Blog
Why SEO is Hard for Promotional Products
March 8, 2011If you’re not already familiar with search engine optimization from reading about it here for the last few years, I’ll give you a very brief refresher. Search engine optimization (SEO for short) is the science (or, in some cases, the art) of improving the position of your websites pages in the ranking of search engine results. When you go and search for “promotional products” on Google, you’ll probably notice that some big, familiar names come up first, and your site doesn’t appear at all – not even in the first 15 or 20 pages of results.
Search engine optimization really consists of two simple practices: first, your search ranking is, to a great degree, determined by the links from other sites to yours. These so-called “back links” or “inbound” links are essential in building the type of trust that search engines like Google analyze to determine how to rank your website. These links take time, expertise, and often great effort to build and maintain.
The second part of search engine optimization is the management and fine-tuning of content on your own site. The keywords that you use to build your webpages, the variety and originality of the content on your site, and even the structure of the site itself – that is, the way your site is organized – all affect how Google analyzes and ranks your website. (more…)
Categories: Articles
E-commerce Fraud declined in 2010
February 28, 2011Online fraud was down in 2010, although we shouldn’t be too excited about it – it’s more than likely due to the general decline in the economy, rather than improvements in security. Check out the full article at the New York Times GadgetWise blog.
Categories: General
Maybe that Groupon deal isn’t so awesome
February 22, 2011MerchantCircle released a big survey yesterday detailing the rise of social media among small businesses as a cheap, effective marketing tool. Among the more interesting results is the conclusion that “social media are now the top marketing strategy for local businesses” – we wonder if that trend will continue or if social media-based marketing is simply having its moment in the spotlight right now.
What raised our eyebrows was this statistic: “55 percent of people who have run a daily deal campaign said they would not do so again.” That means that Groupon, LivingSocial and all the other group-buying knockoffs are either doing a terrible job at customer retention or that perhaps the group-buying premise is a flawed one – at least for the businesses themselves – to begin with.
Our experience with group buying in a business-to-business e-commerce environment has been mixed. Everyone seems to want it, yet once it’s implemented, adoption tends to be very low (or, in some cases, nonexistent). At least part of the reason for this is that, despite the appeal of group discounts, many business purchasers don’t really want to wait to see if their colleagues are going to buy something just to get a discount; purchases are driven by need, as opposed to by impulse.
