Read more in-depth about how good blog content can boost organic search in this article from Inc.com here.

Among the extraordinary site features offered to customers are testimonials, buying guides, billiard basics, RSS for featured products, detailed product specifications, and more.

One of the unique and very successful features of the new PoolDawg site is the shopping cart, real-time, shipping estimator. Providing a shipping estimate early in the check out stage allows for total price transparency to the shopper and conversion rate optimization to PoolDawg. PoolDawg.com offers one stop shopping for all your billiard needs.

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Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

The company came to Netconcepts to establish a complete ebusiness presence. The site we created for them offers more than great nursing supplies and equipment. It offers the latest school kids news and a separate nursing blog, authored by a local school nurse.

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Of course, as a group blog, the blogging system supports multiple authors. It includes an RSS feed. Since DM News’ staffers go to plenty of conferences and trade shows, it’s not surprising that they blog frequently about what is happening at these shows; therefore a separate subcategory is dedicated to each of the major shows that DM News attends.

DM News, welcome to the blogosphere! Glad that Netconcepts could help you get there.

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The audio podcasts featured on Steve’s blog are targeted towards science teachers and include interviews with leading educators and monologues from Steve with helpful teaching tips. The video podcasts, targeted towards both teachers and parents, are some of the most amazing experiments you have ever seen. From exploding pumpkins to flying potatoes and erupting soda bottles, each episode is a hoot!

Functionality on the blog includes email subscriptions to posts and comments, buttons for readers to submit the post to Digg or del.icio.us, tag clouds and tag pages, RSS feeds, a audio podcast player built right into the blog, and more. Read the case study to learn more about this project and some of the results, including the fact that over 13% of their online sales can be attributed to Steve’s blog. The company’s products, which include science toys and experiment kits, are worked into the blog in a very soft sell way, so the blog doesn’t seem like a shill for the ecommerce shop.

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Webfeeds — XML files containing a list of late-breaking content items — also have a positive effect on search rankings by encouraging additional inbound linking. These could be blog posts, news headlines, new or best-selling products, clearance items, etc.

A feed will be in either the Really Simple Syndication standard or the ATOM standard and typically contains information such as titles, descriptions, Web addresses and publication dates.

By providing one or more feeds on your Web site, you can get syndicated onto other sites that wish to use your content to augment their own. This will result in deep links into your pages of late-breaking content. For example, Slashdot.org has news headlines and associated links syndicated onto numerous other Web sites, including Nanodot.org.

What is it about links that make them so crucial to search engine optimization? From the engines’ perspective, links connote importance. In a way, a link acts like a vote. A Web site with few inbound links won’t appear to the search engines to be worthy of a top ranking for any popular search keywords.

Not all links are created equal, either. A link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page won’t benefit nearly as much as a link from CNN.com. Furthermore, the anchor (i.e. underlined) text in links gets special consideration by the search engines: the keywords in that anchor text are associated with the page that is linked to. That’s why a search for “miserable failure” returns such politically charged results, even though the words “miserable” and “failure” appear nowhere on the HTML of those top-ranking pages.

Two great ways to acquire links with keyword-rich anchor text are blogging and syndicating your content through Webfeeds. It starts with naming your blog with your targeted keywords. Incorporating keywords into the titles of your blog posts and the titles of your RSS items also will yield a rankings benefit.

Over time, the major engines are going to use Webfeed technology in more sophisticated ways. Yahoo currently offers a Web-based aggregator called My Yahoo that you can add RSS feeds to with one click, using the “Add to My Yahoo” link that appears in some listings in the Yahoo search results.

MSN Search lets you subscribe to search results as RSS feeds. Some specialized feed search engines like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub let you subscribe to an RSS feed of search results that pull data from an index of Webfeeds, but I’m confident the major engines will offer the same sort of functionality.

Problem:

Although Steve Spangler has this great persona in the offline world, it wasn’t translating very well to the online world.

“Our ecommerce site was terrible. No, it was worse than that. The website was abysmal,” says Steve. “I was getting one million viewers a week on TV but I was ashamed to send people to our site. After a first re-design (by another company) there will still problems. They knew nothing about SEO or how to translate the Wow Factor into sales. They could make a site that was aesthetically pleasing but they didn’t know how to wrestle the credit cards out of people’s wallets.”

After researching the problem Steve discovered Netconcepts and began a dialogue that continues to this day.

Solution:

The engagement with Netconcepts began with a website audit. We evaluated their existing site and made a whole raft of recommendations on how to improve it or do it better, as far as usability, functionality, search engine visibility, and making the site stickier. All of this had the goal of changing the site so that people will want to return to it again and again.

Steve Spangler Science liked the audit so much they asked us to implement our recommendations through a site re-design which we did, vastly improving the functionality of their ecommerce shopping cart site, and getting every page into Google. The whole site was re-built from the ground up to be search engine optimal.

Steve comments: “Netconcepts taught us to do things differently, to think differently about our web content and to write differently. I realized I was searching for the wrong thing. I had to learn to see the invisible stuff behind the web pages that make them rank well in the search engines. I had to stop thinking like a cataloger and instead draw upon my TV skills from the Four O’Clock News, I had to grab someone’s attention and keep them from clicking off to another site and Netconcepts helped me realize this”.

We also wanted to convey how entertaining Steve was. We did that through installing fun product demonstration video clips on the site and then later through suggesting Steve start a blog. We helped Steve through the whole blogging process: evaluating blogging software, designing the look-and-feel, and training Steve on how to write for blogs.

“The blog came about when I came to Netconcepts with an idea for a site re-design and they replied with the blog concept. What’s more, their concept was going to cost one-third less and be more effective than my original idea. I thought this honest, collaborative approach was great and in retrospect the blog was the right next thing to do. It gave our site more punch. Now it will become the cornerstone of my new speaker website.”

Netconcepts also assisted with email marketing: email strategy, with template creation, delivery and tracking, ensuring the goals of increasing visibility and usability were adhered to at each step.

Results:

Steve Spangler’s ecommerce site has grown in the past 18 months with revenue increasing three figures to mid five-figures a month..

Steve’s blog, although relatively new as of this year has already achieved a PageRank score on a par with his ecommerce site.

“A detailed analysis of our print catalog marketing plan revealed a direct correlation between catalog distribution and increased web traffic. However, a survey of our top customers revealed that they turned to our website to get MORE information on a product that interested them. Our high-content website not only answered their questions but prompted them to buy additional products that “grabbed” their attention.”

“Together we worked to make a very successful arm of my business. I am a tough client and I don’t have a six-figure annual web budget. Why did I agree to publish information in this case study? Am I concerned about our competitors getting a hold of it? Sure. But I have trust in Netconcepts to protect our innovative ideas and creative marketing strategies. Anyone can hire a web design company to “open up shop” on the internet. But just because a store is open doesn’t mean that anyone is shopping or buying. Netconcepts taught us how to turn shoppers into buyers and the key is have creative ideas, to think differently and to be innovative. It’s easy for our competitors to imitate (and we see it every day), but the real secret to internet marketing is to innovate. That’s why our competitors will always be 8 month behind. Thanks Netconcepts.” - Steve Spangler

(Also be sure to check out Steve’s testimonial for Netconcepts)