Auto-Emails Test Shows 5.6% Lift

An excellent article on MarketingSherpa showcases how a great performing shopping cart can perform even better. Adagio Tea had a below-average abandon rate (35% compared to the 59.8% industry average). They offered a $5 gift certificate to incent people who had abandoned their shopping cart. Test emails were sent at a minimum three days after [...]

Does An SEO Need to Know HTML?

Ian McAnerin, an SEO expert on the Search Engine Watch Forums, had this to say on how much HTML and technical knowledge an SEO specialist needs:
In my experience, about 60% of all difficulties in rankings are due to technical issues with coding or hosting/DNS.
Therefore, if you do not know enough to troubleshoot these two [...]

Splash Pages Turn Away 25%

Just in case you needed ammo as to why splash pages were bad:
The number one reason for getting rid of our splash page was that it turned away at least 25% of our site visitors, sometimes more. This percentage is has actually been researched and it turns out that at least 25% of site visitors [...]

Web 2.0 and the Long Tail

Much is being said about Web 2.0 and the Long Tail. Web 2.0 is the marketing term for next generation web sites, but what is ‘The Long Tail’?
In a nutshell, it’s being able to put those infinitely large inventories of product up on the web for consumption, and making money off niche markets. In the [...]

PHP Productivity

PHP is great for programming on the web. It is also a highly productive language:
PHP scripts are five-to-10 times more productive than hand-coding a server application in Java or C from scratch
It is so productive that IBM is pushing it for the mainframe! Read more @ PHP Puts Mainframe Developers in Prime Time

Best Day to E-Mail

Running an email marketing campaign? Which day you should email may differ based on if your target demographic is B2B or B2C:
Business-to-business (B2B) e-mail is best sent earlier in the week. B2B e-mail received on Monday or Tuesday gives readers the opportunity to address the message before the week’s the business takes over. Thirty-three percent [...]

Google Breaks 60%

Google moved up to over 60% of the search market share:
…the top engines combined account for over 94% of all search volume in the US. Since we last released these numbers in June 2006, Google (www.google.com) has increased its share from 59.3% to 60.2%, Yahoo! Search (search.yahoo.com) has increased from 22.0% to 22.5% and MSN [...]

Bloglines Scrolling using ‘j’ and ‘k’

Bloglines introduces hotkeys; most helpful to me is the smooth scrolling when you use ‘j’ and ‘k’.
See all hotkeys at Bloglines | News

In-Bound Link (IBL) Quality

Measurement of key elements on the page containing an in-bound link which, in combination, influence the link reputation for the target of the link. (Read more on this topic at SEMLogic)

Optimize for IE? Better not!

Microsoft’s IE browser continues to lose market share. According to OneStat, as of July 2006, the most popular browsers in the USA are:

Microsoft IE
79.78%
Mozilla Firefox
15.82%
Apple Safari
3.28%
Opera
0.81%
Netscape
0.20%

Firefox continues to gain usage at a rapid clip — Firefox increased total market share by 1.14 percent since [...]