Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting at Apogee Search, to discuss the best strategies for increasing conversion rates.
SEO and PPC efforts can drive qualified traffic to your website, but in order to justify the time, effort, and expense, the site must be able to convert [...]

Link: Best Practices for Product Search
Love: optimizing your universal search presence.  The natural search results aren’t the only results that deserve optimization attention.  Universal search requires a holistic approach to SEO where you need to also focus on optimizing for local, blogs, videos, images, and if you have an e-commerce website, product search which makes [...]

For the past three years my parents have asked me what I want for Christmas and the answer was always the same – SXSW Gold Badge, Gold Badge, Gold Badge. I was a student then and couldn’t afford it on my own, but now that I’m gainfully employed (bless you, Apogee) I can buy my [...]

I recently spoke with Tanya Green, Paid Search Analyst at Apogee Search. She shared her insights about eCommerce paid search campaigns and even offered a few tips to help eCommerce sites get the most out of their online presence.
Tanya began with a brief explanation of the paid search process. Paid search ads appear above [...]

Forget about the endless rain, there is actually something different happening in Washington state. The State Attorney General’s office is suing Visible.net and Captures.com for false claims of results and poor customer service, among many other things.
Now you might think it odd, but I’m not surprised to see this sort of suit. The SEM [...]

The Pessimist’s View
Over the past couple months, it has been quite depressing for eCommerce marketers to read the news – layoffs, recession, consumers cutting back spending, etc. Unless you live under a rock, all marketers have heard that “Consumers Aren’t Shopping Online, Either,” and online retail traffic is down week-over-week. This may be true in [...]

How much is a keyword in your URL worth? If money is no object, how does $185,000 sound? ICANN, the governing body of domain registration, has proposed this as the price for buying a new top-level domain (TLD). So instead of www.thehatstore.com being your website’s URL, that’s the cost to enable you (and conceivably [...]

Anyone watch Curb Your Enthusiasm?  If you do, remember when Larry stole those flowers from the roadside memorial? So bad, and yet I found myself laughing the laugh of a rotund, middle-aged man watching America’s Funniest Home Videos (okay, so I still watch AFV, but I am neither rotund nor middle-aged).
Anyway, in a very interesting [...]

On April 24, 2008 a sizable army of Apogeeans – the Apogee Army of Altruism –set off for the southern most tip of Austin to volunteer at the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas (CAFB).
The eighteen or so of us arrived at CAFB and made our way to the holding area to sign in [...]

Much has been made about yesterday’s forecast of the SEM Industry. Long story short: things are pretty good, or in the words of Larry David: “Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.” According to Radar Research and SEMPO the SEM industry was projected to grow to an $11.6 billion industry in 2007, [...]