WEBS: America’s Yarn Store Casts On Search-Engine Success with SLI Systems

Hosted Provider’s Site Search and User-generated SEO Solutions Bring Flexible Merchandising, and Draw More Customers Through Improved Google Visibility for Yarn and Knitting Essentials Retailer

CUPERTINO, CA – October 28, 2008 – For online retailers with thousands of unique products - like yarn and kitting supplies seller WEBS (www.yarn.com) - effective and fast site search is essential for helping customers zero in on the products they want, and for raising the profile of the company on leading search engines. After WEBS chose SLI Systems (www.sli-systems.com), a provider of on-demand, intelligent search services for Internet and e-commerce sites, the search engine visibility of its yarn and knitting essentials site increased dramatically, and new customer numbers and search-related revenue have risen as well.

The family-owned WEBS business realized that it needed more sophisticated site search when it re-launched its e-commerce site in mid-2006. At that time, WEBS was using a proprietary search solution provided by its Web site developer.

“When we relaunched the site, we went into Google hell – we lost all of our organic search results,” said Steve Elkins, president and owner of WEBS. “We have 15,000 SKUs, but if you went to Google to search for our products, nothing would come up.” Because the new site used Javascript-driven menus, search engines could no longer “crawl” the site for data.

Employees weren’t any happier with the existing site search. “For instance, someone would look on our site for a weaving yarn – one of our core products - and it would come up last in the search results,” said Elkins. “Since it wasn’t useful, we wouldn’t use the search internally – and when your own employees don’t use search, you know it doesn’t work.”

Elkins knew he needed an intuitive site search that would be better able to match search terms to the items that users actually clicked on. In addition, Elkins needed the ability to customize search results and merchandise various products to match sales and promotions when needed. Finally, since the company has just a single IT staffer, Elkins wanted site search that would be easy to implement and would be hosted on the search vendor’s servers for optimal performance.

Based on feedback about SLI Systems from other retailers attending the Internet Retailer conference in 2006, Elkins requested a demo of SLI’s Learning Search site search and Site Champion user-generated search engine optimization solutions. “SLI was the only vendor we considered,” said Elkins. “It was an unbelievably easy implementation – they have been our speediest and most responsive vendor by far.”

With Learning Search and Site Champion in place, WEBS has improved search engine visibility and employee productivity, and is drawing new customers who find out about the site via search engines. “Thanks to SLI, we now show up on the first page of Google results,” said Elkins. “About five percent of our business is coming from new customers who have found us from a search engine, and we’re seeing an uptick in sales.”

Learning Search and Site Champion have also made it easier for WEBS employees to find and market products. “Our employee productivity is improved, since we can find products much faster,” said Elkins. The company can also use SLI search to create special landing pages for groups of products, and can direct recipients of WEBS marketing e-mails to these pages by individual URLs. In addition, Site Champion pages are designed to be search engine-friendly, and can therefore be read easily by search engine crawlers.

Besides all of these other benefits, SLI helped connect WEBS with one of its partners, e-commerce solutions provider WebLinc, to develop a new site and storefront for WEBS. “The SLI relationship has certainly paid for itself many times over,” said Elkins.

About Learning Search and Site Champion

Based on SLI’s patented “Learning Search” intelligent search technology , the company’s hosted site search and user-generated SEO solutions “learn” from user behavior by tracking the search terms people use on a retailer’s site and the resulting items they click on. SLI’s solutions improve the user experience for Web site visitors and ensure the products people are searching for show up in the right searches - whether those searches are conducted on their own sites or on a Web search engine like Google.

More than 300 sites use SLI Systems’ hosted search offerings, including ULTA, Smith & Hawken, FTD, TravelChannel.com and Vermont Teddy Bear, among others.

About SLI Systems

SLI Systems is the developer of learning-based search and navigation technology for corporate Internet sites, e-commerce destinations and consumer Internet portals that Searches, Learns and Improves the user experience. SLI Systems’ hosted site search and automated SEO solutions empower businesses to enhance customer satisfaction while increasing sales, reducing costs and yielding valuable customer information. Unlike traditional search software, SLI Systems’ patented technology continuously “learns” from the behavior of visitors over time to deliver more relevant results. SLI Systems is a privately held company, with offices in Silicon Valley, London, and Christchurch, New Zealand. For more information, visit www.sli-systems.com, or see the company’s blog.