News From the Mercantile

Shoofly Pie Mercantile would like to be your guide to Small Business Resources for Working Women at Home. Last month we talked about starting a website to sell your merchandise and hopefully you are now the proud owner of your own domain! This month we will continue the series of Website Basics 101 and talk about how to optimize that site and drive Internet traffic your way.

Website Optimization is one of the hardest things for website owners to understand and do. Most people think that once you open your site the search engines will direct traffic to you. WRONG!! We now need to work on making your site attractive to those Search Engines and get your site ranked on them, so lets cover the 5 basic areas of Search Engine Optimization.

1. Proof Read Your Site!! This is one of the easiest, and most overlooked, things you can do to improve your site. I cannot tell you how many sites I visit and there are glaring misspelled words. Search Engines are literal and they do not know you made a typo, make sure you spell everything correctly and try not to use "cutesy" spelling for major things. Take a look at the photos you have on your site. Make sure they have a caption when not displayed and that the caption matches the description of the item. Search Engines do not link photos named CGI228843 to your item "Primitive Santa Doll", name the photo "Primitive Santa Doll" too and then when those engine bots see your site, they will link those two items together and give your site a higher rank for being relevant. I know that proof reading an entire site is not the way you want to spend an evening, but believe me it will pay off in the long run and your site will look more professional.

2. Meta Tags - what in the world are they really? Well these strange little things are the invisible words that Search Engines read on every page of your site. You probably added a few Meta Tags when you first started your site. Now is a good time to check those tags and purge the ones that are obsolete and maybe add a few new ones. Meta Tags describe your website pages to Search Engines, they are never seen by the public. If you were doing a Google Search for your site, what words would you search for? Well, those are the words that need to be in your Meta Tags. Think of everything that you could possible search for and use those tags. There are many, many articles out there on the web about Meta Tags and it is time well spent making sure your site has the right ones.

3. Want a FREE and easy way to get people to come to your site? Link your site with other sites that are similar to yours. Links are a funny thing for website owners, some love them and others hate them. I think they are a great tool to help new website owners and I always appreciated established sites linking to me. In my opinion there are a few hard and fast rules on website links. Only link to sites that are like yours, we don't want a primitive doll site linked to auto parts or medical sites. I know that when you start out you feel like the more the merrier, but this can actually count against you in your Search Engine rank. Those silly Search Engines look for relevance and don't see a link between pills, auto parts and primitive dolls. My own personal advise is to always go to the site that is asking for a link and see if it is up to your standards. I make it a hard and fast rule that if people ask for a link and their site has misspelled words, broken links, flashing and annoying things going on, then I decline that link. Also, use good website courtesy, when asking for a link send your banner, your URL and your website name, don't expect those sites to hunt around for your information, you are the one asking a favor. The last word on links is occasionally check your site for broken links, Search Engines and customers get annoyed by those "Red X's" and links that go to no where. Do quarterly website house cleaning and keep your site in good shape.

4. The Holy Grail of website traffic - Search Engines. Eventually all sites get crawled by Search Engine spiders, but it can take months or even years to come up on a Google Search. There are many companies that promise improved rank on Search Engines, but there are no guarantees. My friend Tina at Primitive Business Junction has gathered together a wonderful collection of articles about Search Engines, so this is something I would look into before I paid someone to optimize my site. Almost everything you need to do to increase traffic to your site can be done for FREE, but sometimes it is money well spent to have someone help you with these chores.

5. Last but not least is PATIENCE! The average amount of time for Search Engine Optimization to work is about 1 year. This is when you can do a Google or Yahoo search and your website comes up on the first page. Many people say "I have had my website open for a month and haven't sold a thing!", that is not unusual and before you open the doors you had better be ready for all the work to make it happen.

These 5 things are the basics for getting your website noticed by Search Engines. I have had a website for almost 5 years and I am always learning something new, keep at it. Next month we will be talking about advertising and how to get the most out of your money in these hard economic times.

Thanks for stopping by,