Start actually selling from your website

[UrbelT]

Lets face it, the most common problem for people working at home is actually selling the products they thought would sell fine. Most people start a website business with the thought that I can do this, this shouldn�t be too hard, financial freedom is just around the corner, and once they get it started, and up and running they see little to no results� It�s happened to me, and most everyone who starts an online business. Yes 90% of businesses fail, but yours does not have to be one of them. I will explain in this article how to market your site correctly and get real results.

First of all, lets analyze your Page Rank, after all this is one of the most important things that will control how much traffic you get. If don�t have the Google toolbar yet, download it at: http://toolbar.google.com/. It will show you the page rank of sites you are at, including yours. Ok, now that you have the toolbar, load up your website and check your PageRank (hold your mouse over the green bar in the middle of the toolbar). If your PR (PageRank) is 0-3 then you need to raise it before going on any further. The next section will talk a little more about PR and how to raise it, if you have 3-8 PR you should still read it, even though you may already know most of it.

PageRank is how search engines like Google consider the importance of your website. The page rank is calculated by how many inbound links your website has, basically how many other websites say yours is important and how important are those websites themselves. So lets say a site with a PR of 4 has a link to your site. Google will see this next time it crawls and set your PR to either a 3 or a 2. If you have 5 or 6 PR4 sites linking back to you, you will probably get a 3 or even a 4 yourself�

So, how do you get PR? Well, if you haven�t caught on yet, its links. Sites linking to your site. How do you get sites to link with you? Link exchanges. Create a links directory if you don�t have one yet on your site. Now search for sites that have related content to your site. It is important to have links coming in from related traffic areas. For example, if you have a scooter website, you can perhaps trade links with a helmet safety website, or something along those lines. Try to keep the amount of links going out of your site to under 20. Once you have over 20 you start get penalized. So, find sites that either have link exchange forms or contact e-mail addresses and either fill out the form, or send the Webmaster an e-mail, explaining why it will be mutually beneficial to exchange links between your two sites. Spend as much time on this as possible if your site has a low PR right now. If you start getting close to the 20 mark, its time to start removing some of the low pr sites that are linking to you, and replacing them with higher ones.

Now that we�ve got the basics of PR out of the way, lets go into picking where your site will end up on searches. This is where your PR comes in to be most important, as search engines decide where to put you compared to other sites in their directories. The most important sites come up first, and the least important ones last. Your goal, of course is to either come up on the first page, or first in general. So how do we do it?

This is where most people go wrong, lets for example go back to the scooter website. They launch their scooter website, and then put the keywords they want to appear as to Scooter. Now with a PR of even 4 or 5, you will be lost in the 20th page somewhere with the keyword Scooter so that is useless. Instead lets figure out what people search for related to your site first. Lets go to a site that says what people searched for by month in Yahoo. This should give us a good idea of what keywords work and which don�t. Got to this site: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Here you can type in scooters. The first result shows that 194,902 people searched for Scooter in Nov 2004. So lets search for Scooter in Google. Now the results we get are all page rank between 5 and 7. The first site is a page rank of 5 but moves you to a different page on their site, which has a Page rank of 3. The next link is Segway, which has a PR of 7, 2 points higher then the first, but yet its still under it. I will explain why a little later on. Either way, all the sites on the first page are between 5 PR and 7 PR. So if you have a 6 PR then you are safe to target this keyword. But as 99% of us have between a 2 and a 5 PR we need to find a different spot, so lets go back to the keyword suggestion tool. Now as we go down the list we see cheap gas scooter which returns results in Google between PR 3 and PR 5. If you are a PR 4 or PR 5 site this can one of your targeted keywords. Now as we get to the bottom of the list gas power scooter returns lots of sites with 0-2 PR. If you are in the 2PR range then this is a good place to start. You can do this for 3-5 different keywords that you feel your site fits, the next section will explain how to get your site to appear first on these keywords.

So, now that you have your target keywords picked out, time to start applying them to your website. One of the most valuable places to put these keywords is your Title. This can be accessed by editing your websites code and finding the Area. So lets say you wanted to target the 860 people a month that search for �gas power scooter�. Lets change your website title to: �Gas Power Scooters at Wholesale Prices� or if you have 2 keywords put them both in �Gas Power and Electric Scooters At Low Prices�. Keep your title short though, Google will cut off the end if its too long and those keywords will not be seen.

Now lets apply more Keyword triggering things in your website. Place each keyword between 5-15 times on your websites page. For example, write a paragraph that says �If your looking for gas power scooters, you have come to the right place. We offer a large selection of scooters at low prices, whether its gas or electric�� Gas is already used twice, scooters is used twice, and electric is used once. Etc�

Once you are done with the content of the pages, lets do some back end stuff. First of all, your HTML code should have ALT tags in your images. It helps to put keywords in your ALT TAGS too. If you are not sure what this is, do a search for image alt tags. Next, if you get a chance make some of the keywords bold with the tag in HTML. It adds a little value to do that as well. And lastly use keywords in link text (example: Gas Power Scooter That would use Gas Power Scooter as link text and also add value to the keyword.

Ok so now we�ve got the basics of PR and Keyword Optimization down. There is just one more thing�

Sitemap! Use a sitemap on your site. A sitemap is a page that links to every other page on the site. This is useful incase someone links to a different section of your site, the PR can still trickle down to your main site. For example, You have: http://www.yoursite.com/page2.htm and 10 people link to page2.htm on your site because it has valuable info, this will not raise the PR of yoursite.com itself, so if you have a sitemap, it will raise the PR of each page on your site, not just Page2.htm

This article covers the basics of PageRank and Keyword Selection and Optimization.

Author: Alexi Kerbel
Homepage: http://www.StoreFrontX.com

[kdipressi]

I have to say...I agree with you regarding linking and I agree with you regarding keywords, however, I do not agree with you regarding PageRank.

Page Rank was designed to show the importance of websites...but it is failing greatly. And links are not the only thing that affects PR...content does as well.

I have seen sites with few links, if any and little content have good PR and sites that are loaded with content and have hundreds of links have very low PR. PR is just not as reliable as it used to be. I have had many disucssions with people on PR and the consensus has been to get rid of the google bar and not worry about PR.

Another reason PR is not reliable...do you check it often? I mean hourly, daily, even every few minutes. One minute you can have a PR of 4 and 10 minutes later it is down to PR 2. An hour later it's up to PR 5...PR is just to inconsistent!!!

[UrbelT]

I understand what you are talking about, but is important to understand that there are 2 forms of PR. Actual PR (which is updated daily for any page PR4 and higher, monthly for 0-2PR, and I believe weekly for PR3) and visible PR which is updated quarterly. Visible PR is the PR that is shown in your google toolbar. Yes you can have a high PR with no backlinks (In google type: link:http://www.onceuponawallart.com) and actually go to: http://www.onceuponawallart.com, its shown as a PR2! I believe the reason this site gets a PR is its keyword contents. Notice at the bottom the list of Keywords.

Of course no one, except people inside google, know exactly how often PR and Visible PR are updated, since its googles secrets. But from the research i've done these numbers seem to be most accurate.

Either way, if you follow my article you will still be going in the correct direction... I just use PR for something to follow along, where are your standings at the moment... etc..

I like input, keep it coming...

-UrbelT

[Flipper]

I feel that the PR is good information and appreciate it UrbelT. I didn't know about it until now and it's one extra thing to add to my site to help increase traffic. So, thanks for the article.

I was also happy to hear kdipressi just for the sake of someone else putting their two cents in!

So, thanks to both of you!

[DanPhx]

Google says there are over 100 measurements that go into deciding the order of search results.

The members of the "SEO Choir" singing the "Page Rank Song" are making hay on just the simplest of factors that can easily be understood - that's why they are repeated over and over - and that's usually all they know because they read it from somewhere else.

While being found *is* the #1 problem for any website,
the #2 problem is getting people back.

What has the web done for anyone there except create what I call the "burden of return" ?

Think about it, every website owner says to their audience,

"If you want to benefit from what I have, you must
1) remember my address
2) take the time
3) make the effort to return
over and over."

"When I publish new content, you must click enough to FIND it, IF you eventually come back, and who knows how OLD it'll be by then."

Seems pretty arrogant to me.

It was "sufficient" in the web's earlier years when it was impressive that anyone had a website. That hasn't been true in years.

Would a marriage last long if the communication policy adopted by either spouse modeled the web's, "come and get it" paradigm?
Nawww.

Email newsletter you say? And add to the several hundred emails received per week? Your message is one of hundreds they receive (which all go to the exact same place) - and your brand and message is special in their "inbox" exactly how?
Nawww.

After your audience wades past the spam and viruses, your email gets you only a few minutes of eyeball time, then it's deleted. Nothing special about email newsletters - *millions* doing the same thing.

The web and email are terrible ways to have an ongoing relationship with an audience online. The "burden of return" is too great and squarely on the shoulders of the surfer/audience/customer.


Oh.. and by the way, *everytime* google wakes up and changes their rules (internal, secret ones and external, public ones) a good portion of the "conventional wisdom" about "PR" and SEO found on old pages will be ... you guessed it... old news.

Whoops.

I believe being found is important... but without a better way to *keep* people, the chances of anyone getting big without a *huge* advertising budget, are about zero.

eBay spends over $100,000,000 per year getting people to and back to their website. And they are eBay!!! eBay has an offering so compelling that some are actually addicted.

The rest of us... well, we dance around on the head of the web pin, because others say we should (we read it from one of the millions drunk on the koolaid), just happy if we get 0.000000001 % of the action.