how to get my website noticed

[bluezebra]

I want to get more visitors to my website and wondered if anyone can give me any hints and tips on this.

I've already had some great advice, but things seem really slow and I want to make sure I am doing everything I can to grow my sales. I want to know if there is a trick to getting the 'right customer' (i.e. not getting loads of traffic that doesn't convert to sales). Because my product (baby gift boxes) could appeal to many, I am finding it difficult to target my advertising and marketing resources, plus I'm not getting anywhere on google as the really large organisations seem to be dominating this. I would be really grateful for any advice. Thanks

 

[Rob Holmes]

Hi

I've had a look at your site.

I would say (IMHO) put some of your products on ebay and add your website as a watermark to the image you use and hyperlink through to your site (to a specific url so you can check the click through rate)

Also create a newsletter with some sort of child safety safety PDF white paper to give away as a thankyou for signing up. Then sell on a bi-monthly basis to the newsletter reipients.

Hope this helps

Rob

 

[gary]

Hi,

I've had a look at your site and it's not bad - nice colouring, quite smart, good images. It's nowhere near optimised for search engines though, so it's unlikely anyone will find it unless they're actually looking for your company name.

I would recommend spending a lot of time on www.seochat.com and researching what you need to do for SEO. To get you started, you need a unique descriptive title for each page, plus a description meta tag (keyword meta tags as well, but they're less important). Then add some text to your pages describing the products on those pages - search engines can't read your images. Use the tools on SEOChat to find out what your main keywords are and make sure you use those in your page titles and content. According to Overture for example, the following keywords are most important:

baby gift box 16.0 /day
baby box gift in 1.1 /day
baby box gift wholesaler 1.0 /day
baby blue gift box 1.0 /day
8904 baby box gift 0.4 /day
baby box co gift 0.4 /day
baby box designer gift 0.3 /day
baby box gift in uk 0.3 /day
baby box einstein gift set 0.2 /day
baby box gift packaging supply 0.2 /day
money box baby gift 0.2 /day

While you're doing this, set up a Google AdWords account to advertise on Google, using similar keywords and phrases as above.

Finally, contact all the baby sites you can get your hands on and exchange links with them or advertise on them. It helps your Google ranking and gets you extra direct traffic.

That should keep you busy for a while! BTW, the link in your signature isn't working...

 

[gary]

Oh, and I should also add that it would probably be an idea not to force people to register before they have to buy something - you'll lose a lot of sales like that. As you're using osCommerce, install the Purchase Without Account contrib or amend the current setup so people can just go straight to entering their details, rather than that Create An Account page.

 

[bluezebra]

You sound so knowledgable - it puts me to shame!

Your suggestions will certainly keep me busy. I know I've got work to do on the site and tbh didn't realise just how hard it would be to get the site up and running and customers onto it. Still, I've some a long way and hopefully will get even further thanks to your support.

 

[gary]

You sound so knowledgable - it puts me to shame!

It comes with experience - and you're never done learning! :lol: If you want to get a lot of good search engine traffic you have to do a lot of work, and make sure your site encourages sales once they get there. Even now there are still improvements happening to our site as customer preferences and expectations change.

 

[top-click]

Hi,

Optimising your site has to be a good idea, but to get immediate traffic - from visitors intersted in your products - there are few better avenues than Pay-Per-Click.

I have written a short (very!) paper on getting started with Adwords - let me know if you want me to send it to you.

best regards and good luck!
Rob

 

[c2webdesign]

Some good advice by Gary here which should set you well on your way.

Other things to think about is to use the ALT tags to good effect to help increase the keyword count on your page. A search engine can not read see the text on an image, but it can see the text of an ALT tag for an image.

Also you have '30' as the ALT tags for the images next to the navigation links, I would recommend changing these too.

The main part of exposure from search engines is to help them as much as possible. Unfortunately you have 40 errors on your website (based on the W3C standards - unfortunately often caused by OsCommerce) but I would look in to resolving as many of these issues as you can. You can find these at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.greatlittlegifts.co.uk .

Also have you tried gaining links from other related websites? According to Google you have no other sites linking to your website. Google especially ranks websites on highly on lots of good links coming in from related websites.

Google will assign you a PageRank which is heavily ranked by the number of quality links coming in to your website. At the moment you only have a PageRank of 2 (with 0 being lowest and 10 being highest).

Find out who is linking to your competition and try and gain links from them, if they are linking to your competition they may link to you! Always make sure that the words they are using to link back to you are your main keywords.

Find related baby sites and baby forums (there are quite a few out there) and see if you can gain any exposure (or cheap advertising there).

Also sign up for my free weekly search engine optimisation newsletter at http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk which will give you lots more advice and help.

Good luck,
Dean
C2 Web Design
http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk

Web Design | Online Marketing | Search Engine Optimisation

Sign up for a FREE search engine optimisation newsletter at http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk