SEO tips

Someone on Buy it Sell it was concerned about her traffic so I gave her some suggestions. I thought it maybe helpful for others.

I'm no expert but I wanted to give you some input on your titles and stuff that might help you get more traffic. I have to admit I'm a bit bored at work and that's why I have time. :-)

I recently optimized my pages and my Google percentages went up by 2% (according to the BISI stats on our Dashboard. I was at 25% until I started tweeting a lot so that brought me down for google percentage but not down in Google search quantity. I used google adwords to find the best words for me. After I was done I went to SEOCetro.com and used the keyword analyzer to be sure page title is in sink with my keywords and description. Also you want to have the keywords you find in google adwords to be the first words in your title.

Let me give you an example.... You have this title for a product. Black and White silk/sheer hair clip. Double loop I would change to Girls Hair Clips Black & White Silk / Sheer I always put the spaces before and after the slash so the search engine sees the two words separately otherwise I think they are seen as one word. Most importantly the title I'm showing puts the Girls Hair Clips front and center. That's the keywords you're hoping people will search for. Why? Because in Google it shows people look for that phrase is 1,900 in a month AND there are 618,000 pages competing with you. Now if you change that to Hair Clip you get 301,000 searchers but you don't know if they are looking for women or girls. AND you are competing with 2.36 million other pages to get your page to the top of google AND to be clicked on by the customer. So with Girls Hair Clips you are targeting more of a niche group and they are more likely to be interested in sticking around. And take note when you go into Google that the S on the end of a word makes a huge difference. In your case, I would use the S exactly where I have them.

I know some people on Buy It Sell It think you don't have to add SEO attributes and they'll be added for you, but I think it's just added as whatever you have on your home page... that's not going to apply to all of your items. And when I see my percentage increase by 2% from optimizing I beg to differ with them that it's not necessary to add your own. I had always been adding to SEO, but I wasn't as diligent with my title.

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Are you getting the most out of your Twitter account?

I don’t pay for any twitter tools and I recommend you do not as well. There are plenty of free ones out there. I don’t claim to be a Twitter expert, but I wanted to write this after seeing that many of you don’t have a lot of Twitter followers. I consider that to be less than 200 for many and less than 50 for even more.

If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with friends and fellow sellers that’s fine, but if you want to market yourself on Twitter that won’t work. My purpose in using Twitter is to get sales and market to people that might be interested in my products. To use Twitter as a marketing tool you MUST get MANY followers that are interested in your product line. As of right now I have 1,100+ followers. I’ve been with Twitter only about a month and I do not pay to get that many followers. A lot of people will ask if you want thousands of followers and they’ll want you to pay for a tool, but who knows if you’re targeting your niche market with those techniques.

How have I gotten 1,100+ followers? Twellow.com (and Search.twitter.com sometimes) and Tweetlater.com. Allow me to illustrate. I did post these two tools in another post but I wanted to post them here to encourage everyone to take full advantage of their tweets.

Twellow:
• People fill out profiles on Twitter. Find the people that are interested in what you sell and start following them. If you’re lucky they will start following you. If they don’t follow after a few days or weeks (whatever time limit you set) UNFOLLOW. You don’t have space for that. I’ll revisit this topic further down. The interest I look for is pretty easy. I sell Dog Supplies so I just have to find people that are interested in dogs. If you have troubles figuring out what your customers may be interested in or who to direct, post here and I or someone else may be able to give you suggestions. If you sell antiques I bet there is an interest for antiques. If you sell rummage sale items you can probably find people interested in rummaging. Rummaging interest could probably also be for antique sellers. If you sell kids clothes look for moms.
• Twellow.com is where I found most of my followers of late.

I use twello in conjunction with Tweetlater.com. Some points about tweetlater.com:
1. Unless you are really interest in what someone has to say (like for me it’s celebrity dish) don’t follow the person unless they follow you. Some people start following you just so you follow them then un-follow you once you are following them. You don’t have space on your account to follow people that aren’t following you. You have a max of 2,000 people you can follow before Twitter starts looking at the ratio of followers to following on your account. I don’t know what the ratio is but I hit 2,000 the other day and they wouldn’t let me follow anyone new so I knew it was time to clean out a bunch of people that were following me. I give people a few days to follow me before I will un-follow them. I try to keep the follow to followers ratio pretty close.
2. I don’t recommend un-following people that are following you just because you think you got ‘em. If you do that to someone like me I will un-follow you automatically.
3. Tweetlater has sooooo many functions. One being to un-follow anyone that un-follows you AND to automatically follow anyone that follows you. This is such a time saver.
4. You can also keep your multiple twitter accounts here so you can tweet from one central location.
5. You can set it up to receive emails when people tweet about keywords like your store name, something you sell or whatever you think you need to watch out for. I should note this tool hasn’t worked for me as I only received one email from it.
6. Tweetlater also allows you to set up tweets when you’re away from your computer. If you want people to constantly get messages from you set it up here. Remember that MANY people that will be following you will be following 1,000 others. So you want to make sure they read something from you everyday. If you only tweet once or twice a day you are going to get lost in the shuffle.

Don’t just post about your store on twitter. For me, that gets boring. If someone is following you that is only following 50 people they are going to get frustrated if all you put up all day is visit my store with a link. Frustration leads to an un-follow. Tell everyone about your day so you are seen as a real person. See what everyone else is tweeting about. It can be dumb stuff like “I just got the laundry out …. I hate laundry.” You might start a conversation with someone else that hates laundry. It makes you more personable.

I hope this helps everyone! I want to see higher numbers out there from everyone… if you want to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Great Twitter tips and tools

Check out the tools I love on Twitter

1. http://search.twitter.com/search: This allows you to search what people are talking about. For example if someone says "my dog" or has dog in their comment and sounds like the like or love dogs I add them as a follow. Then I hope they'll follow me and see my advertising.
   
2. I also use this http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter to find people with "dog" in their name or profile. I add them and hope they add me. I currently have 600+ follows.
3. If you have multiple accounts on twitter you can use http://hootsuite.com/
   Someone recommended this site the other day. I guess you don't have to log in and out of your accounts. That will come in handy when I start my next website.
4. Check this out.... this site lists all the cool twitter tools. I'll have to browse every now and then for stuff that isn't helpful today... might be helpful tomorrow.
5. I love the Karma tool. It even shows the last time the person tweeted so I drop them if it's past 100 days. I'm seriously considering 60 days. There are so many different accounts I log into that if I haven't updated one for even 30+ days for me it's not a very important account and I may never touch it again. In addition I've gone through the people I follow and if they haven't started following me within maybe a week or so I'll stop following them. I try to keep # of people I'm following and people following me pretty even so it's not so obvious that nobody wants to be my friend. LOL
6. The one I've been using the most lately is Tweet Later. You can schedule tweets. So I think of things (personal) that I might be thinking later. And I'll post products. Then I'll schedule them for 2-3-4 hours from now. I have 10 tweets set up for after I go to bed.... if I ever get off the computer. You can also shorten your URL that you include with your tweet when you create your message.
7. My new favorite tool is Twellow.com. You can enter interests of people to find them and follow them right from that page. With Search.twitter.com you have to click on the person, be taken to Twitter then follow them, but you can follow very quickly and easily from this site. This might allow me to get to 1,000 followers by the end of the month. I'm running out of time.
   
   Another thing I love about this is that I can indicate preferences to follow people automatically if they follow me, I can set a preference to unfollow people that unfollow me (love that).
   
   And you can set up automation to send a message to people when they start following you. If twitter already has that as a main function I haven't found it.
   
   ANOTHER THING: If someone says my dog, dogdishstore, or dog dish store, or dog dishes, I will get an email with those people listed every 12 hours.
   
   

I'm building my list to have many people per day that I have in my advertising audience.

I try to post at least 5 product links a day. It doesn't have to be something I JUST added. Just usually something I haven't posted on Twitter yet. That will get me about 25 views on that product in about 5 minutes. Pretty quick advertising!

I also talk about my personal life on there so it doesn't seem like I'm just posting to get people to look at my site. It's a nice place to talk about what I want to talk about without wondering if people I know will here. I can remain anonymous kind of. Sure if someone investigated me they'd find I made comments about so-and-so, but I haven't done anything that will be investigated so I should be good. :-)

Just some helpful hints I've come across in the few weeks I've been on Twitter. I'd love for everyone else to share any techniques they use on there to help their business.

I accept Credit Cards

Yes, you can accept credit cards from people through paypal even if they don't have a paypal account but soooo many people don't realize that that I'm sure it's hurt my business. SO today I signed up with Propay. For $40 a year I can accept credit cards and the charge is done right through my store. I don't have to risk customers getting confused about that process if they had to go through Paypal. I'm very excited. I've been promoting this on Twitter today. It's already looked like I accept straight up credit cards for a while now so I won't need to announce it on the site or anything.

I've been adding more items to catdishstore.mybisi.com. I would like to be adding more more frequently but there isn't enough time in the day. I really need to set a plan in place for the following nights so I know what I want to get accomplished the next night.

One thing I've been busy doing is adding friends on Twitter. You get quite a few views on your products that way so I highly recommend that. I'll post some Twitter sources for everyone soon.

I'm ranked on Google!!!

I'm ranked 1 out of 10. I'm so excited! This is huge for anyone starting an online business in my opinion. You can see your own ranking by downloading the Google toolbar OR if you don't have the google tool bar downloaded you can go to http://www.googlerankings.com/ or http://www.googlerankings.com/prindex.php

to see how your site ranks.

Here's a blurb from Wikipedia to explain the importance of page rank. "a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is."

"Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google." From the way I understand it you'll end up in more searches the higher you are rank.

Buy It Sell It has an affiliate program now!!!

Exciting news! Buy it Sell It has a new affiliate program where if you recommend people to them you receive 25% revenue share on those referred accounts. So I've added a link to the left. You sign up, create your fab website and start recommending people to Buy It Sell It after you see what a great place it is to sell on.

Got my 1-888 number today

I finally bit the bullet and signed up for a 1-888 number. It's only $2/month with a $2 sign-up fee. Then it's something like $.06 /min if someone calls. I used kall8.com for this and I get a referral credit if someone signs up under my number so keep me in mind when you sign up for your 1-888 number. I considered getting 1-888-dog-dish but it wasn't available on the site and it would have been $15 so I'll go without. It's not that important. So when you want to use me as a referral... or if you have product questions.... 1-888-219-0452

Link Exchanges

Yesterday I submitted my site for link exchanges with about 10 different companies. I had to give myself a pat on the back for that one. Tedious but necessary task. I was able to do it at work because I had some time on my hands so I didn't even have to take away from family time to do it.

My new visitors was up to over 50 yesterday. That is GREAT for me.

Well, I'm off to try and get more link exchanges.

Where did all that motivation go???

It's funny how long I can be UN-Motivated and how briefly I can be motivated. I see that just a few days ago I was motivated enough to add some items to my store and I even got a sale yesterday, but somehow today I am just not feeling motivated. SO that's EXACTLY why I'm writing in my blog tonight. It will help me stay on track and MAKE me create a list of things to do. My goal tonight will be to contact 5 companies to see about a link exchange. It's kind of a tedious process, but it really is worth it because those incoming links are very important for a business's success on the internet. I should start Re-reviewing the SEO Class notes as well. There is so much to learn in the class that you can't possibly remember it all... well I can't at least. Off I go....

Been a while

OK I'm motivated today! I just got a new ceramic dog dish supplier and I'm really excited because they are fantastic looking and of fantastic quality. I'm going to post a bunch tonight.

I've been getting quite a lot of visitors from Twitter to my store which makes those quick posts worthwhile.

There's quite the buzz on buyitsellit.com today. Fees went up on the paid account from $4.95 to $9.95. Not too bad... actually a bargain based on other sites out there for hosting and having the tools for you to set up a great looking site with your own domain name. I think the problem is coming in for people that currently have free stores. With the new structure they'll be limited to 10 items in their store... that's not many at all. So many say they'll close their store. It's my understanding that this is all to curb fraudulant activity. I can see that working. People that are fraudulant aren't going to waste their time with a place where they can only post 10 items... most likely AND they don't want to spend $10 on a store if they are an ameture scammer. I was thinking about opening a new store, but I'll have to wait until my first store can pay for it.

Off to add some dog dishes to the website....

I signed up with Twitter a few days ago to use that as a source of advertising. I've gotten a few hits from there so far. It's easy enough to use so I figure I'll use it for a bit to see if it helps. Follow me!!!

It was pointed out to me the other day by someone on Buy It Sell It that I didn't have the information on my blog page for people to follow me on here. I'm thinking that made it difficult to gain followers so I've added that.

I've been using sitemeter to follow my stats for my store because for ME it's more user friendly than Google stats. I'm sure google contains more information so I'll have to explore that more too. Well, I realized the other day that I didn't have the sitemeter code on ALL of my pages so I was only getting reads if someone came in through my home page. I've fixed that and now I see many more people visiting. I can see that they're coming in through google so I'm very excited about that. I also clicked on one of my items and noticed that when it appears in Google Base it shows my name rather than my store name. I'd MUCH rather it show my store name of course so I've made the adjustment that I think will correct that I just have to watch for it to change. I'm expecting it to take a day or so to take affect but I might have to do some investigating to figure out why it hasn't shown up as DogDishStore yet.

I've been posting more in a dog forum to try and get customers. It's pretty nice. I've been adding input regularly on there.

I've gotten a few places to link to me and I'm thrilled about that. I have to work on getting more of that going. It's kind of tedious but VERY necessary to rank high with google.

I hadn't realized how much I've done until I wrote it all down. I think I need to give myself a pat on the back. :-)

Need to Focus

So I've decided that prior to getting in front of the computer to work on my business I have to have a concrete plan in mind otherwise I don't think I'm accomplishing as much as I could otherwise. I feel like I spend half of the time needlessly trying to figure out what I want to do when I could already have that thought up and save so much time.

I have a few things on my immediate to-do list.
1. Create Unique descriptions for all of my items in my store. The ones I'm using right now are from my supplier and Google is strongly apposed to
duplicate content. I need to tweak those.
2. Link Exchanging: I need to get more places to link to me to get my visibility increased on Google.
3. I need to add items to my store.

There are many other things on my list of things-to-do:

• market via posting to dog forums
• getting a 1-800 number
• getting signs from vistaprint for my car and maybe some other merchandise from them (I'll have to browse when I order the car sign)
• making cosmetic changes to my site
• go back to Cricket's Marketing and SEO class to review for things I've forgotten about or overlooked the first time.
  

I started a Twitter account today. It feels kind of like Facebook in terms of making small updates rather than a large blog like on here. Seems fun so far. We'll see if I get any hits from it.
Everyone seems to be opening an account with them so I thought I'd better jump on that band wagon to see if I can gain some hits from that venue. I'll keep everyone posted.

I think I'll work on those unique descriptions tonight. It's been a long weekend so I should really turn in early. I'm starting early so I'm hopeful.