Each day, the iPhone app features a new designer style, available for purchase for 24 hours exclusively through the app or in Bergdorf’s New York City store. The app is free, and for every download through March 31, Bergdorf Goodman will donate $5 to City Harvest. The app is user-friendly with a quick and easy checkout process.

See the app here.

The Shoe Salon - an iPhone App from Bergdorf Goodman

When will Google remove those old URLs from their index?

Hey Yahoo! Have you even heard of a 301 redirect?

Partial Credit for Bing. They never really indexed our old blog very well anyways.

All 3 top search engines still have a lot of URLs indexed from the previous blog location:

• Google: 127 URLs indexed
• Yahoo: 244 URLs indexed
• MSN Bing: 29 URLs indexed

This is not surprising in the least bit. While all search engines advocate the use of 301 redirects when changing URL structures and/or domains, they don’t seem to remove the old site URLs very quickly. In my experience, it can take a up to 3 months. It really just depends on the number of URLs and other factors. I mean, maybe googlebot is having a rough day or something.

The old Range blog at rangeonlinemedia.com/blog had about 300 URLs. Included in those 300 URLs were post pages, archive pages, tags, author pages and other links on the blog. As mentioned earlier, we created 301 redirects for all URLs. Here is how we redirected those URLs:

• Posts (301 redirected on a 1-to-1 basis to the post URLs on the new blog)
• Archives (301 redirected all archive pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
• Tags (301 redirected all tag pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
• Author pages (301 redirected all author pages to the http://therangeblog.com/)
• Images, CSS files, RSS links, etc… (301 redirected all misc file URLs to the http://therangeblog.com/)

I typically advocate 301 redirecting every URL on a 1-to-1 basis to its counterpart URL on a new site. For TheRangeBlog.com, we did that for post pages. For all other URLs, we created a wildcard redirect. Basically, all non-post URLs are 301′d to the homepage of TheRangeBlog.com. It was a time/resource issue. I know, I know. Not perfect, but it’ll have to do. BTW, none of our old blog URLs had any links, so I wasn’t too worried about 301′ing a random tag URL to its counterpart on the new blog. Just sayin’ is all…

Well, that’s about it for now. Stay tuned for more – in the future!

• We removed the placeholder HTML file for the homepage.
• We removed the disallow entry from the robots.txt file.
• We updated the privacy setting in Wordpress to allow search engine access
• We updated our corporate website to reflect the new blog URL.
• We created and uploaded the 301 redirects from all of the old blog URLs to the counterpart URLs on the new blog domain. [Note: We did not write 1-to-1 redirects for every URL. Due to time constraints, we only created 1-to-1 redirects for the 60 or so blog post URLs. For all other URLs, we created a wildcard redirect that 301'd all URLs to the new blog's homepage. Due to our previous blog's lack of links, I caved on this item. In most other cases, I recommend 1-t0-1 redirects when changing URL structure or moving from one domain to another.]
• We built an XML sitemap for the new blog.
• We created/verified Webmaster accounts with Google, Yahoo and Bing. In these accounts, we submitted our XML sitemap location. All sitemaps were accessed within 24 hours of submission.

All of that took place last Tuesday (3-Nov-2009). Today is November 10, 2009. How have the search engines responded? Let’s take a look at our site counts in Google, Yahoo and MSN Bing:

Google Site Count: 8 URLs indexed

Yahoo Site Count: 1 URL Indexed

MSN Bing Site Count: 49 URLs Indexed

Just in case you cannot see the pictures, here are the results:

• Google: 8 URLs indexed
• Yahoo: 1 URL indexed
• MSN: 49 URLs indexed

That’s amazing to me. In my experience with crawling speed and indexing speed, Google typically wins big. But after a week of TheRangeBlog.com being live and active, Bing is clearly winning the race to index our blog. Nice work, Bing! Thanks for taking note of our blog.

I should also note that our blog has almost no inbounds links. Aside from the links from our corporate site and from a few Range Twitter accounts, we have virtually no link authority. Our lack of inbound link love is obviously playing a role in how quickly our site is getting indexed. But worry not – because we are working on links! (And if you are the linking kind, please consider linking to us. I won’t beg, but I would appreciate any link juice. Well, not from bad neighborhoods. Yes, I am an SEO.)

• Make sure to allocate appropriate budgets and include promotional messaging on key shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Green Monday
• Incorporate the spirit of the holidays in all marketing channels, including the Web site
• Create unique landing pages for Holiday Gift Guides and Specials
• Test marketing messaging and offers to see which resonate best with your audience
• Be relevant to your consumers and personalize when possible

In the world of online, luxury brands often get a reputation as late adopters. Here goes the stereotype: They were cautious to launch ecommerce websites. Then, they were cautious to market them and let everyone know the site exists. However, with every stereotype, there are exceptions.

What intrigues me most about luxury brands is how brands have longevity at such an elite status. Most brands have been around for several decades if not longer. They have evolved with changes in media and survived tough economic times. All of this tells me that they must be doing something right.

How these brands approach their brand equity and image is applicable on many levels….which brings me to my personal variation on Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten:

All I Really Need to Know I Learned Marketing Luxury:

1. Be True to Yourself. Luxury marketers are the best at staying true to their brand. They are very cautious in their marketing strategy to ensure brand image.
2. Respect Your Friends. Luxury buyers are loyal. As brands are expanding into new channels, they are very conscientious of their customer base. They respect their friends (read: customers) by developing “insider” groups and lists to keep the most loyal “in the know.”
3. It’s About Who You Know. We’ve all heard this one before, and it’s no different with prestigious brands that revel when a celebrity name-drops their brand. They take the buzz and make it work for them in their marketing strategies.
4. “Don’t Be Evil” says Google. Luxury brands fight evil everyday by policing their brands to maintain their quality online through trademark infringements and gray marketers.
5. Enjoy Quality, Not Quantity. Marketing strategies for prestigious brands involve quality placements for quality products.
6. Balance Is Key. Luxury brands continue to implement strategy that includes a cross- channel, diverse media mix. They understand the need to reach consumers at all steps of the buying process.

Luxury retailers are hesitant to get involved in the social space because it is a platform for 2-way communication with consumers—the type of marketing luxury brands typically shy away from. Social media is a playground for spreading unfiltered and opinionated information by uneducated consumers across the web, and this lack of control is the top turn-off for luxury marketers. And really, can you blame them? Luxury retailers are hyper-protective of their brands, almost to the point of remaining distant from average consumers, towering over regular joes via lofty billboards and high-society events. You might think this is elitist, but elitism is part of why they’re luxury brands. However, a few high-end retailers are participating in social media and initiating a conversation with consumers using social media sites. For example, in May 2009 Louis Vuitton released a limited edition bag available exclusively to their Twitter followers. Hooray for incremental sales, but more importantly, this gave a new platform for Louis Vuitton to engage in the conversation with consumers.

Another reason luxury retailers are not participating in the social space is because of the myth that the luxury demographic does not spend time on social sites. A recent study by eMarketer says that affluent internet users will grow from 43.7MM in 2006 to 57.1MM in 2011, while in February, Facebook identified its fastest-growing segment as women over 55, up 175% since November 2008. Luxury customers are online and participating in social media, but there is another crucial demographic influencing and participating in social media: future luxury customers. 52% of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 – 25 years old, and they will determine the future of luxury brands within the next 30 years. Luxury retailers should be communicating with the next generation, those who aspire to luxury brands as soon as they can afford them, say when they’ve graduated college and landed there first real job. And when the money does come, consumers will purchase from the brands they have built a relationship with since their teens and early twenties.

Lastly, if luxury brands do not participate in social media it likely means there is an uncontrolled brand presence being directed through unofficial groups, posts and images. Luxury brands are supposed to have all the characteristics that mass market retailers do not: customer service, unrivaled quality and an exclusive price point. If luxury brands’ products, employees and reputations are solid shouldn’t it be trumpeted from Facebook’s News Feed?

• Keyword: (random 7-term keyword)
• Impressions: 1
• Clicks: 1
• Cost: $.25
• Conversions: 1
• Revenue: $1,256.37
• ROI: Hahahahahaha

It may be the only impression that particular keyword gets for the next 6 months. But if you can create a campaign that reaches out effectively enough to reach customers looking for very specific things, these one-click wonders can easily leverage investment in wider ranges of nonbrand keywords – i.e. make you look super smart.

With a solid SEO program and smart keyword selection, you can accomplish the same thing – only exponentially larger, given the volume of clicks that natural results drive versus paid ones. All it takes is a readable site and the time, patience and courage to see it through (though having an award-winning SEO department at your back can really help), via opportunities like:

• Taking your meta data beyond single-word targets based on what you’ve named your categories or products
• Taking your product names and descriptions beyond what your branding team or manufacturers provide you
• Taking your internal linking beyond a three-clicks-to-a-product mentality and finding ways to get engines from your most authoritative pages to your most valuable content faster

Combining these efforts will open up your site to the ability to rank for a much wider range of keywords, in much the same way that a six-digit keyword buildout can, with much the same effect – only without those pesky click costs!

My personal feeling is that it has lost shelf space to things like ‘social marketing,’ which are not nearly as immediate and are much more expensive. So how do we approach local search?

1. Get a comprehensive feed for your brand listing all properties that includes the following information:
   • Physical Address
   • Phone Number
   • Official Property Name
   • Property Page URL
   • Property ID
   • Amenities (if available)
   • Rate Per Night (if available)
2. Submit to your feed to the engines at least once a week, and definitely submit it immediately if there are major changes in the property list. Also be sure to contact your engine rep to see if there is any way they can help accelerate changes and fixes.
3. Utilize a third party aggregator to disseminate your feed throughout other web properties. There are hundreds of outlets for local listings to be shown aside from just the big 3 search engines. There are companies out there who will submit your feed in any and all formats those outlets require for a nominal fee and even report back on traffic and other metrics. Well worth the investment.
4. Monitor on an ongoing monthly basis.

Now all of the above sounds complex, but it’s really not. The result? A much more comprehensive approach to local search that doesn’t break the bank and allows for much greater coverage across many smaller local outlets.

This tells me that luxury retailers/brands should cater their major initiatives to ‘refinement of living, indulgence, enjoyments of comforts and pleasures’. As such, shouldn’t the online experience be as comforting and pleasurable as the product itself? Doesn’t it make sense that a buying a luxury brand’s product should be easier and more enjoyable than a buying a discount product from a mass retailer or discounter? So why is it so difficult to even find the luxury official website? Most of the time, I never see an ad where I frequent online and I rarely see search listings (paid or natural) when searching for products (or sometimes even the trademark name) in the search engines. And when I finally find the site, I still have to navigate through flash, wait for video to load, experience a confusing site search and endure a clunky process just to order something. That is not a luxurious experience; it’s a trip to the DMV.

Luxury retailers are highly protective of their brand. Why not treat their customers with similar diligence and care? If your luxury brand’s purchase process has more in common with a trip to municipal court than Monaco, you might want to try the following:

• If you’re going to have beautiful images through flash/video ads to remind me of the brand and show me the beautiful new products, have them where I spend time online. Better yet, make them clickable right to the product I want to buy, or at least interactive so I can hover /explore, then go to the site when I’m ready to purchase.
  • STRATEGY: Have a strong presence on major networks. Use re-targeting and behavioral targeting to reach your customers/potential customers. Creative test/use multiple messages to ensure your audience is getting the ad units they like best.

• You’re present in the engines, so be there like you mean it. When I’m looking for a product like yours, make it easy on me to find you. When I’m looking for you by searching for your brand name…be there. Every time.
  • STRATEGY: Have a strong presence, both from a brand and non-brand presence, both from a paid listing and natural/organic standpoint. Make the creative and meta-description clear by telling me who you are and why your brand is special.

• When I finally end up on your site, make it easy on me to purchase. Let me see the beautiful, large images of the products I am interested in, show me descriptive words to describe the product, and when I’m ready to buy, let me be able to do that quickly and painlessly. Better yet, thank me for doing so and make me want to come back again and again.
  • STRATEGY: Use large multiple images. Use descriptive and detailed copy. Remember me if I’ve registered with your site before so I don’t have to re-enter all my personal information. Test! Use conversion optimization tools to target and refine the most customer friendly purchase paths and website organization.

I think it’s very fair to say that most luxury retailers and luxury brands do a tremendous job of making beautiful and luxurious products. It’s the basis in which all their efforts are based. Catalogs and image ads are gorgeous and classy, and so is the typical in-store experience. So why is it that luxury retailers are usually the last to make the online experience as luxurious and comforting as possible? Why is it the mass discounters and retailers of the world are the ones that make the online shopping experience comfortable and convenient? Online works amazingly well for most advertisers, and it’s trackable. That’s no secret. Focus on making that entire online channel as luxurious and comforting as that handbag or skin cream your customer loves you for, and you’ll have me coming back again and again. Or at least on payday.

One of the most significant factors for determining online behavior is age. Chances are a business’ products won’t provide the same service for a grandmother as they will her grandchild. As such, age stratification is a practical tool to use for finding your audience. Focusing on a consumer’s age when choosing social networks on which to place ads and shopping engines to offer your products is a vital tactic for growing your business.

Believe it or not, young, online consumers are bargain hunters. Although teens and young adults want to have exactly what their friends have, they are also (generally) aware of the depth of their providers’ wallets. Increasing visibility of Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) has led to an increase in online research before a product is purchased. A recent study performed by Platform-A and Information Resources, Inc. found that 51% of 18 to 24-year-old shoppers indicated they would be very likely to use coupons presented to them online.

The go-to phrase of businesses recently, “in these economic times”, remains a valid reason for a marketers to increase their presence on CSEs and offer more bargains when pursuing a younger demographic. High school graduates and college students returning to school are under pressure from their parents to find better deals. Whether it be PCs, digital cameras or back-to-school clothes, the term “budget” is creeping its way in to the vocabulary of these young people.

Where do you go from here? Obviously no one sells every product a young person wants or needs, but for those that do, paying attention to the economy’s effect on Generation Y has its benefits.