Rob Snell Gives the Scoop on SMX Advanced

Today’s Y!Store blog is yet another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who has sold dog training collars on his Yahoo! Store since 1997. Rob also blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Starting a Yahoo! Store For Dummies.

Just back from Seattle & SMX Advanced

Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is one of Danny Sullivan’s many search marketing shows. The Seattle show, SMX Advanced, is labeled that way so the speakers can dive off pretty deep into some pretty heavy topics without worrying about leaving the new folks behind. This show, like PUBCON, is for the heavy search geeks!

The programming at SMX Advanced was so intense, I couldn’t justify partying like a rock star and risk missing some new important nugget or idea. This was the first search conference EVER where I went to every single class. I only slept in through the keynote.

SMX Advanced is also a 2-day show, but I took 79+ pages of notes in my little black Moleskine notebook. More than half of my notes were ideas for getting links, or increasing conversions, or other marketing ideas triggered by something someone said in a presentation or during a bar conversation. Some of my SEO friends tease me about my little black notebook, but it’s ironic that they’re the first ones to call me to get copies of my notes!

Nothing is radically new this year

I’ve been going to search marketing shows since 2001, and the more I go to, the fewer brand new things I tend to pick up. For me, the major advantage of attending is seeing the same information in a somewhat different light, meeting like-minded folks at meals and in between sessions, and catching up with old friends. Search marketing shows are also great for getting out of your daily routine, letting your mind wander, and figuring out what you want to do next, marketing-wise!

A buddy of mine was bellyaching that “he paid $3500 for flight, hotel and tuition, and he didn’t learn anything radically new.” Did he get any ideas? “Yes, tons.” Great. Now he also knows his SEO chops are completely current.

In 2009, SEO is still all about TITLE TAGS and LINKS

As you probably know, on every page you want your best keywords for that page in a descriptive TITLE Tag. Yahoo! Stores are SEO-friendly right out of the box because TITLES are generated by the NAME field, or PAGE-TITLE field.

You also want the same keywords you want to rank for in the anchor text of links pointing to that page. These links should be both from your Yahoo! Store (navigation, breadcrumbs, links in CAPTION fields, and thumbnails/text links on category pages) as well as from lots of other sites. For more info check out some earlier posts of mine: Converting Keywords, Southern-Fried SEO, and How to Get Vendor Links.

What IS new in SEO for 2009?

Link diversity

Link diversity (having links from different domains and different IP ranges) is somewhat more important for SEO than it has been in the past. For example, 20 links from one site isn’t as good as 20 links from 20 different sites on different domains.

Want to see how many unique domains link to you? Check out SEOBook.com’s Aaron Wall’s tool here: http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php.

Want to see Ystoreblog.com’s backlinks? (May take a bit to load!)

I show 1 Unique Government Domain (*.gov, *.mil) with 1 Unique C Block Addresses and 74 Unique Commerical Domains (*.com, *.net, etc) with 59 Unique C Block Addresses.

One of the SEO superheroes, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ.org, discussed the upcoming release of his 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors report, which is coming out this July (here’s the last one). Every year or so, Rand surveys top SEOs and compares their opinions with real data from reverse engineering top-ranking sites for hundreds of popular keywords. This year, “Everything’s the same + link diversity” sums up my notes. Rand said he believes that even "nofollowed" links (links that don’t pass PageRank or anchor text) DO count towards domain diversity.

Nofollowed links are links that have the attribute “rel=nofollow”, which was something the search engines invented to stop blog spammers. Nofollowed links really don’t give you any SEO benefit because they don’t send PageRank (link popularity) or anchor text. For example, all the links in comments on this blog are nofollowed.

Duplicate content and the Canonical Tag

One new thing Google and the other search engines came up with earlier this year to help ecommerce sites battle same site duplicate content problems was to come up with the Canonical tag. Matt Cutts has a great post on everything you need to know about the canonical tag right here.

Ironically, Yahoo! Stores don’t need canonical tags because we have SEO-friendly static URLs (like www.storedomain.com/page.html), so our stores don’t have the problems that a lot of other carts do like dealing with dynamic URLS with all these parameters.

Also, you should consolidate all your pages into one domain using the Store Manager’s 301 settings. This permanently redirects all store URLs and your non-www URLs to a single domain, which consolidates your link popularity. Read this helpful Domain Redirect Setting help file for more info.

Oh, yeah! One possible Yahoo! Store use for the canonical tag is so you get SEO credit for links tagged with parameters like links from some affiliate programs, click track, internal campaigns, or even tagged banners.

For example, search engines would see a link to http://www.storedomain.com?s=affiliate&id=8675309 as a completely different link than http://www.storedomain.com. I have some SEO tests running right now, and I’ll report back if/when we find something.

PageRank Sculpting (Just say no!)

In the “you shouldn’t play with fire” category, was the PageRank Sculpting controversy. Sculpting PageRank is the practice of using NOFOLLOW tags to squeeze PageRank around on your site to maximize your link popularity on only your most important products and pages. That sounds like a good thing, right?

Nope! 99.9% of Yahoo! Store owners shouldn’t even think of messing around with PageRank sculpting because it’s not unlike like shaving with a chainsaw. Horrible things can happen if you do something wrong. The best way to control what pages get the PageRank on your Yahoo! Store is to put links to your most valuable products and categories right on your homepage. That’s so easy!

Google still hates paid links

Matt Cutts, Google’s Search Quality Engineer and the voice of Google to most SEOs, repeated that buying links to manipulate the search engine rankings is still a high-risk activity. He said anything sponsored should use a rel=nofollow tag or it’s high-risk. Any consideration (i.e., free products for links) to get keyword rich anchor text links with the intent to manipulate rankings is high-risk. Matt said you’re free to do as you wish with your sites and your links, but so is The Google.

Google also says they won’t penalize you for anything someone else could do to your site, only things that you do ON your site. Google can be pretty cryptic about what will and won’t get you in trouble! For example, if buying paid links got you banned from Google (or even penalized), all a competitor would have to do is buy paid links for YOUR site, report you, and then you would suffer and probably not know why.

My experience with buying paid links (from long, long ago!) was that the site that gets caught SELLING (not buying) paid links gets in trouble. Google most likely quietly turns off that site from any SEO benefits of passing PR and anchor text. Buying links from that site then is a waste of money, and you also run the risk of having your domain flagged as a possible spammer. This may lead to a manual review which is when a Google Quality inspector puts your site under the microscope to see if you’re doing anything else you shouldn’t be doing and gets to assess penalties if applicable.

(Now my dog is hiding under the bed, whimpering like it’s the middle of a Mississippi thunderstorm. It’s okay. Matt Cutts isn’t going to eat you!)

My own personal rule for SEO? I pretend Matt Cutts knows who I am, and knows all my domains and client sites. If you assume the Spam Cops are watching everything, keep your nose clean, and you should be fine.

Anytime I try to keep anything on the down low, it’s to hide things that work from my distinguished competition rather than trying to get anything past the PhDs in Mountain View.

I still have 73 more pages of notes I didn’t get to, so hopefully the Merchant Solutions gang will let me have another guest post pretty soon! Appreciate the forum, folks!

Until then, keep building great content and collecting links!

P.S. Here are some other posts: Pimping Your Product Page, SES NYC 2007, Free Conversion Rate Chapter.

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Rob Snell Went to Vegas and Gave Us His PubCon Slides

Today’s Y! Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers, located in Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the almost three year-old book on Yahoo! Store: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies that is still somewhat current. Rob is recovering from the frenzy of the Festivus shopping season in an undisclosed location somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

"My marketing consultant went to Las Vegas, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Howdy! I would say I’m just back from Vegas, but PubCon was last year! PubCon in Las Vegas is the show of the year for me. I dare say it’s the best Internet marketing conference because of who speaks, what they say, how much they give away, and who attends. I love to "network" with some of the smartest retailers and Internet marketers on the planet, and being a speaker gets me on the guest list for some of the really cool parties, too!

As promised, here is my full presentation with 77 PowerPoint slides. This year we have audio, and I hope you enjoy my new theme song, too!

If you’d rather read it than listen to it, take a gander at an expanded transcription of my PubCon PowerPoint slides with additional info.

Here are some highlights:

• Skip to Slide 6 for Tip #1. You might want to skip three minutes on my marketing background and life story.

• One change in our company philosophy increased our conversion rate almost instantly by 20%. What did we do? We told folks what to buy.

• Buyer’s Guides work! With buyer’s guides we have had a 50% increase in conversions when buyer’s guide pages were used as entry pages. When folks would come into our site from a search engine organically, if they come in on the buyer’s guide page, they are 50% more likely to convert. For example, here’s our dog training collars buyer’s guide.

• Write unique product descriptions. It is good for your customers to show that you are an expert and you know what you are doing, and The Google loves unique product descriptions.

• Write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price. Now I just made that up. Write what makes sense to you, but that is a good rule of thumb for creating content. You say, "Gosh. That is a $600 product. You mean I have to write 60 paragraphs about the dang Garmin Astro?" Yep.

• Play 20 questions with every single product. Start at the top with your best selling products and work your way down. Ask yourself what customers have in their mind when they are looking to buy something. Customers want to know if this product is going to work for them. I literally have over 200 questions that I can ask about any product.

• Capture killer content in any which way you can. Like I said, I lock my brother up in a room and pull it out of him. Record everything. Audio. Video. Still pictures. I mean, everything. When I don’t want to carry a professional digital camera, I have a little FLIP (video) camera over here I carry everywhere I go. I can get my brother to jabber on about some product about why this manufacturer should do this, blah, blah, blah and I have great info for the Yahoo! Store.

• Blog to build content and attract links. I do a much better job of this as an e-commerce consultant and a speaker than I do with the dog stuff or our other stores. We take email questions that my brother has answered, his content, and we stick it on the Web. I got over 1,000 pages in a Word document from a year’s worth of Steve’s sent emails.

• Make your suppliers link to you. I finally have everybody in the company used to the fact that when we buy something from somebody, they are going to link to us. Or else! Linking to us is almost a condition for doing business with us.

• Romance your suppliers for additional links and free content. Example: Steve took a supplier out bird hunting on one of his fancy Texas quail leases. He gets to be good buddies with folks he needs to have a good relationship with and we ended up getting a link out of it, which is really nice.

• Add keyword modifiers to page text. I have over 600 modifiers that I have identified that generate revenue for different businesses, and I use those where they make sense in the text on the Web page. Ask me later. I’ve got some good secrets that I can’t share over the microphone on how to do.

• Survey your customers. One of the best things we ever did was install 4Q, the free customer survey software, on our website. What 4Q does is it asks your customers four questions. "What are you here to do? Did you accomplish it? How satisfied were you with the website, and why?"

Why I heart PubCon the way I do

PubCon is always hard on my ever-present notebook. I always fill up that little black book with takeaways or ideas generated from presentations. Speakers at PubCon tend to give away real-world, actionable advice. I know it’s going to be a good show when there are multiple sessions where I can’t make up my mind which class to attend. PubCon is the opposite of the worst kind of conferences or trade shows where the sessions are bought and paid for, and the speakers pitch you all day for their company’s products and services. Personally, I’d rather sit at home and watch Vince of ShamWow infomercial fame.

I get to speak at PubCon, too! For me, it’s a chance to give back a little to the search marketing community that I’ve learned so much from over the past 12 years. The high caliber of the other speakers makes the pressure to perform really intense. My friends make fun of me for over-thinking my speech. Instead of partying and going to all the sessions, I always seem to get stuck in my room tweaking my slides the day before my session.

And I tend to spill my guts, too. Sometimes I give away too much! I figure people spend a lot of money going to conferences, and I want to make sure they get their money’s worth for the whole show from my 20 minutes in the spotlight. One thing I always tell myself is that no matter what I give away, at least the good stuff is available only to the folks who spent a couple thousand bucks or so and showed up for my panel. They may archive my PowerPoint, but all the really good stuff is hidden in the stories between the slides.

Well, not anymore…

Keep capturing killer content!

I get somewhat obsessive about getting my retailers to capture content, and this blog post is a pretty good example of what I recommend fellow retailers do all the time. You have so much product info in your retail brain. Get it out! How? When you’re talking about stuff your customers are interested in, you need to record it, whether video or audio, and then get someone to transcribe it. Edit the transcription and insert relevant links. Finally, insert that keyword rich text in your Yahoo! Store where it makes sense, like in the CAPTION fields of relevant products. If it makes sense, edit some video footage together to make a little demo for your Yahoo! Store.

In the spirit of taking my own advice, this year I taped my session at PubCon mainly so I could see what I really ended up saying. I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m going to talk about, but I always throw stuff in I didn’t plan on sharing! Doh! I ripped the audio, sent it to a guy who transcribes stuff for me and 3 hours later I had a 10 page Word document. Did I really say all that?

Wrapping things up, I hope you enjoyed the info, and your feedback is always appreciated, so please post comments or drop me a line. Before I put all this together, I got the blessing of PubCon owner and WebmasterWorld founder, Brett Tabke, so this post is authorized and official and all that. I don’t get paid to say this, but if you want to make more money, I suggest you attend the next show, PubCon South in Austin, TX, March 11-13, 2009. Your competitors will be there…

Rob Snell
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

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Movin’ On Up in Search Results: Link Building and Keyword Ranking

Today’s Y!Store blog is another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and developer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers. Rob blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of the Yahoo! Store book: Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies.

Rob has submitted posts before but this time I asked if he could give his thoughts on the Search Marketing Expo: SMX Advanced earlier this month in Seattle. The following is a distillation of Rob’s takeaways from the sessions, parties and conversations. –Paul

Just back from Seattle and Danny Sullivan’s second annual SMX Advanced (Search Marketing Expo), and I’m writing this post on the plane and up in my hotel room at Internet Retailer 2008 at the McCormick Center in Chicago. A client was teasing me about how I go to more Internet Marketing shows and conferences than any other retailer he knows. The main reason I go is to soak my brain in this week-long conversation with friends. Someone, somewhere is going to say something that just clicks in my brain which gives me an idea that will increase my sales. I’m almost never seen without my notebook because I want to have that bottle ready when lightning strikes.

Most of my action items were ideas I got from something the speaker said which directly applied to one of my own stores. Many of these To-Do’s are the things I know I need to do, but it’s always good to get a kick in the head. Since SMX ended last week I’ve already implemented two SEO tests on a couple of my Yahoo! Stores that could double the effectiveness of my SEO, which right now delivers about two million visitors a year to these sites. Cross your fingers!

Many takeaways were on what NOT to do – deceptive tactics to watch out for, many of which unethical competitors may be using on you. All were added to my list of sneaky blackhat SEO tricks. I would recommend NOT doing anything that’s against the Webmaster Guidelines of the search engines unless you are prepared to get banned from Google, Yahoo!, and/or MSN.

The last class of Day 2 was the session called “Give it Up” where the most notorious and infamous of all SEO’s shared some ranking and link building secrets that no attendee can share until 7/4/2008. Ping me after the 4th for some awesome ideas!

SEO Gap Analysis

My favorite session was "Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know" moderated by Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) with speakers: Brian Klais (Netconcepts), Laura Lippay (Yahoo!), Jonah Stein (ItsTheROI) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite). All of the speakers addressed the economic implications of moving up (or down!) in the organic search results (SERPs) for various keywords.

Click-through by Search Position

Most Yahoo! Store owners know that the higher the position in the natural results, the more clicks they get, but since no search engine releases click-through rate by position it’s kind of hard to tell when your rankings are good enough! What’s the difference in traffic for the store ranking, say #7 for a keyword and ranking #3 for the keyword? Well, now we know…

Last year, AOL released a very large sample size of search user data and some propeller heads crunched the data and figured out click-through by search position. For more info see this post. Now, AOL users typically are beginners and n00bs and are much less sophisticated users than the average surfer using Google, Yahoo! or MSN, but at least this data gives us a baseline:

From the AOL search user data (somewhat simplified):

• ~90% of AOL users clicked on Page 1 results
• Less than ~10% of AOL users clicked on Page 2 results
• Almost no one clicked on Page 3 and beyond

So you want your Yahoo! Store to be on the Page 1 for all your best keywords! But it looks like the 83% of the clicks go to the top 5. If you’re not in the top 5, you have some work to do!

Out of 100 organic clicks on Page 1 of AOL search results:

• #1 position gets 47 clicks
• #2 position gets 13 clicks
• #3 position gets 9 clicks
• #4 position gets 7 clicks
• #5 position gets 6 clicks

And it drops off precipitously from there: #6 and #7 get 4 clicks each, and #8, #9, and #10 get a measly 3 clicks each. Yuck!

Laura Lippay had an Excel spreadsheet which was great for doing gap analysis. It showed your current ranking for a keyword, number of searches, visitors who clicked, number of orders, and revenue. With that information and the above click-though percentages by position, you can tell what keywords are worth chasing in the natural search engine listings on Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Also, you can make your own! If you know where you rank for a keyword using rank checking software (like Web Position Gold) and how many clicks you get from that engine for that keyword using your analytics (say IndexTools or Google Analytics) and if you track that on a daily basis, you have a pretty good idea of your own click-through rate by position.

Finally, when you know the number of searches for a phrase, there’s a cool tool you can use to see how the clicks distribute across the various engines. See http://seoblackhat.com/clicks-by-search-rank.html.

Here’s a real world example that I can share without giving away the store. For a given time period, my Mom’s Yahoo! Store which sells dog training collars, pet containment systems, and dog houses got this real world traffic and sales:

KEYWORD: “dog first aid kits”

• 400 visitors
• $150.00 in sales
• 4 orders (averaging $37.50)
• Conversion rate was exactly 1%
• That’s 37-cents in revenue per visitor.

I’m #3 on Google right now for “dog first aid kits” with the page www.gundogsupply.com/firstaid.html which is a section page. What would happen if I moved up in the search results? First, let’s look at the other guys to see how hard it would be …

The #1 guy has 29 backlinks to his page. (See: Yahoo! Site Explorer results.) Ok. That’s an article page. Looks like he’s syndicating an article with anchor text rich links back to this article. Article syndication is a pretty easy way to get links, but it’s also pretty easy to beat.

The #2 guy has 223 backlinks to his page. (See: Yahoo! Site Explorer results.) Yikes! That’s his homepage. He should be #1. If he just added “dog” to his TITLE tag, and/or got a couple of links to his site with “dog first aid kits” I bet he’d be #1. Hope he doesn’t read this blog post!

The #3 guy (that’s me!) has 314 backlinks to his page. (See: Yahoo! Site Explorer results.) Most of those are internal links from my site navigation. I click the dropdown to “Show Inlinks: Except from this domain” to see only off-site or external links and I get nothing! I see a couple of old store.yahoo.com links, a link from one of my other sites, and the rest are links from a scraper site.

My section page has NO quality backlinks from other sites, yet I rank #3 for a decent keyword. This shows the importance of internal linking, especially when you have a trusted, older domain.

The text in those internal links comes from the text in the NAME field, so it’s very important to use good keywords in the NAME field. Also, maintaining good internal links is another reason why you have to be so careful when doing a site redesign or anything that affects your site-wide navigation.

Anyway, to boost my rankings, I could get some good external links (links from other Web sites) by paying for them (boo!) or by sponsoring a canine health site or sometimes just by asking for links.

Getting links is hard work, but is it worth it? If I jump up to #1, I’ll have a five-fold increase in traffic and (hopefully) revenue, so is the 5x extra profit worth it for the effort of link building? I think so…

Note: The 1% conversion rate tells me I’m not doing something right. Either our prices are too high or folks coming to this page are looking for something else, maybe not a hunting product. This is where you have to make a gut check to see what YOU need to do.

Hoo boy. That’s only one SMX takeaway. And I have 13,999 other keywords to check. And that’s just one store…

SMX Advanced was truly for advanced SEO folk. I think this is the first time I ever attended every single class at a conference. Usually I play hooky and skip a class or two and catch up on my sleep, but not at SMX Advanced. The SEO classes were unbelievably valuable. Over the two full days I took well over 30 pages of notes in my little black Moleskine. After digesting and rewriting them I now have over 13 double-spaced pages of action items and takeaways, some of which the kind folks in Sunnyvale are going to let me share with y’all hopefully in the very near future. Time to get to work!

Rob Snell
Somewhere in the Windy City…
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business