Page 233 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 4

On social media Web sites, followers of a particular company’s discussion activity are
called fans.
In absolute numbers, these metrics can be hard to interpret; however, monitoring
changes in the metrics can provide a readily available measure of the success of specific
initiatives. For example, Extreme Pizza distributed a wave of coupon promotions through
208 a combined Facebook/Twitter campaign. Their combined number of associated individuals
(sometimes called collectively a fan base) increased by almost 60 percent in 10 days. The
company interpreted this as a major success. Using multiple social media outlets (such as
Extreme Pizza did in this example) is a good strategy in a viral marketing campaign
because different customers will favor different social media sites and technologies.

SEARCH ENGINE POSITIONING AND
DOMAI N NAMES

Potential customers find Web sites in many different ways. Some site visitors are referred
by a friend or click a link on a referring Web site. Others are referred by an affiliate
marketing partner of the site. Some see the site’s URL in a print advertisement or on
television. Others arrive unintentionally after typing a URL that is similar to the
company’s name. But many site visitors are directed to the site by a search engine or
directory Web site.

Search Engines and Web Directories
A search engine is a Web site that helps people find things on the Web. Search engines
contain three major parts. The first part, called a spider,a crawler,ora robot (or simply
bot), is a program that automatically searches the Web to find Web pages that might be
interesting to people. When the spider finds Web pages that might interest search engine
site visitors, it collects the URL of the page and information contained on the page. This
information might include the page’s title, keywords included in the page’s text, and
information about other pages on that Web site. In addition to words that appear on the
Web page, Web site designers can specify additional keywords in the page that are hidden
from the view of Web site visitors but that are visible to spiders. These keywords are
enclosed in an HTML tag set called meta tags. The word meta is used for this tag set to
indicate that the keywords describe the content of a Web page and are not themselves
part of the content.
The spider returns this information to the second part of the search engine to be
stored. The storage element of a search engine is called its index or database. The index
checks to see if information about the Web page is already stored. If it is, it compares the
stored information to the new information and determines whether to update the page
information. The index is designed to allow fast searches of its very large amount of stored
information.
The third part of the search engine is the search utility. Visitors to the search engine
site provide search terms, and the search utility takes those terms and finds entries for
Web pages in its index that match those search terms. The search utility is a program that
creates a Web page that is a list of links to URLs that the search engine has found in its

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