I read an insightful New York Times article by Stephanie Clifford titled "High Fashion Relents to Web’s Pull" offering commentary on the sudden influx of luxury brands launching ecommerce stores.  She notes the dominant reason for the increase being, as most would expect, due to failures in the economy; people just aren't buying  $1,600 t-shirts in bulk anymore. And when brands like Balmain make them, they are often criticized for it.

So what happens to that $1,600 t-shirt after months on the market and only a few have moved? They get heavily discounted and put up for sale on department store websites, like Saks.com and NeimanMarcus.com. Or they get sold to independent online luxury retailers like net-a-porter.com and discounted some more.

Well, based on trends, it looks as though luxury brands have had enough. As per Clifford's article, designers are moving rapidly in the direction of launching their own web storefronts where they can:

• Take back control of their image, and more importantly –  take back control of pricing
• Repair (or attempt to repair) any damage to their image that may have accrued over the years by the association of "discount" in connection to their names
• Tailor the online experience to reflect more directly with the brand’s aesthetic

What took so long? Luxury titans like Marc Jacobs are just now in the process of launching online stores, with Jacobs' ecommerce site scheduled for release in September. And more importantly, how does this affect what I call their "designer websites", which display their artistry and typically has:

• All flash everything (which usually mimics and supports the designer's overall vision)
• Zero consideration for non-broadband visitors (probably because if you don’t have broadband, you probably can’t afford their product anyway)
• In-your-face HD videos of the most recent fashion shows
• Unnecessarily complicated, but really cool navigation
• Some form of annoying background audio

See the current marcjacobs.com, versace.com and the stunning johngalliano.com if you want proof.

So what’s going to happen to these designer websites if their purpose is to expand from just being a continuation of the brand to offering a user friendly checkout experience?  Opening a skinned HTML/CSS ecommerce store in a new window isn’t what I’d call "designer." And, at least for now, an entirely flash retail site isn’t going to do very much in Search Engine Optimizing your storefront either. It also makes it difficult to update frequently and quickly like the recently launched online accessory retail catalog for Balenciaga (based in flash).

I'm looking to the near future for that luxury brand with:

1. A sexy site
2. User friendly ecommerce
3. Product pages optimized for search

 If you know of any, comment and let me know.  Not that I'll buy anything.

As my colleague Josh Blair mentioned in an earlier post, Flighpath was at SMX East here in New York City. With a slightly different perspective than Josh, going to SMX allows me to recharge and learn about emerging methodologies, share insights with my peers and hopefully learn about the latest from the big three. Here are 3 things that stuck with me now that the show is over.

1. PageRank sculping and nofollow

The first session I attended, moderated by Danny Sullivan, discussed the usefulness of nofollow for the purposes of PageRank sculpting—especially considering the somewhat recent announcement from Google regarding this particular tag.

Back in June, Matt Cutts announced that nofollow does not suppress link-juice, and hasn’t for the past year or so. What has this done to PageRank sculpting? Well a lot. In many ways it defeated the whole purpose.

For those not familiar with PageRank sculpting, it’s an SEO technique used to pass link popularity to priority pages within a site. Every page has only so much PageRank and the amount of link value passed on to other pages is equally divided through each link on that page. So, in order to redirect more link-juice to pages with more ranking priority, the less important links could be suppressed by using rel="nofollow".

And how has this affected websites? Well for smaller sites, PageRank sculpting probably has very little to no affect. But for larger ones such as Zappos.com? Well let’s just say that Adam Audette, President of AudetteMedia, announced that Zappos.com will stop using nofollow altogether.

Rand Fishkin, of SEOmoz, however still sees the value of nofollow. For pages you absolutely want to get indexed and thereby help with their overall ranking, nofollow can still be very useful to help prioritize these pages. He has a point.

2. Cross-domain canonicalization

This may not mean a whole lot to many, but why is this important? Well for those managing multiple domains with duplicate content, it means plenty.

Many sites by themselves have duplicate content. Yours too and you don’t even know it. Sites using dynamic URLs come across this problem often. For example, http://example.com/page.html could have the exact same content as http://example.com/page.html?trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678. In this case rel="canonical" should be used to consolidate link popularity.

Currently this isn’t possible across domains. However, during one of the sessions, featuring software engineers from Google, Yahoo and Bing, Joachim Kupke of Google announced that very soon Google will honor the canonical tag across domains. This resulted in a very nerdy cheer from crowd, me included. We manage hundreds of domains for some of our clients, some with similar if not identical content. This new rule will allow us to minimize unnecessary page competition throughout many of these domains.

3. Social media and attribution

Attribution came up more than a few times. Not only across media type, but also down to the campaign, keyword and query levels. The ability to get that granular and really know what works and what doesn’t makes our lives easier. I’m still enjoying Google’s new (well, actually it was released in March) Adwords interface. With the old interface, actual queries for broad match keywords were not available, at least not within Adwords. We couldn’t see the exact terms people were typing into Google. Now we can, and more importantly, we know whether or not those queries are converting.

So what does attribution have to do with social media? Well social media received a lot of attention at the show. As it should. Many organizations are using it in very useful and creative ways to help build and maintain their brands. But in certain organizations, especially in the B2B world, where marketing initiatives live and die through lead source data and ROI, questions are raised about how to quantify its value. 

Many tools that measure buzz volume, sentiment, etc. are great and convenient solutions for providing an aggregate view of online chatter. These tools are invaluable for reputation management, which can have a direct impact on sales. But it’s that direct correlation between social media and sales that seems to be the problem, or lack there of. There’s no tool to measure this, at least not the way we can with a paid search campaign. We do know however that a social media presence can drive more traffic to your site. And that social media sites are good for link-juice, thereby helping to increase your search rank. For now we just have to do the extra work to monitor this data. Is it really so hard to track traffic source? That or we’ll just have to see how Facebook ads pan out.

So there’s my take on this year’s SMX East.

One of the pillars of our digital practice at Flightpath is to integrate the art of technology with the technology of art.  Nowhere is the fluidity of this precept more evident than in our SEO work.  The best search-engine optimization requires a mercury-quick understanding of what is happening in any given market at any given time, what words describe that market snapshot in an informative, creative way, and what technology delivers the information in compelling design (incidentally, another of our tenets).

A major breakthrough for us, then, is Google's increased ability to index Flash.  Flash, when it broke into mainstream consciousness, was the pretty new girl in school.  Everyone was a little bit in love and wanted to take her for a ride, but there was a rumbling contingent that warned about the correlative probability that good looks can mean less substance. 

This turned out to be true--Flash didn't offer much in the way of text that search-engine spiders could index; the crawlers couldn't link back to anything, because the browser didn't reload after interactivity.  Even pages that spiders indexed were useless in search results, because users landed on Flash home pages instead of product pages.   

Flash was . . . well, at least it was pretty. 

But, then, last year, Google dedicated the resources to figure out how to index text in Flash sites:

[We] developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.

The trick, then, is to put the text that you want indexed "along the way" the algorithm travels.  This might include adding text to Flash applications, including a Robots.txt file or adding alternative HTML code.  Making sure the site's organizational strategy includes lots of deep links helps with long-tail optimization, and page titles have never gone out of style.  

Essentially, as Google becomes more and more ubiquitous, making nearly everything about the digital space more inclusive and included in a more intuitive way, we can expect to allow our artistic strengths to shine in happy equilibirium with our market goals and technological requirements.  

We have a project we're wrapping soon for an amazing, artistic client with big-figure goals that will show this to great effect.   Stay tuned! 

Organic SEO was once a meritocracy--not that long ago, either. 

Back in February, I talked about "the soulless algorithm" that defines search-engine visibility and how to accomodate its calculations while remaining creative.  My point was that an incisive choice of words that mirrors the common lexicon of a targeted market has the capability to generate visibility in search engines and excite and convince an audience about your offer's value in equal measure.  In simpler terms, I said smart writing delivers results.  

I mentioned, then, that search engines influence what we, as writers and marketers, offer them in concomitance.  I promised to tell you more about the syntactical evolution your offer requires to stay relevant in the market and to the search terms your targets enter. 

As it turns out, online marketing is trending away from that syntactical evolution, but only within the context of what creative marketers offer.  Where you may have been able to lead the majority of your market--and, thus, your searchers--into entering sequences of words you created for them, now search behavior leads the creative mind and the digital marketer more than ever. 

Organic SEO is becoming a democracy--and that means you need a lot of people to prefer your offer in order to generate the results your position-based angle generated in the past.

Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insight at Edelman, the world's largest PR firm, writes for AdAge [account required] about how sites earn search visibility more than ever these days:

 . . . the search-engine landscape is shifting. Today consumers are far more likely to seek out and, what's more, trust what they read on other sites rather than anything we put out. The reasons are both technological and sociological. 

He cites two new kinds of search, reputational and social.  Reputational search isn't anything new to most of us, but it recognizes that as online media grants growing credibility to blogs, social-media pages, and aggregators through increased PageRank, writers and marketers need to apply SEO concepts to traditional PR materials that appear online.  His tactical triumvirate of research, content development, and measurement is old hat for SEO copywriters, but offers a new approach for PR professionals.  

Rubel breaks ground when he discusses the importance of social search, though:

As more searches take place inside social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, brands that are early adopters in building out "embassies" will be more visible.

There's no doubt that brand reputation today is incresingly shaped by sites we don't control.  This means that even a nascent field such as search-engine marketing must change in order to survive and thrive.

Rubel ends his thoughts with the mention of requisite change, undoubtedly so that readers engage with Edelman to learn more, but I like the idea of exploring the thought with you further here at Flightpath.  

Essentially, social search means search benchmarks are powered by the people.  SEO copywriters and digital marketers must meet the audience on its turf and on its terms, in all senses of the word.  We have to calibrate our message to keywords the masses use within their own worlds. 

As digital marketers, our traditional website and social-media pages must match the vertical and social engines' expectations.  Our blog posts have to satisfy the topical markers--the words--the audience promulgates.  Our tweets must integrate their hashtags.  Our voice is now the brand voice plus the voice of everyone in the world who already cares about our common interest, that is, our offer to them.  

The fine modicum of control we may have enjoyed as creative market leaders still exists in part--Google will never die, and natural search results will always matter--but, more and more, the future of search is in the hands of the people.