Holiday Preparedness: 10 Tactics for Driving Inbound Links

| MCM staff

The 2011 holiday season is right around the corner, and crunch time is here for ecommerce merchants who want to rise to the top of the search engines. Rimm-Kaufman Group strategy lead Paul Panteleon offers up 10 tactics you can use to drive inbound links this holiday season.

Supercharge your URLs for SEO

| Stephan Spencer

When optimizing URLs for high rankings, many websites pay little attention to optimizing the URL for maximum clickthrough. Yet the URL undeniably affects searcher clickthrough rates in the search engine results pages. MarketingSherpa demonstrates this in its eyetracking study published in its Search Marketing Benchmark Guide in recent years.

Testing your SEO

| Stephan Spencer

Search engine optimization is more science than art. As with any scientific discipline, SEO needs to be done with rigor. The results need to be reproducible.

Custom Content and SEO Boost Sam Ash’s Traffic and Sales

| Tim Parry

An SEO and custom content campaign conducted by search engine tracker AdGooroo and online marketer Rocket Clicks for Sam Ash has helped the musical instrument retailer grow its online business. In six months after the program began, SamAsh.com experienced a 15% increase in organic search traffic and a 30% increase in year-over-year sales for the month of April 2011. What’s more, Sam Ash saw a 29% increase in overall sales, which include both phone and ecommerce.

Building Brand Loyalty on the Search Engine Results Page

| Michael Kahn

Building loyalty and credibility on the SERP starts with dominating results and taking advantage of all options for increased visibility. True, a combination of text ads and organic listings is still an extremely effective method for building brand trust and more frequent purchases. In fact, according to Performics

Consumers Making Most of Mobile Search

| Tim Parry

Mobile search is on the rise, and this is a missed opportunity for merchants. According to a study released March 21 by performance marketing agency Performics, more than three-quarters of smartphone owners who use the mobile web more than once a day …