StoresOnline Day 35: I’m Googled!
June 6th 2007 03:16 am
Well, my homepage is showing up in Google. Can’t believe I was so dumb as to forget to put a metatitle on my homepage! D’oh! So of course Google looked for the highest H tag it could find which was…"Shopping Basket" in my side column. So my very nice Google result has a title of "Shopping Basket." Double D’oh!!!
By the way, here’s a little tip. The absolute fastest way to get your website to show up in Google results is to put a link to it from a blog, provided that blog is hosted by a big blog company like WordPress and not just on your own website.
By the way, here’s a little tip. The absolute fastest way to get your website to show up in Google results is to put a link to it from a blog, provided that blog is hosted by a big blog company like WordPress and not just on your own website.
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Jean responded on 26 Jul 2007 at 10:12 pm #
When I did a google on baby slings, I did not find your site in the first 5 or 6 pages, did I miss it? I am doing a lot of research on storesonline since my mother-in-law bought sites way back in 05 and has not worked on them yet. She’s had a lot of health and family issues, so now it is getting passed on to me. I don’t know if I have the time to deal with them so I’m doing a little upfront research before I give my m-i-l an answer.
Thanks,
Jean
Tac responded on 26 Jul 2007 at 10:13 pm #
I also Googled ‘baby slings’ and couldn’t find it. Did you use another search term? Or just your site name?
susb8383 responded on 27 Jul 2007 at 10:26 pm #
Hi,
There are a lot of things that determines where your site shows when you search for keywords. In order to get into the top few pages, you have to have lots of incoming links to your site, for one thing.
I don’t expect to be seen for baby slings for a long time to come.
The true way to see quickly if Google has indexed your site is by typing site: and then your url.
So if you Google site:www.babyslingsdirect.com you’ll see my Google results. As you can see, I neglected to change my title to babyslingsdirect from babyslingsRus when I changed my name. D’oh!!
These results probably show up somewhere for some search term since they are in the Google cache. But who knows how many pages down they are.
Jean, putting up a site is not very hard at all. But the hard part, depending on your product, is getting seen by Google and the other search engines. To get high up on their ranking is a lot of work; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Now, if you’re selling something like “Yodokus red widgets” and your pages are the only ones that have that term, then you’ll be right up there on the front page of Google if someone types that in. But if you’re selling something that other people are selling, you’re competing with their sites as well.
I do have a recommendation, though. There’s an extremely good eBook written by Jim Cockrum called The Silent Sales Machine Hiding on Ebay and another one called Turning Auction Traffic into Cash.
I’ve purchased the Silent Sales Machine. Auction Traffic is his latest.
His eBook is really awesome: This guy uses Ebay not just to sell his products, but uses the auctions as a lead generator. He gets most of his sales from people who found his site because of Ebay, not people who bid on the auction, and NOT traffic from Google.
You might want to check it out. That’s one way to get traffic without waiting for Google to find you. He also has a really good free email newsletter about eBay.
Another way, which I’ve used, is Pay Per Click. You know those little boxes of ads on the right side of the page when you Google something? Those are all paid ads. They are called Google Adwords. Since you’re paying for the ad, the more you pay, the higher up they show, basically.
There’s another resource that I’ve purchased specifically for Google Adwords. Perry Marshall is a known Google Adwords expert. He has a free 5-day email course on getting started, but he also has a great, great resource called the The Definite Guide to Google Adwords. It’s a little pricey, though. I’d start with his freebie email course.
The bottom line is, getting traffic is a lot of work.
If you’ve inherited this from your mother, here’s one thing you might want to try. StoresOnline has a free all-day workshop for new merchants called their Boot Camp. You might want to try calling them, explaining the situation to them, and asking if they’ll let you come to one in your area. It’s a 1-day session that teaches newcomers to StoresOnline a lot of basics about getting a store up and running. It has a lot of good information in it, including touching on eBay and Pay Per Click ads.