There’s a chill in the air. Lowe’s has their Christmas lights on display. But wait, Halloween is still weeks away. No matter…the holiday season is upon us. If you are selling products online, you should be in “Holiday Prep Mode.”

This season is bringing far greater challenges than any we have seen in the Internet economy. With economy “isn’t great” to say the least. So customers are looking to cut their shopping budgets. And they have a lot of choices, so you need to provide them with a comfortable shopping environment, great prices, and overall an experience that far outshines that of your competition.

Here are 3 things you should be doing now to prepare for the holiday season.

1. Testing 1, 2, 3. While larger organizations often have teams focused on testing and modifying their shopping carts on a regular basis, many small businesses rarely go through such regular processes, and others admit to testing their sales process once when their site was developed, and then never again.  Every business owner who has a website should be extremely familiar with their online sales process and to the only way to gain that familiarity is to actual experience it. That means ACTUALLY going through the whole process and buying something!

Test the sales process. Test the communication process. Test the overall experience. Over time you may find that some internal processes have changed and those changes may indicate that some upgrades to your online process are required. You may also find that server upgrades, modifications to processing and security, and other behind the scenes technical issues may need attention. If you cannot test your site, ensure you have someone in your organization that is responsible for doing so, or discuss a maintenance agreement with your development firm.

2. Promotion. Prepare all of your promotional efforts now and have a clear plan for when they are to move on to customers. That doesn’t mean you can’t insert a promotion in along the way, however you’ll find that it makes planning much easier to know that starting November 1, you will be running a print ad with a code for a discount, banner ads through the months of November and December for the hot products of the season, etc. Customers are looking for the big deals now more than ever. That may be why they shop your site over a competitor’s.

3. Reach a new audience. Is anyone out there? Is this thing on? If your recent promotional efforts have not brought in the customers, don’t expect they will now. Try some new avenues, such as blogging or social marketing to reach new customers who may never have heard of you.

Do you have a search marketing program in place? Is it effective? Make sure you are evaluating that program now and planning your budgets for the season. People are searching everyday for the products you sell. Make sure you are sending them to the closest match to their request, with the right message, and clear calls to action. Simply sending them to your home page isn’t enough.

These are the basics. Each of these topics can be expounded upon many times over. Unfortunately, as basic as they are, many companies do not have clear practices in place, and rarely practice all 3.

You can be a casualty of the economy or you can come out a winner. Do what you need to win.

Two of my favorite restaurant chains have fallen victim to the economy and possibly disconnected marketing. Bennigan’s and Steak & Ale have filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and stores owned by its parent company will shut their doors.

The news appeared to be a shock to most of the company’s employees, but some may have had an inkling that the company was not doing well. Steve, a Bennigan’s waiter in Plano Texas, said he recently went from making $30 on a good lunch shift to only $10. “Business has been slow,” said Steve, who said he relies on tips. “I went from making a lot of money on a shift to making very little.

I’ve shared many a laugh and a meal within the walls of these two restaurants and I’m sad to see them go. I fear this is just the beginning for the restaurant industry unless a major marketing mind shift takes place.

At first glance the closing of these two casual dining mainstays seems to be indicative of the economy. Sure the economy has something to do with it but I’m not 100% convinced all the blame lies on the economic downturn.

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To my dismay, I received an email today from my one of my bosses at work with the subject that read:

The new “Google” is Cuil.

At that moment, although I couldn’t remember why, a dark cloud began to come over me.  Not because I am an avid Google worshipper.  Not because I feared that Google might be dethroned.  No not for that, but for some other unknown reason.  I knew I came acrosse that name before… “Cuil”, but I just couldn’t remember where.  So I continued to read the email and followed the link to this article Ex-Googlers Debut Cuil, A(nother) Anti-Google.

I read the article, instinctively skipping over the first paragraph. Yes, I am weird like that.  But more often than not the first paragraph just provides references to some other posts.  I wanted to get straight to the meat and potatoes.  Kind of like skipping the introduction in a book.

Anyway, I  must say I was impressed to learn that this new search engine just launched with over 120 billion pages in its index.  Cuil claims to the largest and fastest search engine in the world. But being a Webmaster and developer of hundreds of sites and several web servers, I asked myself “How in the world did a massive search engine launch without me knowing about it?”. 

Then A new Outlook email notification popped up:

“More on Cuil…Do a search for Internet marketing consultants. If this is going to take off, we will need to understand where they are grabbing the logos from. The BlueClaws logo isn’t going to cut it for us.” 

So I searched for Internet Marketing Consultants. Yeah, when I copied it from Outlook it selected the period as well.  And what do you know, “We didn’t find any results for ‘Internet marketing Consultants’”.  I was immediately apparent that Cuil has a long way to go before they can claim they are bigger, faster and better than Google. And it wasn’t just me, many bloggers and news article reported that Cuil fails to return results for a variety of search terms.

So then I removed the period and what do you know… My company Single Throw Internet Marketing is right there on the first page. Just it is in Google.  Just as we should be.

But Cuil’s search result for my company showed our clients logo instead of our own.  How did they manage to mistake Minor League Baseball’s Lakewood BlueClaws logo for ours.  A quick blog search revealed several blogs reporting Cuil was in hot water for algorithmic flaws.  Hey it could have been worse.  As one blogger points out, his blog has nothing to do with cigarettes.  I am also pretty sure that Google is going to love Cuil’s thumbnail of Eric Schmidt.

Eventually, I made my way back to the original article I was emailed.  I read that first paragraph I initially skipped.  When I got to the part that says  “Cuil (”cool”),” a light bulb went of in my head.   After quick search I found a post I made last year on samaBlog and remembered where I knew their name from.  When I made that post, I didn’t know who they where. Their spider, the “Twiceler Bot”, had began crawling a new web site I was working on and mauled my server. It would not go away and every time I tried to block the bot, the chameleon put on a new face to avoid detection.

A warning to webmasters:

Cuil’s Twiceler bot maliciously indexes content.  It does not respect well accepted standards like Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or even the Robots.txt protocol.  It blatantly ignores http status codes like 404 page not found and 403 Access is denied.  Their bot has the potential to crash your server and wipe out your databases.  The more you try to fight it off, the harder it tries to index your content.

Cuil’s black background suits them well.  Let’s just say the Google is a white hat search engine and Cuil is a black hat.  A very black hat. Let me go out on a limb here and say I would bet money that a vast portion 120 Billion page index is html error pages and duplicate content.

What do you think of Cuil?  Pass or Fail?  Let us know.

Not only does Cuil fail to return relevant search results, Cuil’s Index is way out of date.  In many cases they return no results at all. I don’t care if your index has 5 trillion pages or 500,000 pages as long as you return relevant results for what I am seaching for.

In my opinion, Cuil fails to live up to their marketing hype. Furthermore, they are going to have alot of explaining to do.  The already have a bad reputation with webmasters who know who they really are.  They are going to have issues gaining trust among the community, so if they want to be the next Google, that’s where they need to start. Especially as more developers and webmasters like myself start coming out of the woodwork to reveal how they got their massive  index.

Cuil - SHAME ON YOU!!!

Once again, Single Throw’s Caryl Felicetta looks at search marketing and search results giving her own spin of a “perfect world” in SERPs.

Felicetta notes how many results simply do not provide what searchers need.

How many of you are frustrated when you are trying to find a new vendor, or a new product, and you instead are fooled by spammy link farms, or simply sites that do not really suit your needs?

Organic search results - those that are indexed by the search engine spider, then run through a series of formulas, or algorithms - are generated by content found on a site, as well as Title and META tags. By including the content searchers are looking for, you are serving on of the formulas requirements: relevancy.

Relevancy is the key to generating qualified leads, bringing you that much closer to the sale. It is the connection made between you and the searcher. If that connection is not made, or broken, you will likely lose the sale.

Understanding the basics of relevancy and customer need combined with tailoring our sites and messages can help to improve the quality of search results - and business! I know it’s not like saving the Earth, or global warming, but it’s a start to making information, communication, and maybe even the economy, better.