About Contributor Stephan Spencer
- Number of posts contributed
- 84
- Website
- Netconcepts
- Email Stephan
- AIM
- StephanSp
- ICQ
- 71503726
- Profile
- Stephan is the founder and president of Netconcepts, an 11 year-old multinational web agency specializing in search engine optimization, web design, ecommerce, and website auditing, as well as email marketing through Netconcepts’ gravityMail division. Stephan is a Senior Contributor for MarketingProfs and for Practical Ecommerce. He has contributed to DM News, Multichannel Merchant, Catalog Success, Catalog Age, Unlimited, Marketing magazine, Building Online Business, and others. He is co-author of the analyst report "The State of Search Engine Marketing 1.0 - New Strategies for Successful Cataloging" published by Catalog Age. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences around the globe for organizations such as the DMA, the AMA, Search Engine Strategies, Internet World, IQPC and IIR.
Posts by Stephan:
Treat your Customers like Royalty and the Traffic (and Links) will Come
Have you heard the words, “reputation management” applied to SEO before? Well, if you haven’t, you certainly should. Where some corporations might argue that the blogosphere isn’t important, Zappos, the web’s biggest shoe store would, no doubt, disagree. If you have any questions about how positive the blogosphere can be for links (and traffic), grab a box of tissues and read this post entitled, “I heart Zappos.” The blogger bought a pair of women’s shoes for her mom. The post is currently ranked #12 in Google for “zappos” (and #9 in Yahoo). Want to learn how you, too can garner link love and traffic for your brand? Here are some great lessons we can learn from this story to help you manage your online reputation…
Bend Corporate Policy When Appropriate: Per the post about Zappos, they typically have a 15-day return policy for their products, even though they pay for shipping both ways. Due to the death of the customer’s mother, they had no problem making an exception given the tragedy the customer was dealing with.
Be Accessible: How many times have you tried to contact a company to lodge a customer complaint? How many hours of your life have you wasted in so-called “phone purgatory”? Unlike the “Spirit Airlines Story, Zappos was easily accessible and had a great response time. By giving your customers a way to easily provide positive (and negative) feedback about customer service issues, it prevents your customers from jumping to conclusions and blogging about it. Remember, that timing is everything.
Be Human: By putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, you will no doubt achieve customer service excellence. When Zappos found out that their customer’s mother had passed away, they arranged for their product pick-up and sent a huge bouquet of flowers. How’s that for reaching out and being nice to someone? Not only did they do something nice, their humanity turned into link bait — because their customer happened to be a blogger with an audience.
Practice Company Values: One of the best ways to preserve your reputation is to take a hard look on how you are selling your customer service. If you are billing “premier customer service,” then do whatever you can to back it up. That way, not only do your customers know what to expect, but they will be eager to refer your company to other individuals. Comments on blog posts like the “I Heart Zappos” showed that her referral drove new customers and traffic to their online store, just because Zappos practices what they preach.
Don’t Invalidate or Ignore Negative Responses: One negative response, if handled improperly, can be more powerful than you think. Type in “Spirit Airlines” and the #2 position in Google is a blog post that declares “Do not Fly Spirit Airlines.” Another big name company, Dell, had a policy not to respond to bloggers that was eventually reversed, but not before the blogosphere picked up on “Dell Hell.” Type that search into Google and find millions of blog posts, articles, and negative reviews all dedicated to talking poorly about Dell. If handled appropriately, you can turn a complaint into a positive experience, to change customer perspectives and get them blogging about you–in a good way.
Be Proactive, Not Reactive: Instead of reacting to when things go wrong, put yourself out there via a personalized email or note to your customers and let them know what happened if you made a mistake. If a customer is that unhappy with your products or services, offer multiple choices to let them choose what works best for them. Keep in mind that, by owning up to your mistakes and read about it for a week in the news, you will prevent getting attention from a group of angry, irate customers (potential bloggers) who then create something like “Dell hell” which will be around for a long, long time.
By keeping these thoughts in mind, and following Zappos example, not only will you preserve your brand’s reputation, but you will also increase brand loyalty. When you think about it, being nice to your customers is a lot like karma. The nicer you are, the more traffic you’ll get and, ultimately, the more links you’ll build.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 11/30/2007 | Permalink | 
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Podcasts of Neil Patel, Eric Ward, and Vanessa Fox
I’ve been interviewing speakers of the AMA’s Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing events taking place April 20th in San Francisco, May 25th in NYC, and June 22 in Chicago (all three of which I will be chairing). I had fascinating and insightful conversations with link builder extraordinaire Eric Ward, Googler Vanessa Fox, and social media marketing guru Neil Patel. There’s some real gold in those interviews.
Download/Listen:
- Neil Patel interview (15 minute MP3, 3 megs) - getting to the front page of Digg and other social media sites
- Eric Ward interview (36 minute MP3, 8 megs) - tips and secrets on how to garner links
- Vanessa Fox interview (40 minute MP3, 9 megs) - Google’s webmaster tools, SEO impacts of AJAX, Flash, duplicate content, redirects, etc.
More podcasts to come from other speakers, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss them. Also be sure to register for the conference at one of the three cities, it’ll be great!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 03/28/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Leveraging Wikipedia for SEO: it’s no longer about the link juice
Recently when I blogged about the SEO benefits of contributing to Wikipedia, I alluded to some of the complex strategies and tactics around creating entries, keeping your edits from getting reverted, etc.
One of the benefits that can no longer be gained is link juice. That’s because rel=nofollow has just been instituted across all of Wikipedia and its sister sites (such as Wikinews).
Does that mean you no longer need to concern yourself with Wikipedia? Heck no! It is still a valuable source of traffic and, just as importantly, credibility. To have a Wikipedia entry for your company show up in the top 10 in Google for your company name gives a nice credibility boost. Even better if the coverage on your entry is favorable!
Wikipedia is still key to the discipline of “reputation management.” By understanding the ins and outs of Wikipedia — navigating the landmines of notability criteria, not contributing your company’s entry yourself, disambiguation pages, redirects, User pages, Talk pages, etc. — you can potentially influence what is said about you on Wikipedia. Furthermore, if web pages that are critical of your company occupy spots in the first page of the SERPs, you can push them out and replace them with your Wikipedia entries. Because Wikipedia holds so much authority and TrustRank, it’s easy to get an entry into the top 10 for any keyword.
Back to the nofollowing of external links… I don’t think SEOs will leave Wikipedia any time soon due to this new development. Even though that was Jimbo Wales’ hope.
There is still significant incentive for SEOs to edit (and manipulate) Wikipedia so long as Wikipedia holds the top spot for important keywords such as “marketing” in Google.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 01/23/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Getting 404 errors with Ultimate Tag Warrior?
If you’re running WordPress and you care about SEO, then you’re probably running the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin too. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then read my blog SEO tip on tagging.
There’s been a long-standing bug in WordPress 2.X, ever since WordPress switched to internal rewrites instead of external ones within .htaccess. The bug is that UltimateTagWarrior displays 404 errors (File Not Found) on tag pages when you have rewriting of local tag URLs turned on (in Options > Tags in the WordPress admin). The bug usually only manifests itself when you are using custom permalinks (i.e. if you’ve selected “Custom” from the Permalink Options in the WordPress admin).
Well I’ve got good news! I’ve figured out the problem!
(more…)
Popularity: 12% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 01/20/2007 | Permalink | Email
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New WordPress Plugin for tracking offline impact of SEO
We just released a new WordPress plugin, Replace by Referrer, which allows you to track the effectiveness of SEO and other online marketing activities by replacing text on your landing page based on the referrer (i.e. which search engine or site referred the visitor). So, for example, you might want to offer a different toll-free phone number depending on the search engine used by the visitor. That would give you the ability to track the number of phone inquiries delivered by each search engine. Pretty cool, eh!
It’s free and open source. Download it now for your WordPress blog or site. Enjoy!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 01/01/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Hey Google: Nofollow is for when I don’t vouch for the link’s quality
I’ve said before that I don’t agree with Google’s tough stance on link buying and use of “nofollow” to mark it as a financially influenced link (here and here). One of my favorite white-hat SEO bloggers, Rand Fishkin, is also on Google’s case for it. A key argument that Rand makes:
Nofollow means “I do not editorially vouch for the quality of this link.” It does NOT mean “financial interest may have influenced my decision to link.” If that were the case, fully a quarter of all links on the web would require nofollow (that’s a rough guess, but probably close to the mark). Certainly any website that earns money via its operation, directly or indirectly is guilty of linking to their own material and that of others in the hopes that it will benefit them financially. It is not only unreasonable but illogical to ask that webmasters around the world change their code to ensure that once the chance of financial benefit reaches a certain level (say, you’re about 90% sure a link will make you some money), you add a “nofollow” onto the link.
You go, Rand! Tell those Googlers a thing or two! 
Despite all this, Google is the one who holds the keys to the kingdom. So we have to abide by their rules, no matter how “unreasonable” and “illogical.” That’s why my January column for Practical Ecommerce goes into some detail explaining Google’s stance on link buying and the risks. I’ll post a link once the article comes out in a few days.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 12/28/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Get some free clicks
Not playing in PPC yet? Then here is some free cash (well, credits) to get you started…
- $200 credit at Live Search (MSN). Code is DM-2-1106
- $75 credit at Yahoo. Code is US1522
- $50 credit at Ask.com. Code is SESCHI06
- $300 credit at LookSmart. Code is SESCHQ4
Now go forth and craft some great search ads!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 12/23/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Tagging WordPress Pages with Ultimate Tag Warrior
I’ve blogged before about the SEO benefits of tagging blog posts. For those bloggers using WordPress, I recommend the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to accomplish this.
But what if you have a WordPress-powered site and you want to tag static Pages, not just Posts? Well I have some good news! Even though Ultimate Tag Warrior doesn’t currently support tagging of Pages, I managed to figure out a workaround. The hack (to version 3.14159 of the plugin) involves the addition of a mere two lines of code…
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 12/13/2006 | Permalink | Email
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“Search Master” teaches SEO101 but needs SEM101 himself
Was surfing an SEO blog and this Google ad caught my eye:
I’m pretty up to speed with the SEO experts in New Zealand, being based here and all, and I hadn’t heard of any SEO training being given by any master optimizer in Auckland. I was intrigued to learn more about this self-proclaimed “Search Master”. So I clicked. Guess what I got! Yep, a nasty error instead of a landing page!
Methinks this “Search Master” with his SEO101 and SEO201 courses needs to go back to school himself for SEM101.
Lesson #1 in SEM101: If you’re going to pay for clicks, make sure your landing page works!
We all make mistakes, but this seminar is in 3 days and you’d think he’d be watching the online registrations pretty closely right about now…
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 11/11/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Nike.com gets taken to task over its search mistakes
This article just out on MarketingProfs.com is an entertaining rant about Nike.com’s search marketing mistakes, which include…
- Missing out on long-tail terms
- All-Flash sites with no alternative version
- Nothing from the searcher’s query is reinforced on the landing page
- Not developing a descriptive meta description tag
- Putting “Cool” over helping the user find stuff on the site
- Driving a user with a very specific query to the homepage can waste parts of pay per click (PPC) budgets.
- Bad landing pages that hurt PPC rankings
- Flash sites with no alternative version can suppress natural rankings
- Flash shopping cart = no love from Froogle/shopping search
- Investing in great tools and not driving traffic to them
As I was perusing the article and the included screen captures, I couldn’t help but think that a critique like this would be well-suited to being produced as a screencast, using Camtasia Studio or similar.
Maybe I should produce my monthly SEO Report Card column as screencasts? Would that be valuable to you folks?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 11/10/2006 | Permalink | Email
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