Repeat these steps for each of your competitors. At this point, you should have a bunch of list with names and numbers on them. You should have:

* List of keywords
* List of top 10 results for each keyword – name and URL
* List of competitors – Name and URL
* Number of total pages on each competitor’s site
* Number of total inbound links to each competitor’s site

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/2010/02/17/sell-handmade-stuff-on-the-internet-seo-part-two.html

So, you have your lists. The strategy is to get links from sites that already link to your competitors. You found that list of links in the last step. Now we’re going to do something about it.

Review the links that you found. There will be a few different kinds of links.

1. Comments
If the link is from a comment, you should immediately go leave a comment on that site also. Some times, comments get posted in a sidebar under “recent comments”. If that’s the case here, then you might see one comment generate as many links as the site has pages. You need to comment on that site. These “recent” areas will roll off as newer comments are posted. You should make a schedule and come back and comment on that site once a week or so, whatever seems reasonable.

2. Blogroll

You want to sell them your stuff because you love them and want them to be happy.

Be careful about being too pushy here. They will link because they want to, not because you asked. You can be seen as “spammy” if you ask without any kind of relationship with them. It’s best to comment a few times first, then maybe strike up an email exchange and become their friend, their real friend, not their car salesman friend. Blogroll will follow.

3. Blog Posts
They may have written something in a blog post about your competitor and linked to them in the post. This is a wonderful kind of link to get. Even though you do get the number of links like you would in a blogroll or a recent comment section, you get a huge gift of authority. They thought enough about you to link to you. Readers of their site will probably follow that link more often than they would the other kinds of links. This drives more real traffic than it does build SEO, but it’s very valuable. It’s also hard to get. If you comment and become friends, and mention your own site, they might just though out the random link for you in a post.

4. Guest posts and Articles
I’m going to group a couple things together here. A guest post is one that you write for someone else’s blog. This will have a link back to your site in it and that’s good stuff. You get authority because they trusted you enough to write something for them. The other thing I want to group that with is the “article”. You can write articles for article directories, which will publish that article with a link back to your site. This also has some authority behind it and will get you some traffic and that link. Each of these are similar because you are writing content and publishing it somewhere other than your site. Seems counterintuitive to give away free content, but it gives you authority, people read it and want to check out your site, and you get a free link out of it. www.ezinearticles.com is a good place to start.

You’ll notice that all of these methods have to do with connection and communication. You need to connect with other people and have them notice you.

This isn’t sales. This isn’t marketing. It is real, human interaction, the kind we all want. If you do this for money, it won’t work. You have to do it for love.

You have to communicate with people who like the same stuff you do. You want to sell them your stuff because you love them and want them to be happy. If you are selling it only to make money, selling drugs on a street corner is faster and easier.

Make the world a better place by connecting and communicating with real people in a real way. You make cool stuff. Share it with us.

The web site is the truck of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

After you get your keywords, before all that other stuff I wrote about for SEO, you need to get a domain name and build yourself a web site. This is not a definitive post on how to do this, but more of an overview of the process.

Here’s what I wrote:

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/2010/02/14/sell-handmade-stuff-on-the-internet-seo-part-one.html

The web site is the trunk of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

Don’t use dashes. I’m not sure why, but no one likes them and Google will give you points off for them. I guess that spammers liked using them and they got a bad reputation.

There’s a link in my right sidebar that will take you to a page that will allow you to check if a domain name is available or not.

Domain Name Look Up

The steps to building a web site are:

1. Register a domain name.
I suggest GoDaddy for domain name registration. (NOT for web hosting!) Check on to make sure the domain name you want is available at the page above, then go here to register it. You have to point the domain name at the web host server to make it all work. Again, the details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this article.

2. Rent some web hosting space.
This is the subject of much debate, but I like PowWeb. There are many web hosts out there and they have pretty much become a commodity. I also host sites and if you want us to host your site, we have better customer support than the big guys.

3. Install your web site.

Under that number 3, I’m going to tell you that using WordPress is the absolute best way to build a web site today. I’ve been building them since 1994, for large companies and small. Today, I only use WordPress.

Steps to using WordPress:

1. Install WordPress.
Usually the web host has an option to do this for you with a click of a button. There are many “how to” guides out there for this. If you read this post and ask me to do it for you, I’ll do it for free. No strings. Just mention the secret word “penguins” in your email. (My personal addiction.)

2. Pick a “Theme”.
There are a bunch of free themes and some “premium” themes that cost money. If you want a custom theme, I can build you one. This topic has more depth to it than I can address here, but pick a theme and install it.

3. Write pages.
Create the static pages that you want on your web site. These will be the normal “contact us”, “about us”, and other stuff that stays the same.

4. Write posts.
You need to blog. Yes, you do. I’ll talk more about what to say and why later, but for now, make sure this is set up.

That is a quick overview of how to set up a web site. I have 15 years of experience to pour out into a long, rambling post about the details of each step, but I’ll save that for another day. Today, you should just know that this is the overview of steps you need to take.

It’s not a human, so it can only guess, using calculations based on what it finds. What does it find and what is important? How would you determine what a page is about?

Tip Number One - Just say it!

How many time have you looked at a web page and not quite known what it was about? There were a lot of sales talk mumbo jumbo, but they didn’t tell you exactly what the product or service was.

Tip Number One – Just say it!

If people don’t know what your page is about, how do you expect search engines to know? You need to indicate, with no doubt, no ambiguity, what this page is about. You need to tell people and you need to tell search engines with focus and clarity.

You know what people take their cues from, because you a people. What do search engines take their cues from, not being as smart and nuanced as us humans?

Here are some ways they decide what the page is about:

This is not keyword density.

Something that matters a bit more is the use of heading tags. Those <h1> and <h2> tags that are usually used to make copy bigger and bolder. Google sees them in a different way. They are seen as giving the page organization. A heading defines a section of a page, so they must be important. If the heading has the keyword, then the page must be about that keyword. The trick here is that the style for the heading is usually way too big. Change the style sheet to make them look normal or at least reasonable, then use headings to control what’s important on the page.

“Anchor Text” is the actual text that you click on on a web page to take you to another place. You can click on images or text, but the text that you actually click on is called “anchor text”. I said that twice because it’s important. Think about this. When you click on a link that says “bicycle seats”, what do you expect to find at the target page? That’s right. So search engines, being stupider than a normal human, figure that the anchor text used somewhere else to link to YOUR page, must indicate what your page is about. That seems to be a pretty good indicator of what your site should be ranked for in the search engines.

It now becomes critical what anchor text people use to link to your site from their site. All you have to do is change the anchor text on their sites. Oh, wait. You can’t do that. It’s on THEIR site, not yours. You have no control over their site. You might be screwed.

This is where the post on Building Links comes in handy. There are ways to get links to your site and control what the anchor text says.

The next thing that a search engine will use to figure out what to rank your site for is the number of links to your site, to your page. They actually score each page, but they know that those pages are on your site, so your site might, probably will, get ranked higher than an individual page for a keyword. If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.

If you can just blast out a huge number of links to your site, that will help.

The last factor that I want to cover here is the page rank of those pages that do link to you. Google is putting more weight into what they are calling “authority”. A few links from a high authority site is worth a lot more than a ton of links from a low authority site. I’m not sure how to tell which is which, but larger, established, long term sites will be higher on the authority spectrum. Try to get links from these kinds of sites.

All of these factors get thrown into a big ‘ol bucket of numbers and they score your page for different keywords or phrases. When someone searches on a specific keyword or phrase, the look at all of the pages that have scores for those keywords and compare them. Whatever page has the highest score at the moment gets the top ranking. Some keywords get thousands, or millions, of searches a day. Some keywords have thousands, or millions, of pages that mention them. How does your site compare?

If you search for “does wordpress cost money” or “how much does wordpress cost” or even “wordpress cost” and you will find a page on my site ranked number one. That is primarily because one site out there put a link to my page in their blogroll, so they link to my page on my site from every page on their site. This is great if I wanted the world to know that WordPress is free, which I guess I do. I just want them to know that I’m awesome at SEO and web design also.

People do find me and I’m thankful for that. As long as I have enough stuff in the sidebars to get their attention and tell them that I do web development and SEO also, then I’m happy.

Anchor text is king. Long live the king.

Do a normal Google search on each of your keywords. Write down the top 10 results. Names and URLs are enough. If you have 5 keywords, you should have 5 sets of top 10 results now.

Review those results. Do the same sites come up in more than one of them? Are there a set of sites that seem to “own” these keywords? Some might do a little better with these keywords and others might do a little better with those keywords, but generally, there’s a couple sites that seem to rule the results pages. These are your competition and we are going to crush them, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Now, you should have a feel for the best keywords and who your competition is. They are high on the results pages for these keywords. We need to ask why they are so highly regarded by the search engines. We’re going to dig in deep and find out what’s making them do so well.

We're going to dig in deep and find out what's making them do so well.

Review each of the competitor sites. Search engines love keywords. They love them in the links. If they have a menu, the menu links will contain these keywords. Blogs that are updated regularly are also great for search engines. Lots of pages and lots of content. Just having a bulk of content is good in the eyes of the search engines.

Now, let’s do a little mathematical analysis. It’s not really harder than anything you had in third grade, but I like using big words sometimes.

Go to the magic SEO site, SiteExplorer on Yahoo. Use the input at the TOP of the page that says “Explore URL”, not the one in the middle that says “My Sites”.
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Type in a URl from a competitor. First, let’s look at the total number of pages that they have on their site. You want “pages” for “all sub-domains”. Write down that number next to your list of competitors. Did I tell you to make a list of the top competitors? Go back and write that down, then add this total number of pages next to their names.

Step two is to find out who links to them. Inbound links are probably the biggest impact on page rank and SEO. If you can just get a bulk of inbound links to your site, then you’re probably going to do pretty well. There’s another button, up there at the top of the Site Explorer page that says “Inlinks”. You want to see how many “From all pages” to “Entire Site”. Write down the total number of inbound links to their site.

Repeat these steps for each of your competitors. At this point, you should have a bunch of list with names and numbers on them. You should have:

• List of keywords
• List of top 10 results for each keyword – name and URL
• List of competitors – Name and URL
• Number of total pages on each competitor’s site
• Number of total inbound links to each competitor’s site

Run this analysis on your own site. Do you see why they rank higher than you do? Yes, I thought you would.

Next, we’ll talk about how to do what they did and beat them at their own game.

The most important, and first, thing for you to do is to figure out a strategy for SEO, search engine optimization. Going through the exercise will get you thinking about your site and how it fits into your overall business model.

What is the goal of your site? I asked that of a potential new client last week and it stopped him. He didn’t really know and said he’d have to think about it. I assume that the goal of your site is to sell stuff. That means that people have to find it through search engines. It might be to only add credibility when you talk to people in other sales venues. It might be to make yourself feel good about yourself because you have a place to tell the world whatever it is in your head.

If you want to sell stuff, who will you sell it to? What will they be searching for when they find you? What are you selling? Exactly? How specific is your product?

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

It's a balancing act.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Put in a keyword that makes sense for your site. Take a guess, if nothing else. Do a search for related keywords. You can sort the results by clicking on the column headers. We want to see how many searches for a keyword there are, on average, for a month.

Look at the “additional keywords to consider” at the bottom of the page. Look at the number of searches for these. Are there any that are relevant? Feel free to slice and dice these results, adding keywords to search for and sorting on the results, until you get a feel for what the best keyword(s) are for your site.

Make a list of the top 5 to 10 keywords. You’ll know which ones seem to mean the most in your niche. Write down the number of monthly searches for each one.

We want to compare the number of searches for each keyword, per month, with the number of competitors out there with web sites for those searches. Do a normal Google search for each of your top 5-10 keywords. Look at the number of total pages out there that use that phrase. At the top of the page, it will say, to the right, “Results 1-10 of about NNNNNNNN”. Write down that number of other pages next to that keyword.

You now have a list of keywords, the number of searches per month and the number of other pages that contain that keyword. If anything jumps out at you, you might have a good idea which keywords to target. If nothing jumps out, do the math. Divide the number of pages by the number of searches. This gives you a ratio. Compare the ratios. Pick the top 3-5 keywords that you think you have the best chance of beating, that is, the most searches compared to the least number of pages for that search.

Does that make sense? You’re trying to find out what keywords you want to try to rank for. Everything else we do for SEO depends on picking these keywords well. You can always readjust later, but pick good ones to start with.

Now that you have your list of keywords, we’ll move on to what to do with them in the next part.

Do You Use Etsy To Sell Handmade or Unique Products Online?

If you would be interested in answering some questions, here’s what I’d like to know. Feel free to skip any that you don’t want to answer. If you want to copy and paste these into an email and send them to me that way, please do so. You can also use the Contact page.

Depending on the responses I get, I may group the results and report only the composite information, or I may want to publish individual responses if they are interesting and valuable.

I may have follow up questions, based on your responses. I promise to not do anything with your name and email that you don’t give me permission to so. It’s just so that I can follow up with you.

Please tell me if you give me permission to publish your responses in my blog, either with or without your name. I can link to your Etsy store if you want me to. Entirely up to you.

Thank you very much for your time and patience.

1. How long have you been selling things on Etsy?

2. Have you tried selling any place other than Etsy, online or in person?

3. What venue works the best for you and why?

4. What tips do you have for people who want to sell on Etsy? What is the best way to sell there?

5. How technical would you rate yourself, on a scale of afraid of computers to building your own web site?

6. What do you like the most about Etsy?

7. What do you like least about Etsy? (You knew that was coming.)

8. Any advice about things to watch out for when selling on line?

9. Have you ever tried using your own web site? Did it work? Why? Why not?

10. Any advice for a person just setting out to sell their own handmade products?

11. Any other stories, advice, or comments that you’d like to make?

I want to train people who are not experts

The first step in that quest is the new design of the site. The blog is now on the home page, where you can see that I’m writing about good stuff, so people will be more likely to stay around and read more. That’s the plan, anyway.

I wrote a page describing the concept. I put on my sales copy hat and wrote what I thought was a pretty good page, describing what to expect and how it will benefit you. Here’s a quote and a link. Go read the rest of it and subscribe to the newsletter.

Untangling The Web – Training

With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars.

The world has changed. The Internet is becoming a normal part of everyday life for a majority of people. With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars, from radio to TV, from vinyl records to CDs to MP3s.

Today is no different. It’s adapt or die.

Many people who own a small business know that they should “do something” about the Internet, that there is a huge opportunity out there somewhere, but they are not quite sure how to do it, much less do it efficiently, and if that they miss that opportunity, it might mean the end of their business.

The biggest issue that we heard from small business owners, and everyone else, for that matter, is that they don’t understand this stuff. No one has the time to find and distill all of the information. They do research and the technical information that they find is too complex, too difficult to understand. They are afraid and overwhelmed by it all. It’s frustrating.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/untangling-the-web-training

Untangling The Web

We also talked about the tag line of “understandable guide”, which one person thought was boring. OK, at least one person thought that enough to actually say it, but I don’t know how many actually thought it. We came up with some other thoughts, which didn’t thrill me, then we hit on “Untangling the Web”. That’s totally what I do. I take this big, ‘ol mess that the world wide web is and break it down into small, easy to chew, bite sized pieces.

What is out there can be a mess and trying to figure out how to make your way through it all can be a mess. I can untangle all of that for you.

I’m loving the new tag line. What do you think of “Untangling The Web”?

As I try to define what I’m best at, it seems that I keep coming back to the idea that I can explain complex technical information in simple, easy to understand ways, so that even the people who are afraid of their computers can get it.

I want to stand next to you, not in front of you on a platform.

I’m not about telling, or preaching, or speechifying. I’m about guiding. I want to stand next to you, not in front of you on a platform. I don’t want to point at the sky or at you. I want to hold your hand and gently help you along the path.

I like Chris’s “non-conformity” idea that is also in his “unconventional” guides. Those are all good things and I’m all kinds of nonconforming myself, but what I want for you, dear readers, is something that’s easy for you to get.

I know you are not “dummies” or “idiots”. You are smart. You just need some information explained in a way that makes sense without all of the technical jargon.

“Easy-Peasy Guide To SEO.” That sounds fun and makes the point, but it ain’t me. I don’t use the word “peasy”. It’s just wrong.

“Piece of Cake Guide to Building a Web Site.” I’m not Julia Child.

“The Complete Explanation of Selling Handmade Items On The Internet Without Knowing Any Technical Jargon For Beginners.” Um, yeah, but no.

“The Noob Guide To Basic SEO.” That’s true, but you don’t know what a noob is, much less the fact that you are one. (Noob is short for Newbie, which is slang for a person who is new to a field of expertise.)

After some debate with my lovely wife, who knows all things and is always right, she suggested “The Understandable Guide To” as a tag line. I love it. This proves once again that she’s always right. Every book I write will be named The Understandable Guide To whatever the book is about. I’ll try not to mumble or use big words.

My first effort will be to write up a free book on basic SEO that you can get if you subscribe to my newsletter. I get asked about SEO all the time and everyone seems to be more aware of the value of it all the time. I’ll write a second book that you have to pay me for to get everything that’s in my little brain on the subject, but this will be a good head start for people who just want to understand the basics.

It will be The Understandable Guide To Basic SEO.

What do you think? Please leave a comment. Thanks!

I was talking with a friend who wants to build up traffic to their blog when I was reminded of this cartoon from Hugh Macleod.

The best way to get better search engine ranking is to get more links from more sites. The best way to get more links to have some content that someone, anyone, will care about.

Why should anyone care about what you are selling on your site? Why should anyone care about your site at all?

That could be a very depressing question, but it’s not. There is an answer. You have products that are special and have value that no other products in the world have. What is it?

I want to make you think about the value that you bring to your reader. There is some value. You have the funniest posters or the most unique rings or necklaces made out of a specific kind of glass. You must have something that sets your products apart and makes your stuff special.

It’s easy to focus on what you want to do or say or why you think your products or ideas or words have value. No one cares what you think. They only care what they think. There are other people in the room besides you and you need to think about things from their point of view.

You need to think about what you are trying to sell and why anyone would want to buy your products. What makes your products different? or special? or more valuable? or more desirable? Write these reasons down.

If I wanted to get academic, I’d tell you that this is your “Unique Selling Proposition“, or UPS. You should know what it is. You should know how to define it and communicate it. The only way someone will care about your products is if they understand your UPS.

Now that you can communicate that UPS, then you need to say it explicitly and repeatedly. People need to understand it. They want to come to your site and link to your site because you are the best place to get what?

If you can communicate your unique selling proposition well, then a few of those 6 billion people may care about your products enough to come to your site and buy one.

The greatest challenge is to make people care.

Since you care, it shouldn’t be hard to make them care.