Web Marketing Strategy Update

If you want to improve your website sales conversions — and I’m sure you do — have a read of MarketingSherpa’s new Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007.

This is not the latest, greatest marketing twaddle of some Internet marketer who’s been online all of 5 minutes, but no-nonsense, “just the facts please” information from people in the trenches that will help you:

• Raise shopper-to-buyer conversions and increase buyer lifetime
• Improve search engine marketing ROI, despite rising costs per click
• Reduce shopping cart abandon rates
• Increase email open rates, number of clicks received and conversion rates
• Compare your own marketing stats to those of your peers
• Ensure your marketing tests and site revamp ideas are approved by management

The completely new guide contains a whopping 223 charts & tables, with data from 1,913 ecommerce marketers’, and results from surveys of 2,449 online shoppers. There’s also “best-of” data from 30 independent research organizations, plus 6 brand new eyetracking heatmaps for sites like Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and others.

I went back and had a look at the Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines the other day after Michael Campbell mentioned them in his ezine. They tell us that Yahoo wants to index:

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1. Original and unique content of genuine value
2. Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary
3. Hyperlinks intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable
4. Metadata (including title and description) that accurately describes the contents of a web page
5. Good web design in general

Immediate Thoughts:

No revelations in (1) & (2).
(3) Seems to shout “anchor text,” but probably simply refers to linking in general since it’s said that for years
(4) Makes it plain that the title and meta description tag ARE important.
(5) Reinforces that search engines like html that validates, with structured sites full of good old plain links.

So what is search engine spam to Yahoo? Well, here’s what Yahoo says it doesn’t want in its index:

1. Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
2. Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page