When it comes to e-commerce you need to select your SEO firm very carefully. There is perhaps no service more important to the success of your company online than SEO. Brick Marketing makes SEO simple and effective through a methodical process that is proven and continues to bring results for our clients. Some of the SEO services we offer include:

• SEO Strategy
• Keyword Research
• Meta Tag Copywriting
• Content SEO Recommendations
• Link Building Strategy

We will communicate with you every step of the way to ensure that you get the best possible SEO for your business. Whether you have an Internet-only business or you have a brick-and-mortar business that you are moving online, we will do everything we can do to ensure that your SEO is the most effective that it can be at an affordable price.

Our SEO packages are designed for any level or size of business. Whether you need a long term SEO strategy or you need a one-time SEO copywriting service, we give you 100% of our attention all the way through your project. Give Brick Marketing a call, or contact us through our website for more information

In your website copywriting, are you using emotional trigger words? This is the one thing that I see more often on website copy – copywriters not using the trigger words.

Trigger words are words that trigger an emotional response. You want that response to be an appropriate response for your product or service – one that inspires action. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a positive response. Trigger words could be words that provoke fear, love, greed, self-confidence, lust … and it must be appropriate to your product or service. In other words, if your website is about food then you want people to get hungry, not greedy for money.

Website copywriting is all about getting people to respond. End your website copy with a call to action with a strong trigger word. Then watch the dollars roll in.

One great tool you can use to improve your SEO and the user experience on your website is called Site Search. Google Analytics allows you to track what your users are searching for. You can see what pages they are on when they search and where they end up. Then you use the information you gather from the analytics tool to improve the SEO of your website and the experience of your users based on what they’ve searched for on your site.

Site Search is easy to set up, but there is a free and a paid version. Which you use is up to you, but I’d definitely put it on your website, especially if you have a website that has a lot of pages on it. Some of the great information about your site visitors that you can gain from the tool are:

• Search terms they use
• Start pages
• Destination pages
• Categories they search for
• Trending allows you to see individual user statistics over time
• Segments lets you group your users and see how they act as groups

It’s the perfect tool for large websites with lots of information.

I found this on TechCrunch today.

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

This is actually a good idea, but I could find no record, either at TechCrunch, on Google’s own website, or at Marketing Pilgrim, which also ran a story on the topic, of how to sign up for this experiment.

Another benefit to Google, and this could be the real reason behind the experiment, is this: If users vote up or down certain results on their searches and this experiment works the way it is supposed to work then Google will know more about each person's preferences. That means more personalized results and better results for each user's personalized preferences. Once Google nails down precisely what you are looking for when you type in "Rabbit" - the furry little creature or the German-made automobile - then they'll be able to target their customers' pay per click advertising to you better, which will increase the value of the clicks. It's all food for thought.


(Source) Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

This is good news for advertisers and e-book publishers. It has been recognized for awhile now that the PDF format is more conducive to publishing e-books because it is a format that has the widest compatibility since mobile phone users can read books in PDF, but generally do not have web browsers. If this takes off then we’ll likely see more PDF e-books getting published and advertisers flocking to get their ads published in them. The only drawback to this is perhaps that it’s Yahoo! and not Google. Although if Google were to roll out a similar program for AdWords it might take off sooner. Maybe they’ll wait to how it fares with Yahoo!

One question that is an obvious one to ask is how will this affect the SEO of e-books. Search engines can already crawl PDF documents, but if the search engines can make any money on advertising, you can bet they’ll figure out a way for advertisers and publishers to make those books more available. Will free downloads be more crawlable in the future? Will we start seeing mass advice on how to SEO your PDF e-books? Will the search engines off up new verticals for PDF documents? We can count the possibilities. At this point, all of them are valid.

Several companies have been promising us better search for a long time now. Some of them have succeeded. Others just keep trying.

One company that is racing to improve its search is Yahoo!. So how does the search engine hope to improve search for its users? Here’s what Mashable says:

In an effort to stand out (and then beat) Google, Yahoo may soon be rolling out a structured search for particular keywords, which would give a more informative set of results than just links to websites containing relevant information.

But what does this mean? According to Mashable’s blog post on the topic, Yahoo! is attempting some version of semantic search. Other search engines have tried this before and some of them have succeeded in one way or another, including

• Grayboxx
• Powerset
• Twine
• Krillion

Each of these unique brands in search offer some kind of natural or semantic search, but none of them have the power or reputation as Yahoo! Grayboxx, for instance, tries to incorporate search engine technology at the local level. The problem is that its database is incomplete and it hasn’t rolled out the technology into every geographical area just yet. Powerset promises true natural language search, but it’s still in development. Twine is still relatively new and boasts of giving users true semantic search and it’s still in beta. Krillion sets up a nice interface for letting users find national brand products in their local area.

While each of these smaller search engines can cater to a niche market, I doubt that any of them can achieve the kind of greatness that Yahoo! if it tapped into real semantic search with the ability to help users find local businesses better. One simple technology improvement could potentially wipe out any of these smaller competitors. Why couldn’t Yahoo! replace the need for Krillion, for instance, with its own brand search technology? It seems like such a simple thing to be able to do. By incorporating a Grayboxx-type local search box with a Krillion-type product search box, Yahoo! could truly be a force to be reckoned with and might actually achieve some sort of search technology that might live up to the term “revolutionary.” But will it happen?

If anyone is in a position to make it happen, it’s Yahoo! But based on what we all saw this past Monday, are we holding our breath?

Yahoo Merchants Solutions had an off day two days ago on Cyber Monday. They lost revenue, many of their customers lost revenue, and they likely will lose many of their customers. The comments and feedback on Yahoo!s blog were not friendly pats on the back. One customer had this to say:

“Just telling us the time line of what happened isn’t very useful. We already know that as we watched it happen and suffered the lost business because of it.

If you want to gain back the confidence of your customer base you ought to be more specific about what happened, why it happened, and what you are doing to assure us that it won’t happen again. ”

That’s just plain old-fashioned bad business. If Yahoo! expects to keep its small business customers and not lose them to Google’s Checkout services then they’ll have to work hard not to let this happen again. One more such instances on a heavy shopping day like that and you’ll see small business merchants flying to anywhere else. The sad thing is this: The customers who likely lost the most business were the customers who did the best job in their SEO and SEM promotions. Their reward? Nada.