Guide To Promoting Your Shop On The Web And Get Traffic

Guide To Promoting Your Shop On The Web And Get Traffic

Getting your website up on the Web is just the first step. Promoting your new site is at least as important as developing the site. We have put together this guide to provide quilters and quilt businesses with the information you need a guide to promoting your shop on the web and get traffic.

Introduction to Search Engines and Directories: 

Many of the visitors to your website are directed to your site by one of the major search engines and directories. Getting your site listed, and well-placed, on as many of the major search engines and directories as possible is a critical task for the new site owner.

Search Engines

Search engines use crawlers to travel around the web locating all of the websites they can find. The websites found by the crawler are placed into the search engine's index which contains a copy of every web page found by the crawler. The search engine uses proprietary software to sort through the huge index every time a user makes a search request. Each search engine's software uses different criteria to rank the hundreds or thousands of pages that have some relevance to the terms used in the search request. The search engine presents its results to the person conducting the search in rank order with the most relevant web pages listed first.

You usually don't have to submit your site to a search engine to get listed in it, provided there are links from other listed sites pointing to your site. However, many search engines have a web page that allows you to submit your site, usually for free, if you feel a need to take an active role. We do not recommend using any of the services that offer to list your website on hundreds of search engines. The only search engines of importance to you are the biggest ones. Most likely all you'll get from the services that offer you listings on hundreds or search engines is an unnecessary hole in your pocketbook and spam in your e-mailbox.

Directories

Directories are populated via human decision-makers. Directories are organized into main categories and many branching subcategories. To place a website into a directory, you must first determine the category in the directory that is most relevant in your site (e.g. Arts:Crafts:Quilting: Patterns). Then submit your site providing the directory with your URL (e.g. www.yoursite.com), a title, and a short description. A human reviewer will go to your site and, using the directories own criteria, decide whether or not to place your site into the directory. Some directories charge a fee to be listed while others are free.

Combination Search Engines and Directories

Many of the major search engines and directories actually provide hybrid results to searchers. Although Google is best known as a major search engine it also has a categorized directory you can use. Although Yahoo was once known primarily as a directory, it now has its own popular search.

Major Search Engines and Directories

Just a few of the major search engines and directories account for a large percentage of the searches conducted on the Web. The biggest players, by far, are:

• Google (www.google.com, Google's search engine, and directory)
• Yahoo (www.yahoo.com, a search engine, and directory)
• MSN (search.msn.com)

The Open Directory (www.dmoz.org) is a volunteer-operated directory that is an important place to list your website. Listings are free, though it can take a long time to get your site listed.

The popularity of different search engines and directories may increase or decrease over time. An excellent resource for finding out about and keeping track of the different search engines and directories is www.searchenginewatch.com

Quilting Specialty Directories

There are also a number of directories that are operated just for quilting or crafting sites, such as the directory of quiet professionals. Use the general search engines and directories listed above to locate these specialty directories and sign up your site.

Optimizing Your Web Pages for the Search Engines

The ranking your pages are given by the search engines is determined by a specific algorithm (like a formula). Although each search engine has its own proprietary algorithm, there are some general design principles you should use in designing web pages that will improve how your pages rank on the search engines.

Selecting Key Phrases

The first step in optimizing a web page for the search engines is to figure out what key phrases you want your page to emphasize (e.g. quilt shop). When people are conducting web searches they enter a keyword or phrase into the search engine and the search engine pulls up what it considers to be the most relevant sites for that word or phrase. What are the search phrases that you want your web pages to show up for?

In selecting key phrases you want to pick phrases that your prospective customers would be likely to use to search for a business like yours. However, you don't want to select a key phrase that has also been used by a huge number of your competitors.

For example, you probably wouldn't want to have your primary key phrase be "quilt". Although many, many searches are conducted each day for the word "quilt" there are also thousands and thousands of websites that come up in any search done for that keyword. What are your chances of being one of the top 10 or 20 sites listed in a search engine out of 30 or 40 thousand competing quilting sites? It is best to focus on fairly specific key phrases rather than single keywords.

There are a number of tools available on the Web to help you select key phrases. The Overture search engine allows you to query its search engine about the popularity of any key phrase. Go to http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion to see how many searches have been conducted over the past month for a key phrase you are considering. You probably won't want to select key phrases that have very few searches done, nor will you want to select key phrases that generate thousands upon thousands of searches.

Another useful tool that gives you an estimate of both the number of searches and the number of competing for websites for a given key phrase is available at WordTracker. WordTracker provides this information for a very low fee and has a free trial also. It's well worth checking out their free offer, at least. If you do use WordTracker's service what you want to find is key phrases that are popular, but that have relatively few sites competing for them.

Google has recently revised the keyword tool they provide businesses using Google's pay per click advertising option. As part of the revision, they've made the tool available for anyone to use for free. Trying out Google's tool is well worth your time. Access it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. The tool will give you information on a relative quantity of searches on Google for a given key phrase and also the degree of competition for the term. The competition information reflects competition among advertisers for the key phrase, but this information gives you a good clue about competition for their unpaid search results as well.

You will probably want to customize each of your web pages for different key phrases. For example, if you have a shop selling quilt kits, patterns and fabric, customize your home page for the key phrases quilt shop, Florida quilt shop, online Miami Florida quilt shop. Then customize a catalog page focusing on quilt kits for the key phrases quilt kits, baby quilt kits, queen size quilt kits. And so on for the patterns page and the fabrics page and guide to promoting your shop on the web.

Page Design

Once you have settled on your key phrases, you'll want to make sure that the key phrases you have selected for a given web page appear a number of times on that page. Don't go overboard with this to the point of creating meaningless text, but do make sure the phrases repeat on the page. Some search engines will rank your page more highly if the key phrase is repeated more times on the page. However, if you overdo it, some search engines may penalize you for what it considers a spam attempt (an attempt to fool it). Because each search engine has its own rules, there's no way to know where exactly you cross over the line from having a nice high number of repeats and into being penalized for spam.

Some search engines will give you a higher ranking if your key phrases appear near the top of the page (in some cases the first 200 characters), or if they appear in larger type, or inside a major heading HTML tag. On some search engines, it may help your ranking to include your key phrases inside HTML comments, or HTML ALT tags (used to indicate what text should appear in place of a graphic on browsers that do not show graphics). Some web developers have resorted to including invisible text on their web pages (text the same color as the background), but most search engines are wise to that strategy and consider it spam. If a search engine believes your site is using what it considers illegal techniques, it will penalize you, possibly even removing your site from its index.

Designing your web pages can get a bit tricky once you start taking into account how the search engines will interpret your pages.

For example, how do you arrange to include your key phrases near the top of your web pages if, for appearance's sake, you need to have your logo and/or other graphics at the top of your page? What if you've finally figured out that using tables is a great way to help you lay out your web pages, but the use of the table also has the effect of moving your text further down on the page? What if you really like using frames, but now realize that most of the search engines are not very good at reading the content of frames-based pages. There are no easy answers to these design issues. All you can do is design the best pages you can while simultaneously optimizing the page for the search engines.

Meta Tags and Title

There are several lines of HTML coding that can be advantageous to include in the heading area of each of your web pages. The content of your actual web page is specified within the HTML tags. However, every web page has a heading section that precedes the body section of the page. Many search engines will look at three particular lines of code if they appear in the heading area. A sample of these three lines is given below:


The META keywords tag allows you to specify a long (up to 1000 characters) list of keywords for your web page. In creating this list, you will want to repeat your key phrases, but also limit the number of repetitions to avoid spamming. There are no hard and fast rules as to what constitutes too many repetitions. An important trick is to embed key phrases in larger key phrases. For example, quilt shop is one key phrase, as is Florida quilt shop, as is Miami Florida quilt shop, as is online Miami Florida quilt shop. Thus, the example above is getting a lot of mileage out of one appearance of the term quilt shop. The META keywords tag is no longer used by most search engines so there is no need to spend a lot of time and effort developing this tag.

The META description tag allows you to specify a 200 character or less description of your web page. Some of the search engines will use this description, if you have included it, as the description shown in your search engine listing. As with the META keyword tag, include, but don't overuse, your key phrases in the description. For the description, tag makes sure that the description is accurate and enticing to prospective customers who will read it. You want the description to generate click-throughs to your site.

The TITLE tag appears in the title bar at the top of the browser window. Thus, the people visiting your site will see the title you specify. In addition, the search engines consider the TITLE tag very important in ranking your page for key phrases. You will want to work one or more of your key phrases into the TITLE tag, preferably at the beginning. Keep the title meaningful and appealing.

If you are creating a website yourself and don't know HTML, don't panic about the thought of these three tags. Check the software you are using to create your site to see if it gives you an option for adding the tags without actually diving into the HTML yourself. If not, then try copying and pasting the tags we've used as an example of the HTML code for your web pages. Your software will have already generated the tags so don't copy those. Just paste the three tags above the tag on your page. Then substitute your keywords, description, and title for the ones we wrote. Save the page and you should be fine.

Getting Links to your Web Site

In determining what ranking to give a web page most search engines rely heavily on analyzing the links that lead to the page. It is possible to have an extremely well-optimized web page and still receive low rankings from many search engines because there are not any links leading to the site. In fact, if there are no links leading into your site the search engines will not be able to even find your site (except possibly through your proposing the site to them via an add URL facility, if they have one).

Registering your site with directories such as Yahoo, other general directories, and some of the quilt-related directories will provide you with some links, but you will have to take the time to locate lots of additional links to your site. One primary way to acquire links to your site is to offer to exchange links with other sites. You will want to find quilt-related sites that have a reasonably high ranking on top search engines. The search engines do not consider all links as equal and will give your site a higher ranking for having links from sites that 1) share a focus with your site (e.g. quilting) and 2) that have a high search engine ranking.

To improve your ranking on a given search engine do a search on that engine for one of the key phrases you are targeting. Now go and look at the sites that came up in the search results. Is this a site you would like to exchange links with? Do you like the way it looks? Does it have a links page? If you would like to link to this site, then look for a contact page on the site or an email address. Write down the email address and the URL for the site.

At this point, you can either contact the other site and ask for a link exchange or you can first add a link to their site on your links page and then contact them. You may get more positive responses if you first add your link. On the other hand, if you add your link before you contact the other site, you'll end up having to remove some links to sites that do not respond to you.

Try and include a description of the other site with your link to them. The search engines frown on pages that are composed of nothing but links, so make sure that your links page has additional text on it in the form of these site descriptions. Try and get your link exchange partners to include a description of your site too. Include your best key phrases in the description of your site as this will be helpful with your search engine rankings. Also, make sure that at least one, preferably more, of your major key phrases is included in the text that composes the actual hyperlink leading back into your site from the site of your link partner. This hyperlink text is currently considered very important by the search engines.

When contacting another site for a link exchange, your email should say something about the site you are contacting, at least giving their URL. Tell them a little bit about your site and why you think their visitors would appreciate having the connection to your site available. Don't go overboard here and give a big promotional rap. Respectfully ask if they would be willing to provide you with a link from their site to yours. Don't be afraid to ask a second time.

The links you add to your site will not especially benefit you with the search engines, though your visitors may appreciate the extra links. The links coming into your site will benefit you with the search engines plus they may provide you with additional traffic from your link partners.

Getting links is a lot of work. But, if you want to rank well in the search engines without spending a lot of advertising money you will need to get the links.

If you can find other ways to get links from other sites, by all means, do. If you can think of content you can add to your site that would make other sites want to link to your site, then, by all means, add this content. Professional search engine optimizers call this "link bait" and it is an excellent way to get links without having to do a link exchange - if you can come up with a great idea and find a way that other sites will know that your great content is there on your website.