An important part of any SEO or SEM campaign is researching the keywords for which you should rank well or advertise. Did you know that your site search is an excellent source of keywords for your research? The search terms visitors use when searching on your website are very similar to the terms they use when searching on Google, Yahoo!, etc. This data should be readily available by looking at your web logs or using your search reporting tools.

There are several reasons for using site search data for your keyword research:

• these search terms are the language of your customers
• they are continuously updated
• they help you stay abreast of the latest keywords people are using

By reviewing the site search results that visitors click on most for various keywords, you can build keyword lists for both specific products you’re promoting and general product categories. And by analyzing your top keywords on an ongoing basis, you’ll see that the most popular terms can change significantly over the course of just a couple of months. This gives you an advantage over your competition by staying more in tune with what your customers are actually shopping for – and what terms they’re using to find things on your site.

To read more on this topic, visit our blog at blog.sli-systems.com/2006/02/ses_ny_2006_using_site_search.html blog And while you're there, feel free to send us your comments - we'd love to hear about your site search experiences.

Tips 'n' Tricks: Make Sure Your Pricing Info is Up-to-Date

Our research shows that most site visitors like to see an item’s price in the search results. More importantly, the price shown in the search results should match the price shown on the product detail page. If you regularly update the prices on your site, then the search information should update at the same time. If your pricing information is updated continuously, then you should make sure your search is obtaining the pricing information from your product database in real time. It’s a fairly simple step that doesn’t take much time, and can be worth the extra effort to make sure your customers always see accurate information. E-Commerce sites are not the only destinations that need to focus on making prices available. A new report by usability guru Jakob Neilsen points out that B2B site users ranked pricing as the most important information. He also notes that many B2B sites fail dismally in this and other aspects of usability. See: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/b2b.html

If you have any tips or tricks you’d like to share, email us at newsletter@sli-systems.com.

SLI Systems in the News

Below are links to recent announcements and news articles highlighting our Learning Search service:

Cosmetics Retailer ULTA.com Attracts More Beauty Products Seekers With Help From SLI Systems
May 9