I will tell you right now, there’s a lot to know about SEO. There are people out there who make it their full time job and it’s an ever-evolving science. We don’t know with 100% certainty all the things that make search engine robots tick, but we do know some things that matter, so today’s post is about those basics.

First of all, SEO stands for search engine optimization, and that’s the practice of doing things to your website to attract search engines. Great search engine optimization is what will cause Google to provide a link to your website when someone searches “handmade jewelry” over your competitors. The better optimized your site, the higher Google (and other search engines) will place your site in its results when people search for sites like yours. So what do you need to do? Read on…

1. Keyword Selection
The first thing you want to do is decide which keywords you want to target. If you sell hats, you may have a tough time competing with the net’s biggest hat emporiums, and that’s not necessarily the end of the world. You probably sell specific types of hats they don’t sell, like “cocktail hats” or “handmade hats” or “bespoke hats”. You can target keywords that are very specific to what you sell and less sought after by bigger and more powerful competitors. Doing this tends to work out best any way, since when you target such specific phrases the visitors who come from them are more likely to want exactly what you’re selling. If you just had the word “hats” optimized you might get people looking for baseball caps instead of pillbox hats, and that’s not much use to you.

To determine which keywords to target, open up Google’s keyword tool, and enter a keyword that describes what you sell. We can try “hats”. What we get back is a list of phrases including “hats” that people search on Google. It tells us what the phrase is, how often it’s searched, and how much competition there is for that keyword. (Phrases with more competition can be more difficult to rank well for on search.)  You can also try more specific phrases like “vintage hats” or “pillbox hats”.  Once you’ve found some phrases that are getting searched on Google and are relevant to your site, it’s time to optimize for them.

You’ll want to optimize a separate page for each phrase, so you’ll need to repeat steps 2-4 over and over for each phrase you want to optimize for. In keeping with our hats example, let’s say we decide to optimize for “vintage hats.” We’ll want to create a page for our vintage hats and do the following:

2. URL
Create a new file and give it a name like vintage-hats.html. This will signal to search engines from the page’s file name that this is a page about vintage hats.

3. Title Tags
Make sure your title tag includes the phrase “vintage hats”.  So you might have it say “Unique Vintage Hats by Sally Hatmaker” as the title.

4. Keyword usage in your copy
Within the page, you’ll want to make sure you write the phrase “vintage hats” as part of your website copy. Work that phrase in a couple of times as you describe what you’re selling, but try not to sound too much like a broken record. You want to make your page readable for people, moreover than search engines, but you still want to make reference to the subject at hand.

5. Links
Now you’ve done some on-page optimization, it’s time to get some links. Links to your site tell search engines your site is credible, so the more quality links you get, the better. (Not all links are created equal, a link from a site with a good page rank is more useful than a link from a link farm.)  You can do things like getting bloggers to write about your vintage hats or creating Squidoo lenses about vintage hats. These activities will all boost your credibility in the eyes of search engines.

This should be enough to get you started, though to master SEO you’ll need to do a lot more reading. Follow my link love posts each Friday, where I often link more advanced SEO articles.

If I said “You need to move your social media links ATF and lower your CPC to improve your ROI.” You might reply “WTF?!” There are certain acronyms that are used a lot in the online marketing/ecommerce world and it is helpful to understand what they mean. Below is an explanation of 10 common ones:

1. ATF/BTF
Above the fold or Below the Fold. Refers to anything on a website that appears on screen before the user has to scroll down. Items that appear ATF tend to get more attention so things like links to your Twitter account or your newsletter sign up form will get more action if they’re ATF.

You’ll also sometimes hear these in advertising lingo. BTF ads tend to be cheaper than ATF since ATF is a more valuable/visible slot.

2. SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. There are a lot of elements to SEO including your urls, your title tags, your h1 tags, your keyword density and links to your site. SEO can refer to any of those things. You’ll see people talking about doing this or that to improve their SEO.

3. SEM
SEM stands for search engine marketing. It is commonly a reference to things like Google Adwords (a service Google provides that allows you to pay for your text ads to appear to users when certain keywords are searched) but can refer to any kind of activity that involves marketing with search engines, including SEO.

4. SMO
Social media optimization is a fairly new catch-phrase but it’s starting to get thrown around more and more. It refers to things you can do to optimize the value and performance of your social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Flickr, etc.)

5. USP
Unique selling position means the thing that makes you different from your competitors. If you don’t know what your USP is it’s time to think about it.

6. ROI
Return on investment means how much you’re making on various expenditures you have in the growth of your business. If you buy an ad for $500 and sell $10,000 worth of product that’s a good ROI. If you buy a $500 ad and sell $500 worth of product you saw very little ROI (although it may still have been worthwhile if you acquired a lot of new Facebook fans, newsletter sign ups, Twitter followers, etc. since those people might buy stuff later.)

7. CTR
Click through rate accounts for number of people who saw your ad, media placements, etc. online and clicked through to your site. If you had an ad display 1000 times and got 100 click throughs that means your CTR was 10%.

8. CPM
Cost per mille actually means how much you pay for 1000 impressions. Ad units are often sold at a CPM rate so you might buy a $50 ad with a CPM of $1.00. In which case your ad will get 50,000 impressions.

9. CPC
Cost per click usually refers to how much you pay every time your online ad is clicked on. This is how Google Adwords and many other online ad units are sold.

10. CPA
Cost per acquisition refers to how much you pay for customers to do something. It can refer to how much you pay for people to sign up for a newsletter, enter a contest, make a purchase, etc. If you bought a $500 advertisement and got 50 sales from it your cost per action would be $10.00. If you got 500 newsletter sign ups from the same ad you’d have a $1.00 CPA for your newsletter sign ups.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• What Makes a Good Thank You Page – Great read with an amazing gallery of thank you pages from tons of large online retailers
• 7 Insanely Useful Ways to Search Twitter for Marketing
• Getting Back to the Fundamentals of a Successful Website – the value of listening to your customers explored
• The 120 Second Visitor – The average visitor spends 120 seconds on your site. This article talks about ways to maximize their time.
• Maximizing Add On Sales – Tactics to get customers to buy one more thing as they check out

One of the biggest mistakes I see smaller businesses making online is that they often don’t understand who their target market is. As a result they don’t actually market to them. Developing a successful small business means having a very clear understanding of who your target audience is. You might be saying “duh” right now but consider these questions:

Does your media list mostly contain indie blogs?

Do your Facebook statuses say “Just found a new source for fabrics on ebay.” and “Trying to figure out how to use Quickbooks for small business”?

Do you blog mainly about going to trade shows and how to put in a perfect dart?

If you’re guilty of these faux pas, you probably aren’t marketing to your target audience and you may not even understand who your target audience is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to pitch indie blogs. There’s nothing wrong with giving customers a little behind the scenes peak at your day to day life. The problem is that’s all some small businesses do. Unless you sell supplies, most of your potential customers probably aren’t small business owners or artisans. They’re people who admire unique products, but can’t necessarily produce them on their own, and aren’t even terribly interested in how you do your magic. They just enjoy the end result.

So here are four places you can change your ways immediately and start marketing to potential customers instead of, well, yourself.

1. Blog
Blog about things that are interesting to your customers. If you sell dog leashes, blog about cute dog videos from Youtube. If you sell cosmetics, blog about how to achieve the perfect smokey eye.

2. Social Media
Stop spending all day on Etsy’s self-promotion forums. Stop tweeting about new Ebay seller policies, troubles with your merchant account and CPSIA all day. Start Tweeting and Facebooking about stuff your customers will find interesting, amusing or informative. If you want to socialize with fellow artisans or small business owners create TWO social media accounts, one for customers and one for peers.

3. Advertising
This is a biggie. There is a giant world of advertising to be had out there. There are niche publications for nearly everything. So stop spending all your ad dollars on publications mainly read by other artisans and business owners (again, unless you sell supplies or services for business owners or something). It’s okay to do a little marketing to that audience, but make sure the bulk of your ad dollars are being spent on publications that reach potential customers and not just your peers.

Check out sites like Blogads, explore Google Adwords and Adbrite. Think about who your target customers are and what publications they read and what websites they visit. Speaking of which…

4. Media List
Make sure your media list contains press relevant to your brand. A press list for a jewelry company should be different than a press list for a company that mainly designs housewares. Make sure you’re thinking about niche audiences that might like your products. A company that makes jewelry out of circuit boards should be pitching to geek publications. A company that makes pendants featuring different dog breeds should be pitching to pet publications.

Robot Art Print by johnwgolden. Buy it on Etsy for $20.00

I have a great big pet peeve and it’s search engine optimization. Why do I hate it? Because it’s often done to please robots first and customers second. The problem with that is that robots don’t buy stuff. So while your super lame looking SEO might bring robots in droves, you’re going to sound like a moron to customers.

What do I mean? Let’s say I wanted to optimize this page for “SEO consulting.” I might write something like

Hire me to do your SEO consulting. My SEO consulting skills are second to none. You’ll be so delighted with SEO consulting skills that you’ll recommend me to all of your friends. Get started today with my reasonably priced SEO consulting packages for small business.

Holy crap! Could I have said SEO consulting a few more times? What human wants to read that? Probably none. But to robots, this is good stuff. I’ve got lots of “keyword density” going on with the phrase “SEO Consulting”. Not only is this good for my SEO, it’s also good for using as a landing page in my Adwords campaigns. (If you’ve ever used Adwords you’ll see that they give your landing pages something called a quality score. It’s the robot’s estimation of how much your landing page has to do with the keywords you’re bidding on. The more relevant your page appears to be in robot’s estimation, the better your quality score, and the better price you’ll get when you bid on your keywords.)

So it’s a conundrum, isn’t it? How can you please robots and sound interesting to humans? Here are a few ways you can write something that will attract the robots and interest your customers:

1. Teach Them Something
How to do it: Write a page on your site (or post on your blog) that teaches people how to do something your customers are interested in learning. If you sell bridal jewelry, write something about how to to shop for a wedding band. If you sell dog collars, write something about how to keep your dog cool and comfortable on a hot summer afternoon walk.

Why it works: You’ll naturally write phrases relevant to your customers which will attract both people and search engines. Teaching customers how to do something also gives you some credibility with them so they’ll find your brand more appealing than a competitor who hasn’t taught them how to do anything.

2. Take Them Shopping
How to do it: Write gift guides for various people or occasions. (e.g. Valentine’s Day, Christmas, geeks, men, foodies, artists, etc.). Feature your own items and maybe even team up with a cross-promotion partner and include some of their items in your guide in exchange for their listing your items in their gift guides.

Why it works: Customers that are stumped for gift ideas sometimes search for “gift ideas for geeks” or “gifts for dad”.  You can send those searchers your way with your gift guide pages.

3. Make them Laugh
How to do it: Draw a clever comic if you’re an illustrator.  Write a top 10 list of most outrageous bridezilla moments if you sell bridal jewelry.

Why it works: Funny content can go viral easily. People share things that are funny with their friends. Getting your content shared builds tons of back links to your blog or website and that brings in customers and link juice for search engines (search engines give more weight to websites that have other websites linking to them).

Bonus Points: When you craft your optimized pages, figure out what phrases you want to optimize for and work those into your copy. You can do this by using Google’s Keyword Tool to see what keywords and key phrases get searched often. Then select the ones most relevant to your business (preferably some that don’t have truckloads of competition)  and make sure you incorporate those words and phrases into your copy.

For those that follow this blog regularly, you know I post a list of my favorite articles each week from around the web. I preface this by saying that I do a lot of reading, and only a small percentage of it is worthwhile, but that small percentage is really great. The same thing is true of surfing the web in general. I look at ecommerce sites all the time. I look at them for inspiration for Smaller Box posts. I look at them for ways I can improve my own ecommerce site.

So here are 5 things I’ve seen in recent travels that I thought were neat.

1. Scratch and win coupon codes
At Kir Devries shopping is an adventure because each visit is a chance to get a different discount code. You’ll see on their product pages (scroll down) they have a scratch and win graphic where you can virtually scratch a coupon to receive a discount. Neat!

2. Invoice optional
We had a great debate here recently about whether customers want to see invoices in their packages. Numsi solves this problem by asking customers at check out if they wish to receive their invoice in their package.

3. Product Options Above the Fold
Laying out a product page with a ton of information is extremely difficult. You need to convey a lot of details and make it all very easily scanned and digested by customers. I’ll probably be tweaking my product pages from now until the end of time. They’re never perfect.

That said, check out how the Olympics Store arranged their product pages. Their 3 column layout makes it so that both product description and product options are above the fold (meaning customer doesn’t have to scroll down to see either).

I liked this layout so much that I implemented one like it for my own site. It allows me to convey to customers that products are available in a variety of sizes, styles and colors as soon as they see the page. It eliminates the risk that customers will see a product page, not like the color on display when they land and leave before realizing that they can select a different color.

4. Spreading the word = discounts for all
I’ve seen this model on a few different Facebook pages and it’s an interesting idea. (If anyone’s used it let me know how it worked for you.) The shop owner tells fans that once a certain number of fans have been amassed a special discount code will be shared exclusively with all the Facebook fans. It gives existing fans incentive to get their friends to become fans in order to get a coupon.

5. Discounts with a sense of humor
I saw this list of discount policies on Passive Aggressive Notes. I know, it’s a funny source for ecommerce inspiration, but I take it where I can get it. The list outlines a long list of bizarre ways customers can get discounts. It’s amusing and memorable and maybe inspires you to think of a way to offer discounts for creative customer behavior (discount if you send a picture of yourself in my product, discount if you make a funny video about my product, etc.).

Seen something inspiring in the land of ecomm? Let us know about it.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Sprucing Up Your Product Photography with Photoshop – Fantastic and highly visual tutorial on how to fix product pictures
• Tutorial: Use Aviary for Free Photo-editing and Other Design Tools – Can’t afford Photoshop? Here’s a tutorial for a FREE online photo editing tool.
• Strategic e-marketing: Everything should be connected – Great tips on hooking up your blog, newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Who Google Webmaster Tools is Your Best Friend – an overview of how to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to fine tune your website
• 25 Tips for Optimizing Your Online Forms – Fix everything from contact forms to check out pages with these tips.
• The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!

Also, I selected a winner for my FREE 3 for 30 Giveaway. Congrats to Helen and thanks for spreading the word about Smaller Box.

What’s in a name? For brands, it’s just about everything. Selecting a good brand name is vital to the success of your small business, so here are a few considerations:

1. Can they remember it?
Give your company a name that’s easy to remember. If you have an exotic multi-syllabic, hard-to-pronounce, hard-to-spell name, don’t name your company after yourself. Give people a company name that’s relatively concise, rolls of the tongue easily and that’s memorable.

My e-tail shop is called Ex-Boyfriend. Although everything is designed by illustrator Matt Snow, we didn’t call the brand Matt Snow T-Shirts. It’s not interesting, it’s not as easy to remember. It could easily turn into Mark Snow or Matt Snell in a customer’s brain. Ex-Boyfriend is interesting though, it makes you want to find out what the heck a company with such a name is about.

2. Can you dominate Google?
It does little good for your brand name to be memorable if people can’t find you online. You could call your brand “Sex” (which would certainly be memorable)  but good luck getting to the top of Google with a name like that.

It’s a good idea to pick a brand name that you can easily rank on search engines for.  That means your name has to be unique, easy to spell and you have to find a domain name available that includes it.

There’s only one Nordstrom. There’s only one Etsy. Brands like Monster and Domino have to fight it out for search engine domination since those names encompass job hunting, energy drinks, cable or sugar and pizza.

If you use unusual or creative spelling for your brand’s name, that may make it harder for customers to find you. So make sure your brand is spelled how it sounds.

3. Can they recognize it on sight?
Having a good brand mark is an important part of establishing your brand. Think about the iconic Burger King logo in the shape of a burger. Think about the Shell gas station logo, which is a graphic representation of the brand’s name.  These brand marks effectively reinforce brand identity in the minds of consumers. When you pick your brand name, be thinking about how you’ll graphically represent that name to your audience.

I recently had an issue with a vendor. They’d sent me a defective product. When I contacted them to let them know about it, they asked me to send them pictures of the defects. As a customer here’s what I thought:

a. If I got a defective shipment I am probably not the only one, you’ve probably had this complaint before yet you’re treating me with suspicion.

b. You’re treating me with suspicion. Like I don’t have better things to do than email you about some imaginary problem?

c. You screwed up and now you want me to go to the trouble of taking pictures and emailing them to you?

Yikes!

This should get you thinking about how you respond when your customers complain. If a customer emails and says their bracelet clasp broke after one wear do you immediately send her a replacement or do you demand she send you the broken product first? If a customer calls to say that the lining in the new handbag she ordered from you is falling apart after just a few weeks do you try to blow her off?

Every company has different policies with regard to customer complaints. Some are more generous, or maybe trusting, when it comes to their customers. Others are more likely to make things a more difficult for customers. While placing the burden of proof on customers when a problem arises might sound like a good way to protect yourself from being conned, it’s also a good way to further alienate an unhappy customer with a legitimate complaint.

When a customer has a complaint, they’re at a crossroads. They’ve had a bad experience and it can be made a whole lot worse by a retailer who makes them jump through hoops. On the flip side, this is an opportunity to really delight a customer with top notch customer service and turn them into a loyal brand advocate.

Customer service done the right way: A few years ago I bought a sofa from Pottery Barn. About a year into owning the sofa, I found the material inside the sofa cushions was coming out through the upholstery like crazy! Even though it had been a year since my purchase, I called Pottery Barn to complain. They didn’t demand proof of my complaint, they didn’t ask me to mail them back the defective cushions. They immediately express shipped replacement cushions free of charge, along with a coupon for a future purchase. Their fast and satisfying response to my complaint reinforced my positive image of Pottery Barn. As a result, I will shop with them again in the future and recommend them to others.

So what do you when a customer complains? Take them at their word? Make things right only after they’ve shown proof of a defect? Hold your ground and tell them to suck it up?

It may seem like a no-brainer but some small businesses don’t brand their products. If you work with textiles, make sure you’re putting your logo somewhere on the fabric. Either a sew in or screen printed label. If you do jewelry, imprint your brand name on the inside of a ring or the clasp of a necklace. If you design paper goods, stamp your brand name on the back of cards, calendars, and notepads.

Branding your products looks more professional and helps customers remember where they got the items they love.