First of all, you need to understand that the term sitemap usually refers to two very different things:

1. XML Sitemap
2. HTML Sitemap

In their essence, they are basically the same thing. They contain the same data structured for different purposes. XML Sitemap is the one you submit to Google through the Google Webmaster Tools. HTML sitemap is supposed to be used by actual users, not just bots.

Now that we got this covered, I can tell you that submitting an XML sitemap to Google is almost completely useless. Why? Because, if you need to tell Google where your pages are in order for Google to index them, then you did something terribly wrong with your internal linking structure and it’s most certainly not the best user experience.

If Google’s bot can’t find your content, how do you think a user will? Google is not stupid. Their engineers are very smart people that spend the vast majority of their time trying to improve the search results. If a certain URL couldn’t be indexed when the bot tried to index your website because it didn’t find an internal link it could follow to that URL, what do you thing Google will think about that URL now that they have it in your XML Sitemap? Do you think they would assign any ranking value to something even the site owner obviously thinks is so unimportant that you can’t find an internal link to it?

Here is a small Q&A about XML Sitemaps:

Q: Does submitting an XML sitemap makes Google index my website?
A: It might, but it doesn’t guarantee you that it will be indexed; Google’s words, not mine.

Q: Should I submit an XML sitemap to Google?
A: You can if you want, but if some pages of your website are only indexed because of the sitemap, your site has serious problems. Basically, if you did your internal linking structure properly, there is no need to submit an XML sitemap to Google.

Q: I submitted a sitemap but Google still doesn’t want to index majority of my URLs, why?
A: Because, XML sitemap has nothing to do with the number of pages Google can index on a certain website. The number of pages that can be indexed is largely determined by your PageRank, which is largely determined by the number and strength of your backlinks. So if you want your website to be indexed and have a proper internal linking structure, getting relevant, quality backlinks is a much better and useful approach that actually solves your problem.

Q: Will submitting an XML sitemap improve my search result ranking positions?
A: No. Sitemap is not a ranking factor.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just check this post.

OK, now lets continue with e-commerce part of the post. Here you can find some tips and tricks for increasing e-commerce conversion rates

1. Customer’s Safety – let them feel safe!

Invest your time and energy in giving customers signs of protection and safety. Try to use secured socket layer (SSL) encryption or some other specialized services to reassure users of the security of their information. Also, if you use this technologies, make sure that the customers know about it by displaying the logo of the services you use.

2. Specify what you are selling – be simple and clear!

Simple but very important thing is to introduce visitors about what you are selling because visitors are more likely to leave if they can’t understand what your site is all about and what you are selling. Your focus should be apparent in the pictures on your homepage, page titles and tagline, and also in the text on your homepage.

3. State your privacy policy – build trust!

A privacy policy is one of the most important documents on any website. It details your company’s views and procedures on the information collected from visitors. So, one of the essential components of building trust online is treading carefully when it comes to privacy.

Customers are more likely to give their information if they know how the information is going to be used. Reassure them that their privacy is important to you and specify whether you are planning to share or not to share their information with other marketers.

4. Do a spelling check on your site – be a professional!

Making sure that your site has no spelling errors is an important credibility indicator that can give your visitors confidence in your web site. Spelling and grammatical mistakes give the impression of the site as unpolished and unprofessional. Always review your copy for any mistakes, or hire a professional to improve and edit your copy.

5. Buttons and styling – pay attention to details!

The key is to make the buying process as simple and as easy as possible – and ease of use on the Web always translates to dollar. Make your call to buy signals consistent and prominent. Your “buy now” buttons should be prominently placed in your product pages.

Many e-tailers say that bigger “buy buttons” in bold and in a color that stands out can help increase conversion rates. Buy buttons should be placed above the fold to keep it prominent and in view of the customer. Avoid making the user scroll to find your buy buttons.

6. Get a toll free 1-800 number – show that you care!

Really nice to have. For many callers, it will mean that your company is legitimate given the fact that they know they can easily reach the company when they need to talk to a human. Plus, given that the call is free to the customers, they won’t hesitate to call you to inquire about your products and services.

In some cases 1-800 numbers have increased sales by more than 30 percent.

7. Enable Live chat – enhance interaction!

Explore the possibility of using live person chat on your site. Live chat can give you the opportunity to engage a customer during the sales process, whether the customer has questions about your products or they need to be clarified with the ordering process. It is a tool that can allow customers to get to know your business and talk with a real live person in your business and feel that you are responsive to their needs.

Customers are more likely to pull out their credit cards and spend on websites that they know they can easily talk to.

8. Make a sales funnel analysis – study hard!

In order to increase conversion it is first important to know what your clients are doing before you try to influence them into purchases. Sales funnel analysis is important in understanding how you are leading your visitors through your buying process ending in sales. You have to know what visitors do upon landing in your site, looking over your product categories, selecting the products that interest them, putting those products in the shopping cart and eventually completing the purchase by hitting the Place the Order Now button and paying.

The goal is to keep the visitors in your site – and making sure these visitors do what you want them to do – to buy. Also you may find that while visitors are looking at your product categories, they are not putting anything in their shopping carts – is it because you don’t have the products they thought you would have or is it because your pictures are too small or too hazy to help convince visitors that you have great quality products.

9. Use an Upsell Page – show them more!

Upselling is a marketing method used to persuade your customers to spend more money than they had originally intended. It is usually a page added between your normal ordering page and your payment page.

So, instead of chasing new customers, you can always generate extra income from upselling your products. It’s a fact that 30 percent to 67 percent of all people can be up sold at the time of purchase. Make a list of all the different strategies you can use to upsell your clients, then put them into action.

10. Invest in photography – give them a better picture!

People often underestimate the importance of quality photography in their website. Whether you are running a business or just selling your house Photography can be a powerful selling tool, the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words is very true. With the advent of digital cameras people are often taking photography into their own hands. The result of this can often have a negative effect.

So, take care that the pictures of your products should be clear, enough big and devoid of any distracting backgrounds. Your shots should be technically excellent, no blurred or out-of-focus shots.

Now it is possible for many results from the same domain to appear. Exact number is not very clear, but in the blog post at Google’s official blog, they give us an example where only the last few results are a different domain.

What does this mean for the end user?

It means that when you search for something specific, you might get much more results from the most relevant website in the field and you’ll have to go to page two to see some other websites relevant for this search term.

Also note that this might prevent the situation like ReadWriteWeb famous “Facebook Login” debacle. If you’re not up to reading that article, I’m gonna tell you what happened in short: ReadWriteWeb published an article called Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login and outranked Facebook for the keywords “facebook login”, which resulted in 2 500+ comments from confused users that go to Facebook by googling “Facebok Login”. Users thought they were on Facebook and that Facebook got redesigned. There were some hilarious comments like “I figured it out! Facebook doesn’t work on Google anymore. You have to go to Bing.com and write “Facebook Login” over there!” followed by “Thanks, it works!”.

What does this mean for the website owner?

If you’ve been building your SEO strategy on ranking number two for the names of your competitors, well, that was a waste of your time and money.

Recently, PostRank launched their PostRank Connect service, which came with a free PostRank Analytics account. I’ve been looking into PostRank Analytics for some time now so I grabbed the opportunity to have a free account at my disposal. Needless to say, this made my day.

What is PostRank Analytics?

PostRank Analytics is a service that tracks user engagement with your website, both on and off site. This includes all sorts of social networks, bookmarking and sharing websites, comments and responses.

Why do I need to use it?

I might sound lame with this one, but, web has seriously evolved in the past few years. Most of the stuff that goes on around your website is no longer located on your website. It has become extremely hard to keep track of everything that’s happening everywhere on the web. PostRank Analytics makes it easy for you. Now that I tested it, I can say without doubt that this Analytics service is a must have for web content publishers, and likely for other kinds of websites as well.

Google Analytics just isn’t able to track everything anymore. It doesn’t give me any data on some really important stats which I, as an internet marketer, simply have to track.

PostRank Analytics key features:

Track up to 5 websites on a single account. No installation required, just add URL, verify and you’re on!

Extremely clear overview of social engagement with graphs showing you date, amount of engagement, and RSS items that were created on that day. Even more in depth reports can be viewed on daily or per RSS item bases.

You can even set-up custom pages that are not part of your RSS feed to be tracked, such as landing pages or static content by simply adding an URL.

PostRank Analytics shows you the list of people that are sharing your content the most for every social network individually in the last three months. You can easily see which users are bringing you the most benefit. It also has awesome demographic stats of these social networks displayed right above this data.

Give it a try, I find this service extremely useful. It’s not a usual over-hyped social media tool. This is the true Analytics of today. If used together with Google Analytics, this is the real deal.

We now know that this campaign indeed was a complete marketing success, earning OldSpice an impressive 107% increase in sales (which when we’re talking about a brand of this size is truly remarkable number). But what leasons can we take home from their success?

Well, first of all let’s examine the transcript of the commercial:

The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I’m on a horse.

Already at the 2nd word, even the experienced marketers could say they did a terrible mistake speaking to the wrong audience. We now know this wasn’t true. It obviously captures guy’s attention and boosts their egos, making them wish they were him. The sentence continues and slowly but effectively prepares us for the humor.

The text continues with first hilarious and memorable quote “Sadly, he isn’t me”. A marketer could say they just offended their targeted audience, but reality is, the male audience sees themselves in this guy, regardless of their physical appearance. They continue with the first mention of their product. Please note they did not say anything good about their product. They didn’t really “advertise” the product. They just throw it in there, like it’s completely natural part of the “spoof”.

They continue with repeating the theme from the start of the commercial, followed by introduction of parody of female romance stereotypes. The parody continues through the commercial until we hit the final memorable quote – “I’m on a horse”.

The punchline is something that appealed extremely well to the internet audience since it gives the commercial a very strong factor of randomness, while staying on topic of parody. If you look at the modern internet memes, you will see that randomness is extremely well performing “form of humor” on the web.

So what did we learn?

• Don’t take your business too seriously. Humor sells… It sells really well!
• Random humor is good for internet audience.
• Personal video responses are well accepted.
• You can advertise your product without actually saying anything good about it.

Just 5 years ago, there was no Twitter, Facebook had no users, basically, there was almost no social interaction going on between online stores and their customers. Things have rapidly changed since then, but many online stores did not. Many online stores you encounter are still stuck with the 5 year old (or even older) layout and features. Five years in web business is probably equivalent of 50 years in medicine for example.

There is something that old, but still extremely successful online stores (such as Amazon or eBay) have in common:

They never stop changing. They never stop testing. They always teach their store new tricks.

Online store nowadays can not be set to autopilot. Your customers expect a lot from you. They expect perfect usability, they expect awesome customer support, they expect your store to be the artificial intelligence that automatically knows what they wanna do next. If you don’t provide it to them, someone else will, and that competitor will take your clients away.

eBay 10 years ago and now (Click to enlarge)

How do you teach your online store new tricks?

There are several fields in which improvements are necessary for a 5 year old online store. I’d start with social media, being the most obvious one.

Online store going social:

I have a customer support number listed on my site, why do I need a stupid Twitter account?

Things have shifted 180 degrees in the past few years. Consumers no longer engage your brand where you want them to engage you. Instead, they hang out where they wanna hang out and expect you as a brand to be there. In this case, we’re talking about social networks, but you shouldn’t stop there. Consumers might be blogging and ranting about your brand or product on their personal websites, micro sites, blogs… and they expect your response. They expect you to listen to the noise of the world wide web and filter the data about your brand and respond to their needs no matter where they are.

Few years ago, “social media experts” were pointing out that this will be expected from the companies in the future. Well, that future came sooner than you thought because you’re living it right now.

New design and layout:

But I like my current design!

Your opinion about the design doesn’t matter. Designer’s opinion about the design doesn’t matter. Customers’ opinions matter. They bring in the money and your design and layout has to be tailored to fit their needs and preferences. It is highly likely that 5 year old (or older) design isn’t up to date with current web design trends and best practices.

Internet users change. They learn new tricks. They adopt themselves to the new usability standards as more and more websites start using them. What was considered usability best practice five years ago may not be such a bespoke solution nowadays.

Changes in the world of SEO:

When we made the site, an SEO consultant told us it was perfect.

It might have been. But SEO is one of the fastest changing industries on the web. Google introduces hundreds of changes to it’s ranking algorithm every year! Just as an example, several years ago, it might have sounded like a great idea to sculpt PageRank using no-follow, but nowadays it produces the completely opposite effect!

Long-tail shift:

We are ranking well for the most important keywords in our niche.

Yea, but did you compare the amount of traffic these keywords are sending you today to the same day 5 years ago? Even considering the fact that the number of internet users has grown a lot in this period you will have to notice that average internet users started to shift to the use of longer keywords. As average user of the internet is slowly becoming a power user, he learned how to use search engine much more effectively to find exactly what he wants. This led to growth of longer search queries.

If you want to take your share of search engine traffic, you will have to start creating content. Content marketing is already extremely ROI effective marketing method if used properly and will only grow in the future. Have a read on why do you actually need a blog on your e-commerce website.

“Smart” navigations, product recommendations, sharing features:

It is highly likely that your 5 year old e-commerce solution is missing some of the really smart features that new bespoke e-commerce solutions have. Have a look at some of the bespoke online stores nowadays. They know exactly what else you might wanna buy after you add a product to your shopping cart. They are using effective new ways of organizing and filtering products. They are using smarter site search engines. They are enabling their visitors to easily share their products with their friends on social networks of their choice.

If you didn’t teach your store any new tricks in 5 years and you’re thinking about doing it all now, it’s easy to get carried away, so please make sure you don’t “overdo it”.

The post in question talks about eCommerce “megamenus”, the ones that fly-out when hovered with your mouse and feature a lot of internal links. The post suggest you could sculpt PageRank by implementing the rel=nofollow on some of these links so that more PageRank would be sent to the more important pages of your online store. This is actually a pretty common SEO misconception even among more experienced SEOs.

This is the graph that shows simplified version of how PageRank flows from URL “A” to URLs “B” and “C”:

This is a bit more accurate version but still extremely simplified, please note that some of the value returns to the URL “A” through internal navigation. Also, a degradation factor of 15% is introduced to prevent infinite loop of PageRank flow, giving any two different URL’s that link to each other infinite PageRank value:

Now this is the common SEO misconception, a simplified version of what you think will happen when you put rel=nofollow on link to the URL “C”:

And this is a simplified version of what actually happens. As you can see, although you introduced the rel=nofollow on the link towards the URL “C”, URL “B” still receives only 3.4 points of PageRank and the 3.4 points that use to go to URL “C” now completely disappeared from the system, along with some of the value this URL would send back to “A”, decreasing the value of entire system.

Now imagine how much you would hurt your site in total and how much PageRank would you remove from the system if you decided to put the rel=nofollow on most of the items in the “megamenu”. This is why rel=nofollow on internal links in general is a very, very bad idea. Don’t take my word for it, have a look at what famous Google’s engineer has to say on the subject.

Since Google TV will be able to run Android apps, what should we actually call this kind of shopping – e-commerce, m-commerce or tv-commerce? Well, first of all, your TV is not very mobile, so I guess m-commerce is disqualified as a valid name, no matter it can run apps initially intended for mobile use. E-commerce should be a pretty valid name, since your TV will be connected with the internet so you are actually buying via the internet. I think tv-commerce or TVcommerce would be the most proper name, but it could get confused with “old tv-commerce”.

Marketing and TVcommerce

I think marketing to the TVcommerce potential buyers will not be much different than marketing to the e-commerce audience. You will have mostly the same mediums for advertising. With TVcommerce, I believe video content will get much more influence on buyers’ behavior which will mostly benefit the online video publishing industry that will finally get it’s deserved share of world’s advertising budget. TVcommerce solutions, however, will have interfaces similar to the mCommerce applications, rather than eCommerce.

If Google TV goes mainstream, people like Philip DeFranco that are very strong influences in the online video community as well as among the viewers, will become extremely powerful individuals. I took Philip DeFranco as an example not just because he is one of the most subscribed YouTubers of all time, but also because of the content of his show. He was able to collect 1.1 million subscribers by expressing his opinion about daily news. It’s his opinion that people want to hear, which means he has a strong influence on people’s perceptions of brands and products. His influence with Google TV will only grow. It’s a remarkable power given into the hands of a sole individual.

All things considered, I expect a very turbulent age is ahead of us. We will probably witness the great fight between broadcasting and “two-way-communication industry”. Pick a side, get some popcorns and enjoy the match!

I had an opportunity to meet Alex Hunter in person. I was holding an iPad and he saw it for the first time in his life, ironically, here in Croatia. Seth told the same old story, so nothing new happened for people that read his books and watched his talks. Although nothing new was learned, the experience did bring me lots of inspiration, including the inspiration for this blog post. Alex made us think what would happen if there were no new customers in the world and we’d have to use what we already have. Would you treat your customers differently? Why not do it now anyway?

A person that already bought from you and you have a way of establishing communication with this person is extremely valuable. Many online retailers might not realize this. Let’s compare a new customer with existing one.

New customer:

Costs money to be brought. You need some sort of marketing activity to bring this customer to your website.

Is on your website for the first time. This customer isn’t experienced in navigating your website and doesn’t know all the wonders your website contains.

We don’t know if he’s really interested in buying your products. He might be just a casual surfer, or exploring options, comparing prices.

Doesn’t trust you. This customer has no experience with you and isn’t sure if he can give you his money and get a good value in return (or get anything at all).

Doesn’t care about you. This customer has no relationship with you, no story to tell. Not only that this customer doesn’t care about you, but in his eyes you don’t care about this customer either (yet).

When you sum it all up, it takes a wonder for this person to buy anything from you, right? Given a better choice (whatever this customer might define as better), there’s no way this customer will buy from you.

Existing customer:

Knows your website. You can engage him with more call to actions as this customer is more experienced with your layout and knows where to find things he’s looking for.

Knows how you treated him. Let’s hope this is a positive thing in your case. This guy knows exactly what to expect from you.

Has established communication with you. In one way or another, you have made communication between you and this person possible. This means it costs no money (or less money) in marketing budget to bring him back to the website.

Trusts you enough to give you his money. He did it once, he can do it again (if he was satisfied the last time he did it).

You see, your existing customers – if treated right – are the most valuable asset your online store has. So how are you treating them? Are you struggling to make every customer’s experience a positive one? Are you answering every e-mail from your customers, replying to their tweets, commenting on their statuses? Are you creating relationships with them? Do you know who among your customers would be angry if you didn’t e-mailed them about your new product, and who among them would consider it spam? Do you have any interest in their personal life? Did you send a gift voucher or some discount to your existing customer on his birthday? Did you ask them about their shopping experience on your store and what you can do to improve it? Do you actually take action when your customers give you good advice or you just nudge your head in form of approval of their idea but never actually implement it? Can you name just 10 of your customers? Do you create content interesting to them besides your products? Do you mention them on your blog, in your tweets? Do you make them feel special? Have you met with your most loyal customer in person? How did you award your most loyal customer? Did you thank your customer last time someone told you this customer recommended you?

What if your competitors start doing this? Lets be honest, if you were a customer and someone treated you this way, would you consider them a better option?

The king is not dead, hail the new king

Don’t get things confused, Facebook is in no way a “Google killer”. It became kind of a normal thing to say in the tech industry that when a new service emerges it has to be a killer of another preexisting product or service. That point of view is completely wrong, and especially in the tech industry where completely new markets tend to be invented and evolve out of the blue. Just think of the Google’s AdWords program. It was a completely new market that didn’t exist. They invented something new and they didn’t kill anyone in the process. One could argue that in the long run it did hurt the traditional advertising, however, it’s their problem that they didn’t adopt to the new rules of marketing. An example of a giant new market that emerged from the tech industry in the even closer history would be Apple’s app store.

Facebook is becoming extremely powerful, almost as powerful as Google. Eventually (very, very soon), it will overpower the search giant. Google knew this. They could see it coming. That’s why they made several (in my opinion extremely bad attempts) at entering the world of social media. Lets just mention Orkut, Google Wave (remember this one?) and off course, their latest failure: Google Buzz.

If you can’t beat them, join them!

I believe that Facebook’s introduction of it’s newest set of social widgets a.k.a. Facebook Social Plugins (Like Button, Activity Feed, Recommendations, Like Box, Login with Faces, Facepile, Comments, and Live Stream) is the moment that marked the new age of Internet. Let’s name it “The Age of Facebook’s Omnipresence” a.k.a. “AFO“.

What’s the main difference between the pre and post AFO age of the Internet? First of all, search engines are no longer the primary source of traffic, nor they are the primary source of information. In the AFO age, users get information they probably wish to read without even searching for it. The information comes to them through their network of friends and people with similar interests they are connected with.

In the pre-AFO age, users were the one requesting information, searching for it. In the AFO age, targeted informations are broadcaster to them while they retain the ability to choose the informations they will consume and control the sources that broadcast to them.

Not everyone will accept this right now. Some giants will continue to fight the war they can not win and try to push the Facebook away from their websites, but eventually, I’m afraid their competitors who do accept Facebook’s new gifts will beat them.

A major news portal in Croatia Jutarnji.hr already made its peace with the fact that we entered the AFO. They basically gave up their comments section and implemented the Facebook comments instead. They also push their Facebook Fan page really hard on the visitors and they introduced the Like Button on their news articles. They know they can’t beat Facebook, so they decided not to fight the war at all, but join them instead. I believe this was a good call. We’ll see how will this strategy reflect their number of visitors but I can bet it will bring them a giant advantage over their competitors.

What if?

At the end, I’d like to leave you with a single thought to think about: What if Facebook decides to attack the search industry and put more resources into their web search? They are already the homepage of many and according to some sources, the most visited website in the USA. Do you think they would be able to take control of a significant share of the search industry away from the search giants? Do you think they could arrange some sort of strategic partnership with Microsoft and team up against Google on the search industry battleground?

If you liked this article, you should totally join our Facebook Fan Page, or “Like it” if you prefer the new term.

Magento community, do not panic!

1. Magento being slow is just a prejudice, a stereotype. Magento doesn’t have to be slow, here’s a tip on how to improve the speed of your Magento store. There are other things you can do to speed it up as well, just Google it. I’ve seen super fast Magento stores. It all comes down to the resource cost versus the functionality benefit when talking about Magento and it’s speed issue.

2. Rankings will not be affected a lot. Only ~1% of the index will be affected by the speed ranking factor.

3. Magento is slow when not optimized compared to some other e-commerce solutions, but not compared to the really slow sites out there that are the reason for Google’s implementation of this ranking factor.

4. This is just one of the hundreds of factors that Google takes into account when determining the ranking of a page, and it’s a minor one. Even if by some divine miracle this ranking factor affects your store, it will not pull down your ranking if other more important factors are better than what your competitors have.

5. The speed has been a ranking factor for weeks now (yes, before it was officially announced) so if you haven’t noticed a major drop in Google rankings by now, you will not.

Conversion Rate Optimization is a magical part of internet marketing that comes in handy when applying discounts to your online store. How do you know what kind of discount is going to produce better conversion rate? You test it. Try Google Website Optimizer, it’s integrated with Magento.

For example, a store could have a certain product on a 15% discount. You are advertising this really cool special offer everywhere and when thinking about conversion rate optimization you usually try different banner design and placements for this offer.

However, you should start thinking out of the box and think about applying a different discount. In some cases, 15% of product price might be the price of shipping, why not try to offer a free shipping for that product instead of the 15% discount on price. Simply put both of these offers on a conversion rate optimization test and see which one has a better conversion rate.

This process might make you more money not only by increasing conversion rate but also on giving less discount. It isn’t written in stone that more discount means better conversion rate. Different numbers have different psychological effects on shopping and sometimes a smaller discount could provide better conversions.

Another important thing you should test when talking about discounts is percentage versus fixed number discount. For example, 10% discount doesn’t sound a lot, but if that number is actually $ 120 discount, you should totally test $ 120 discount vs 10% discount banner and see which one performs better.

While Google’s algorithm still gives me more relevant results for most of the searches, there are searches where Bing’s results are much more relevant and spam free.

I think Google’s biggest disadvantage in this war for the search industry share will be it’s constant improvements. When we compare the results Google is giving us today to the results we got several years ago, we can see Google is wasting a lot of our time.

1. Images in search results

I just hate it when Google serves me images in normal search. If i wanted to look at the images I’d use the image search. There is simply no need for you to show me images. In most cases, things I search for can’t even be described with an image. Why are you forcing these images on me? Did I ask for them?

2. Video in search

This one is pretty similar to the image problem. Why are you giving me video if I didn’t ask for one? I can’t even imagine a situation in which I’d use your search to find a video I wanna watch. I’d probably search YouTube or maybe in some extreme situations use your video search. I don’t want videos in my normal search results so stop wasting my time please.

3. Personalized search

No, I don’t want my search results to be personalized. Why would I want that? I’m using a search engine to find stuff I don’t know about, why would I want the websites I visit all the time and know about them already show up on top of my search results? If I want a bookmarking service I’ll use one. I don’t want my search engine to be the bookmarking service. Chris Crum of the WebProNews wrote about the similar issue with personalized search.

4. Geo-location based redirection

Sometimes I have a need to check something on Google.com but due to my geographic location I get redirected back to Google.hr. Why would you do that? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever! If I wanted Google.hr I’d go to Google.hr

At Bing, I simply tell it which country preference I want in my searches and it stays that way. It doesn’t redirect me back to my country if I don’t ask for it. That’s the way it should be, it’s the only logical way.

5. Google accounts

I once spent half a day trying to integrate my AdWords and Analytics goals on two different accounts. I’ve read the entire help section to find the crucial information buried somewhere deep inside the sea of text. Why is this so complex? Why doesn’t your account simply work on your products? Why is there a difference between “Google account” and “gmail account” while both are “email”? Google, why are you wasting my time?

The possibility of statistical mistake in optimization tests is a pretty big issue. I’ve seen case studies all over the internet with ridiculous conclusions and ridiculously big improvements all because the performer of the test made a mistake (sometimes I believe they even do it intentionally to show better results to their clients).

There are several things that can go wrong with these tests and here are the most common mistakes:

Low test sample

During the latest presidential elections here in Croatia, some smart people calculated that possibility of statistical mistake with a test sample of 10 000 randomly selected people is ~3%.

They weren’t wrong in all these years that these tests were performed; these tests were always accurate with exactly ~3% deviation.

Please note that this is a test sample of 10 000 people that performed the desired action. If we transfer this knowledge to the world of e-commerce, it would mean that our sample should be 10 000 transactions, not 10 000 visitors.

There isn’t a lot of stores in the world that can get 10 000 transactions in a reasonable time period, so I’m led to believe that most of the conversion rate optimization split tests performed out there are not really accurate.

This calculation (10 000 transactions = ~3% statistical mistake) is true for the election body of 4 402 045 people. In order to get the right calculation for your specific case, you need to calculate the amount of people out there that fit the criteria of your targeted audience. This means that some B2C e-commerce store with wide market of lets say 45 000 000 potential customers would need 100 000 transactions to achieve ~3% possibility of statistical mistake.

Low time period

Let’s say you have a store and you could actually get a relevant test sample of 10 000 transactions within days. You need to extend this test to a longer time period then a few days.

What could happen is, you tested variations during the working days and only a certain population of people with certain behavior comes to your site Monday to Friday. Your test didn’t really capture the behavior of people visiting your store during the weekends and this population might have a completely different behavior compared to your test sample.

Unrepresentative test sample

Choose your methods wisely. I’ve actually explained this in the article before. You could increase the conversion rate of a store by actually decreasing the revenue. It’s highly recommended to read this article to understand how increasing the conversion rate (the percentage) is not the actual goal of conversion rate optimization (I know, it sounds crazy, but just read it).

We still don’t have exact theory on what happened, but reading through comments it appears we have a fine idea on what might have caused this “coincidental” decrees in search volume for these major brands.

Joey Primiani has offered an explanation: “It is the inclusion of the providing the direct link inside Google Suggest.”

Following up to that comment, Dain Binder of the dainsmoviereviews.com adds:

Joey, I just did some tests on this and I think you are correct. When searching for “facebook.com” and going to the results it registers a search. When searching “facebook.com” and clicking on the suggestion direct link it does not.

I would say Google Trends is more accurate now; eliminating people that use it as a “browser”.

(Verified using Chrome with SideWiki with full search and browsing history saved by Google.)

Google’s engineer Matt Cutts joined the thread with:

I don’t have any first-hand knowledge and haven’t asked anyone else at Google about this, but I’d lean toward this sort of explanation.

Basically what this means is, Google is including the direct links for domain quarries to “fix” the problem of typical users who actually wanna “feel lucky” instead of search for all websites that contain the URL they entered in the search box.

This is what the quote says:

Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

* You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
* If you’re a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
* You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control. Here are some good places to start.

We (SEO professionals) do understand that in this case there is no penalty for having duplicate content.

The problem is: Google doesn’t have to enforce any penalty, duplicate content is bad for you by default.

It’s actually pretty logical, let me explain:

You have a product page that can be reached via two different categories, which would create two different URLs with identical content:

• example.com/category1/product-name.html
• example.com/category2/product-name.html

Your store is sending the link juice (the PageRank value) to two of these URLs. If you only had one instead, it would receive double the amount of link juice.

Now imagine what happens if you have multiple products in multiple categories all over your store. How much link juice are you actually throwing away? A lot.

Different URLs when product is listed in multiple categories is just one of the cases in which Magento serves almost identical content on two different URLs. This is why Magento is not really on-site SEO perfect out of the box and you need someone to “make it right”.

In the recent release of Magento 1.4.0.0, there have been some on-site SEO improvements with the default theme, so I can see Magento team is working hard on getting Magento on-site SEO perfect.

Please note that Magento is not “bad” or “terrible” in on-site SEO, as the matter of fact, most of the other open source e-commerce solutions have much bigger SEO problems out of the box. We’re just trying to reach perfection here, and that’s why we advise you to solve the duplicate content problems at your Magento store.

I’ve seen people that are new to the concept of inbound marketing asking questions such as: Should I use Twitter? Should I blog? Should I use social bookmarks? Facebook? LinkedIn? Directories? SEO? SEM? SMM? Conversion rate optimization?

If only they knew that the time spent on asking these questions and reading through answers could be much better used on trying these things for themselves and seeing them work in action.

ROI, ROI, ROI.

The biggest mistake is trying to measure every single one of these elements of inbound marketing separately. Why, you ask?

Because, they work together. Instead of spending ridiculous amount of time on just figuring out how are you going to measure the ROI of each of these elements and then spending lots of time on actual measurement, you should look at all of these elements as one – Inbound Marketing.

All of the elements of inbound marketing work together as one, each making others stronger and more valuable in achieving the omnipresence. Because of this complex interaction between these elements it is almost impossible to measure the actual ROI of a single element in this mix.

“What is the ROI of spending a week on calculating the ROI?” [mp3]

- David Meerman Scott

Could you measure the ROI of 10 seconds it took me to write a tweet? Sure you could, but do you really want to?

• You first need to calculate how much 10 seconds of my time are expense to the company. Then you need to take several measurable factors into equation…
• Did we receive any new followers because of this tweet?
• What’s the monetary value of this particular follower (it’s not the same if you’re followed by a person with lots of money interested in your products / services or some random folk for example).
• Did this follower just found out about our other communication channels like our blog or LinkedIn account, group etc.?
• What’s the value of that follower being there?
• … and so on…

Even if you somehow managed to take all of the possible measurable elements to calculate the ROI of me spending 10 seconds to post this tweet, it would take such a ridiculous amount of time that this kind of measurement makes no sense.

Let’s say that after you did the miracle and managed to actually accurately measure this ROI, this follower we gained brought us a few extra followers. What do you do now? You go back to your ROI spreadsheets and make corrections?

You could have a legion of mathematicians working behind an inbound marketer and they wouldn’t be able to measure 10 seconds of his work in one day.

This is why I advise you to measure the Inbound Marketing as a whole and not every element of it separately otherwise your measurements will not be accurate.

If you take home one line from this text let it be: “The goal is omnipresence.”

Today, according to Google trends, Magento is more popular than ecommerce itself. Somewhere in March of 2009 – less then a year ago – terms “magento” and “ecommerce” became equal and from there on, Magento took the leading position.

Of course, this is not the whole truth, since ecommerce is used in many synonym forms such as “e-commerce”, however, Magento is still much stronger keyword then any of these synonyms individually.

If you look at the curve from the marketing perspective, you will notice that Magento shows significant and stable growth rate with no sign of decreasing or stagnating any time soon.

The graph at the bottom shows us there is significantly bigger amount of articles (or news references) about the term “ecommerce” then there is about “magento” and despite this, Magento still manages to attract more search traffic.

If we compare it to the competing platforms (Magento vs oscommerce vs virtuemart vs zencart) the graph shows us the clear winner is once again – Magento. Tomislav wrote about similar topic long time ago (What’s the best shopping cart).

There is your answer to the question from the title (How popular is Magento?) – a lot. To quote some of the real world numbers from Magento’s official website:

• $25 Billionin transactions
• 30,000+ merchants
• 1,700+ extensions
• 1.5 Million downloads

And counting.

• URL structure
• Meta data
• On-site elements structure
• Internal linking
• Distance of deep links from the homepage

All of these might influence your rankings in negative but also as likely in positive way. If you are attempting to move to Magento platform, I strongly advise you to seek for a Magento SEO expert first, to make sure your move is as smooth and as painless as possible for your rankings.

The most important thing to do when making a switch is to 301 redirect the old URLs to your new URLs, which will allow you to keep the link juice you collected so far. For everything else, consult with your Magento SEO professional.

This is Toni Anicic, if you are reading this, you are the resistance.

Since the web is constantly changing, search engines are following as well, and with the dawn of the real time web, SEOs noticed Google started giving some credit to the websites that are regularly updated. As the matter of fact, having a regularly updated homepage is often a solution for many SEO problems websites encounter.

I’ve seen a lot of Magento stores that have a completely static homepage and experience some problems with indexing. You can see them complain at Magento forums every now and then about not being able to make Google index their online store.

I’m not saying that having featured products (regularly updated content on homepage) will fix all of your indexing problems, chances are your problems might be in some other aspect of on-site optimization, however, it’s something that will improve your indexing for sure.

Inchoo has developed a featured products extension for Magento that can be downloaded and used completely free via Magento connect. Feel free to test it and come back with any comments. It has already been downloaded over 1 000 times via Magento Connect.