As a recent website owner of www.cosmeticsfairy.co.uk, I thought I would write an article about how I set about marketing my site with all the resources involved in doing this, this is by no means a tutorial on “How to Do†but a guide to assist any new site owners to the world of web site marketing. All of this information and more is out there on forums and websites I am just trying to bring the basics together in one place. The first point I should make out is that I did not build my site myself I paid some one to build it for me I used www.vengavenga.com they were professional and produced me I site that performed above the brief they were given and the fee they charged. So with this in mind I will not be going into site construction improvements as part of this SEO exercise as I lack the knowledge to do so. The only pointers I can offer on site construction is keep the site user friendly (don’t over complicate it) make it simple to follow for both customers and robots, using plain text and a logical menu system along with a clean page layout. Time to get on with it. 1) Site Design Think carefully about your site design/page layout. Try and think like a customer, (what would they like to see?). Look at your rivals, what are they doing? how is there page designed?, how are they presenting there products?, what metta tags are they using?. Remember don’t imitate, try and be different without alienating any potential customers. 2) Key Word Selection You will need to think about a collection of key words relevant to your industry and products, remember to only use words that suit your site contents, words outside of your target audience may bring additional traffic, but it wont be relevant traffic, you only want people to visit your site that want to be there. Don’t fill your site with the high searched for words as these will be the most competitive, look for the less frequent search term that are relevant to your products and try and get high page placement with these first before taking on the bigger boys I found the following to be a useful tool for keywords www.inventory.overture.com 3) Site Content. This is probably one of the most important area of your site IMO, get the products and site content right, because you need to capture your visitors interest when they arrive, and if your site is constructed suitably your site contents and words will be picked up. I have fount that putting internal back links onto the site helps with keyword recognition (but don’t flood your site with them, keep it looking natural and relevant) for example if the item on display works with another or there are alternatives to the item then a simple link “Please take a look at the rest of our ‘Link phrase here’ products.†This is achieved by using the following (remove the #'s as they are there to stop the command being recognised and show the make up of the command) type text you want as link here[/URL#] The above code can be used in the same format for signatures in forums etc. 4) Get your links You need to get your site out there with other sites linking to you to make your way through the search engine ranks. There are lots of ways to do this and plenty of do and do not points, I am not experienced enough or knowledgeable enough to be out lining these, what I can do however is run through what I have done/doing to gain my link backs. From what I understand you should avoid at all costs links backs from Adult sites (unless yours is one) link farms, and banned sites. As a new site I believe any link back with the above exceptions is a good link try to get one way links as a priority (links that link to you that do not require a Reciprocal link back) I used the following sources to obtain these links. www.info-sales.co.uk http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=62009 http://www.onlineauctiontrader.com/website-directories.htm I recommend spreading your application throughout all PR rankings. Again there are various site submissions, Free, and Paid generally speaking a paid directory will return better results than a free directory. 5) Offline marketing Don’t just rely on “on-line†promotion, try promoting your site outside of the internet, flyers, bumper stickers, local ads all of these will help raise awareness to your site. 6) Useful tools There are lost of tools out there to be used in your battle for better search placements I have included a few I have found below. http://www.golexa.com type your site in and it will return all the pages it finds that link to your site. http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop compares your site with your competitors http://www.pixelfast.com/overture view keyword bidding costs http://www.webconfs.com has a multitude of site checking tools for you to play around with. I hope the above helps in some way to any new comers, remember the above is not intended to be a Tutorial it is purely a starting block based on my (one site) experience, more in-depth information can be found by searching forums like this and asking questions. Thanks all
Very nice report. How are you doing in search engine rankings for you keywords with these techniques? Any results yet?
Not bad at the moment. I have around 120 words I am tracking, have 5 #1, 16 in top 10. At the moment only around 50% are in the top 200 and the other 50 are over. Site has been up since Jan 06 so it has gone loads better than expected, but I am not in as high compitition catagory as others.