1. Built with SEO in mind: GravityMarket builds search optimization into the site through its technically optimized framework to achieve maximum visibility and minimize ongoing optimization investments.
2. More Product Pages Indexed: GravityMarket’s search optimized platform turns every page in your website into a traffic acquisition engine.
3. Increased “New to File” Customers and Overall Sales: Through increased targeted natural search traffic, product merchandising options and streamlined checkout process.
4. Integrated Product and Website Content: An easy content management solution to strengthen the online product catalog with additional keyword-rich site content including up-sell and cross sell opportunities.
5. Proven Merchandising Tactics: To increase conversion rates through merchandising options (featured, related, accessory and clearance products) and usability optimization of navigation, page layout and design.
6. Standard Integration With Backend Systems: To allow streamlined secure two-way communication between GravityMarket and backend fulfilment systems (CRM, Inventory and Order Management) using standard industry methods.
7. Robust and Flexible 3-Tier Architecture: To allow modular functional enhancements and specific customizations to meet unique business requirements safeguarding the client’s overall ecommerce platform investment.
8. Integrated Online Marketing Services: To develop and implement search and online marketing strategies to ensure profitable outcomes and growth of the business online.
9. Effective ROI Tracking and Reporting: To assess performance of ecommerce website and online marketing activity including sales conversion, email marketing, PPC referrals and much more.
10. Robust and Secure Infrastructure: To meet traffic demands as the business grows online and ensuring a safe environment for commercial transactions.

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

“A year ago, PoolDawg traded in its modified version of an “off-the-shelf” e-commerce platform for a completely new platform from Netconcepts. The Netconcepts GravityMarket 2.0 e-commerce platform offers a flexible design that, for example, supports the placement of content that has proven to help shoppers complete purchases, Feiman says.”

Read the article here. For more information about PoolDawg.com’s success, read the PoolDawg.com Case Study.

Among the features of Playfairtoys.com are personalized account creation, real-time shopping cart on every page, newsletter sign-up, customer information section, help-text for shipping, gift wrapping, and much more including a blog written by President and CEO of Play Fair Toys, Marilyn Walker.

One of the most notable, and successful, aspects of Play Fair Toys is their usability of product navigation. Products are labeled into classic toys, by interest, activity, age level, sale items, best selling, and more. Check out PlayFairToys.com for all your educational toys & games for all ages.

[ conversion | client admin cms | SEO ]

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RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presenation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

Download and listen to the Audio recording: MP3 (34 MB)

For Immediate Release

Fortune 500 Company Adopts WordPress To Answer Credit Questions

Countrywide’s CreditDemystified.com Isn’t a Blog, or Is It?

MADISON, WI (Janaury 17, 2007) Web development companies are increasingly recognizing the potential of WordPress as a content management system (CMS). CreditDemystified.com, an educational site developed for Countrywide Home Loans, illustrates how a corporate microsite can successfully be adapted to the blog platform.

The microsite, developed by Netconcepts, is designed to help visitors become credit savvy by providing simple answers to credit questions. Although the microsite’s platform is WordPress, CreditDemystified.com is far from a traditional blog.

Countrywide Home Loans chose to work with Netconcepts because of the company’s experience developing search engine optimal sites (SEO).

“The SEO benefits of WordPress are obvious,” said Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts’ Founder and President. “‘Powered by WordPress’ is a phrase seen on millions of blogs. But one wouldn’t normally associate that phrase with any other type of website other than a blog. I predict that’s about to change as search marketers begin to appreciate the SEO benefits of running WordPress on microsites.”

Netconcepts’ own corporate site switched from a home-grown CMS to WordPress in August 2006 and showed a significant increase in traffic in the following months. Based on this experience, Netconcepts designed CreditDemystified.com to take full advantage of WordPress’ SEO power.

“We’ve equipped the site with all the SEO goodies like a tag cloud, tag pages, RSS, my SEO Title Tag plugin, and Technorati tags. One breakthrough was adapting the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to handle static pages, and not just posts,” Spencer continued.

The directive for Netconcepts’ website and SEO design team was simple, create a search engine optimized site using WordPress that doesn’t look like a blog.

CreditDemystified.com, designed to make credit information accessible and easily understood by visitors at a glance, has a wealth of credit related content covering credit repair to debt management. For many consumers, the topic of credit can be dull or intimidating, so the site includes fun and quick review elements such as the Credit Intelligence Quiz (CQ Quiz). The quiz provides a score, and includes useful information for participants to improve their credit knowledge.

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.

Also see PoolDawg testimonial

[ conversion | client admin cms | SEO ]

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This online catalog site is powered by our GravityMarket ecommerce platform which means it is search engine friendly out of the gates, with an intuitive feature rich website for customers and a powerful administrative interface for our client. Among other things, the site supports “EZ Ordering” by SKU or item number. They are also embracing the concept that “markets are conversations,” having just started a blog.

[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]

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Your RSS feeds are a conduit for reaching influential bloggers who, for whatever reason, have an interest in your site. In addition, your RSS feeds could be picked up by RSS search engines like Feedster, Technorati and Google Blog Search. Many bloggers subscribe to search results feeds from these search engines to keep up with what is happening on a particular topic or industry. Thus, if something featured in your RSS feeds include the keywords that the blogger is tracking with their RSS search results subscription, you will end up getting in front of that blogger even if he or she is not subscribing directly to your RSS feed.

Within the feed, the titles of each of your items should be keyword-rich, because they will, more likely than not, become anchor text in the links that point to you from blogs and syndicating sites. It is important not only to have relevant keywords in each item title, but to also incorporate your brand name into the item title and include relevant keywords and synonyms into the <content: encoded> container.

Your overall feed should be optimized for the most important keyword you are targeting by including those keywords in the site’s <title> container. Also have a compelling site <description> that draws people in. When searching on Google Blog Search, related blogs will often be displayed at the top of the results. Google creates these listings from your feed’s title and description. You may be tempted to put tracking codes into the URLs of the links contained within your RSS feed, for example, appending a ?source=rss to the end of all your URLs. Don’t do it. It will dilute each page’s link gain (PageRank) by creating a duplicate version of each page with a unique URL, rather than aggregating link gain to one definitive version of the page.

RSS feeds can include “enclosures,” which are references to multimedia files. Podcasting is simply including enclosures in your RSS feeds so people can subscribe to the audio and video you produce without having to think about it. Your MP3 files will automatically download to the subscriber’s computer and into their iPod. Having an RSS feed with enclosures is your ticket into even more directories and search engines, namely podcast directories and search engines like Podcast Pickle. The most important podcast directory to get into is the iTunes directory run by Apple.

RSS feeds can be summaries or they can be full text. I strongly encourage you to offer full text feeds rather than summary feeds. You might think, “Well, I want the reader to have to click into my site to get the complete article,” however, you are robbing the feed of valuable keyword-rich, link-containing content with a summary-only feed.

Most RSS feeds include just the last 10 items published. I would suggest having at least 20. The more content in your feed for RSS search engines to sink their teeth into, the more things you are putting in front of bloggers and customers.

I also encourage you to have multiple feeds on your site, not just one. Each of your product categories could have its own RSS feed. Have a RSS feed of your best sellers, another for your clearance items, another for your new products, and another for your coupons and discounts. Someone may be only interested in one particular category of products that you sell; so give them the option of subscribing to an RSS feed of just those products.

This all may sound terribly complicated, but it isn’t. RSS is based on XML, which isn’t all that different to HTML. If your ecommerce platform doesn’t already generate RSS feeds for you, you have other options including a hosted service that scrapes your pages and creates RSS feeds for you or you could even hand-code the RSS feed yourself with the aid of an editor program like FeedForAll or Jitbit.

Watch it as a streaming Flash video »

This can alternatively be downloaded as a Quicktime movie (169 MB).