Bloggers Digest November 2009

Bloggers Digest is our monthly ritual that highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

• Brian Walker shares some tips on surving the holiday season on the front and back ends of your e-business.

• If you don't have enough reasons to invest in site performance optimization, here's one more: Google will likely factor in site speed into its algorithm soon. Makes sense - users prefer sites that are fast and Google wants to send searchers to sites they'll like.

• Brilliant post by VKI Studios on how to identify the 404 errors that send the most traffic away and how to remedy them.

• Econsultancy offers some good suggestions on improving your delivery service in light of a recent survey that found 7% of customers were unhappy with their deliveries.

• If you haven't been following Kevin Hillstrom's Glieber's Dresses saga, you're missing out. It's an entertaining "fictional" series of blog posts that illustrate the tough decisions retailers have to make about their multichannel marketing strategies and tactics with a hilarious cast of characters. Check out the Home Page Design and Home Page Desing Part 2 episodes.

• For all you Google Adwords advertisers, a couple important announcements: Adwords is now testing a feature called Product Listing Ads. US advertisers can now take advantage of "product extensions" that will highlight your products directly in your search ads with images, titles and prices.

• And check out Google Adwords comparison ads:

• To wrap things up, how about a couple stories about Amazon? The Google of online retail's at it again, read about the 'Zon's plans to bring PayPhrase to the offline world and its trial of SMS order status alerts.

Happy Cyber Monday!