Pay-per-click advertising doesn’t always smile upon budget-minded businesses; even “clean” PPC campaigns (i.e., ones that aren’t plagued by click fraud) can be costly.

Why not dump the whole thing, then? Some users of Mountain Media’s software have been able to do just that - without hurting their rankings.

Mountain Media recently released Mountain Commerce 6.0, an updated version of its “search engine friendly software.”

The company also put out one of the best press releases I’ve ever seen (those things can get pretty dry at times).

Don’t think that Mountain Media is hiding behind its words, though - the company unveiled its newest product at PubCon, in the midst of a bunch SEO pros. O

Our own Chris Richardson attended that event, and he was impressed by Mountain Commerce’s effects.

“The resulting web pages have their dynamic links mod rewritten,” Chris noted, “making them easier for search engine bots to navigate while avoiding duplicate content issues.”

The latest update from Mountain Media represents a substantiation of Chris’s observation and the company’s own claims.

Two users of Mountain Commerce - FireplaceEssentials.com and Ejazzlines.com - reported on how they were able to “ditch” their PPC campaigns (which cost them $40,000 and $20,000 per year, respectively).

Ejazzlines co-founder Doug DuBoff gave an official statement of support.

“There’s no question that the Mountain Commerce software has helped our search results,” he said. “Since moving into the Commerce 6 platform and using the tools provided, our page
rankings have been pushed up so much higher that we’ve been able to turn off our costly pay-per-click campaigns.”

That’s obviously the ideal result of using Mountain Commerce, and Scott Fultz, Mountain Media’s CTO, was undoubtedly pleased to hear about it.

“Letting people focus more on the user and shopper experience and less on how Google sees things was our goal,” he wrote. “We believe the Internet experience as a whole can move forward once site owners and SEO specialists return to creating web sites for people and concentrate less on trying to please search engines.”

As the number of consumers shopping online continues to grow, more marketers are becoming interested in transactional emails.

Some companies are able to take advantage of transactional emails but there are still a good number that are not fully utilizing the medium.

According to a new report from Silverpop titled “How Top Retailers Use Transactional Emails” 40 percent of online retailers using transactional email respond within a minute.

“Because transactional emails reach customers at a time when they are most likely thinking about the company in a positive light, savvy marketers recognize the power of transactional emails to enhance customer relationships, solidify branding and cross-sell and up-sell additional products,” said Silverpop Vice President of Strategy Elaine O’Gorman.

To analyze the use of transactional emails Silverpop purchased items from the top online retailers as defined by Internet Retailer magazine.

Each email was evaluated for subject branding, personalization, layout elements and promotional content.
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Google once more might have crossed the fine line between delivering the most neutral search results, and doing self-promotion in disfavor of such neutrality.

The latest incident, brought to light in an analysis by Danny Sullivan, is the display of a Google Checkout-specific link within the shopping onebox.

The shopping information in question is shown on top of some web results when you search for products like sd cards 128mb, and in itself, it’s delivering just another neutral result with more links to neutral Froogle, which is nothing to worry about.* The worrying part however may be the link with the catchy shopping cart icon reading “See sd cards 128mb results available through Google Checkout”… because it will restrict the originally 11,000+ Froogle results for the SD card to the much smaller scope of 281 from vendors which support Google’s Checkout service, a payment system which can earn Google a commission on sales.**

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The year 2006 was a record breaker for e-commerce as online retail spending passed the $100 billion mark, according comScore.

In all, the year was up 24 percent over 2005, raking in a total of $102.1 billion, nearly $20 billion more than in 2005. The holiday season was an exclamation point to the year as online shoppers increased their spend by $5 billion (26%) to $24.6 billion.

During that blistering holiday season, 12 days saw spending over $600 million, with Cyber Monday at the bottom of the list at $607 million.
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