How to Embed SEO in your business…
…if you have an ecommerce website

* Make sure you add friendly reminders (otherwise known as calls to action) to link to your site in your thankyou emails. Rand wrote a great post on this over here. (By the way, while googling for that post from Rand I came across this which is also a nice read on order confirmation emails.)

* Keep keyphrase research in mind when naming both product categories and products themselves. Things have an annoying habit of ranking for their own name (e.g. wikipedia) and this is also true for the little guys so next time you’re going to release the awesome-o-matic-1200 spend a little time thinking if it might not make more sense to call it the awesome-curtain-rail-o-matic-1200 (assuming you’re selling curtain rails that is….). This can apply to many many different industries, think about which one of these is going to rank better in Google for [hotel in Seattle]; “The Westin Seattle” or “The Mayflower Park”

* Last but not least, check out this super-awesome post (that Sam also linked to in his round-up but it’s just so relevant here that I’m linking to it again): Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO

…if you have a content website

* Motivate your content writers with analytics so that they get excited about writing content which gets lots of pageviews/SEO traffic.Brent is world class at this and has achieved some astonishing results with the Tribune and one of the major things he did was to educate and excite journalists about SEO so that they both understood and craved page views.Brent talks about the process he used in more depth in this amazing interview.

To read the full article, click here

1. ProFlowers 31.1%
2. LL Bean 25.7%
3. Amazon 23.7%
4. VitaCost 23.0%
5. Coldwater Creek 22.4%
6. QVC 21.1%
7. Roamans 20.4%
8. Office Depot 20.2%
9. LandsEnd 19.3%
10. Victoria’s Secret 19.2%

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Googler: “… if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like.” – We can conclude that the information Google receives through its toolbar is used in the ranking algorithm.

Googler: “I think it is fair for Google to use that [age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered] as a signal in some circumstances.” – The age of domains and sites are ranking factors.

Googler: “Google uses a bunch of signals like location of the server or the TLD in order to determine which users might be interested in the sites content. “– This means the location of the server does influence the local page rankings.

Googler: “If you’re moving from one URL to another (even if it’s on a different domain), ranking signals can be passed via a 301 [redirect].” – Google will pass your old domain ranking information to the new domain if you make a proper redirect – 301. However, you should not use a 302 redirect.

Googler: “We work hard to make sure a site can’t have a negative effect on another site.” – So, a bunch of links from “bad neighborhoods cannot cause a drop in site rankings.”

Googler: “We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.”

Googler: “PageRank is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year.” – The toolbar PageRank is often misleading and does not show a true picture.

As search engine marketeer we should take note of these points. You could hang it as a poster in your office. Each time you look up,you will remember these points.

source: WebCEO