If you have been a regular reader of my blog you know that I don’t really promote any one product or service. I wanted to tell you about this magazine and website because I know these guys well. I wrote a customer service column for them for about a year when they first launched, and they have really grown into a great publication for ecommerce merchants.

Check out their website. They offer all of their content online free, so there is tons of articles and forums to read on a variety of business subjects.

Visit Practical Ecommerce here…

Alright, I’m not really going to present an entire case, but it sounds so darn official. I will say I love using online chat with websites that offer it. Most notably, a couple of years ago eBay added Live Chat to their website in an effort to assist their customers. It makes getting answers to quick questions much easier, and is sure to stop frustrated customers from leaving.

For larger ecommerce sites it can significantly cut down on your call center needs. One customer service agent can handle multiple online chat sessions, however, most humans I know, are limited to one phone conversation at a time.

For the average small merchant Live Chat might not be a feasible option. Since many of us (me included) have regular 9-5 jobs we’re unable to attend to customer service all day. However, if you do have the staff to handle this, it is an economic and powerful feature to add to your site. If you search for Live Chat services you’ll find many that offer easy website integration, and usually a month long free trial. After that the cost is very reasonable. I have seen as low as $9.99 per month. Think of all of the abandoned carts you’ll save!

One neat feature you may not have been aware of is that with most Live Chat services, you can see customer’s (IP address) as they visit your site. You can see what page they’re on, and even initiate a chat conversation. It’s pretty cool to watch live traffic travel through your site.

Let’s face, not everyone likes to pick up the phone and wait for a customer service agent. Why not give them an option?

I hate to be a hypocrite, but I have an important SEO tip that I myself have ignored. Since this blog is only a few months old I simply have not had the chance to make the proper adjustments in order to make it more search engine friendly. Furthermore, WordPress does not make it terribly easy to change title tags.

One common SEO snafu is to have every page begin with your domain name. I believe it’s so common because most content management systems, shopping carts, and blog platforms by default set every page’s title tag with the domain name followed by the page name. For example:

Domain.com - About Us Page

Domain.com - Widgets For Sale

You absolutely do not need the domain name in every page’s title tag. In fact, I have even read that it could cause “duplicate content” penalization. The best practice is to have your index page, or most important page begin with your domain name in the title tag. Then, all other pages can have unique names in the title tag. Many people have suggested it helps rank well under your domain name, but I would say that it is really easy to rank well under your specific domain name, so why bother?

Again, I apologize for being a hypocrite on this issue, but I do plan to update my own title tags soon enough.

I came across this great tool online. Anyone who runs an online business should check this out! It allows you to enter any website and see what their average a PPC spend is. For fun, I checked out Ebay.com and see that they spend between $42,000 and $108,000 each day on PPC. You can also search by keyword to get an idea of how competitive a word is, and who is bidding on it.

I cannot speak to the accuracy of the information, but regardless, it is a cool online tool for marketers… and it’s free. Check it out. If you have any experience with this tool please submit a comment and share with everyone.

Back during the dot com explosion at the turn of the century, I heard a story about some guy who received such poor service from Dunkin Donuts that he started a website called dunkin donuts sucks, or something like that. Shortly after, it was rumored that the happy donut people bought the domain for millions of dollars so they could shut the site down. Now I’m not sure if this was motivated by greed or by a deep routed hatred for the brand, but it stuck with me.

This winter my wife and  I went on a Carnival Cruise from Fort Lauderdale all the way to Panama and back. It was our seventh cruise, and we expected it to be just like all of the previous cruises… absolutely wonderful.

Well that was not the case. Through some venting issue on the back of the boat we had garbage compactor smell pumped into our room through the A/C about three or four times a day. The smell was so foul we had to open the door and kill the A/C making it unbearable in the room. Despite repeated complaints, and seemingly weak attempts to solve the problem, Carnival was unable to do anything. Final on the last day we were granted a meeting with the captain of the hotel division. He was of course apologetic but powerless to offer compensation.

To make a long story short, we ended up with an insulting compensation offer, and were left pretty unsatisfied. In the spirit of revenge, I hatched a plan to buy a domain like, CarnivalSucks.com or something of the sorts, and start my own site to post our experience on. Unfortunately, other web projects tool priority and I was unable to find the time.

Anyway, this is my solute to those who use the internet to keep big corporations with terrible customer service in check.  Greed may be their ultimate motivation, like our D&D friend, but I’m okay with that.

I came across an ad the other day promising “Number 1 Placement in all of the Search Engines Guaranteed!”. Wow, that sounds good to me. And heck, there’s a guarantee, so what could be better than that? Uh, how about the truth.

Allow me to be brutally honest, and perhaps save some small merchants their life savings. There is absolutely no known way to guarantee number one placement in any search engine, unless of course you bid on the keyword and appear on the top. Other than that, anyone who makes promises that sound too good to be true, are swindling you. Or, perhaps they’re over confident in their abilities.

If you’re like most small merchants, spending money on SEO is a necessary evil. It can be incredibly expensive to hire a firm to do this, and there are a few good reasons. For one, very few people are good at it. Two, it’s tedious work. Finally, it’s worth a lot if it’s done well. You may be happy to know that there are many, many things you can do on your own to improve your organic rankings without putting out a dime. It’s going to cost you a bunch of time, but it will be time well spent.

1. Spend time seeking out quality link partners. Don’t randomly email millions of people looking for links. Look for quality websites in your industry and solicit link exchanges with them. Industry sites like associations and organizations are a good place to start. Or, sites that compliment the products you sell.

2. Be sure your meta tags are well written and unique on each page of your site.

3. Make sure the copy on your site is keyword rich and written well.

4. Be sure that your internal link structure is easy for site visitors to navigate and access every page on your site.

5. Use links that describe the page they’re linking to instead of generic links like “learn more” or “click here”.

These are only a few tips, there’s much more you can do on your own. Please continue to read this blog and other blogs on the subject for more tips on SEO.

DMNews reported last week about a new round of attacks from the lovable spammers. This time Symantec was warning about a Valentine’s Day spam. Apparently the spammers are sending men (or anyone who has a pulse… no scratch that, anyone with an email address) an email with the subject line “Get your Valentine’s Gift bag from ghd”, with an image that the user should click on. These type of “retrieve your message” spams are nothing  new, but it’s nice to see they’re getting sentimental. I was beginning to think all they wanted to do was relive all of my sexual dysfunction, but apparently they’re concerned about my relationship too.

Thanks for your concern, buttheads.

It always amazes me when I deal with some company and their sales or customer service reps are really rude. Yeah, I can understand the huge companies with thousands of people in a call center will occasionally hire a bad apple. However, there is no excuse for a small business to be rude to its customers.

This week I called a gift card manufacturer to get 5,000 custom cards made for a trade show in two weeks. I was informed in a really blunt and rude manor that the cards would take two weeks, and I had better get my artwork in today! Oh, and if I didn’t hurry, there would be a $250 rush fee. Okay, so my deadline was tight, but why was I being treated like I just asked her to move a mountain? There was no excuse.

Instead of dealing with this company, which I had done business with before… ya hear that, I was a return customer! I decided to search the net for an alternative. I easily found another company who could produce the cards in half the time, and half the price. Bam! Problem solved.

When I wrote a customer service column for Practical Ecommerce magazine, I use to stress the point that the internet is a vast land full of competition. If you’re rude or difficult to deal with, someone can easily hit Google and find the next guy.

When I evaluate websites, I always look for ease of use and availability of customer service. It’s too easy to lose customers these days, and merchants need every advantage they can get. I’ll be posting more tips and tricks for making your web business as easy as possible for the customer.

I get a bunch of emails each week soliciting some sort of “site submit” service for thousands of search engines. Of course, these services aren’t free, and what are they really giving you? Well, like most things that cost money, they’re giving you something you’re too lazy to do yourself! Ok, so I made it easy. You only really need to worry about four major sites, and you can easily submit your website for inclusion in just a couple of minutes. You don’t have a couple of minutes? Ok, pay someone $50 to do it see if I care. Well, I do care, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. And, I made it easy for you. All of the links you need are below!

Yahoo Free Site Submit

Google Add URL

MSN Live Search

DMOZ.org

For a long time the general consensus in the SEO world is that more links were better. In some respects that’s true, but the tables have turned a bit. It’s now more important to have higher quality, industry-specific inbound and outbound links.

There are many services on the net that will help you find link partners, and some of them are good, but some are bad. Since link building takes time and effort, you might as well do it right. Good quality links from good quality websites that have something to do with your website will serve you much better in the end.

I encourage all of my clients to be picky, very picky. In a very real way, your online reputation is at stake! You don’t want links coming in or going out to link farms, or useless directories. Search engines want to see that the links coming into your site are from reputable sites, with fresh and relevant content. I would much prefer one link from an association or other industry site, than 10 links from random websites, regardless of their Page Rank.

You want to win the war, not just the battle, so take the extra time and slow down your linking efforts just a bit. Seek out those high quality links, not just the easy-to-get ones, and you will be well rewarded down the road.