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HP can spam the hell out of Google and Google engineers are afraid to do anything about it because they do not want to lose the associated AdWords ad budget. But if you follow HP's strategy it is called spam - and a Google engineer will smile while killing your site. It's just business.

We all want to know which sites, search engines and keywords are sending us traffic. But what about direct type in traffic? When people access your site URL by typing it in from memory, it can be a great indicator of your brand preference, success of your offline and online marketing efforts and customer satisfaction. If you're smart and lucky, you named your site your main-keyword-dot-com and you get search traffic from visitors who use their address bars as search engines. For example, a search on "reusable bags" sends you automatically to "reusablebags.com" which sells…you got it, reusable bags.

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages. In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will briefly define search engine optimization (SEO) and information architecture (IA), describe one of the many places where these marketing specialties intersect, and explain how easy and natural thematic structure and linking really is. I've also included a video. I should point out that this technique is very intuitive, and many site owners or designers are probably using it to some extent naturally. We are simply putting a name to these natural tendencies.

Why do I need SEO to improve my site? Because 80 percent of all website traffic originates from the search engines, with the majority coming from a select few.

This week, the SEOmoz crew and I are heading to Pubcon in Las Vegas for one of the search industry's more advanced conferences. However, before departing, I felt an irresistable urge to do some coverage of a tough competition shaping in the world of search marketing...

Customer reviews certainly help shoppers, but they are not substitutes for weak or generic product descriptions. Unique product descriptions help your search engine optimization, help overcome your customer FUDDs and ultimately sell more product! I want to share a few tips for creating unique, compelling product page copy using customer review content - even when your site has few or no reviews.

Here are some holiday data feed management tips courtesy of the team at online retail merchandising technology provider, Mercent. This post is the fruit of a Twitter connection with Rick Galan, Strategic Marketing Manager of Mercent and ecommerce blogger. You can follow Rick on Twitter @rickgalan, or follow Jason Billingsley and me at @jbillingsley and @roxyyo respectively.

The Internet Marketer's Handbook was compiled by Danny Dover and is the result of literally hundreds of hours of study and practice in internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques. The information below represents the web's best resources and tools. All of the items listed below are available to the general public and most are free of charge. Enjoy!

With 60% of online shoppers cite free shipping as a reason they are more likely to shop on the web (Harris Interactive, July 2008), if you use free shipping as a marketing vehicle, you want to make sure you communicate your offer at every touch point. In the current issue of eM+C magazine, you'll find my article Get Your Site Into Shipping Shape This Season with ideas on how "get the most mileage" out of your free shipping offer from search engine to shopping cart (this version includes screen shots):

Last April, I posted a script that allowed paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors. This was essentially a free tool that gave website owners the ability to weed out ineffective keywords and put more money toward the precise phrases that were really driving their business. Google Analytics doesn't do this out of the box. It will tell you exact search queries for visits from organic listings, but for paid search, you're stuck with the keywords that you're bidding on. With broad and phrase matching, these could vary pretty drastically from what the visitors typed into the search engine.

Most of marketing is now measurable, directly or indirectly. With digitally produced and distributed marketing - particularly channels such as search engine marketing, online advertising, email marketing, post-click marketing, and web site optimization - it's often practical to test dozens or hundreds of ideas within a short time. So if you have more than one competing suggestion for "what will work best", the solution is "test them and let's find out". The answer is quantifiable, not emotional.

The perception that search engine optimization is a limitless source of free traffic and sales is one reason that SEO campaigns sometimes fail to live up to expectations. Yes, SEO efforts can deliver excellent returns on investment. But how much expected return is realistic? This article will help you estimate the potential growth in traffic and sales that SEO efforts can drive to your site.

Link building has been a very important factor in Search Engine Optimization, even though so many factors have changed over time after their abuse, it appears link building will not change.

About social bookmarking

Why online presence

Why Seo?

Last week's reputation management post brought several emails about how to go actually go about implementing a reputation management program. With that in mind her are five steps that you can take to manage your reputation online (and control the search engine rankings also).

In ecommerce, one of the most important things is search. And right now, search has been moved to a whole new level with what is called blended search. Blended search is when the search engine takes it beyond text links to include pictures, video, blogs, news and just about anything else. This is changing ecommerce search especially, because now product search is part of this.

Learn how to optimize your weblog to rank well in Google and other major search engines.