DaveLindberg.net

Forrester Research and Shop.org released their new state of the industry report this week. The big news in The State of Retailing Online 2007: last year’s online sales leader was the apparel category. Sales of clothing, accessories and footwear totaled $18.3 billion, up 61% over 2005 — a strong contributor to the 29% overall growth in overall online retail sales last year.

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Riding a creative wave for a bit, I’ve been involved in re-energizing the site and communications for our local Buddhist meditation group. The website has received a freshening, with some added back end enhancements as well. The visual approach was inspired by, and intended to complement, the freshly branded international site.

The new introductory flier is also part of the mix.

Rewarding to see the growth over time; the email list has doubled since its launch, visits last month were ten times over the same month last year. While we’re not talking about huge numbers here, it’s the ability to connect with interested individuals and help a community grow that makes the difference.

Bloggers and ecommerce sites alike are working hard to deal with the unintended consequences of their content management systems. For all their wondrous flexibility, blogging software can create duplicate content at just about every turn — archives, categories, tags, stubs — each can potentially create, as Google puts it, “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”. Google’s preferred method of dealing with duplicate content is to filter out those pages it considers duplicate from their search results.

Dupe content happens. One way is as a side effect of creating multiple paths to content — by allowing users to access the content they desire in the way they prefer [browsing, tagging, search, etc], CMS systems can create pages with identical content where the only difference is in the navigation.

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Growing the keyword list. There are a wealth of sites that will help you define and expand your search terms; some have been around for years now, while other fresh faces are bringing new depth and features to the job of broadening the reach of your search marketing campaigns. What follows is an overly brief list of online tools to compare and contrast:

1. Adwords Keyword Selector Tool provides access to trended search volume, and potential SEM cost & position estimates<
2. KeyCompete shows PPC keywords by advertiser, nice competitive source with a flexible array of uasge & pricing options
3. SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool draws for a healthy range of data sources
4. Trellian’s Keyword Discovery looks mighty cool, check out this detailed review at ClckZ
5. WordTracker now features more options [unlimited projects, UK keywords] and a more usable interface.
6. WordZe is new and looks sharp. Keyword-based search and link trending. Will explore shortly.
7. Yahoo Search Marketing’s Keyword Tool looks like it produces the same results as the classic Overture Keyword Selector. I was hoping to see a difference in results with the fresher flavor, but so far it looks like the interface and adgroup integration are what the new version has going for it.

Got more? I’m all ears.

Looking forward to spending a couple of days at SES_NY next week. For immediate reference, a couple of quick links to the agendas for:

• Tuesday, April 10
• Wednesday, April 11

Lots of good options here, including seminars on SEO, SEM, Conversion and Analytics.