What I learned at San Jose...

The SEO conference in San Jose was, as conferences go, a great experience! Peggy Li Creations handmade jewelry was the topic of an interview for The Chris Pirillo Show, I attended as many sessions as I could, and, of course, my site was pimped!

As a result, you may notice some changes to peggyli.com, including:

1) New Add to Cart button (changed from "Shopping Bag")
2) New Add to Cart purchase button (changed from "Order")
3) New Add to Cart purchase button BIGGER
4) Alt-tags on the images on the homepage
5) HTML text (keywords and business location) added to the homepage.

Other suggestions include adding more keyword rich text to my pages, getting a 1-800 number and displaying it prominently, and moving this blog to my site domain. I met the author of the book "Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies" and purchased his book, which not only has Yahoo! store site building tips, but tons of internet marketing tips as well. Thanks Rob!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on your interview! I know you've done a ton of them in your career, but I can't imagine it ever losing the excitement. :)

Sounds like overall the conference was very rewarding. I am curious about adding the business location to your homepage. I have my location information on my contact page, but I would assume this means there is an advantage to adding it to your homepage also. Interesting...

If you decide to move your blog to your domain, I would suggest WordPress. It's very user friendly, there are plugins available to do just about anything you can imagine, and (the best part) importing your Blogger posts and comments takes only a few seconds and is very easy.

plcpeggy said...

Hi Rachel,
No particular advantage to location on homepage except to make it "friendlier" to customers. The other suggestion was to add a 1-800 number as well. Not sure if I'll do that.

I am definitely confused by Blogger and the export/import of my blog. However, I feel that blogger has a larger network of eyeballs than WordPress -- how do you feel about WordPress traffic-wise?

AtPlayWithFiber said...

Congrats! Sound like a very productive trip.

Anonymous said...

Sorry about the delay in my response. I just returned from a (much needed) week-long vacation.

I see your point about Blogger's readership. My blog was only a couple of weeks old when I switched to WordPress, so I honestly don't have much of a basis for comparison. I was able to easily redirect the url and my feeds (I use Feedburner) so I was able to keep my subscribers, but I suppose I did lose the benefit of the Blogger community.

As a platform, WordPress runs circles around Blogger though. I really love the flexibility in template design and the plugins available. I was able to integrate Google Analytics and Feedburner reporting directly into my admin panel, which is really handy.

Anonymous said...

Hi Peggy

Read about the changes you made to your site and am wondering why you made changes to "Shopping Bag" and "Order"? I currently using Shopping Bag and Order as you did, and would love to hear your thoughts on why you changed them to "Add to Cart". Thanks!

plcpeggy said...

Hi Patty,
the suggestion to change bag to cart and order to add to cart was that most people are more familiar with the term "cart" when shopping online -- also, that "order" sounds like a commitment to purchase, whereas "add to cart" still gives them the option to browse... not sure if I can truly measure if this improves conversion, but I will see if my clicktrails show more folks "adding to cart" :).

peggy

Margarite Elaine said...

Peggy--
It sounds like the trip was productive. The advice about adding an 800-number is interesting. Did you decide to go with that option? If so, who hosts your number? Based on my research, having an 800-number can be a costly choice if you are a small business. What are your thoughts?

plcpeggy said...

Hi Margaret,

I posed the exact same question to the helpful gals over at The Switchboards. They give a few suggestions for 1-800 companies they use, such as Costco and kall8.com. I'm still undecided as to whether it is really necessary for my business. Personally, I think it looks a little cheesy, especially for a really small business and creative product. It's different if you sell a wide variety of merchandise/common merchandise, high volume of sales.
peggy