Sequence Factory

Page yield and other SEO tips

Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by shibl in Blog

Justin Palmer explains 25 SEO tips for Ecommerce.

All the tips are extremely useful and are agood summary of best practices for Ecommerce SEO.

The one that I found particularly interesting is having a long tail metric that Justin calls Page Yield:

Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

What I particularly like about it is that it focuses our attention away from going for big bang on a few terms to using a lot of long tail terms.  This particularly useful for new web site who have low chances to compete on the big words.
Another tip that helps in long tail building is:

Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.

Social Shopping Sites

Posted on 10. Nov, 2009 by shibl in Blog, Sequence

Mahable lists 18 social shopping sites.

In order of importance the sites to target for social commerce are:

• Kaboodle
• ShopStyle
• SyleHive

A site that is not mentioned that is very promising is Polyvore

Here is the Alexa Rank of each of them curtsy of xoogie

Twitter backgrounds

Posted on 21. Oct, 2009 by shibl in Blog, Social Media

Smashing Magazine has a great article on the best practices for Twitter profile backgrounds.

It has loads of examples that will inspire you if you are thinking about changing your background.

What is important to remember:

1- Scalability

Don’t forget that users have different screen sizes, so the background has to look good in all sizes.

Test it on both small and large.

An easy solution is to go with small patterns or abstract images, but the article has many other scalable examples.

2- Impact

The best backgrounds create an emotional response and differentiate you from the crow.  Go with bold colors and patterns and dare to be wild.

3- Fun

The culture of twitter is friendly, zany, informal and playful.  Keep this in mind when building your background.

Happy tweeting.

Review of 5 ecommerce blogs

Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by shibl in Reviews

Adam Michelson presents his selection of Top 5 Ecommerce Blogs for Top 500 Retailers.  Here are the 5 blogs with a quick review of what we think of them.

1- StorefrontBacktalk  http://www.storefrontbacktalk.com/

The web site combines news and analysis of latest happenings and trends in the ecommerce world.  It is a serious no-nonsense blog targeted at professionals in the field.  Any CTO, CMO of a large ecommerce operation will find it very useful.  It is of more interest to very large retailers.

2. Shop.Org Blog  http://blog.shop.org/

Shop.org is the digital arm of the National Retail Federation.  The blog is a dry take on industry news including conferences and the like.

3. Michael S. Levy’s blog  http://michaelslevy.blogspot.com/

Great blog with excellent selection of ecommerce topics.  Succinct and to the point.

4. Optaros Ecommerce Blog

Industry news from around the world.

5. Get Elastic   http://www.getelastic.com/

This is by far our favorite blog.  Fun and actionable advise on improving e-commerce sites.  Including insights into SEO, Social Media, etc.  This is definitely the blog to read for results oriented ETailers.

Get rid of the Digg button

Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by shibl in Know How, Social Media

says Get Elastic in their analysis of the
Top 10 Web 2.0 Activities for Ecommerce:

if I could add a #0 to this list (absolutely no impact) it’s Digg This buttons. I see them often on top retailer sites and that puzzles me. It takes an extremely hot story to get popular on Digg. It’s a bit like asking customers to nominate you for President.

Reverse Auction on iPhone

Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by shibl in Ecommerce News

Seven Snap is a refreshing new shopping concept that is being delivered as an iPhone app.

The idea is very simple, products are presented to the client and the price drops every second.  When you like the price you take it, if you wait too long it might be too late.

http://www.sevensnap.com/index.php

Cart abandoment metrics

Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by shibl in Know How

Etailers are always upset at the number of users who fill in the cart and then abandon the site.

While this is clearly something that needs to be monitored and improved, it is a natural part of the shopping process.

Users use the cart as a bookmarking for items they are considering purchasing and then they might decide not to purchase.

According to Cometrics benchmark report the average abadonment rate is 65%, this differes depending on the industry from over 80% for department stores to 40% for gifts.

Our recommendation is that you shoudl strive for an abadonment that is 70% of your industry average.  If the rate is higher than then you should take corrective action.

Start by asking the following questions:

1) How many clicks do I need to checkout

2) Is the checkout button prominent and inviting

3) Is easy?  Does it look easy?

4) Do I offer a good selection of payment options?

5) Are the shipping and handling costs higher than my competitors?

6) Do it work?  On all browser, screen sizes and operating systems?

7) Get a report of the actual carts that are dropped.  Are there any patterns?  Gegraphy, product categories, etc

Do not forget to always look at reports of products selected in abandoned carts as it will give you an indication of good targets for promotions and discounts.

Companies and poeple we admire

Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by shibl in Reviews, Sequence

- Seth Godin

- Zappos

Partnership model

Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by shibl in Sequence

We think that the traditional supplier/client relationship is a very wasteful model for business collaboration.

Each party is motivated to give the least and take the most from the other party and lot of energy is spent in negotiation of deliverables and then verification of each deliverable.

We prefer to work in a partnership approach:

- We analyse your website using our DNA strategy

- We propose areas that we can improve and provide metrics and ROI analysis

- If the ROI is in line with your objectives we work on a performance basis

- You pay us in proportion to our contribution to the ROI of the project

Methodology

Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by shibl in Sequence

Sequence has combined best practices it used in over a decade of building and promoting online stores to create DNA our online strategy methodology.

DNA is based on the common sense observation that online strategy should fit the target user community.

Each store is unique and has a unique target community.  The target users have an unique online behaviour profile that we call their online DNA.

This DNA includes:

- Which social networks do they use

- How comfortable they are with using the web

- What are the computers they use

- How long do they take to make purchase decision

- Are they driven by emotional or analytical factors when purchasing

Your brand DNA should be made to match the target market DNA.

We mesure your current DNA and see which areas are lacking as compared to your target market DNA.

Using this we find opportunity spots, these are areas that will have a good return on investment if addressed.

We propose to you strategies to fill these spots.