Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Big W has taken the plunge and entered into the online retail market. They have launched their online store available here – http://bigw.com.au.

Compared to the North America and Europe, Australia is lagging behind in the world of ecommerce. Large department stores such as Myers, David Jones and Target do no have an online store.

The launch of the Big W store is great news for ecommerce in Australia. It means that the large chains may start investing some real money into selling online.

Online stores such as OverStocked, DStore, and Big Brown Box have been open for a number of years now. Australian consumers are getting used to buying products and services over the Internet.

About Big W Online
The Big W store has over 4,000 products in a variety of categories -

• Electronics
• Baby
• Photo
• Home & Garden
• Fashin
• Entertainment
• Toys
• Sports & Leisure

Delivery Options
Australia post is being used for delivery of products. It seems like a fairly simple pricing structure is being used. Pricing for packages are as below -

• Packages less than 500 grams will cost $4.98
• Packages less than 10 KG will cost $9.98
• Packages over 10 KG cost around $20
• Express Post is also an option but costs extra

Payment Options
PayPal is being offered as a method of payment. PayPal is not offered on other Woolworths websites such as Wooolworths and HomeShop.

Prices Online
Big W have stated that there is no price difference between it’s online store and it’s normal stores.

Features
Front page
The website appears to be nice and simple to navigate. The frontpage does have a lot of pictures and banners trying to get your attention. I think this could have been cleaner in design.

Reviews
There is a reviews and ratings for products. Customers like to read reviews and ratings from other customers. Just like testimonials can make customers feel satisfied that they are ordering a quality product.

Product images
The product images have a nice popup display. Other images of the product are displayed as thumbnails. This makes it really clear that other pictures of the product exist. I think this is very nice.

Estimate delivery
The estimated delivery charge is a great tool. By entering your postcode on the product page, you can see exactly how much you are going to be charged for delivery. There is nothing more annoying to a customer when they need to go through the checkout procedure to see the cost of delivery.

Tell a friend
The tell a friend tool has made an appearance as well. A nice lightbox appears with the opportunity to email the details of the product to a friend. Many online stores benefit having this tool.

Stock levels
You can check the stock levels of particular products as well. By entering in your post code, you can see the stock levels at many of the Big W stores. It also displays the distance to each store. If the store is low in stock, it displays the phone number so you can call that particular store. You could call the store and check for stock and maybe they could reserve the product for you.

Overview of features
The features of the website have been nicely done. You would expect that from a large department store but even they can get it wrong sometimes.

The lightboxes (popup windows) load very quickly. There’s nothing more annoying then these being broken.

The website still has a couple of formatting issues to resolve. Some of the text goes over the background in some places. I am sure they will will these up as the site continues to be improved.

Wrap Up
It’s great to see a large department store go online. Overall, I think it will help push online sales in Australia and hopefully the other department stores will follow suit.

Google has been very busy this month with the release of their new design.

The left column on the search results page is more pre-dominate now with more options. A lot of people do not take advantage of the additional search options on Google. Did you know you can search through news articles, images, videos, blogs and much more?

You can also specify the time and date of your results. This means that you can do a web search with pages from this year only. This is great for researching current statistics for example.

Google has also implemented a brand result area in the search results. If you search for footballs, you now get many different areas as part of the universal search results -

• News clips
• football images
• football brands
• videos of football
• football products

All these changes are taking place to provide the user with a more user friendly appearance and better search results. Google says that by providing all these results, it adds to the users’ overall experience with the search engine.

Many people ask me why they aren’t ranked number one for their targetted keyword. I explain to them that their page needs great content and good backlinks to their site. If the content is great, people will link to it. Google will rank it higher because it is what people are looking for.

The profession of marketing is changing faster than ever before: from search engines to social networks, the marketing landscape has changed dramatically. Target audiences are diversifying and marketers have to complete traditional marketing tasks, be up to date with the latest trends, implement campaigns using new technology, do it all with a smaller budget, and yet the only events you can attend to keep sharp are in Sydney!

Digital Wollongong helps you:

• hear intelligent and interesting speakers who know marketing
• meet a group a of like-minded marketers who face the same challenges as you
• have a network of people you can turn to for advice and offer your own
• stay up to date in a fun and relaxed environment
• meet some good people

We’re running our first event on Wednesday the 5th of May at 5:30pm. Thanks to our sponsors, the event is free, and if you’re on of the first 20 people to arrive on the night, you’ll get a complimentary drink on arrival.

The event sponsors are AVS Networks and Internetrix.

This is a book about Search Engine Optimisation without the fluff.

If you do not have much time and you want to know more about how to get your website to rank well on Google and other search engines, this is a great book to read.

Michael’s quick explanations about techniques and strategies for SEO are great. Many books on this subject are big, heavy and full of information that you do not need to know.

On-Page Optimisation
Michael discusses simple changes you can make to your website to improve your rankings. This is known as on-page optimisation.

Many websites are not search engine friendly making the task of getting the website indexed by a search engine to be a difficult one. By optimising your web pages, Google and other search engines will be able to work out what you website is about and index it accordingly.

If the search engine cannot read your website, don’t expect it to get listed properly. Some websites using a javascript navigation tool can hurt a website because search engines cannot go past the first page. An XML site map can help fix this.

Other elements that you can modify on your site include heading tags, alt tags, meta tags and internal linking methods.

Off-Page Optimisation
This is about search engine factors that are not directly related to your website. Examples include links to your website, social bookmarks, directories etc.

You may not have control of how people link to your website but managing it will definitely help. Identify the keywords that you want to rank well in and ask webmasters to use the keywords when linking to your website.

Creating links to your website can be very time consuming, Michael gives a few methods to increase links to your website from asking other webmasters for links to submitting articles to article submission sites.

Wrap Up
This is a great book, a quick read, for anyone that wants to get involved and understand SEO. Unfortunately there is plenty of aspects that are missing that should be included, such as identifying great keywords.

There are a few gold nuggets of information such as how to research your competition and how to beat them. I really did like this part and will read that section again.

Have you ever had those phone calls from companies claiming to get your site to the first page of Google within 28 days?

Even as a search engine optimisation and marketing consultant, I still get them. I listen to their pitch and then ask a couple of questions. They usually have no clue how to answer them so what kind of service will they be providing?

I have done a search on their business name and they didn’t even come up first. That is a very easy task and a pathetic attempt on their behalf.

We advise all our customers to be aware of anyone calling up trying to sell them Internet services. There are a lot of people out there to take your money and there’s not much you can do about it if they do not deliver.

These telemarketers are driven by commission and can become aggressive pressuring you to sign up with them. I recommend avoiding any business that you have never with dealt with before or if they sound like they are over promising on what they can do.

They claim that having a good ranking will increase visitors and increase sales. This is true. It’s how they get you there – if they get your there at all. I don’t believe they will ever get you there. If you get banned from Google, that’s the end of it!

Wrap Up
Beware of any company that contacts you regarding search engine optimisation or marketing that you have not contacted first.

If you are ever unsure, contact your web developer or myself and I will tell you if it’s a good or bad.

The top 500 major Internet retailers spend approximately $1.2 million every day in search engine marketing. The problem is only 33% of their highest-priced keywords appear in the top 50 of natural search engine results.

Large corporations continue to fail with SEO efforts and keeping spending big to gain market share online.

This is where the smaller players have an equal playing field – natural search engine results.

It is estimated that 43% of people click on the number 1 natural search engine result for any query. This kind of traffic for popular keywords can really help a business grow.

Why aren’t large corporations getting in on this?
They often build their sites and think about optimising it afterwards – too late!

A solid SEO friendly web site starts withe foundations – when the web site is initially being built. Making major changes down the track can be time consuming, expensive and take up time.

What can you do about it?
You can learn how to optimise your own web site or pay an SEO expert to do it for you. Then plan a link building strategy to compliment your efforts.

When your web site is ranking well for you specific keyworkds, the amount of potential customers will increase and your online sales will increase. This means more profit for you.

Wrap Up
Optimise your web site if you haven’t already and start gaining that advantage over the big guys!!

Google leads when it comes to quality of search engine results for end-users. If you are looking for something, usually Google will find it. That’s why Google wants to continue to satisfy it’s customers.

Google has now added a new factor to the rankings of their search engine results. Research has shown that faster loading web sites adds to a user experience. They stay on fast longer web sites for a longer period of time.

Web sites that are slow to load are often aborted because they take too long to load.

What about your web site?
How long does your web site take to load? If your web site is slow to load, are you losing visitors? Now, you will not only lose visitors but your search engine rankings will drop.

Slow loading web site factors
The factors are all measured from the users’ point of view. How long it takes for a web site to be downloaded and rendered on a users computer screen is the measurement used.

There are two great books based on this topic by Steve Souders – High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites.

Here are his rules for producing fast web sites -

• Rule 1 – Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Rule 2 – Use a Content Delivery Network
• Rule 3 – Add an Expires Header
• Rule 4 – Gzip Components
• Rule 5 – Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Rule 6 – Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Rule 7 – Avoid CSS Expressions
• Rule 8 – Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Rule 9 – Reduce DNS Lookups
• Rule 10 – Minify JavaScript
• Rule 11 – Avoid Redirects
• Rule 12 – Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Rule 13 – Configure ETags
• Rule 14 – Make AJAX Cacheable

Wrap Up
If you optimise your website, your users will have a better experience and you will get higher rankings in Google search results.

The iPad has been hailed a success by Steve Jobs at an Apple press event. The iPad was only launched last Saturday and had already sold over 450,000 – and 300,000 sold on the first day.

Here are some iPad stats -

• 600,000 iBooks have been downloaded since Saturday
• Over one million apps hace been downloaded on the Saturday
• Over 3.5 million apps have been downloaded since Saturday
• There are now 3,500 iPad-specific apps available
• The total number of apps downloaded, across all platforms has passed 4 billion

iPhone 4.0 OS with multi-tasking
The new operating system for the iPhone was announced last night. The new iPhone 3GS will have multi-tasking but older iPhones will not.

iStock is a photo stock website allowing users to upload and sell images for web and print. It now also includes videos and sounds. Each image, video and sound that is downloaded is charged according to the format, size and type of media.

As a professional web developer, I use iStock nearly everyday in producing website for my customers.

It is amazing to note that iStock started as a free service back in 2000 and still going strong, growing every month.

Here are some of the statistics from iStock in the social networking decade -

iStock is now owned by Getty Images but I still like iStock.

If you have never been to the website, go check it out especially if you are into web design, development or graphic design.

Digg is a social bookmarking website allowing users to bookmark their favourite web pages. These bookmarks are then shared with other Digg users. The more Diggs a webpage gets, the better the content must be and so Digg promotes that content to it’s users. It’s like a human search engine of relevant and great content.

Digg has been suffering popularity lately but they could all be about to change.

It was time for a change and the current CEO (Jay Adelson) is departing after 5 years of service with an internal email -

Got some news. After five years, forty million users, and an amazing ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Digg… The entrepreneurial calling is strong…

The original CEO is back! Kevin Rose is making some big changes. He wasted no time with the two following decisions.

Unbanning all previously banned domain names

…with the launch of the new Digg will be unbanning all previously banned domains. While we will apply automated filters to prevent malware/virus/TOS violations, no other restrictions will be placed on content.

Removing iFrame

Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg

We hope that these two changes will help Digg revitalise itself and become a stronger player once again in the social bookmarking market.