May 14th, 2009
The technically inclined might want to check out this article on Google’s newly announced support for certain types of semantic data. This should have an interesting impact on e-commerce, especially complex e-commerce products which have a great deal of options and attributes like promotional products.
Essentially, Google is looking to index information in a more meaningful way so that computers can understand it and provide better results to users. Right now, when Google looks at something like a product page, it really doesn’t know the difference between something like an imprint area and an imprint method, because they are both simply textual information. Google may understand them in the sense that they are similar to other terms in other places, and it may be able to help you find something using that similarity, but at the root, Google doesn’t really know what those terms mean.
XML gives us the ability to structure data in a meaningful way, but it isn’t necessarily available to Google in an html web page. It is only meaningful within a system or when exchanging data with another system.
RDFa attempts to structure and label data in a way that in meaningful to a computer. The development of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) pointed web content in the direction of semantic markup, but RDFa takes this much further by explicitly defining the structured content in a web page for the purpose of indexing and understanding.
If all this is making your head spin, think of this: What if you saw an event on a web page, and could automatically add it to your calendar, with all details correct, with just a single click? What if you could compare the lead times of products across many different websites just using a search engine - say, to find the vendor that has the fastest turnaround time for a given product?
That’s what Google is shooting for, and we will be testing these features and incorporating them into storeBlox over the next few months. We’ll let you know how it goes.
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April 3rd, 2009
We’re proud to announce the launch of Mondo Tees, a consumer e-commerce website specializing in movie-related apparel, posters, DVDs and collectibles.
Mondo Tees is operated by the fine folks at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, another great Austin company.
Mondotees.com showcases two great strengths of storeBlox: Complete design customization and apparel management. eBlox also built a JavaScript-based dynamic image slider for the homepage that loads thumbnails for all the products in the site and then allows a visitor to quickly scroll through them.
eBlox also developed custom listing styles for categories and searches, and used the storeBlox Banner Management system for rotation of header images on every page load.
The result? A dynamic, appealing merchandise site with a lot of visual “wow!” Check it out!
Tags: alamo, cinema, dvds, e-commerce, Launches, mondotees, posters, storeblox, t-shirts
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January 7th, 2009
PPAI announced today that eBlox designed and developed sites Advalite and 3M Promotional Markets won Silver and Gold Web Awards. Advalite took Silver in the Technical Innovations/E-commerce category, and 3M Promotional Markets was awarded the gold in the Marketing/Branding category.
We’re very proud of both sites (and many others!) and are happy to see storeBlox-driven sites take these big honors from the premier association for the promotional products industry. Both sites are products of much sweat, hard work and intensive collaboration with the clients.
Both sites showcase the extensive customization capabilities of storeBlox, as well as a wide variety of custom-developed distributor tools that enable both suppliers’ customers to market, sell and purchase their products easily.
Please check them out at advalite.com and promote.3m.com. You can view the Web Awards winners here.
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December 11th, 2008
Continued from the previous post. This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine
PageRank is critical to understand (or at least know how to find) because it affects the quality judgment of inbound links. If a site with a very high PageRank links to yours, it can have a positive effect on your ranking; PageRank is “passed on”, to a degree, to the site that receives the inbound link. Conversely, a site with very low PageRank offers little value to your ranking. This is why trading links with your buddy’s nifty new website won’t accomplish much (most such “link-swapping” tactics are completely ineffective); you’re both passing on nothing of much value to each other. So, the goal in building inbound links is to get those links from sites with higher PageRank than your own.
Even this can be problematic, because Google is on the lookout for anything that might pass PageRank inappropriately – that is, without actually reflecting quality. That means that a lot of sites that you might consider as possible venues for building inbound links will actually not help you. For instance, advertisements, blog comments and many other commonly used tactics for building inbound links no longer pass PageRank to the target site. Google has even removed many common directories from its page ranking algorithm.
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Tags: google, search, SEO
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December 3rd, 2008
This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine
If there is anything approaching a “secret sauce” to search engine success, most experts would probably agree that it is the inbound link. An inbound link is simply a link from some other site to your site. On the surface, it would seem simple to acquire these – trade links with friends, get a link on your brother’s blog, get listed in a local directory, etc. And it is superficially simple to build inbound links to your site (and even simpler, though often expensive, to pay someone to build them for you).
Building and acquiring good inbound links – that is, ones that actually benefit your search engine rankings – is an entirely more difficult proposition. There are a number of reasons for this, but first, let’s review what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place.
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Tags: google, search, SEO
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October 31st, 2008
It looks like Google is changing the way they measure ad quality again. TechCrunch reports that Google will be factoring in ad position when measuring quality score, effectively removing whatever boost is provided by higher ad positions.
Google will also be making it easier for ads to appear above the search results – because a certain level of quality is required for an ad to appear on the top, the higher quality rankings from the first change result in more ads that meet the quality guidelines to appear above the search results. Result? More money for Google, of course, because more ads appear on top, which should result in more clicks.
Full story here. Google’s complete explanation of ad ranking can be found here. Here is Google’s AdWords blog post on the change.
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September 25th, 2008
eBlox is currently in the testing phase of an important upgrade for our storeBlox e-commerce platform customers: Keyword-optimized URLs. What the heck is that? Well, a keyword optimized URL is structured in such a way that the product keywords are actually part of the URL itself. Here’s a comparison:
Standard URL:
http://storeblox2.eblox.com/product.jsp?id=6329
Optimized URL:
http://storeblox2.eblox.com/pl/Ace-Sport-Shoe-Bag/6329
As you can see, the latter URL contains keywords, which benefits the page in search engine relevance. Best of all, these URLs are generated automatically based on product names, so there’s no effort required to implement them.
eBlox continues to develop and deploy best-practice technologies for SEO and e-commerce, and we’ll be rolling this upgrade out free of charge to all customers over the coming month.
Tags: e-commerce, google, SEO, storeblox
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September 15th, 2008
This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine
Once you’ve filled your site with appropriate keywords, there’s still one other place you can build relevant content that will help your site’s search performance: a blog. Blogs (short for web logs) are simple, personal publishing platforms that allow you to post daily updates or information about your business. They’re easy to set up; just go to blogger.com, typepad.com or a host of other providers and you can set up your own company blog for free.
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Tags: google, search, SEO
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September 8th, 2008
This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine
In a keyword-centric universe, interactive or animated content like Flash can be problematic. We generally don’t recommend that companies who are selling online and competing for keywords build their sites in Flash. Although Adobe recently announced full support for keywords in Flash, it’s unclear how much re-authoring of content is required to make this happen.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use Flash at all. Flash is very effective in an embedded format, when it is simply another element on a page. Many of our customers use Flash banners on their homepages or other areas of their sites to highlight products or specials, or to show a product in a more attractive, animated presentation. Embedding other multimedia content, such as product videos or interactive features, can also be a very effective way to keep audiences engaged. If the content is strong, you shouldn’t worry about the impact on your keywords. Just make sure the rest of the page and the site is built with keyword content in mind.
Tags: Flash, google, search, SEO
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September 3rd, 2008
This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine
So, you’ve done the “uniqueness” exercise and you’ve got your site built with appropriate keywords, but you’re still not getting much search traffic. What’s going wrong? Well, beyond the sheer volume of competition that’s likely fighting for those words, you may be simply using ineffective keywords. Sometimes it’s difficult to predict what real users are actually searching for, and it could be that your words – as meaningful as they may be to your business – are not particularly effective for searches.
Thankfully, Google provides a free tool to help you generate keywords. Available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, Google’s Keyword Tool can take your basic keywords and show you alternatives, along with their potential search traffic. The tool is built primarily for pay-per-click advertisers looking to generate keyword lists for their advertising campaigns, but it’s also an effective way to see what users are searching for. The Keyword Tool is one of a list of many free tools I’ll discuss in the coming months to assist you in your search engine optimization.
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Tags: google, search, SEO
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