Online party store Shindigz.com doubled traffic on its Web site over the last year using search engine optimization (SEO). Better still, the party supplier is so impressed with the strong leads it gets by submitting keywords to a dozen or so search engines it has stopped using banner ads.

Shindigz, one of four sites run by 77-year-old parent Stumps (www.stumpsparty.com) in South Whitley, IN, began submitting keywords through trusted feeds in February 2002. Traffic increased 20% within two months. Between July 2002 and July 2003, prospects arriving at the site to research or buy party supplies rose 100%. And online sales rose from 10% of total sales when the trusted feed program started to 15% by this July.

“Search engine optimization brings in a quality customer that I can then convert to being a recipient of our [relationship management] e-mails,” says Jacquie Downey, senior marketing manager at Stumps. “I don't want to bring in 20 million people — I want to bring in the quality prospects.”

An XML trusted feed is a separate channel created to present specific keywords to search engines. A trusted feed is literally a very detailed spreadsheet of information that includes an overview of the content on a marketer's site and the content the marketer wants to appear on the search engines. XML stands for extensible markup language — the language that's used to write the spreadsheet.

The idea is that when a potential customer types in a keyword — say, “party supplies” — at a search engine, www.shindigz.com appears as one of the top search results.

A position isn't guaranteed, as it would be if Shindigz paid for placement. “But the benefit of the XML feed is we are able to spoon-feed each engine that has a feed very specific information, which includes keyword, descriptive text and destination page within the Web site,” says Andrew Wetzler, president of MoreVisibility.com, which handles Stumps' feed program. “And that takes away the need for the search engine to spider the entire Web site itself.”

Plus, search engine spiders typically have a hard time crawling catalog sites like Shindigz's, which create Web sites on the fly in response to visitors' search requests. That problem is solved with trusted feeds — the spiders crawl those instead.

Marketers like trusted feeds because they deliver customers who are truly in the market for what the Web site offers.

And feeds are more cost-effective than paid placement. A marketer pays each time a unique visitor clicks through to his Web site via the XML feed,” Wetzler says from his Boca Raton, FL headquarters.

Downey submits 40 keywords a month to MoreVisibility for all Stumps' sites. Some are evergreens like “party supplies.” But she alters other keywords based on a report she gets from WebTrends, which analyzes which keywords people prefer. She could submit more, but 40 is a good number to test.

Additional keywords appear seasonally. When the Christmas catalog is mailed in August, Downey will submit Christmas-oriented keywords, too.

MoreVisibility helps trim and embellish keywords to better target them. For example, “party supplies” performs well most of the time even though every party store uses it, Downey says. But “Halloween party ideas” or “luau party supplies” work harder because of their narrower reach. These terms send searchers to the precise part of the site they seek.

“If a term is too broad, it brings too much traffic that's not quality — all the party dudes of the world show up looking for things we don't carry,” Downey explains.

The price for MoreVisibility's services? About $800 a month.

The quarterly Shindigz catalog reaches 2.5 million people. About 20% of sales come from the Web site. Affiliate marketing through Commission Junction is the top online prospecting tool. But SEO — still so new to Stumps — is being eyed closely.

“We'll evaluate for 2004 and see what area of our marketing we want to spend money on,” Downey says.