THE RKGBLOG rss feed for the rkgblog

March 2008

Here’s a video from Steve Souder speaking about site speed at Google in November.

Be unique in your merchandising and value proposition, not on where you put your site search box. Testing and usability labs show that conversion suffers when users can’t find site elements where they expect them to be.

Polyvore lets people make collages of cool products from across the web.

Shhhh… RKG engineers crack Google’s PR server.

If you’re mailing catalogs, are you watching what is happening over at Catalog Choice?

Don’t choose a e-commerce platform; first, choose the type of platform, then choose the right platform of that type.

Which advertising dollars drive sales, and which don’t? Direct mail drives web sales, web advertising drives phone and retail business, and within web, paid search drives email and vice versa. It’s increasingly difficult to see. We’ll give some tips for finding a way through the maze.

Some follow-up thoughts on Google’s search-within-the-site.

Several of our clients report receiving fake Adwords phishing emails.

The following post was inspired by a presentation I did at Searchfest earlier this month. Since this blog is new, I’ll be posting articles on fundamental marketing concepts that we can use as reference points on the site. This is the first in a series of posts along the theme of Internet Marketing Fundamentals…

If you’re a retailer running a home-grown e-commerce stack, your engineers will enjoy and benefit from Cal Henderson’s “Building Scalable Web Sites”.

I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video.

Is there an interchange between search engine optimization (more accurately, internet marketing) and usability? That’s the question veteran SEO Grant Crowell asked Jared Spool, a veteran usability engineer, in a twenty minute phone interview. Grant Crowell of Grantastic Designs enaged Jared Spool on the topic in late November of 2007, and shared it with the [...]

The Register recently ran an article outlining some critical issues with Adwords. I was quoted in the article, along with Andrew Goodman, Dan Thies, Aaron Wall and others. I thought it was fairly balanced and well-researched. I want to make clear that while I don’t consider Google an “evil” company in any sense, I recognize [...]

I’ll be speaking at the Shop.org Marketing Workshop in Scottsdale, April 7 — 9.

Linking to a SEL post on site speed, Google quality score, usability, conversion, and reducing your carbon footprint.

Google, serving competitive ads against “Search Within The Site” results is greedy and wrong.

NEMOA followup.

The March MCM “Effective Website” column suggests 4 fundamental activities to online retailers developing their Social Media strategy.

I’m in Cambridge at the spring NEMOA Here are some quick notes.

Tim Armstrong on the DoubleClick deal: “We are focused on uniting search and display online metrics and on improving the measurement and execution of media campaigns.”

Here’s a transcript and a podcast of an enjoyable conversation with multichannel expert Kevin Hillstrom.

Pagerank sculpting: something SEO-savvy retailers might want to consider.

Where should I be spending my acquisition marketing dollars?

What should I be looking for in respects to ROI on keyword spends?