Search Engine Optimization Building a New Online Bookstore

Building A New Online Bookstore - A Case Study In Search Engine Optimization By Patrick Dent, Owner of New Online Bookstore, Author of Execution of Justice If you already have a website, and are struggling to draw the traffic you need, you may have to go back to your URL and reconstruct your site to sing out to search engines using strategies that attract the attention of the biggest search engines. The basic strategy has three steps: first, select the best 3-4 keywords or phrases for your products, second, build those keywords into your URL, and third, to tweak your site to rank high for those 3-4 keywords. Selecting Keywords To truly pick the best keywords, you need to understand the KEI (keyword efficiency index). But, I'm going to show you how to modify the formula for the KEI to separate your true competitors from those who merely have the same keyword indexed on their site. The KEI formula is simple. You take the number of worldwide searches for a keyword per day and call that 'P' for popularity. Then, you take the number of websites containing that word or phrase in their 'keywords' tag, and call it 'C' for competition. When you perform a Google search, it will say 'displaying top 10 results of 540,000,000'. That huge number is 'C', and 'P' can be obtained from the free version of Web CEO. Now, Web CEO is going to calculate the standard KEI (which should be in the 100's to be good) and give you a number like 0.0009 for just about any keyword you can dream up. If there are new keywords under the Sun, I haven't located any. Here's where you tweak the formula to your advantage. The standard KEI is (P^2)/(C). Since you plan to build your keywords into your URL, which is heavily weighted by all major search engines, you want to modify 'C'. Type your keyword search phrase into Google as follows: allinurl: "keyword phrase" and 'C' drops from hundreds of millions to maybe tens of thousands or fewer. These are your true competitors. You beat the millions of others by default because your keywords are few, focused, and contained in your URL. After typing in the above, simply take the number of competing websites Google lists, and plug that into your KEI equation, and the KEI will be in harmony with your strategy of building keywords from the URL level down to the Title, Description, Keywords, Body Text and Alt Tag levels. The owner of Quincy's Steakhouse said he'd leaed all his mistakes building Quincy's and he wanted a fresh start. So, he sold Quincy's and opened Ryan's Steakhouse, avoiding all the pitfalls of his first run. He soon trampled Quincy's. Wise man. This is the same process I went through. It took me a year to lea the pitfalls of opening a new commercial website. The first decision I made was the name of my URL, before I had any notion of what keywords I would be competing for. So, I named my site after my business - a sound strategy if you have name recognition like Amazon - but not for a newcomer to a very large pond, filled with 540 million competitors. I also tried to emulate the business model of the major online bookstores by being everything to everyone. Big mistake #2. Being a small, upstart business, I needed to focus in on a niche, not the entire planet. Now, look at the URL and keywords for my new company, New Online Bookstore. http://www.new-online-bookstore.com Note that the URL contains 'online bookstore', 'bookstore', 'book', 'books', 'new' applied to any of the before, etc. This is because I wrote the copy for my entire site in natural language, with a few keywords in mind, then checked the keyword density with any number of free online tools. That told me what words I naturally used most often and prominently when describing my site. I then used Web CEO and the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, both free, to tweak my keywords to make them focused on my niche - new books from new authors. I figured I could take a small sliver of what Amazon and the other Big Boys do and focus with such single-minded intensity on that niche that I could beat them for a reasonable number of searches. This means sticking to the restriction of 3-4 keywords or phrases, each of which should: be included in your 'H1' tag, constitute a minimum of 2% of visible text (mine are in the 15% range), and be included in the Title, Description, Keywords and ALT tags. You'll never completely satisfy Web CEO, but come as close as you can. When your site is as good as you can get it, have Web CEO automatically submit it to the major search engines every 30 days to keep your listing fresh. Now, you're set up to attract first time visitors. Email Marketing The problem is that less than 30% of first time visitors actually make a purchase. You need to collect their email addresses (www.worldminer.com) and follow up with them. For instance, my site offers a free monthly Short Story Ezine, which attracts both readers and writers without the need for spamming. Ezines are best published through an autoresponder, and your website should have ample opportunities for visitors to sign up for a free subscription. For those visitors who don't sign up on my site, I follow up with a non-commercial email offering them a no charge subscription to my ezine. This is not considered 'spam'. Spam is defined as "unsolicited, bulk, commercial email". There are many autoresponders to choose from, but none will tolerate more than a few spam complaints before dropping you. Stay away from FFA leads and services that promise 10 MILLION FREE EMAILS. These mailings are random and meaningless. Sending out 10 MILLION FREE EMAILS to Chinese antiquities dealers is a waste of your time if you're selling new books. Using my unobtrusive method, I picked up 700 subscribers the first month, and am now into the thousands, with my next 13 ezine issues already loaded into my autoresponder. It's that simple. Pick your keywords. Build them into the business name and URL. Then, do the detail work, parceling your keywords evenly across the alt tags for all images and text links. If you don't know HTML, it's not a big deal. You can easily find tutorials to show you exactly how to use these tags, and no other knowledge is needed. Then, figure out some kind of newsletter that would interest your customers and include subscription forms on each page, with a clearly stated privacy statement. Offer a free subscription to your newsletter in as many avenues as possible, such as in the footer of this article. For no charge tutorials on the craft of writing or inteet marketing, please visit our site. Patrick Dent New Online Bookstore New Books by New Authors Expect a little more...And get it. http://www.new-online-bookstore.com info@new-online-bookstore.com For a Free Subscription to our Short Story Ezine, simply mail: ezine@new-online-bookstore.sendfree.com