If you sell goods online, whether it is fashion, electronics, books or tools, there are a tonne of virtual shopfronts you can use to increase sales.

Virtual shopfronts can be set up at a variety of stores, like Ebay and Myshopping.com.au. The advantages of having yourselves on these stores is;

1. It increases your exposure to shoppers - comparison sites are becoming more and more popular. Some people use them as their first port of call to compare prices and see who the providers are.

2. It is very low cost, often commission based

3. It increases your exposure in the search engines - for many products, sites like Getprice and Myshopping show up on page 1 search results. If your site isn't on page 1, shoppers could still find your store through Getprice and Myshopping if you are listed.

If you want to increase exposure for your products, you might want to consider stores on;

Ebay                                     Getprice
Shopping.com.au              Shopping.com
Shopbot                               Froogle
Bizrate                                  Shopferrert
Yahoo Shopping                Miracle Shopper
PriceCompare                    Etsy (if your goods are independent, handmade or antique)

 

PC Mag has again run an article trying to Trash Talk SEO. The basis of it seems absurd. This is the sub-heading:

Try and find the best cell phone deal on the Internet using a search engine. Every hit is some commercial site trying to sell you something.

Maybe it is just me, but if I was looking to buy a mobile phone, I guess I would be pretty interested in sites trying to sell it to me.

Personally I think the article is just a bit of 'link bait' . Trying to encourage interest by being controversial and hopefully getting inbound links and lots of comments for PC Mag. Seeing as online marketers generally provide a lot of online content through blogs, forums and comments, it seems a pretty good way of getting interest.

But I am not going to add to it, so no links here.

However, there might be a few people out there who take that bit of nonsensical ranting seriously, and if that is you, then please read on...

The principle of SEO is to make your site rank well in a search engine. If you sell 'widgets in Melbourne', then you will want to optimise your site to rank highly for 'widgets  in Melbourne'. If people are searching for widgets in Melbourne and find your site - well that is a good match, wouldn't you say? This is what they were looking for, and they can check out your site and buy or not.

SEO helps businesses improve their profile online and expose themselves to relevant  customers. This doesn't mean that there are no 'spammy' practitioners out there. Of course there are. Just like there are dodgy lawyers, stock brokers, sales people, insurance companies, builders... there are dodgy people in every industry. Just because there are ambulance chasers out there doesn't mean there aren't lawyers who genuinely help people and businesses (did I just shoot myself in the foot?).

So if you have a website, and you want people to visit it, implement some SEO measures. You're not a bad person for doing it, you're just living in the 21st Century.

With the introduction this week (overseas, not here in Australia), of the Google Nexus One phone, comes a new incentive for businesses to pay attention to mobile search.

Hailed as the 'next big thing' for two years in a row at least, mobile search seems now, more than ever, to be an inevitability.

When I say mobile search, I mean the ability for people to use a mobile device, like the Nexus One  or iPhone, to browse the internet. Obvious uses for this could be;

•  Price comparing
•  Finding shops/services/restaurants in the area
•  Looking up maps and addresses

However, mobile internet usage has been around for a while now, and it has shown that people are using mobile devices for all kinds of things, including social media like Facebook and Twitter, checking news and researching products. Mobile usage ISN'T a separate market to normal internet usage, it is an expansion of the existing market.

When mobile was in it's infancy, businesses could ignore it. They could say 'our market doesn't use mobile', or 'this isn't a significant opportunity for us'. But now, they can ignore it no longer.

Making your website mobile friendly is almost an essential now. If people can't use your site on their mobile device, then either they will wait until they get to a computer to check your site, or they will use your competitors mobile-friendly site. How patient do you think people are these days?

While writing the post below on Bing, I thought I would check out Google to compare, and saw some wierd results for the term 'hairdresser'. The page appears to be 'sectioned' ;



You can see it has 3 sections;
1. Includes images, a result from the job guides unfortunately titled 'Police Officer', and another occupation entry
2. Includes an expansion of the searched term to 'Hairdresser games' - This left me a bit bewildered, maybe it is a new fad to play hairdressing games?
3. Includes the expected Local business results, Toni and Guy, other 'local' results, and Wikipedia.

To me it seems that the third segment contains the results we are used to. But since Google is always going on about adjusting the algorithm for intent, we might infer that 'recruitment' and 'games' are two of the big new trends in searching online.

If you search for accounting, builders, bakery, SEO, etc, you get the normal results at the moment.

On Monday this week Google announced the arrival of Google Real Time Search (I would put a link to the announcement, but I am currently working from China and thus have no blogspot, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.).

While Twitter was heralded as the 'real time' search engine, there are problems with using it as a real time search engine due to spam and the extremely fast pace of the Twitter feed (as demonstrated last week when Tony Abbott became liberal leader).

Google real time search is going to utilise Twitter among other things, but apparently will be able to filter out the spam, and include only powerful Tweets. They are still in negotiations with Facebook to utilise Facebook results.

Bing already integrates Tweets and Facebook into their search results, with Bing having a Twitter beta search engine (again, I can't show that here right now, because I can't get onto Twitter in China, but go to www.bing.com/twitter).

Google is likely to include Tweets, Google news, new web pages and relevant blog posts in real time feed, although I hear on the grape vine that at the moment it is mostly Tweets. Real time won't be instantly shown for every search, but rather when Google notices a 'trending topic'.

To optimise for real time search then, it is important to have relevant and timely content, but also that it needs to be on 'trending' topics, which would be difficult to anticipate, so would require vigilance if you want to be a part of it.