One of the most frustrating parts of working in search engine optimization is the time it takes for your efforts to bare fruit. In fact, many of my ecommece buddies have given up on their home-grown efforts, and hired an SEO thinking that it would speed up the process. While there is real value in hiring a professional SEO, this is simply out of reach for many smaller merchants.

As you’ll read throughout this blog and many other blogs there is a countless number of ways to improve your search rankings, and improve your website too. Sometimes, the number of things you should be doing get in the way of growing your business! For example, when I first opened my furniture website I spent countless night-time hours researching different website tips, and studying my own SEO practices. What I lost sight of is that my website needed to grow and improve. I was so busy with learning and researching, I didn’t work on adding new products, writing more product descriptions, improving the images on the site, working on the navigation of the site… all the things a site visitor looks for!

What I slowly came to realize was that there were too many things that need my attention, and not enough hours… what a cliché, huh? Anyway, I decided to create two lists… One list was “Things To Improve Website” and “Search Marketing”. I created goals for myself, so that I could get a little of everything done each night, and slowly grow all aspects of my business.

For example, the “Things to Improve Website” list included all the things I mentioned above. I would pick one thing to work on during the week from that list. Then I would take one thing from the “Search Marketing” list and work on that too. By setting small benchmarks each week, I was able to organize and balance the work I was doing on my website.

Here’s what a typical week looked like….

MONDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Send out 10 emails requesting a link exchange.

TUESDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Improve meta tags on category pages.

WEDNESDAY: Improve images for 5 products. Send out 10 emails requesting a link exchange.

THURSDAY: Rewrite description for 5 products. Check Alt-Image tags, submit site to 3 new directories.

FRIDAY: No working tonight, my eyes are burning and my wife is pissed.

SATURDAY: Check rankings on main keywords, see if Redbox has any new movies out

SUNDAY: (See Friday)

I would highly recommend writing a small schedule for yourself for a week, and see if that helps you achieve more. This is especially beneficial for the small merchants that slave away at a 9-5 during the day.

Good luck! Please leave comments highlighting your weekly tasks so others can see.

Internal linking is very important to successful search engine optimization. You really have to utilize every opportunity your site offers to use relevant keywords or create a relevant link. Notice I used the word “relevant”! Don’t keyword stuff, and do not create a page full of links.

One place that is often overlooked for good internal linking is the “click here” or “learn more” links. Most sites have them, and they are totally not necessary, and good opportunities to increase the relevance of the page you’re linking to.

For example, let’s say I am linking from my index page on outdoor furniture to a page that talks more about my company. I could do either of these…

Click here to learn more about our company.  OR

Learn more about our outdoor furniture company.

Obviously the second option is going to tell the search engines that crawl the site, the page about us, is about an outdoor furniture company. “Click Here” doesn’t really tell them anything.

Take a look at your pages and see where you can replace some of these plain boring links to something more descriptive and useful.

This character is currently being used by Northcedar.com, an ecommerce site that sells outdoor furniture. In speaking with the owner I got the whole story about how he came to be, and increase business for this small company.

“We were looking to re-brand the site and add some life to it, literally. I contacted a graphic designer from craigslist.com and got a great deal on his services, I think I paid about $120. He drew the character above, and I knew it was the perfect brand image for my prospective customers. I added the character to the header of the website and immediately noticed results! Sales averages seemed to increase on a weekly basis. I really can’t explain why”.

I have spoken to several of my clients about adding some “life” to their ecommerce sites. I can’t guarantee the same results, but I know people tend to respond to characters. You have to admit this guy looks, honest, trustworthy, and like an all-arouind swell dude. Why wouldn’t you buy from him?

I would encourage you to take a look at your website and see if your branding would allow for some “life”. A character just may be what you need.

I came across an ad the other day promising “Number 1 Placement in all of the Search Engines Guaranteed!”. Wow, that sounds good to me. And heck, there’s a guarantee, so what could be better than that? Uh, how about the truth.

Allow me to be brutally honest, and perhaps save some small merchants their life savings. There is absolutely no known way to guarantee number one placement in any search engine, unless of course you bid on the keyword and appear on the top. Other than that, anyone who makes promises that sound too good to be true, are swindling you. Or, perhaps they’re over confident in their abilities.

If you’re like most small merchants, spending money on SEO is a necessary evil. It can be incredibly expensive to hire a firm to do this, and there are a few good reasons. For one, very few people are good at it. Two, it’s tedious work. Finally, it’s worth a lot if it’s done well. You may be happy to know that there are many, many things you can do on your own to improve your organic rankings without putting out a dime. It’s going to cost you a bunch of time, but it will be time well spent.

1. Spend time seeking out quality link partners. Don’t randomly email millions of people looking for links. Look for quality websites in your industry and solicit link exchanges with them. Industry sites like associations and organizations are a good place to start. Or, sites that compliment the products you sell.

2. Be sure your meta tags are well written and unique on each page of your site.

3. Make sure the copy on your site is keyword rich and written well.

4. Be sure that your internal link structure is easy for site visitors to navigate and access every page on your site.

5. Use links that describe the page they’re linking to instead of generic links like “learn more” or “click here”.

These are only a few tips, there’s much more you can do on your own. Please continue to read this blog and other blogs on the subject for more tips on SEO.

I get a bunch of emails each week soliciting some sort of “site submit” service for thousands of search engines. Of course, these services aren’t free, and what are they really giving you? Well, like most things that cost money, they’re giving you something you’re too lazy to do yourself! Ok, so I made it easy. You only really need to worry about four major sites, and you can easily submit your website for inclusion in just a couple of minutes. You don’t have a couple of minutes? Ok, pay someone $50 to do it see if I care. Well, I do care, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. And, I made it easy for you. All of the links you need are below!

Yahoo Free Site Submit

Google Add URL

MSN Live Search

DMOZ.org

Many clients have fairly small budgets to spend on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. They need to see results from spending as little as $100 per month. This is not a lot of money for PPC advertising, but still workable. If you call any online marketing company they will probably ask for a minimum spend of $1,000 - $2,500 per month. This is simply not doable for many small merchants. So, what is someone with a small budget to do?

One of the first tips I give my client is to watch what keywords you’re bidding on. If your industry is indoor furniture, for example, do NOT bid on the word furniture! This top-level keyword will likely cost you a fortune, and receive a lot of unqualified traffic. If you’re selling furniture, do you really want clicks from people searching for “furniture repair”, “used furniture”, or “patio furniture”? These words are budget-busters, and they’re no good to you. You should be looking for very detailed keywords, that may not get as many searches, but when they do, the traffic will be much more qualified. For example, you may bid on, “living room coaches”, or “brown leather chairs”.

Of course any PPC campaign, regardless of the budget should be preceded by a keyword research period. However, don’t be too selective. It’s a good idea to start with a lot of keywords and narrow down the list every day when you see what keywords aren’t working. Google Adwords has great reporting tools to help you do this.

Many folks believe that adding your website to major search engines is a time consuming process. It’s not! In fact, many entrepreneurs play off this assumption and offer services to submit your site to thousands of search engines for a low fee. First of all, there is no need to submit your site to thousands of search engines. The overwhelming majority of searches done online are on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It’s that simple. Why pay to submit your site to thousands of other sites no one else is using? Secondly, there is no need to pay at all. It’s easy enough that a well trained monkey could do it. In fact, I just took five minutes to submit my site to all the major engines.

Here’s what you want to do. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “Google Suggest A Site”, then do the same for Yahoo and MSN. You’ll get a very simple form that will allow you to submit your URL. It’s also a good idea to go to DMOZ.org and submit your site there.

Furthermore, against popular belief, there is no benefit to submitting your site every month to the search engines, in fact, it may hurt you. They may interpret the act as spam. Once your site is listed, be happy, and spend your time working on improving your rankings. More articles on how to do that can be found on this site.

When browsing the various sources of online help for search engine optimization, you will find many people that devalue the use of meta data in your header. Of course, the title tag is important because that’s what appears in most browsers. However, you should always treat meta tags as an important part of your SEO strategy. Here are some tips for using meta tags well.

- Make sure the title and description tags are unique and well written for each page
- Try to include a few important keywords for the page, but do NOT stuff them in
- Your title tag and description should speak specifically to what is on the page
- When possible, make sure each page has unique meta tags

The last bit of advice about meta tags is to be sure NOT to make your website name the first part of each page’s tags. Many, many sites use their site name and then the rest of the title tag. This can be viewed as duplicate content. Pick one page (probably your index) and have the website name in the title tag, then be sure all other pages are unique.