September 2006 – ackley-uniforms.com

Forum Forums Featured Clients September 2006 – ackley-uniforms.com

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    Website: http://www.ackley-uniforms.com/

    Description: Ackley Uniforms was founded in 1933 as a manufacturer and brick/mortar retailer of medical uniforms, lab coats and similar apparel. Ackley Uniforms was perhaps the web’s first uniform company, having had an Internet presence since 1993. The company’s president, Jeff Singer, handles most of the online chores himself and considers his website a hobby that became nicely profitable. The current site, Ackley-Uniforms.com, has utilized a shopping cart since 2000. The company is headquartered in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.

    Focus of newsletter: This month’s newsletter talks about Search Engine Optimization. Ackley-Uniforms.com dates back to the Golden Age of search engine optimization, before pay-per-click, when well constructed sites could thrive on free traffic alone. While PPC has eliminated most free traffic, it is still easy for a site to rank first for many two and three word search phrases. ShopSite’s static pages and simple URL format are very search engine friendly. In order to maximize search engine placement, Ackley uses fairly long, keyword-rich product descriptions. More Information page file names are carefully chosen as well. Each page also uses unique title, keyword and description tags. Ackley does pay for some web advertising on Google and Overture, and employs a limited affiliate network.

    Technologies used: Selling uniforms online requires an advanced cart system that can handle an array of product options, as prices can vary with size and color selections. This customization exceeds the ability of many shopping carts, but ShopSite handles demanding apparel applications nicely, including custom embroidery options. In 2004, the ackley-uniforms.com website converted to ShopSite as its shopping cart solution, because the current solution was not working out well. The original site was already ranked highly in search engines, so ShopSite’s Order Anywhere buttons were added to the existing site in order to commerce enable it using ShopSite as the cart, while still maintaining rankings. More sophisticated ShopSite features such as customer registration and product search were gradually added. The latest incarnation is a mixture of old pages using Order Anywhere Buttons and new template-based ShopSite version 8.1 generated pages. Custom templates are used for all functions, from product search to checkout.

    LexiConn’s new (and free) Search Statistics Module has also been added to the website. This module reveals the products that customers are searching for in the site’s keyword text search box. Ackley has added several products due to information provided by that module. “Sometimes they search for products we don’t carry or haven’t even thought of stocking,” said Singer.

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