Quite a few friends and family members have asked me recently about blogs. I just created a baseball blog for my uncle (he’s a huge Washington Nationals fan). Besides being fun if you’re a subject matter expert, blogs can help your business get found by search engines. The premise is that a blog produces fresh and orginal content, which search engines like. Blogs are often updated frequently, so search engines “learn” to visit the blog site more frequently for content.

The Ecommerce Times just published a piece on blogs, and it’s an interesting read if you’re unfamiliar with how blogging can benefit your business. Read the article for more information.

Take this search engine marketing blog, for instance. I’m a search engine marketing and ecommerce web design guru, but no one will know unless I can prove that I have a pulse on the industry and can share my own commentary and successes. Blogs are a way to build credibility and exposure.

If you’d like to establish a blog of your own, there are a few platforms you can use. There are some free systems out there that will host your blog for you. They are Blogger (which I use) and TypePad.

You can also install software on an existing server, which costs a little bit of money (less than $100) and extra time. The most popular software for existing servers is Movable Type and WordPress.

Blogging isn’t for everyone and doesn’t benefit every business, but for those with good information to share, it can make a lot of sense. If you’d like to learn more, contact me and we’ll discuss it.

I monitor the ecommerce industry regularly, and on a weekly basis Comscore sends out ecommerce sales data. Comscore is measuring sales for a week versus the corresponding week a year ago, and the trend over the last few months has been strong. Sales have typically been up 20-30% over the last 3 months. Use these numbers as your benchmark, and if your sales aren’t up 20-30% over the same time period last year, perhaps it’s time to evaluate why.

Keynote Systems recently published a new study saying that online retailers are getting good at designing visually appealing and easy-to-use home and product pages, but site performance is suffering.

“It was surprising to find that several of the sites had major load-related issues, a result of detailed page designs and did not easily facilitate the check-out process,” says Chris Loosley at Keynote. The checkout process was the worst offender.

It’s surprising that at a time when online retailing is out of its infancy stages, companies still don’t devote enough time to improving load time and the checkout process. Without a fast-loading, easy-to-understand checkout process, online retailers are preventing customers from buying.

For those of you considering changing the design of your site, perhaps the first thing to consider is the checkout process. It should be tested for load time and ease of use through usability studies, then improved.

Roopak Patel, an Internet analyst at Keynote Systems, wrote an article in the Ecommerce Times today for the small e-business owner. The article lists ten tips for running small-to-medium sized businesses on the web.

Patel covers all bases from content, site usability, technical/hosting issues, competitors and search engines. Perhaps the only aspect he didn’t cover adequately is the marketing aspect.

I was reading some news today from the ad:tech conference and read that while some chief marketing officers sitting on a panel were hesitant to reveal their online marketing budgets, Eloan spends $20M and Purina sets aside 5-7% of their budget for interactive marketing.

I learned a few years back during my Fortune 200 days that large brands should spend between 5-10% on online marketing. But does this apply to the small business owner? Sire, but you might want to consider shifting more money online.

Online marketing can be very cost effective if a campaign is properly run and the proper media is bought. Small businesses can get a lot of exposure from marketing online, and I would encourage most small businesses, especially small online retailers, to shift more of their media spending online.

One thing from the ad:tech panel stood out — most companies use outside firms to manage their online marketing. Why? Companies do this so they can keep a “skeleton” staff in-house and contract experts to manage the campaigns. Whether you’re a large company or a small company, having a pro to manage your marketing efforts is good marketing practice and makes good financial sense.

You’ve seen it when you’ve searched the web before: search engine results that are nothing but a long list of keywords. As it turns out, internet searchers look for concepts and context, not just keywords, when they search.

A study, based on eye-tracking technology, underscores this notion. People are looking for the best search result that meets their need, and to do that, they evaluate both keywords and their context, the concept that the combination forms.

If you’re optimizing your site for keywords, then you might want to pay special attention to how your results are displayed and adjust accordingly. A long keyword list might not attract a customer as well as a well-formed page title and description.