And what advice would you give someone getting started in online media and marketing?
“My best advice would be to learn – and execute… Too many resumes that come across my desk seem to get the concepts, but no real experience. If you’re trying to jump into online marketing then read as much as you can. Then find someone – uncle, aunt, spouse, etc… who you can help with their web site. Be your own case study and document the results.”

There’s plenty more where that came from. Head over to The Online Beat for the full interview. Good luck with the site Joanna!

Click the screenshot below to see the newest member to the Groove family of eCommerce website designs:

Classic Gourmet Baskets has all the features of a highly usable, search-friendly, conversion-friendly eCommerce website, including:

• Optimized on-page SEO
• Custom navigation
• User-friendly checkout
• Clear calls-to-action

…and much more

Read more about Classic Gourmet baskets in our portfolio section!

Take a look at Dealer Refresh and let us know what you think! What do you like/dislike about it? What could we do better?

We always appreciate constructive feedback and a fresh pair of eyes

CTR based on Ad Rank

The quality score. It is the bane of the search engine marketer’s existence. The amount of money that you bid, plus this mystical quality score, equates to your ad position. One of the factors that goes into the calculation of this quality score is an ad’s historical performance, i.e. the click through rate. Google determines an ad is of high quality if it is clicked often, among other factors. Here it is straight from the horses mouth:

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.

In the coming days, we’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position. This will result in more accurate Quality Scores, ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, and enable Google to show the most relevant ads to searchers by rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

What’s shocking about this is that Google didn’t take ad position into account before this announcement. Before this change, the ads that appeared higher were the benefactors of a higher click through rate, and a higher quality score. So it costs them less to appear towards the top, while the ads in the no-so-visible 8th position had both a lower CTR and quality score. Therefore the low ranking ad has to pay more to overcome its unfairly low quality score. This is hardly a fair system, and I’ll have to admit, I honestly thought Google took this into account already. Maybe I was giving them too much credit?

In the spirit of Halloween, Google has temporarily re-worked their logo, as they do on most holidays. They’ve also made sure they’re safe from zombies. That’s right, they’ve blocked zombies from accessing their brains this Halloween.

See more on Matt Cutts’ latest post.

Also, there’s been some news about Google AdWords’ Quality Score calculation. They are making improvements to how they are scoring and placing ads to server better results to the user. Watch for a post next week by Mike with more details.

Happy Halloween!

A caveat: I write this post out of frustration. I’m struggling to understand why Google does what it does with its rankings. As an online marketing specialist here at Groove, I spend a ton of time reading about SEO best practices straight from Google, and from other trusted sources. So when I see Groove Commerce go from the 5th overall rank on a highly targeted term, to completely unranked, back to number 5, and completely unranked again over the last week, I have to wonder what it is that we’re doing wrong.

Groove Commerce is a lead generation and eCommerce website design, development, and marketing firm. When we launch a site, we’d like to have our name credited in the footer. Most everyone does this, and usually in a similar format. For us, we like to say “eCommerce Website Design by Groove Commerce”, with a link on eCommerce Website Design leading to our services page of the same name, and a link from Groove Commerce to our homepage. We chose eCommerce website design as our anchor text because its a good snippet defining our services, and a high traffic phrase. From time to time we alter the phrase a bit, to diversify our backlink anchor text. Additionally, we’re a relatively new-ish company, so there aren’t hundreds of sites out there linking back to us with the same anchor text (considered not a good idea).

Over the last few months our rankings on the phrase have improved. As stated earlier, we’ve been as high as number 5, and trending upward. But something we’re doing is making Google unhappy. As of this posting, we simply don’t rank for the phrase. Not on the first page, not on the 100th page, nowhere.

Complete removal from the SERPs is often a sign that Google has caught on to your black hat techniques. The problem is that we do not engage in black hat techniques. We don’t even engage in gray hat! We run a responsible link building campaign; gaining relevant back links with varying anchor text through various sources at a moderate pace. You won’t find links to Groove on completely unrelated sites, disreputable sites, or meaningless directories. So why the Google “slap”?

I’ll never get an answer. In fact, come tomorrow, we’ll probably be back in the SERPs for our preferred term, and maybe we’ll stay there. Maybe we won’t. The point is that the SERPs are a volatile place. Google’s ever changing algorithm, different data centers, personalized results, geo-targeted results, and so many other factors can cause your site to appear and disappear. Guaranteed rankings are a risky business to be in for this reason. Someone guaranteeing you first page rankings may just be able to get you that ranking with the latest method of tricking Google into thinking your site is important. However, the quicker they get you there, the quicker you’ll fall off.

EDIT: Wouldn’t you know it? We’re back on the first page.

Before we begin, let’s just get this somewhat critical piece of information out of the way. John McCain does not have an official store. Instead, his website leads to this page, which points to a few for-profit stores. I’ll be taking a look at the first one listed, http://www.johnmccain08store.com. That being said, this is hardly a fair competition (i’m hesitant to even call it a competition), and I recognize the gigantic difference in time/money spent on each site. There isn’t much of a question which site is better, but there are definitely a few things each of them could do better.

The Homepage

Both the official Barack Obama store and the John McCain store have a very unique level of inherent security; they are linked to directly from a major US presidential candidate’s home page. So while neither of the sites feature the standard “VeriSign,” “McAfee Secure,” and/or “GeoTrust” logos, typically a must for increasing shopper confidence on an eCommerce site, we’ll forgive them for this one (though, is it that much work?).

Site Layout

Both the Obama and McCain store do a decent job of laying out their products. With the Obama store, I’m not particularly fond of putting the “Product Categories” section so far down. Typically, we recommend getting as much above the fold as possible, without crowding. This is one area where the McCain store does a bit better. For a window-shopping visitor, the McCain store presents more product images above the fold, which is that many more opportunities to catch the visitor’s interest. There is some unnecessary white space on the Obama store that could be eliminated, which may help a bit as well. Putting the “Product Categories” section up above the fold would be the best move, in my opinion. Also, the dynamic “New Arrivals” section at the time of this writing features mostly high-priced “designer” items. I find it kind of silly that I have to do a bit of searching to find the normally priced clothing. I will say that the tiny images next to each category in the category sidebar is a nice touch.

Category Pages

The John McCain store is disqualified from this section of the analysis, being that they don’t have category pages. From the visitor’s standpoint, I don’t see this being a problem. The store carries so few products, that breaking them up in categories might just create an unnecessary step in the funnel. From the standpoint of the search engine spiders, this is less than ideal, but I’ll touch on that later.

The Obama store category pages feature large product images, refinements, and a call to action for each item. Any changes I’d recommend would be nit-picking.

Product Pages

Eeek. The John McCain product pages are about as simplistic as it gets. They do feature very large images of the products, but the images themselves could use some work (check out the design hanging off this cap). Otherwise the product pages are lacking in upsells/related products. The “add to cart” call to action could also use some sprucing up to grab the attention.

The Obama store product pages do a better job, in that they do feature related products, although the styling of these could use some work. The call to action is nicely styled, but could use a size increase. The wish list and recent history features are a nice touch as well.

SEO Elements

For one reason or another, the John McCain store only has one page indexed in Google. The webmaster may need to submit a sitemap to Google, or make other adjustments. Fixing this should be priority number one. Otherwise, the McCain store should also work on adjusting their page titles. The title tag “ELBusa/Red Elephant - Mccain Store” runs throughout the whole site, which is a big SEO no-no. The site doesn’t appear on the front page for a Google search for “John McCain Hats”. Just adding those three words to the title tag of all of the hats on the site would help immensely. The same goes for their use of H1 tags throughout the site (they don’t use them at all!).

The Obama store does use different page titles, but not nearly as much as they should. The title tags remains static on most of the pages, but it changes on the most important categories, like shirts, buttons, and stickers. This is one of the reasons why a Google search for “Barack Obama buttons” has them at the number one spot.

Google Analytics

Both sites have Google Analytics installed, which is definitely a smart move if they’d like to track visitor patterns. In fact, the candidate’s main pages utilize tracking as well, with Obama sticking with Analytics, and McCain using Omniture. Kudos to the web teams on that one!

The Checkout Process

The John McCain store checkout process has its share of problems. There’s no real way to see the shipping rate until the very last step (they have a link to preview the rate, but it was returning an error when clicked). Product images aren’t viewable once you’re in the cart, making editing pretty difficult. The checkout process of the John McCain store is the Achilles heal. It is here that the lack of assurances and the bare-bones site design could really cause the buyer to step back and say, “Is this legit?” A question you do not want your visitors to be asking themselves.

Unlike the McCain store, the Obama store checkout displays product images, and the shipping rate is visible as well. The whole process on the Obama store takes less steps, which is always highly recommended, though its pretty difficult to find out how to move on from the first step. The “Proceed to Checkout” is below the fine print! The one page checkout is preferred, and the little padlock and text, “Secure checkout by Volusion” is the only assurance found on either of the candidate’s checkout processes (tisk tisk).

Conclusion

Put simply, there is a LOT of room to improve for both stores.

The John McCain store owners should really give us a call to get some of their SEO elements working correctly. Having one page indexed in Google is simply unacceptable, and the site owners are missing out on a ton of sales by not getting this corrected. Being linked to directly from John McCain’s official site is going to bring a ton of traffic, but they could be getting so much more from the search engines. The checkout process would be next on the list of improvements, but first things first ;).

The Barack Obama store could use some of our conversion consulting. The shopping cart is confusing and does little to instill confidence in the buyer. The layout of the products is hardly optimized, and with the amount of items the store sells, this can be a real average order size killer. Additionally, with the abundance of different products, I would recommend the implementation of an internal site search. It would certainly help where a customer is searching for say, a shirt with a particular phrase on it. With purchases from the store directly contributing to Obama’s campaign, any increase in average order size or conversion is an increase in campaign funds.

It may be a little late for changes this time around, but 2012 candidates take note! Give us a call when the time comes, we’ll be happy to help. Maybe we’ll give you a discount for a few .gov backlinks

The Meetup starts around 6:30 with pizza and beer/soda. Hope to see you all there.

Click here for more info and to RSVP:
http://www.meetup.com/webdevelopment/calendar/8938327/

• We tend to focus on the eCommerce side of SEO and SEM, and Ann Smarty hit one out of the park this week, breaking down pro’s and con’s of some eCommerce Link Building methods.
• Not so long ago, Google was simply unable to index flash content. Back in June of this year, the webmaster blog announced it had developed an algorithm to do so, and this week Brian Ussery revealed an extremely well thought out and thorough blog post taking a look at just how good Google is at indexing flash.
• AOL and Yahoo is a done deal…wait its not.
• WebTigerSeo explains why SEO in the economic downturn isn’t as bad as one might think.
• Adwords has begun DIY display ads.
• According to TechCrunch, Google’s personalized homepage dubbed “iGoogle” is debuting a new look that will keep users on the iGoogle page.

That’s it! I’m having my wisdom teeth removed today so I’ll be out of commission for a few days. Not Fun! Pray for Mojo.

• The online advertising field grew yet again, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. The article is actually a bit of a downer, stating that while growth is still in the double digits, its down from last year’s number.
• Frank Reed of Marketing Pilgrim reacts to the pessimistic nature of the LA Times article. He’s not buying the gloomy scenario.
• Amit Agarwal spotted something interesting in this Walt Mossberg Wall Street Journal article about online alert notifications: Google Alerts will soon be offering feeds to complement its email alerts.
• SEOmoz introduced their new tool called Linkscape. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it spits out some pretty cool metrics. I haven’t been able to get full use out of it yet, but I expect once I’ve gotten the hang of it, I won’t know how I lived without it.

Sometime next week we’ll be posting a more in depth look at Linkscape, so look out for that. Enjoy your weekends!