Benchmarking: If it works for Amazon, why wouldn’t it work for your site?

source: Webcredible - unedited

My comments in quotes and italics

If it works for Amazon, why wouldn’t it work for your site? By Ariana Polyviou on 9 August 2010

When creating a new ecommerce website, one of the key issues that is likely to come up is ‘How to create a successful user interface?’ An easy answer could be ‘Do it like Amazon’ and besides, nobody can deny it, Amazon is one of the most successful ecommerce stores worldwide.


Amazon’s facts speak for themselves:

• Listed at 17th position within the 1000 most visited sites for June 2010 
• Approximately 81,000,000 unique visitors per month 
• Around 3,600,000,000 page visits per month. 
• Market capitalization of over $50 billion 

Sometimes it’s good to copy the big guys. But copying a successful design does not mean that the company’s success will be copied with it!

So, ‘If it works for Amazon, why wouldn’t it work for your site?’

Reason #1 – Amazon’s low prices offsets its imperfect user experience

Amazon definitely doesn’t have a sparkling interface design. So what is it about it that makes it so successful?

Amazon can afford to sell at cost or below cost prices, offer free delivery and still have profit! It relies on its large number of customers and its fast selling pace, which can provide cash before the payment of the goods, is due to their original supplier.

This refers to Return On Capital Employed (ROCE).

Question #1: Is this type of marketing included in your business plan?

Reason #2: Amazon’s existing customers are more important than new ones

If you’ve used Amazon before then it’s more than likely that you will easily find what you are looking for.  Firstly, because you know that in order to find the product that best suits you, you have to follow the process of:

• Searching by a product by name 
• Choosing only one category of goods 
• Then have the sorting and filtering options enabled 

Secondly, if you’re an existing user then Amazon already knows your purchasing patterns. This boosts up your chances to experience serendipity by receiving more personalised product recommendations.

Amazon has a lot of existing customers who are used to its product search process. Thus, making major changes to it involves the risk of dissatisfying its 81m+ registered customers.

But what happens if you’re a new user and there’s no purchasing patterns log for you?

You’re most likely to get odd or not useful recommendations and struggle to search efficiently for the desired product. Therefore, unless you have plenty of time, patience or luck, it’s unlikely that you’ll reach a product’s best matches to your requirements.

Question #2: Can you afford transacting only with your existing customers?

Make sure your Search is simple & effective for new customers.

Reason #3: Amazon is continuously testing

Have you ever noticed frequent change of features in the layout of Facebook e.g. the Newsfeed?

Of course, if you are Facebook (the website with the most traffic for June 2010) or Amazon, then you can afford to test some new designs and features directly on your users. Besides, losing some of them may not even be noticeable!

The problem with copying Amazon is that you can’t know what’s there to stay and what’s to be removed after a while. You can’t know which features have a positive and which ones have a negative return. Copying Amazon involves a high risk of copying features which are temporarily placed on the site just for experimental purposes.

Question #3: Can your ecommerce site afford having features that are possibly not usable?

Use A/B testing.

Reason #4: Amazon has good customer reviews

Sometimes, people hesitate to purchase goods through ecommerce sites because they’re unable to physically see the item they’re planning to buy. Reading reviews of recent buyers of a product can provide future buyers with a clearer idea about what to expect from the purchase. It’s hard to get people to post feedback on a product. Statistically, 1 in 3000 of buyers are likely to leave a review for an item. Considering Amazon’s traffic, this still gives it enough reviews per product.

Many people choose to buy from Amazon not necessarily because of its good prices or interface but because of the trustworthy community and the content it holds.

Question #4: Is the size of your customer community analogous to the Amazon one?

There will never be enough comments left by your customers alone. Use Reevoo who aggregate comments from multiple online traders.

Reason #5: Amazon’s famous name is enough for making its users feel secure

Have you ever noticed that Amazon does not have an EV SSL certificate? This certificate indicates when it’s safe to transact by changing the URL initials from http to https and turning the URL address bar green.

The use of this certificate is critical for making customers feel safe and confident to purchase goods using their credit card over the Internet.  But, if you’re as popular as Amazon, then there is no trustworthiness issue.  In fact, people may not even check to see if you’re using an SSL certificate.

Question #5: Is your company as famous as Amazon?

Get a SSL certificate.

In summary…

If your answers aren’t ‘Yes’ for the questions #1-5, then perhaps you should rethink before copying Amazon.

To sum up, just because the system is working for Amazon, it doesn’t mean it will work as efficiently for you. Each design is created to match a certain type of business model. If the business model of Amazon doesn’t match yours, then perhaps copying the design of Amazon to your site could be a bad idea.

Links by Business Link - James Cope

James Cope 'Search Engine Optimisation There is a great tool that checks to see if you have the basic onsite elements at' http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/


for my www.data-mind.co.uk
http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/reporta0542de6897a014c42e103a7cd33f379.html

Comments

Overall grade 16/29 (56%) Body text doesn't contain credible amount of content No keywords High number of images (94) Some images don't have descriptions Page is large (57k) Total page (with images) is large (530k) Page contains broken links

How to get to the top of Google's search results

By Intergage Search Marketing Consultant Roan Fair, a Qualified Google AdWords Professional.

Ever played a sport and lost to a weaker opponent you know you could – and should – have beaten?

Maybe your team was overconfident…or maybe your opponents were just really good at getting the basics right.

Getting beaten like this can be very frustrating for companies, especially when it’s on Google or the other major search engines.

You want to be number one but for some reason you’re below some minnow you know isn’t as good as you. Why? How did that happen?

Simple. They got the basics right. They did some fundamental Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and they did it well.

Getting the SEO fundamentals right is vital but it doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive.

Beat 90 Per Cent Of Your Rivals Easily

Ninety per cent companies have not optimised their Web pages. So even a little basic SEO will put you ahead.

Most of it is common sense. Search engines like and reward relevance. The more closely a page matches the searcher’s original search query, the more likely it is to be found.

So when you can include the searcher’s original search keyword in the right places on a page, the higher Google is likely to rank that page.

Finding The Right Keywords

First, you need to find the right keywords. This is absolutely critical.

You need keywords with good search volume – ones your competitors are not using.

Use Google’s Keyword Research Tool to find keywords with high search volume – then search Google for that term.

How many Web pages did that keyword bring up? If the answer is “more than 1 million”, then that’s a search battle you’re unlikely to win. You need a more niche – or ‘longtail’ – keyword.

Compile a list of good, relevant, high search volume, low competition keywords.

This is a basic job you must do well. Your SEO success will depend on it.

Where To Use Your Keywords/Keyphrases

It’s a myth that you need to stuff page with hundreds of keywords. Don’t – it only confuses the search engines.

Instead use one main keyword per page in the following places…

1.    Domain name
2.    Filename
3.    Meta Title
4.    Meta Description
5.    H1 and H2 tags (headlines and sub-headlines)
6.    Main text
7.    Alt Tags (image captions)
8.    Hyperlinks

Domain Name
A powerful place to use a keyword. But what if you sell 1,000 products? You can’t have 1,000 different domain names/Web sites, one for each product, can you?

Well, actually, in a way you can – by using the user’s search term in the Filename – the unique address that search engines use to find pages…

Filename
By including the name of your product in the Filename – ie www.example.co.uk/yourproduct.html – then you are giving Google the right address for the information.

Meta Title & Description
Don’t be put off by jargon like ‘Meta’. Every Google listing comprises three main text elements – the Title, the Description and the Filename.

Your search query must be in the Title, the Description below it and in the aforementioned Filename below that.

H1 and H2
H1 and H2 are simply the headings on each page. Make sure your keyword appears in them.

Main Text
Use your keyword several times in the page text – ideally in the first paragraph, in the middle and at the end. But not in ways that look gratuitous or over-repetitive.

Make your content compelling, give searchers the information they want. It’s only common sense.

Alt Tags
This is effectively a type of image caption. Search engines can’t see images. All they see is a black hole on the page. So you have to describe the image with a keyword in the Alt Tag.

Inbound links
These are ultra-important. Google judges pages – giving them what it calls ‘PageRank’ – based on how popular they are.

A good indication of a page’s popularity is how many other Web pages link to it (and how important/popular those pages are).

Google will reward you with better rankings if it sees good one-way links from other Web pages that have higher PageRank than your page.

Do not be tempted to buy links. Search engines can penalise this. Good content and online PR are two good ways to build inbound links from external sites.

Also, you can create internal links yourself from other pages on your Web site. For maximum effect, use the name of the page involved (ie the keyword).

When Will I See Results?

Be patient. It can take up to nine months for search engines to rank a new Web site’s pages. This is known as the ‘Sandbox’ effect.

One answer is to use an existing domain name with proven volume.

Another is to supplement your SEO with Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising. This can not only get your page to the top of Google’s sponsored rankings immediately, it can also provide valuable SEO data.

After all, you can effectively get free clicks by writing pages based on keywords known to generate plenty of PPC traffic and conversions.

Used together, SEO and PPC are a very powerful combination – but you must get the basics right.

SEO for Dummies by Bruce Clay

Just got delivery of April 2009 book by Bruce Clay.

Using named anchors to identify sections on your pages

I've made some longer pages eg BeSeenOnABike.com info site which I'm going to transfer to BeSeenOnABike.co.uk soonest. Must remember to use the named anchors and include a table of contents.

source: Google Webmaster blogUsing named anchors to identify sections on your pages

Friday, September 25, 2009 at 12:29 PM

We just announced a couple of new features on the Official Google Blog that enable users to get to the information they want faster. Both features provide additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.

To increase the chances that they might appear on your pages:-

1. ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. 
2. Ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just "Section 2.1")
3. Ensure your page includes a "table of contents" which links to the individual anchors. 

The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won't see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

Posted by Raj Krishnan, Snippets Team

Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search AND meta description tag won’t make your website rank higher!

SEPTEMBER 21, 2009

in GOOGLE/SEO

We went ahead and did this post on the official Google webmaster blog to make it super official, but I wanted to echo the point here as well: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search.

To this day, you still see courts mistakenly believe that meta tags occupy a pivotal role in search rankings. We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google.

Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.

In addition to the official blog post, we made a video as well:

I hope this clarifies that the keywords meta tag is not something that you need to worry about, or at least not in Google.

The Google Webmaster post included:

“Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”

I find that information a lot more newsworthy then the fact that Google ignores the keyword meta tag.

Matt Cutts September 21, 2009 at 1:29 pm

sandeep, nothing in how we score keyword meta tags has changed in the last few years, so nothing has changed about the ways to rank well on Google.

Joey, we do the videos in a single take. We use the keywords meta tag not at all in our web search ranking. Full stop. If I were doing the video over again, I’d make it even more emphatic. 

Patrick, our web search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag at all. Our enterprise box (Google Search Appliance) can index/return meta tags if you want, but that’s a completely separate product.

Andrew, there’s no harm to using the keywords meta tag other than wasting your time.

Ara Pehlivanian, that’s right. 

Rokas, I don’t want the post to sound like an order, because it’s not. I just wanted to clarify Google’s position (that we don’t use the keywords meta tag). Maybe this will help some people avoid getting stressed about things that don’t affect search engines, or at least that’s my hope.

graywolf, meta descriptions don’t count in scoring (that is, determining the scores which are then used to determine what order to show the results in). So changing your meta description tag won’t make your website rank higher. When we show snippets, we can sometimes use the meta description as the snippet that we show. To your point, if two results have the same snippet (not just because of the meta description but in general), we will often show the first result and then the other results are shown if you add “&filter=0″. But the post was about the keywords meta tag and clarifying that we don’t use the keywords meta tag. The reason we mentioned the description meta tag was to make the point that we don’t disregard all meta tags.

The Optimizers SEO video

Two 10 minute videos on SEO by The Optimisers Internet Marketing Ltd in Ringwood.

Contents include: What is SEO, SEO & your business, Pay per click, Watch out for SEO conmen!, Why use The Optimizers for your SEO?



Video 2 (7 minutes)