This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition was a great success – thanks to the team at Internet Retailer who worked so hard to pull off an amazing event!

Probably to nobody’s surprise, mobile commerce was a big theme this year. As our recent survey revealed, 80% of retailers haven’t yet tackled the mobile arena, but my guess is that’s going to change quickly in the months to come. Given the early results from some of our customers, it seems clear that having a mobile web site is not just about keeping up with trends, it’s good for business.

SLI had quite a presence at IRCE, with 14 members of our team on the show floor, and we also sponsored drinks on two nights (hopefully you enjoyed a cocktail or two on us). Three of our customers presented, and we saw lots of traffic to our booth. We also had a drawing for a 3-D TV and 3-D DVD Blu-ray player – the winner was Lada Heep, eChannel manager for Thomson Reuters. Congratulations, Lada!

If you were at IRCE 2010, hopefully we had a chance to connect – but if not, feel free to drop us a note if you have any questions or requests. Next stops are eTail East (Aug. 9-12, Baltimore), Search Engine Strategies San Francisco (August 16-20) and Shop.org Annual Summit (Sept. 27-29, Dallas). We hope to see you there!

We’ve all been busy this week getting ready for IRCE which starts tomorrow in Chicago – and it looks like this year’s event is going to be one of the best yet. Several of our customers and ecommerce technology partners will be there, and we’re looking forward to all that’s in store.  If you’re a retailer, be sure to stop by our booth #301 — we’ll be providing complimentary Site Search Evaluations where our team will look at your site and offer suggestions for how you can improve the site search to create a better user experience (and capture more conversions!).

We’re also holding a drawing for a Samsung 3D TV and 3D Blu-Ray Player – so be sure to drop by our booth and enter to win.

If you haven’t already registered for IRCE, we’re offering a $100 discount on registration fees. To receive the discount simply click here and enter discount code EC02220 and Booth #301.

We hope to see you there.

Your website may have the hottest products on the market, and the most engaging content – but if the site doesn’t have “findability,” potential customers won’t even know you exist. They’ll go to Google or Bing (or other search engines) and search for products or information, and your site won’t turn up on the first page of results.

But if your findability has been fixed, your site will rank high in search, and conversion rates for visitors will improve. Today I’ll be talking more about the keys to findability at the Gilbane Content Management conference in San Francisco. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion titled “Findability – Crafting Your Site to Drive Traffic and Improve Conversions” with Sam Mefford of Avalon Consulting and Richard Zwicky of Enquisite, moderated by Hadley Reynolds of IDC.

One key to improving your site’s findability via organic and paid search is to take a close look at how your current site visitors search on the site, and the language they use. You can use their searching language to adapt your site content (such as product descriptions and keywords) to the way your customers interact. For instance, do people commonly misspell an important search term? If so, that misspelling needs to be built into your site search and your content. Do they often use a generic category term rather than the actual product name (e.g. “MP3 player” vs. “iPod”)? If yes, then you need to incorporate that generic term into your site content. Your customers’ search language can also be useful in identifying the keywords to utilize in SEO and paid search efforts.

Improving findability ties in with site visitors’ increasingly short attention spans when it comes to finding what they need. They spend their days browsing search engines and social networking sites and they have high expectations for being able to quickly track down what they need – and they’ll easily desert any site that doesn’t meet this requirement.

If you’re at the Gilbane conference today, please come check out our discussion – we’ll be speaking at 1:30pm as part of the Customers & Engagement track. And if you’re at the conference this Thursday, I’ll be speaking again as part of a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce – Raising the Bar for the User Experience.”

SLI has started out the year with exhibiting at two great conferences – Internet Retailer Web Design and eTail. We had a wonderful time and hope all of you who attended have gained valuable knowledge from the speakers and networking with your peers.

At both conferences we had some great prizes we were giving away. We wanted to take a moment to say congratulations to John Du Cane from Dragon Door Publications who won a iPod Nano, John Parrish from Kellyco who won a Flip camera, Christopher Lailey from CanadaFlowers.ca who won a Zune HD, Rob Williams from Printglobe who won a PSP, Debbie Truitt from Professional Supplement Center who won a iPhone and Jeff Stone from Bikesomewhere.com who won a Netbook. We hope you all are enjoying your prizes.

We’d love to see you at future events. Keep your eye on our events page to see where we will be exhibiting next and make sure you stop by and visit our team at the SLI booth.

SLI Systems is exhibiting at the Ecommerce Expo taking place at Earls Court, London on October 20 – 21, 2009. Ecommerce Expo is in its third year and is the largest ecommerce event in the UK. Entry to the expo is FREE of charge so it’s a fantastic opportunity to catch up with the latest thinking and developments in online retailing and meet the companies who can provide the solutions you’re looking for without spending a penny.

If you’re visiting the expo, stop by SLI’s stand, #514, we have an Acer Netbook (Windows XP, 160GB HDD, 10.1 inch) up for grabs so leave us your business card to go in the draw to win. We’ll also be performing FREE site search reviews at our stand so if you’d like someone on our team to review your site search please click here and we’ll arrange a time.

Osric Powell, Business Development, SLI Systems & Rob McNair, Ecommerce Manager, Tiso UK will be presenting at the Customer Conversion & Retention theatre between 2:45pm – 3:15pm, Wednesday, Oct 21. Please come along to this case study based presentation and learn how Tiso improved their revenues using advanced on-site search.

For more information about this event, visit www.ecommerceexpo.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you there expo!!

Shop.org Annual Summit
We will be exhibiting at the Shop.org Annual Summit next week September 21-23 in Las Vegas. If you will be attending, stop by booth #623. Or, if you haven’t already registered and would like to attend we can offer you a discount of $100 off a full conference pass or a FREE exhibit hall only pass. When registering, enter the code 1332 to received the discount.

Ed Hoffman, VP of Worldwide Field Operations, will be giving a 30 minute presentation in the Big !deas Theater in the exhibit hall. This presentation, Preparing for the Holiday Hurricane – Identifying Trends, will focus on how you can understand what your customers want as well as how to increase the customer experience. Join Ed on Tuesday September 22nd from 2.45 to 3.15 to find out more. Also, SLI along with our partners Certona, ExactTarget, PowerReviews and Acadaca will be giving away a MacBook Air. Visit these participants at their Shop.org booths to receive your entry card.

Shop.org provides keynote presentations by some of the retail industry’s leading companies that can give you great insight on how to better direct your business goals. And they will provide afternoon sessions focusing on specific tactics to improve your ecommerce business with topics such as social marketing, mobile commerce, SEO and more.

For more information on the Shop.org Annual Summit, visit www.shop.org/web/summit09.

LENSER 09 Summit
SLI is a sponsor of next week’s LENSER 09 Summit, September 23-25 in San Rafael, CA. If you will be attending, stop by our table and find out how you can improve your site search with SLI.

Visit www.lenser.com to find out more about how LENSER can help you with your multichannel marketing efforts.

This week we’re making the journey to Foxwoods Resort & Casino, Ledyard, Connecticut for the NEMOA fall conference – September 16th – 18th. The event is focused on “Beating the Odds” and has some of the best minds in the industry teaching online retailers how to win against the tough economy.

We’re sponsoring the Thursday cocktail reception with our partner LENSER so if you’re in the area please come by and have a cocktail on us.

Chris Tucker from SLI Systems is hosting a roundtable on Thursday morning where you can have breakfast and share ideas with other industry peers.  Chris’ table topic is “Creative Uses of Site Search and Navigation”, so if you’re attending the event, please join Chris and friends for breakfast and learn how industry leading online retailers are optimizing their Site Search and Navigation to create the best possible experience for their customers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to “Walk Away a Winner”. To find out more about the event visit.

We hope to see you there!

It delights me to say that I’m convinced after IRCE that E-retailing remains a bright spot in this dark economy and it was fantastic to see people searching for new ways to improve the performance of their websites.We met a lot of enthusiastic online retailers at the show and to those who dropped by our booth I’d like to say thanks for taking the time out to talk to us. If you left your business card behind then you probably went in the drawing to win our prize – an Acer Netbook! Angela Walker from Christian Cinema won the Netbook so I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate her for winning and I hope the netbook is getting plenty of use.

We have also been exhibiting at shows in the UK and the feedback we’ve received has been overwhelming with Internet World and Ecommerce Expo North both exceeding expected attendee numbers. We also gave a Netbook away at Internet World so we’d like to take a moment to recognize Tim Broughton from Confetti. Thanks Tim!

We look forward to seeing everyone at future events all over the world and we’ll do our best to keep you excited by providing new and innovative ways to improve your website.

This year we’ve been exhibiting at some excellent conferences around the world. At many conferences we have telescope drawings to win a Stanley London 30-inch brass telescope. We’d like to take a moment to recognize a couple of our winners this year. From the Internet Retailer Web Design conference in January our winner was Carl Winter, and from the Shop.org Strategy and Innovation conference in February our winner was Andy Carpenter from Vera Bradley. On behalf of the SLI team, we congratulate you and hope you are enjoying the telescopes! Keep an eye on our events page to see where we will be exhibiting next and make sure you stop by our booth and have a chat with our team.