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How to get More Traffic & Sell More!

This tutorial will be to help you get through some steps of getting more traffic to your store. More traffic means more Sales! I think we are all interested in More Sales!

Lots of us can build a website – but can we build a SUCCESSFUL website????
Ummmm let’s see>>>>>

Product

First we have to have good product at a fair price – now I didn’t say the cheapest price – I said fair price. Very important point.

Next I will assume you have a website built. Let’s go about optimizing that website.


Optimize - Keywords

This is very important.

My store is a Wrought Iron Home Décor store so I will use this store for all further dealings with this tutorial. If you would like to visit the website to see examples of what I did – please feel free to do so as we go along.


First you will need to get some good keywords for your site. There are many places to find these.
Let’s go to this website: (it’s Free)
http://www.nichebotclassic.com/#info

Since my site is about wrought iron I will type in the words “wrought iron” where you see the box labeled “keyword”. Then unless you have signed up (which I haven’t) then you will need to enter the security code as they show it to you and then hit the “Search” button.

Great – now scroll below – you will see a list of keywords that pertain to the keyword you typed in above.

You can see that they have broken it down to the number of times these keywords have been typed into the search engines recently. Of course you want the top keywords but what you may not know is that you could also do well using some of the keywords that are not at the top. Mix it up a bit – or better yet – find a way to use them all throughout your site on different pages.

So get some paper out and jot down these keywords or if you want you can copy and paste them to save some writing. Whichever you choose, just so that you get these keywords in front of you somewhere so that you can refer to them as you are building your site.

Let’s go on to the next step:



Your Home Page

Next you will want to work on your home page.

Your home page should include info that your site is about. Some of your highlighted products or services, maybe some specials or a special shipping price. Whatever you decide to put on your homepage – make sure you are using those keywords.

Use the keywords from the list you have in front of you. Pick maybe 10 of the words and or phrases and use those words and/or phrases around 3 to 5 times on your page. This is not as hard as it seems. Just start creating a paragraph about your site – Use the words in the paragraph where they fit naturally. Pretend you are telling your friend about the site. What would your friend need to know.

After you have created this paragraph about your site on your homepage then let’s take those keywords and turn the ones that you can into text links. These text links should point to other pages within your site. This is an important step so that when your page is found and indexed and crawled by the search engines – the crawlers will also follow these text links to the other pages on your site thus indexing more of your pages (which of course you will have fully optimized)

After you have created some of these text links you will now want to create a footer area on your pages. On the bottom of each of your pages create links to every page on your site. Your products page, your home page, your about us page, your links page – every page on your site. Again, the search crawlers will follow these links to better index all the pages on your site.

Next, since our web sites need to have navigation other than text links in paragraphs and footer links – I will assume you have some navigation tabs either along the left hand side or your site or along the top. Label these with your KEYWORDS whenever possible. See how many times you can use these keywords. You can sprinkle them all over your page naturally – in your footer, in your paragraph and in your navigation. You have created all this keyword rich home page and you have not spammed your keywords at all. Nice job!

Now – every page on your site needs to be optimized same as your home page. Every page is important. Give every page text links, navigation, footer links and keywords that pertain to that page.


Meta Tags

Once you have these things in place we will need to get a bit technical and we will need to insert some META TAGS into your source code. Each page needs to have these basic meta tags and they should pertain to the page you are building.

There are lots of meta tags out there but these are the most important.

Your Title Meta Tag
Your Description Meta Tag
Your Keyword Meta Tag
An h1 Meta Tag.
And a Robots Meta Tag


Check to make sure you have these meta tags – if you do GREAT – if you don’t you will need to learn how to insert them. I cannot go into all the details here because in this crazy world of building websites there are many many ways to add these tags. It all depends on what you are using to build your site.

And don’t forget – USE YOUR KEYWORDS IN YOUR META TAGS!

Make sure you have included a links page on your site. Linking with other sites and having them link back to you is a great way and an important step also in getting ranked on the search engines. Your links page should be neat and categorized so that your customers can easily find what they are interested in.



Check Out How You Are Doing

There are some great sites out there that will help you along your way as you are optimizing. One such site is

http://www.submitexpress.com/

You will be able to put in your website address and ask them to analyze your meta tags and more. Follow their suggestions if they seem to make sense to you and your site. You will love this!

Now that you have the basics – take a look at your site


Questions to Ask Yourself

Ask yourself these questions
1) Do I like the color?
2) Is my contact info easy to find?
3) Is my site easy to navigate?
4) Do my links work?
5) Do I have action words like BUY NOW or FREE SHIPPING?
6) Is the text easy to read?
7) Do I have pictures – people love pictures
8) Is this site interesting?

There are other questions you can think of to ask yourself – you can even visit some competitors’ sites and get a general idea of what is working for them. Do not copy their content – you will hurt you both by doing that. Search engines will see two duplicate sights and figure someone is trying to get away with something. You can, however, borrow some of what each competitor is doing. Pull what you like about each competitors site to make yours THE site with it all going on!

Well, by now you are well on your way to a great site. Let’s see what’s next.



Building Traffic

The steps you have taken above have greatly increased your chances of being seen. Now let’s go a few steps further.

You can do these things (and more) to build traffic to your store.

1) Pay Per Click – just pay attention to your budget- and be sure you are optimized before starting a pay per click campaign.

2) Trade links with other relevant sites. You will need in excess of 100 links – more is better. Relevant sites though – not just anyone. Make sure these sites are linking back to you also. Not every site should link back to you but you should be able to get over half of them to link back to you. Before asking someone to link back to your site, make sure you can give them the url of where they can find their link on your site.

3) Submit your site to relevant vertical portals, directories, newsletters etc. Wherever you think your presence would help someone.

4) Submit to Major Search Engines like yahoo, msn, google. Some people want to shy away from submitting their sites because they have been told that it is bad to submit your site. That the search engines will find you. That is all good but if you submit once there will not be a problem. Just don’t submit over and over and over. Once you see you have been indexed – submitting to a search engine will no longer be necessary.

5) Sign up for forums that you can be useful on. Do not spam them. Do not go in and start promoting your site. Go in and say hello and help out where people are asking questions – ask some questions of your own. Get the ball rolling. Lots of forums will allow you to put a link to your site(s) in your signature. If people like what you are saying- they will click on your link. That way you are not spamming but you are getting attention.

6) Start a blog – Put good useful info on your blog and create links in your blog to your website and/or your product or service. This shouldn’t look like an advertisement – but useful info. Sometimes people will put part of the info on the blog – enough to get attention and then have a link that says – to learn more click here –

7) Join some social networking groups like My Space, or ICQ – there are thousands throughout the internet. Find groups you can relate to. Go in and meet new people. Tell them what you are doing. Listen to what they are doing also. You never know when a new idea will pop into your head.

8) Watch the local papers in your area – Pay attention to special days that your community may be having. Like my site is about wrought iron – or about home décor in general. I could see an event for home décor coming up – you know they are going to advertise it and want to bring attention to it – the more the merrier – so submit your info to them. See if you can be included in some way.

9) Write articles about your special niche or about your website and submit them to local newspapers – or newspapers anywhere. If your article is well written and interesting – lots of times these editors are looking for content to fill up a page. They just may pick yours – for free!

10) Today the big push is on CREATE A VIDEO! I still am working on that one. Submit it to You Tube and other places that take video submission.

11) Create business cards, flyers, magnets for refrigerators – anything you can think of for advertising hand to hand. Always have something on you that you can hand to someone – just to help spread the word. How many times have you given out your phone number to someone you haven’t seen in a while or someone you just met? Why not give them that phone number written on your business card? Why not have free samples to hand out?

If you want a successful website you will need to make this your life. Be interested in what you are doing and let others know what a great thing you have. Don’t keep it to yourself.

There is so much to write on this subject but I think there is a lot here to get you well on your way. By the time you are this far into the process you have been at this for a few months or maybe even a year and throughout your time building your site you will find more things that you have learned on your journey. Keep a log of all that you have learned or all that you want to do or need to do. Keep it with you everyday to jot ideas into.

Most of all – HAVE FUN – ENJOY YOURSELF – LEAD BY EXAMPLE

If you are having fun – everyone will want to have fun also.

BEST OF LUCK TO YOU ALL!

Connie