns.
Google says that several things can help raise your ranking.
Links coming into your site are important. We had more to say on this topic in a recent blog posting. Link farms are not the answer. Though you may get a quick fix of many links to your site, if they are not valuable links that make sense in connection with your site, they are not a good thing for your ranking. How do you get good links? Put a link to your site in your signature. Participate in online forums and discussion groups and member organizations in your field. Contribute real ideas and discussions. Don’t be a an ad-posting machine. If you are a member of a professional organization, putting their logo on your site (linked to their site) may make sense. And if the organization offers a venue for posting links to members’ sites, take advantage of that.
Keywords and meta tags in your pages are important if your internal search mechanisms need them. They are not used much by Google. See a longer discussion of this on our blog. Google prefers to index the content of the pages, and looks for readable text that humans understand. It should be clear from the text what you offer and why and how. Images should have alt tags that describe the image adequately for those who do not get information from images (including the crawlers).
Creating content and keeping it fresh is real work. As your site and offerings change, how well does that information get to the search engines? There are automated tools like Google Base Data Feed (now under Google Merchant Services) and Google Sitemaps that feed the data regularly to Google in the format they prefer. The Profits Plus Sitemaps module does these two things – set it up once and it automatically sends the current data to Google on a regular schedule.
Google also offers a set of free Webmaster tools that can be very useful for studying how people use your site. What to do with that information is a topic we will take up another time. 
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Customer Site News
June saw us launch Pomegranate Community Marketplace‘s web site. This is a membership organization that sells organic and eco-friendly products. Community-based, local pickup is the delivery method. The site is built on PDG Commerce 5 and has a clean peaceful feel to it. If you live in the San Anselmo CA area, you might want to give this site a serious look.
Another new site built on PDG Commerce 5 is SportHansa. This is a B2B site where shopping is available to registered members only. The public landing page, though, is a nice presentation of information about the brands carried and where they come from. The map that lights up based on your hovering over a logo of any of the companies represented is a cool touch. Clicking on a logo brings up a profile.
Another instance of specialized search is newly available at StageSpot. The left nav lets you approach the products by category. The search box embedded in the left nav has two modes. The default mode is Full Text search, which will search all the text associated with a product. When you enter a search, the results page has a toggle to do the same search in Title and Keyword mode. Typically, the Full Text search will bring back more results than the Title and Keyword search. However, if what you are seeking does not happen to actually exist as a word in the title or keyword fields, then the best approach is to do the Full Text search. For large result sets, as you scroll to the bottom of the page and press Get More Results, another chunk of results downloads, giving faster page loads with usable content when results sets are large. Try searches like “floor” or “gobo” to see how these search types contrast with the category-based access.
