Tips from Chicago Search Engine Strategies –
By goodgirl

The first meeting I went to for the day was Organic Listing Forum at Search Engine Strategies. Bruce Clay, President of Bruce Clay, LLC and Mike Grehan, CEO of Smart Interactive (and Author of Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide) were the speakers. Detlev Johnson, President of Technology, SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, moderated the Forum.

Each speaker gave a presentation for a few minutes and then they went to questions. Here are some of the questions and answers that were given (they are not word for word).

Question: Is it okay to use cloaking technology?
Answer: Yes as long as it is using the same information from your website. But don’t use it to spam keywords.

Question: Which is better to use when naming files or folders, hyphen or underscore?
Answer: All panel members recommended using hyphens not underscores. They said search engines have confirmed that they recognize hyphens as spaces. Underscores are not seen as spaces, the words will be joined to form one word.

Question: How many hyphens are to many hyphens?
Answer: You shouldn’t use more than 2-3. Preferable you shouldn’t use more than 2. Bruce Clay mentioned that he rarely uses them except for words that need to be separated, his example was mensexchange, which he used a hyphen like this mens-exchange. (so nobody would see it as men sex change).

Question: What type of redirect should I use?
Answer: 301 is the only good redirect.

Question: Can older domains be in the sandbox? (Sandbox: newer sites may face the sandbox, which means they are delayed on showing up in the search engine results).
Answer: Domains well-established or older domains do not usually have sandbox.
goodgirl’s Tips:
For those who have many older domains that you started, but never finished, these would be good domains to use now. If you had some content and it was indexed, it is better than buying a new domain.
Preplan your sites. Put as much basic information on a new domain as soon as you can. Let it get indexed, build a few links and then move on to something else. Go back to it in 3-6 months and finish it off and link build some more.

Question: What is the longest filename you should use?
Answer: 12 characters for filenames.

Question: Should I use keyword Meta tags?
Answer: Yahoo still uses keyword Meta tags.

Notes: The following sites were mentioned during this session:

IP-Delivery.com, which was mentioned during discussions about domain hijackings.
cmsmatrix.com, which was mentioned during discussions on CMS systems, were able to be spidered. This site will let you know if your CMS can be spidered.

The next session that I enjoyed was Shopping Search Tatics at Search Engine Strategies. Chris Bowler, Media Director and Search Practice Lead at Itraffic.com, Laura Thieme, President and Founder of Bizresearch and Craig Snyder EVP of Marchex were the speakers. Detlev Johnson, President of Technology, SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, moderated the Forum.

I have chosen to go over Mr. Bowler’s part of the session. This was by far one of the best speakers I had heard all day. Probably because it wasn’t as much theory, it was based on a client case. He gave detailed enough facts that you could understand and grasp the shopping engines potential.

Chris Bowler went over a client case “Barrie Pace”. A little about Barrie Pace:
Barrie Pace offers women’s designer and exclusive career, business-casual, and special occasion fashions
Sold $23+ Million in apparel online in FY2004

Barrie Pace uses customer email, search engines, online advertising/direct marketing and shopping engines to obtain sales.

Mr. Bowler then went over why you should use shopping engines. This is because you are placing the products in front of shoppers that are already transacting. He also provided this chart on shopping engines:

Source: Nielsen Netratings, October 2004

So far a pretty convincing case to why you should use shopping engines to promote your products.

Mr. Bowler then discussed the shopping engines that Barrie Pace partnered with. These were Amazon, Altura/Catalog City, Froogle, AOL Shopping and Shopping.com.

Next he went over some tips for the shopping engine newbie, these were:
Determine your financials
Crawl, Walk, Run!
Shopping Programs do not run themselves
Adjusting your feed is critical (a feed is a data file with your product details, product name, prices, product images all in one file, usually line by line .txt file)
Store Feedback is invaluable

Determining your financials questions you should ask yourself and analyze:

What’s your overall budget for shopping?

For Click-over Shopping Engines (pay per click engines):
What’s an allowable bid price:
By brand?
By product?

For Transactional Shopping Engines (engines that you pay per sale or percentage):
What’s an allowable commission?
Including returns?
Without returns?
How will returns be handled?

During the Crawl, Walk, Run part of the presentation, Mr. Bowler suggested you start with something easy to setup. Shopping.com he said were the easiest to setup, price and manage. Mr. Bowler stated if you can produce a feed quickly that setup could occur in a few weeks.

Mr. Bowler also suggested that Amazon was one of the hardest to setup. They require 29 forms to be filled out before you can begin. He also said it took 2-3 months to setup with Amazon.

Shopping engines do not run themselves Mr. Bowler now went over this giving more details, like if you choose 4-5 shopping engines to partner with it will take 1-2 hours of staff time a day. This is ongoing. Staff in charge of the shopping engines will have to daily go over the following:

Monitor feed upload and product display
Pull-down Store reviews / feedback
Resolve customer problems
Track Sales, Fulfillment, Returns

These shopping engines will all need to be monitored and adjustments will need to be made. He gave an example of some items using the same images. When you build a shopping site you can have several choices for size, color, etc. In shopping engines they list the sizes, colors, etc separately. So you have the same image for several items.

Mr. Bowler also provided a snapshot of feedback on Amazon. He stated feedback is invaluable and someone should be reviewing feedback often.

Mr. Bowler ended by giving some tips for succeeding:
Track results at the product level
Take advantage of operational and customer service emails
Shopping sites will buy your brand keywords in search – beware!
Advertising – more visibility
Partner with the newer engines

Notes: The following is a list of shopping engines that were mentioned during this session:
Yahoo Shopping
Shopping.com
Amazon.com
MSN Shopping
Froogle
MySimon
Nextag
Dealtime
PriceGrabber.com
AOL Shopping
Altura
InStore

Also mentioned were:
Bizrate.com and Resellerratings.com

About the Author:
goodgirl, Director of Internet Marketing at Adult Search Engine Marketing and Sex Pictures Pass has been involved in Internet Marketing for 7 years.