Let the Backlinking Begin!

Since I've gone through the process of optimizing my store for the search engines, it's now time to start building backlinks. Soggy hooked me up with a guy on the BANS forum who has a social bookmarking service. So far my pages have be reindexed as well as the front page of the store. Good news. Also, organic clicks are beginning to come in as well. I expect to keep rising in the SERPS as the backlinks increase. I realize that I'm in a tough niche and have been considering doing some ppc to increase targeted traffic. That's just a thought. Lately I've been reading up on SEO and PPC. I bought Perry Marshalls Ultimate Guide to Adwords and I'm hoping it gets here today. The prospect of getting targeted traffic to the store for just a few cents a click is tempting. However I do see alot of other competition in my niche doing the same thing. These are important lessons that I can't begin to put a price on. My biggest wish was that I identified a less competitive niche to go after. Fortunately I've got a few in mind and will run these past Soggy. He's turning out to be a great mentor. Check him out at Soggy's Blog
I thought that being in IT would give me an advantage in Internet marketing but it doesn't. The thought process is different, but once you learn the process, it's pretty straightforward. The hard part is making sure you're doing the right thing and getting good advice. There's alot of shitty advice in the BANS forums, one reason why I haven't been there in awhile. Like my mom says, you can't eat from everyone's kitchen. Words to live by..........

Slow going

It's been slow going updating the store pages. mainly because I don't want to write shit, but original content is key for this portion of the exercise. It also led me to a revelation. I have too many store pages. My previous theory was the more pages the better, kinda like the big store theory. But in retail sales are tracked per sq ft meaning you've got to make money on every inch to the store in order to pay expenses and make a profit. Well in the case of BANS, you only need a few high traffic "aisles" aka store pages. By optimizing those and getting organic search results it can push your profits upward. Plus it's just a flat out pain in the ass to have to write content for 20some pages. BUT its the path I'm walking. I'll go ahead and finish it today so I can move on to the next phase of the project and that's getting those all important backlinks.

More work on the Niche Store

The work continues on my BANS. Alot's been accomplished over the past week, yet there's still more. Last week, I rebuilt the outer shell of the store, changed the template, optimized each page for my keywords and set the store pages up to reflect the content in the link. Meaning, when you go to the batteries page you get - yep you guessed it Batteries. Now my mission is to write a short paragraph or 2 for each store page keyword optimized describing what can be found on that page and giving some background information. This is tedious work, but once it's done it's done.
This past week I haven't done much work on the store as I haven't gotten much rest due to job duties and after work obligations. So after getting home at 10 pm after having been gone since 7:30, I basically don't feel like doing shit. And I haven't. I'm making up for that today. Once this is done, the next task will be submitting to the directories. Now truth be told, I'm not hand submitting these, I'm going with a company to do it for me. It's too tedious and not worth my time. I'm a big believer in outsourcing low $$$ projects in your business to others so you won't get bogged down in the details. so I'll probably go with submitedge. I've used them before and they're pretty good. After that's done it'll be good to get some backlinks, and next up for that will be articles for backlinks. Well, I have about 7 more store pages to do a writeup for so it's back to that work. Enjoy your Sunday.

Globat support sucks ass!

I'd been using domainsarefree to register my domains at 3.99 a pop. I figured I'd save a few bucks. But now it's causing me headaches as they cancelled one of my accounts and of course no one knows why, they keep asking for my credit card number to activate it.
Can you believe this shit? They cancel it and need my cc number to activate an account they hosed. Not only that, it's damn near impossible to get anyone on the phone. I was just on hold for 20 minutes and the line mysteriously disconnected. Trust and believe I will be using godaddy or some other registrar in the future. And it's not like I'm using them for hosting, I'm with hostgator and they rock. I'm going to see about getting a discount with them as I plan on registering another 30-40 domains this year. And I had planned to register one for my next BANS this week. Not with these numbskulls!

Do yourself a favor, DON'T fool with these clowns. Use another registrar, or go with hostgator for registration and Hostgator for hosting

Links are SEO'd - hopefully

This SEO stuff is taking longer than I expected. It's also more work too, but the rewards will pay off. It's already paying off in lessons learned. I've had more than a few aha moments while doing this. In the short term, I'm seeing more visitors in the pays 3 days than the site's seen in any 3 month period, and I'm talking all of my BANS, all 4 of them. I'm tempted to log into epn (eBay partner network) to see how many clicks and bids this store's gotten. But I'm going to hold off and keep working on making this into a high traffic site. I've emailed soggy for him to check it out and see if I've overlooked anything.

Lessons Learned: a well thought out keyword strategy can speed SEO along drastically. Link Descriptions are VERY important as are link names. This improves your score in the eyes of the ever so present search engines. Having a mentor, the right mentor/coach even in an informal capacity is a necessity to anyone serious about business. In my opinion you can't afford not to have one.

More SEO, of the link rewriting variety.

Tonight I'll be doing more keyword research and optimizing my site. I'll also be rewriting the descriptions. I expect this to take awhile. However it is encouraging to see the number of visitors increase. Although I have to take into account some of those visits are me and Soggy checking things out. Once it's more together I'll post the link to it. It's not quite ready for public consumption yet so hold your horses.

Soggy's got some slick templates at his blog too. I meant to post the link friday but forgot, here it is Soggy's Templates

Remember fellow BANS and future BANS owners. Change that default template ASAP!

No Store Page Left Behind

Last night I began the arduous task of customizing my store pages at HRS. Why, they weren't optimized and used the same site wide title tags which is a big no no. It's the sign of a thrown together plain jane out of the box BANS that'll make a whopping sum of not much. I did some keyword research and made some interesting discoveries along the way. And these lessons will be with me when I set up my next niche store. It's got to be keyword based on what people are actually searching for, not what I "think" they're searching for.
What I did was pick 3 keywords that were getting a good amount of searches, with avg competition and changed the title and description tags to match them. This took alot longer than I expected and was somewhat tedious, but the good news is, once it's done it's done. The next go round it'll be much much easier and will go faster.

Lessons: Thou shalt customize all niche store pages.
Thou shalt master keyword research and use tools to get it done faster.
**I will be renewing my subscription to NicheBot ASAP
Just what is nichebot you ask? It's a sweet keyword research tool that pulls from wordtracker and other databases and combines them into one interface. It's cost effective as you don't have to subscribe to the other services and it's VERY affordable.