Driving traffic to your website ( the simple free way )
By: Colette Marshall
President, WorldwideBrands.com
Alright you’ve done your market research. You’ve picked your first product to sell online. You’ve contacted your first drop ship supplier and setup your wholesale account. You’ve even got your website or auction started and your merchant account setup. What’s next? Driving traffic to your site!
There are several options you have:
1. PPC – Pay per click advertising (Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Bing PPC)
2. Social Marketing (Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter)
3. Natural Search results (aka Getting your website to the first page of Google)
In this article we’re going to discuss the option that is simple and free, but it does take a little bit of your time and patience: Natural search results.
To get yourself to the first page of Google you need to focus on SEO (Search engine ptimization). There are several companies out there who will help you with SEO. But before you even start considering outsourcing your SEO, there are several basic steps that you can do that cost you nothing but your time to implement.
Let’s focus on what you can do with your website or auction starting today. The first 5 main areas of your website to start with are:
1. Title of the webpage
2. Meta Description
3. Meta Keywords
4. Images
5. Product Descriptions
Each one of these you need to focus around your main keywords for that particular product page. Let’s use “Pet Couch” as our example for each of these 5 areas:
Your title needs to have what the product page is about at the very beginning of the line.
Example title: Pet Couch for Large Breed Dog – MyCompanyName.com
Your meta description should include that main keyword and be less than 140 characters. Remember this is what people see under the first line in the natural search results.
Example meta description: A Pet Couch can stop your large breed dog from taking over your living room couch. This dog couch is available in red, green and blue.
Meta Keywords are all the important keywords that your customer is typing into the search engines. Five to seven keyword phrases is a good number to focus on per product page. Hint: make sure to use the keywords you find when doing your market research.
Example: pet couch, dog couch, large breed dog bed, giant breed dog bed, large dog bed, large beds for dogs
Images: Name your images with the keywords that are important. Instead of img001.jpg is should be pet-couch.jpg.
The Product Descriptions is the first main area that you can provide a lot of content around your keywords. Make sure to answer who, what, when, where, why and how and relate the product to your customer.
So there you have it, 5 simple and free things you can do to your product pages right now that’s going to help you get to first page of Google. To help you further with this topic, we’re having a free webinar on Monday, August 31st 9PM EST to discuss SEO in more detail and specifically show you how to take a wholesale supplier’s csv, apply SEO, and then upload into a Yahoo Store. You can apply the techniques we’ll be talking about to your own site and auctions too.
