Just like in a physical store, it’s important to merchandise your navigation pages with information about what products are on sale, the promotions you’re running, what items are marked for clearance, and any other specials that you’re offering. There are a few ways to showcase this information – refinements, banners, and specialized landing pages are a few examples. Below are a couple tips to get you started.

1. Have merchandising-specific refinements – Refinements don’t have to be limited to product details. Visitors want to know what sales items, special offers, bundles and clearance items, you’re offering. Allowing them to refine by these factors is a great way to improve the usability of your site, and guide visitors to items you are promoting, while improving conversion potential.

2. Rank the products in a way that makes sense for your business – Many companies choose to order their products by popularity. This minimizes the amount of clicks people will typically make to get to the products they’re looking for. Consider also showing your highest margin products first, or the ones you have excess stock for.

You can separate the results into “items on special promotion” and “most popular items” for example, or show all items in the same results list, but with the top 5 items in excess stock first followed by the most popular items. We occasionally encounter websites that rank their products alphabetically by default. This is almost always a non-optimal way to rank your products, although it is sometimes a useful sort option.

For more tips, download the full ebook – Big Book of Navigation Tips.

When approaching navigation it’s important to remember that search engine spiders are a key audience. Google, Bing and other search engines analyze site navigation structures as they crawl your site to understand what’s important. For example, if a product page is only two clicks away from the home page it will be considered more important than one that is four or five clicks away. Not only should the pages be able to be crawled, but in many cases they should also be indexed. So be sure to follow SEO best practices when designing navigation pages so they rank well in natural search results.

Below are some tips to help you in this regard. You can find the complete set of SEO tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” available from our website. Next week we’ll provide some tips related to online merchandising in navigation so be sure to check back.

1. Ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines. To ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines, use short URLs that include useful keywords to your navigation pages (e.g., category or subcategories) with very little parameters. Avoid using javascript-produced links because the spiders may have trouble interpreting these. Also ensure that navigation pages are not excluded in your robots.txt file.

2. Include title and <h1> tags on your navigation pages. Customize your title and <h1> tags to include the category title of each category page. These are both located at the top of category pages and are factors that search engines consider when ranking a page. The text in the title tag appears in the search engine results – so it should be accurate, unique and compelling. You may also want to include subcategories within the title tag to help rank for those more specific keywords.

3. When making any changes to your navigation, consider what to do with your old navigation links. The main issue is the old navigation links may have generated great SEO results. You will likely want your new navigation pages to benefit from your old navigation pages’ popularity. The recommended way of handling this is to use a 301 redirect. This will redirect the old navigation links to any equivalent new navigation link. By doing this, the value of the old page will be linked to the new page, minimizing the negative impact on your SEO.

Refinements are an important part of navigation, as they help narrow a broad category so visitors get to items they’re looking for more quickly – and also help them get to particular items to suit their needs such as size, brand, style, or price faster. There is no shortage of options for how to present navigation refinements, which means some retailers offer too many choices or they present refinements in a way that confuses the visitors. Below are a couple of tips to guide you in this area. You can find a whole slew of refinement tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” now available from our website.

Next week we’ll cover SEO, so stay tuned.

1. Consider using sliders for continuous refinements Test the placement of refinements – Using sliders for refinements like price or size range take up less space and are a nice tool to use along with AJAX to build smooth transitions from one information display to the next. Some visitors may find them more complicated than the alternatives – links or drop downs with fixed ranges, or text boxes allowing you to specify an upper and lower limit. So test and make sure your visitors do understand how they work and consider offering alternatives. Make sure your sliders work well on a touch screen device, and if they don’t you can  provide alternative way of displaying them.

2. Make sure navigational images can’t be confused as products – Navigation usability tests were conducted by showing participants a retail site with three product subcategories represented by an image and the associated text description. Many participants misunderstood that  the images were representations and took them to be three product images and assumed there were only three products. You should try to avoid these types of misunderstandings as much as possible. You can minimize confusion on navigation pages by showing products as well as subcategories. You can show other cues that will help differentiate between subcategories and products – such as showing the number of results they’ll see if they click on the subcategory images, label the subcategory images clearly and make sure there’s a clear distinction between the layout of your products and subcategories.

The relevance of the search results is critical to helping your visitors find the products they are looking for quickly, as well as keeping them browsing to increase the order values.

Last week, Mark Brixton, Country Manager for Australia, sat down with Phil Dobbie from BNET Australia to discuss 10 things ecommerce sites can do to keep their site search performing efficiently. Mark explains that site search accounts for 30-40% of a site’s revenue so there’s a huge benefit to making search a priority. Mark also highlighted the fact that etailers should be continuously monitoring their analytics to understand visitors’ behavior on the site and particularly within the search. You can listen to all of Mark’s tips on the BNET site: http://www.bnetau.com.au/blog/aussierules/10-ways-to-improve-your-on-site-search-btalk/8381.

For more tips on how to improve your site search and navigation, download our e-books:

• Big Book of Site Search Tips
• Big Book of Navigation Tips

The 2011 Multichannel Merchant (MCM) Awards are out, and we now know which are the top 10 retail sites with the best search and navigation. It’s great to see such an influential industry publication drawing attention to sites with outstanding usability features where good search and navigation have a clear influence on higher click-throughs and conversions, lower site abandonment, and improvement in brand loyalty.

We were also excited to see that 3 of our own clients were called out on the list – including Folica, The Pond Guy and Century Novelty. These 3 sites were recognized for the ease with which people can find products and other content on the site and the overall look and feel. You can find more specific attributes that were highlighted in the article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/photo-gallery/2011-mcmawards-website-top-search-navigation/index4.html.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Today marks the 10th anniversary since SLI Systems was incorporated. So we’re celebrating. We’re having parties, giving gifts to our staff and I though I would take a little time to reflect on the past decade.

In the beginning

SLI started from the ashes of NBCi. We had sold our search company, GloblaBrain to NBCi in 2000, only to find that it was closing down in about April of 2001. We saw then that there was an opportunity to use the GlobalBrain technology to improve site search, which at the time was either non existent, or extremely poor. So we formed SLI Systems, bought our technology back from NBC and started selling our software as a service site search, which we called Learning Search.

Fast forward
When you look back it is amazing how quickly a decade seems to have passed. We now have over 300 customers, and almost 500 sites that we run the search and/or navigation for. Our product suite has broadened and we have over 70 staff in 4 countries. We are growing as fast now as we ever have, with our last quarter being our best ever.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. We started in the depths of the dot com crash. September 11 happened soon after the company formed. They were tough conditions under which to run a company. It meant we really appreciated any customers we were able to acquire and we did anything we could to keep them satisfied so we could keep them as a customer. This has helped form our culture of a fanatical focus on customer satisfaction which is now one of our core differentiators. I am constantly hearing from our customers that we are one of the best vendors they deal with.

In more recent times we have come through the global financial crisis strongly and, in the last nine months, survived the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. We are still unable to access our office in the middle of the city and the fate of our building is unknown. But we are working productively from temporary offices.

The knowledge that we have weathered these storms means that we are we are confident that we can survive anything that the future will throw at us.

Our secrets to success

• This sounds like business 101 – but our focus on our customers has been key. Ensuring that they get great service and value for money is core to what we do.
• Our willingness to change. We are constantly seeking to improve our product and the way we do everything in our business. It’s part of our name and part of our DNA.
• Our staff. We employ smart people. We stimulate them and ensure that they enjoy being part of the company. As a result we have a great team that is dedicated to our customers.

I’m very proud of what our team has achieved. We have huge opportunities ahead of us and I’m looking forward to the next 10 years.

Earlier this week we had a problem at one of our data centers. The way it was successfully handled makes for an interesting story that I’d like to share.

The outage
We use multiple data centers in different locations. One of them lost power at two of their core switches which meant our servers in that data center were not connected to the internet for about an hour and 40 minutes. Now this isn’t supposed to happen. The providers we use have all sorts of processes in place to try to ensure that they are online all the time. However from our experience over the past 10 years of doing this, we see that every now and then a series of unforeseen events happens and they do go offline. To deal with this unlikely eventuality we have designed our hosting architecture to provide uninterrupted service even when these outages occur.

What would have happened in the past?
Depending on when in our 10 year history this happened, we could have had the following outcomes:

• Loss of service for all of our customers during all the outage
• Loss of service for some of our customers during the outage
• Loss of service for a portion of our customers’ visitors for a part of the outage

In any case, it would have been all hands to the deck while we tried to find a solution and there would have been a lot of communication with our customers letting them know that there was a problem and what we were doing to fix it, and then afterwards, what we had done to reduce the possibility of it happening again. In short there would have been a lot of stress all around.

So what was the impact?

We have over 100 sites whose search and navigation are partially hosted in the data center segment that had the outage.

• For the first 50 seconds a third of the visitors searching on those sites experienced a single 30 second delay while their browser timed out and then tried our next data center. Thereafter they will have had service as normal.
• For the next 100 seconds a third of the visitors to those sites experienced a single subsecond delay while their browser got a connection refused response and tried another data center. Thereafter they will have had service as normal.
• After that the data center was automatically removed from the DNS and no further requests will have been sent to it
• Once our servers came back on line the data center was added back into the DNS and operations continued as normal

The data center has informed us that they have made some changes to their processes and hardware so this type of fault won’t happen again. So they are a little stronger now than they were before. However I’m sure they will still suffer another outage at some stage.

In summary, during a 150 second period, a third of the visitors searching on the effected sites will have experienced a single delay, but after that delay they will have been able to use the services as normal. We didn’t hear anything from any of our customers and it was all handled without any stress. This is a significant improvement over what we’ve done in the past.

I wanted to highlight this story because it shows one of the unseen benefits of our service. Our less experienced and cheaper competitors don’t offer this sort of redundancy. Most website operators that are hosting their own search are also unable to provide this level of redundancy. Our customers expect our services to be running all of the time. The reason we are able to provide the level of service that we do is a combination of our dedication to continually improve the way we do things, combined with the knowledge gained through years of experience.

SLI Systems Blog, Guest Post

Contributed by: Ed Kennedy, Business Development, Guidance

Recently, I was listening to APM’s Marketplace Tech Report which highlighted how Google and Bing are now including social content such as Twitter and Facebook postings in natural search results.  The report left me wondering how retailers can leverage social search to drive traffic to their sites.

So … I decided to contact eCommerce search partner, SLI Systems, to learn more about how this new trend has impacted their site search and navigation solution.  During our conversation, we talked about ways retailers can combine social and search to enhance the customer’s shopping experience.  Here are some of them:

• Index social media content in search results: If you have blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook wall posts, videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, all of this content should appear in your site search results – possibly in a separate tab, as Yarn.com handles it.




• Place Facebook “like” buttons on product pages: This will encourage site visitors to share your products with their connections. In addition, Facebook “likes” can improve the page’s ranking on search engines, like Bing. You can also import the number of likes that each product has into your site search index and allow your site visitors to reorder site search results so the products with the most “likes” are ranked highest.
• Add search to your Facebook page: You can add a search box to your company Facebook page, and results will appear within Facebook. This is a good way to build stronger relationships with shoppers who like to combine shopping with social networking. Here is Chaparral Motorsports’ facebook search.




• Implement Facebook Sign-In for your store: A more advanced integration between Facebook and your commerce site is allowing visitors to use their Facebook profile as their account on your store. This reduces the amount of information visitors need to provide to create an account with your site. This functionality can also trigger personalized content for the user based on their friend’s activity on the site. TripAdvisor does a good job of encouraging Facebook Sign-In and using friends’ activity to promote certain destinations or trips.




• Encourage user generated content and tie to social networks: When Guidance designed TOMS Shoes, our User Experience and Design team looked for ways to combine the customer’s passion for the brand’s canvas shoe and the popularity of social networks. They came up with How We Wear Them, a section on TOMS’ site that allows users to upload a photo of themselves wearing their favorite pair of TOMS. The user associates the shoe in the photo to a SKU in the catalog, linking directly to that product detail page (PDP) and is then prompted to share the photo on Facebook. These images are then represented as thumbnails on the PDP, adding a social touch to the buying experience.

Got any tips of your own?  Share them with me via Twitter, @EdwardPKennedy, or via @guidance.

Next week we’ll be exhibiting at the annual Retail World conference in Sydney, taking place June 27-29. If you’re attending the event, be sure to see us at stand #51, where we’ll be demonstrating our recently announced Conversion Optimizer A/B testing tool for site search, as well as the power our Learning Search site search, navigation and merchandising solutions deliver to online retailers. You can also enter our draw to win an iPad 2.

Be sure to also pick up your conference passport, which allows you to get stamps from participating exhibitors (like us) and be entered to win prizes once your passport is complete. And on June 29 we’ll be exhibiting in the eRetailing and Multi-Channel Retail Day in stand #2 – so you can also catch us there.

We hope to see you there!

Minor changes to search and navigation, such as the way search results or images are displayed, can improve conversions and increase orders, while helping streamline the customer experience. However, if you’re not testing the various options before you put them into place, it’s hard to know what impact they’ll have – and testing can take a lot of time if you don’t have help.

Today we unveiled Conversion Optimizer, our new tool for conducting multivariate and A/B testing. We announced the beta version of this tool several months ago, and we’ve been working closely with customers to make sure it delivers all the right functionality and performs smoothly. Like all our products, Conversion Optimizer is backed by our team of search and merchandising experts who will help you figure out which options to test and manage all the tests for you, then help you determine next steps after you see the results.

Click here to read more about Conversion Optimizer, or ask your Customer Success Manager for a demo.