Simple Things You Can Do to Maintain Your
Site's Long Tail
There are a number of simple things that website owners can
do to maximize and maintain their long tail. These techniques
have been used by many of my most successful eCommerce customers
and cost almost nothing.
- Preserve your site architecture. Whenever a your online
store is redesigned or moved to another server, care should
be taken that the new move does not cause any broken links
and that existing file names that were indexed by search
engines will still work. There are a couple of different
ways of doing this.
The easiest is to just make sure that the new filenames
match the old ones, even if the technology powering
them changes. For example I have a few customers who
had completely static "HTML" pages which are
now using JSP and PHP code within the pages. We simply
reconfigured the webserver to run all HTML pages on
the client's site as PHP or JSP pages. This allows the
new pages to present their dynamic information, but
maintained the exact page names as before.
The second way of accomplishing this which requires
a little more work is to create a program that does
an autoforward to the new pages and sends back to the
search engines a status 301, page permanently moved
code.
- Do not prune old products from your site. A lot of ecommerce
site owners have a tendency to automatically remove products
which are no longer in stock or carried from their site.
While this prevents the items from being accidentally ordered
and solves problems in the short term, long term the ecommerce
site is losing valuable sales leads. A better way of handling
these products is to clearly mark these products as out
of stock or discontinued and remove the add to cart button
from these products. The merchant will also want to disable
these products from being indexed by their website's internal
search engine. Finally successful ecommerce sites will then
list alternatives to the product that is no longer available.
By putting something like customers who liked this product,
LOVE our new product: This technique will do a number of
things. It will preserve the deep links that search engines
have to your products, and will steer potential customers
coming in through these links from the products you do not
have to the ones you do.
- Create an Affiliate/Associate Program and promote it.
Having an affiliate program gives website owners a commission
on all traffic from their site that buys a product on yours.
The result is that by paying a commission you can dramatically
increase the number of incoming links to your site, and
in turn increase your search engine relevance. The other
thing this does is provide additional traffic to your site
that does not come from search engines. These trickles of
traffic from all over the web can add up to a significant
increase in sales. I like to think of Long Tail Marketing
as Reaganomics in reverse - The Trickle Up Principle
The methods I've outlined above will result in increased
sales at very little cost. Try them out today and see what
your results are in three months.
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