Build a Home Based Business from scratch selling products online using Drop Shippers.

Constructing Your Web Site

By now, you have your website template sorted out. You also have all of your category, sub-category, products and information pages listed on a sheet of paper along with their corresponding keyword(s) including your home page’s keywords. Now lets put it together.

If you’re using a package then constructing your web site’s navigation should be simple. They’ll normally allow you to simply name a page and then link it to a parent page. Like the diagram above, you want to link all your category and information pages to your home page.

You then want to link all your sub-category pages to their relevant category pages (parent pages) and so on down the line.

When naming a page, try to name it with the keyword involved. This is another reason why keeping pages to one or two keywords, is so important. For example, a web site selling animal statues has a category called eagle statues. If the name of the website happened to be www.animalstatues.com then naming the category page, ‘Eagle Statues’ gives the eagles statue page this address: www.animalstatues.com/eagle-statues.html or www.animalstatues.com/eagle_statues.html.

As you can see, the keyword is now in the URL address, which is important when search engines crawl your site.

To take this further, if you then had another sub-category under eagle statues such as bronze statues, then your URL would look like this: www.animalstatues.com/eagle-statues/bronze.html.

Once again you can see that the keyword phrase, ‘bronze eagle statues’ is embedded in the URL, which is good for search engine optimisation. A search engine will recognize the three words together, even though they are not in order of the phrase searched for.

The next step is to optimise your pages with text. First of all, you need to be aware of what needs to appear on certain pages you are optimising for.

To sum it up, you need to have a title, meta tags, bread crumbs, headings, a certain amount of content (text) and the content needs to be keyword rich to a certain density and proximity. Not only that, the content you write needs to read in an inviting way, encouraging your customers to shop at your site. You also need to do this for every page you are optimising for keywords.

Lets start from the top.

The Title –

The title of any page is the text you see in the blue bar right at the top of your browser. If you go to Google or MSN and type in any search term, the blue links that appear at the top of each search find (the left side of the page) is the pages title. The title forms the first part of your meta tags.

When typing in the title of each page, you need to incorporate the keywords into the title in sentence form. You also need to make it appear inviting or have a benefit or claim, as people will read this when they search for your keyword, and you should keep it to less than 100 characters long.

A good example would be with the keyword phrase ‘scented candles’, assuming this is the only keyword used for this page -

“Our Scented Candles will bring relaxation and harmony into your life. Only from OnlineCandles.com”

If you optimised for two keywords such as ‘crib tents’ and ‘baby tents’ then your title could read like this –

“Our Baby Tents and Crib Tents from CampWorld.com meet the strictest of industry standards”

The three things that both of these titles do is contain the relevant keyword(s) within a sentence, the sentence is inviting or has a benefit or claim, and have less than 100 characters.

The Meta Description –

The Meta description is a longer version of the title. Although less importance is placed on the meta description these days, it is still important to some search engines so the following should be done.

Write one to two sentences describing a bit more about the products offered on the page but still keep it to the theme of offering a benefit, or making it sound inviting.

Still only use each keyword phrase once, but this time you can make your meta description as long as 200 characters.

Using the baby tents example, it could read like this –

“The safety of your baby when camping is assured with our baby tents and crib tents. We only sell the toughest and most durable tents adhering to industry guidelines.”

Meta Keywords –

Self explanatory: If the page was selling crib tents and baby tents then your meta keywords would look like this –

“baby tents, crib tents”

Breadcrumbs –

Breadcrumbs are like a trail of where you’ve come from. If you were on a product page, then somewhere on the page will be a trail of links all the way back to your home page. They should look similar to this –

Home> Category Page> Product

Home> Fishing Rods> Shakespeare Rods > Model XXXX

Usually a good spot for breadcrumbs is right up the top of your content just above your header, and in small text.

The Heading –

This is very important, as it is usually the first thing someone reads once your page opens so it needs to do several things.

For the sake of search engines, it needs to contain your keywords.

For the sake of visitors it needs to get them excited about your site so use words that will compel them to stay, such as action words and persuasive words that would appeal to them.

Lets look at the scented candles example.

“Are You Looking For Sweet Scented Candles Of The Highest Quality? Then This Is Your Store!”

“Are You Looking For Scented Candles To Harmonise and Fulfil Your Inner Desires? We Have What You Need!”

I want you to notice that although it may read a little over the top, don’t concern yourself with that. What you need to be concerned with is that the title, description and the heading especially, need to be talking to the visitor.

The visitor is always asking the question ‘What’s in it for me’, or ‘Why should I visit your store’ and so on, and so you need to answer these questions. The visitor does not care about you, so never should the headings be talking about you.

An example of a bad heading would be –

“We supply the cheapest and most extensive range of scented candles available. We are second to none.”

Notice this heading is all about the business and has nothing to do with the visitors wants. Sure, a visitor is going to want to find the cheapest (without compromising quality) available, but the visitor would respond more to a line that read –

“Are You Searching For The Cheapest And Highest Quality Scented Candles Available? Then We Have What You Want!”

I’m sure you can see the difference.

The Content –

Here you need to do several things. You need to preview what your page and business is offering, you need to include keywords, and you need to write at least 150 - 300 words of content.

Apart from questions such as ‘What’s in it for me’ visitors also want to know if there is anything free or discounted (like shipping), how secure their ordering will be with their credit card and any guarantees you offer.

If you can answer questions like this in the first two paragraphs of your page you’ll go a long way to keeping a visitor at your site.

Remember things like benefits the customer will receive from not only the product itself but also how they benefit from shopping on your site.

When writing these first two paragraphs incorporate your keyword phrases into them and write them in bold, and do it once for each paragraph. If you can, you may even want to list the benefits as bullet points.

Always remember in the back of your mind, the customer is only concerned with what they’re getting and what’s in it for them.

Depending on which page you’re developing in the chain, you can now add some features of the topic such as a featured product.

If we were working on the home page of the candle site, we would probably have categories such as scented candles, jar candles, soy candles and so on, so it would be a good idea to feature several products out of these categories.

This is something you can change from time to time as it keeps your site looking fresh as there are new products becoming available, but it also keeps the search engines interested in you because they like to see content remaining fresh.

After featuring some products, you’ll want to conclude your content with a call to action. You want to get your visitors to do something. A good way of doing this is to mention something like, ‘stocks are limited so hurry’ or ‘these crazy low prices won’t last long’, and then ‘click here to see more’.

Of course if you’re optimising a product page with one product, then the call to action would be similar as above but with ‘click here to order now before stocks run out’

Now that you’ve written your content, you need to test it for keyword density.

A good site for this is www.se-tools.com. You can use the inspector by typing in the page you are optimising for and seeing how well you’ve used the above list, including the density of your keywords.

 You’ll see tabs and comments on Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, and so on, but you’ll also see in the last tab the density of all your words.

It’s important to know that search engines will penalize you if they feel you are keyword spamming. If they see a large percentage of a certain word, they’ll feel it to be spamming and not normal content, so try and keep all words under 5%. This includes a single word that makes up a phrase such as ‘soy’ in ‘soy candles’
 When putting pictures on your pages, you will have the option of giving the picture a tag, which is called an ‘Alt Tag’. Because search engines can only read text, and therefore have no idea what your picture is about, giving it an alt tag will tell them what it’s about.

 If you have a picture of a product with a link going to a category page, then give the picture the alt tag of the keyword phrase belonging to that category page. For example, if the home page of our candle site has a featured product of a soy candle, with a link going to your soy candle page, then give the picture the alt tag of ‘soy candles’.

 In keeping with links, any links to any other pages should be embedded with the keyword phrase belonging to that page. Like our example above, the link below the picture of the soy candle should read ‘soy candles’ and not something like ‘click here’.

 Do this with all your pages, including specific product pages, especially if a specific product gets searched for. Just imagine if someone types in ‘vanilla soy scented jar candle’ into Google, and up pops your product page in the top ten! The customer has no need to navigate their way around your site because they are looking directly at the product they searched for.
 
 Tasks:

 1. Name all your pages.
2. Optimise your home, category, sub-category and product pages with the title, meta-description, meta-keywords, header and content, and check with se-tools.
3. Give all pictures an ‘Alt Tag’ and anchor all your links with keywords.

Adding Products