Forget about shopping carts & trying to make sales directly from your site. Your strength lies in the fact that you have a better selection of jewelry & the customer can actually touch & feel the pieces. The online retailers can’t offer this kind of presentation using photos alone.

Don’t try to compete with online retailers in their own arena.

Take the home court advantage!

Every page on your site should be designed to funnel the viewer into your store. To do this you need to consider all of the reasons why a person is on your site in order to tailor the content to their needs.

The obvious reason would be that they are looking to get married or they have an anniversary or birthday or some other gift giving occasion which jewelry would be appropriate for.

Next you need to consider how they are finding your website.

These are some of the ways a visitor finds your website

• FREE search results
• Paid search results
• Print or other advertisement

Print & Other Ad Visitors

The chances of someone typing your website in after seeing or hearing an advertisement is pretty slim unless there’s some kind of hook in the ad. Offer a special in the ad or promote a social/charitable event.

Have a microsite tailored to each particular offering.

Use a separate dot com name to point to a promotional microsite.

A microsite can be a simple one page announcement or a full blown website in itself. You can use the same hosting account that you use for your main website. The only cost is for the additional dot com name & the page design. If the microsite promotes a charity you may be able to get someone to design it for FREE!

FREE Search Result Visitors

These guys more than likely found your website because you’ve done a great job of optimizing your site for local search.

They may or may not have been looking at online retailers before they found you.

You should probably include highly visible links to any microsites or other special offer pages which you are already advertising to the general public.

Paid Search Result Visitors

These guys need to be sent from your ad to a special landing page.

The page content needs to be specific to the keywords they used to find your ad.

If they typed “diamonds” then you want them landing on a page that states you will match online diamond prices & then outline the additional advantages of coming to see you.

• Bigger selection of rings
• See before you buy
• Hometown service for life
• FREE watch battery?

The landing page should include navigational links to the rest of your website.

However; your main website should not have any links directly to this page. The reason for this is obvious. You do not want to tell them that it’s possible to compare diamond prices online.

By the same token don’t specifically mention Blue Nile or any other online retailer when you offer to price match. Simply say you’ll match online retailers diamond prices & leave it up to the visitor to find the online dealers (they’ve probably already found them if they’re on your landing page but there’s no sense advertising for them anyway.)

People tend to focus on selling directly from their website.

There are more productive methods.

I hope this has been helpful!

Feel free to comment…

Make sure the page title is descriptive of what is actually on the page & make it different for each page on your website. Duplicate content tends to bore the search engines.

You page title is what shows up as the header in search results.

Next you want to use a meta description tag and make it good as this is what will most often show up directly below the header on a search result.

The description can be different if the search results are related to keyword content which is not in your meta description or title. Google will frequently use keywords in the content of your pages to generate search results which can blow your carefully crafted meta description. If Google generates search results from keywords found outside of your meta description then the text which surrounds the keywords will be used as the description in the search results.

Make regular searches for keywords & phrases you are optimizing your site for & see how Google shows the header & description in your web page’s results.

Make sure you use your keywords & phrases more than once in your copy & make them bold to draw your readers to that section of text (most people scan a page & this can help them find what they came for.)

Use “headers” (H1 or H2 tags) throughout your pages to separate content. This will help your customers find subject matter they are interested in & can increase the importance Google attaches to the keywords used inside the header tags.

Make sure to use alt and title tags on images. It lets the search engines know what the image is about and can cause your images to show up on the Google image search.

Use title tags on your links. It will help the search engines know more about the page you are linking to and improve relevancy. Don’t put too many outbound links to other sites as this can lower your page’s importance. More importantly links out will send a prospect away from your website. You wouldn’t just send someone out of your store so plug up the exit points of your website.

Attract links from jewelry related websites, blogs & shopping comparison sites.

Links are like a popularity contest. The more links you have from highly ranked sites that contain content relevant to yours; the higher you get ranked! Use the Google Toolbar to easily find the rankings for sites.

Stay away from link farms since the search engines are good at detecting them & will discount anyone linked to them. Also stay away from sites with a lot of advertisements.

Human edited “open directories” like the DMOZ Open Directory Project have people who actually visit every site submitted & decide whether to include it in the directory or not. Google attaches a great deal of importance to these directories & if you get listed in DMOZ it’s a huge thumbs up!

Many news sites allow you to post comments on articles. You will need to create a user profile to make posts (FREE) Find articles that are related to the jewelry industry & post a few comments. Don’t include any links to your site in the comment postings. Instead; you should have a link to your website in your user profile.

Most of all – don’t buy expensive software & services claiming to get you ranked. Do it yourself with a little help from a friend (me for FREE!)

Feel free to comment on this article…

When someone places a link on their site to yours it shows they value your content.

The quality of links is more important than the quantity. Your search engine rankings will get more of a boost if the sites which link to yours have related content & are highly ranked themselves.

Avoid link farms which are just pages of links to a multitude of different sites.

Some of the best links are from human edited directories like the Open Directory Project DMOZ which is very difficult to get a link from. The process takes a long time due to the sheer volume of submitted sites & the fact that actual human beings will look at your site & decide if it merits a link. A link on the DMOZ is a big thumbs up in Google’s mind & if Google likes it then most search engines will like it too.

You will more than likely have a lot of clickable links on your site. Some will send visitors to a different website (external) & some will refer to pages on your own website (internal). The text on your page which shows these links to visitors is called “anchor text” & it should be formatted in a particular fashion.

Your anchor text should always describe what it is you are linking to.

For example -

• Fleur de Lis jewelry takes you to http://www.cajunjewelry.com
• Eternity Bands takes you to http://www.sugarfingers.com
• funny gag gift takes you to http://www.bluepillring.com

Whether you use capital or lower case letters in anchor text is not important.

Anchor text should never say “click here” as this is virtually worthless.

If you Google the term “click here” without using the quotation marks you’ll see Adobe.com & Apple QuickTime in addition to a number of other sites. The reason for this is that so many website owners have used the anchor text “Click Here to download Adobe Acrobat” or “Click Here to download Apple QuickTime” software. The result is that when you Google “click here” these sites show up on the 1st page.

Do you see how this could help you to own particular keywords & phrases?

Visit the Search Engine Watch website for more in depth link strategies.

Please leave comments if you find this article helpful (or not!)

They have a hard time separating the code that generates the beautiful designs from the actual content of the website & for this reason you should always offer to serve up normal HTML web pages in addition to the Flash portion of your site.

Since flash websites take a loooooong time to load this has the added benefit of offering faster loading pages to people who are on slower internet connections.

If you have a flash site then your home page should offers visitors the choice of HTML or Flash or better yet tell them to click one link if they have high speed & another for dialup.

Then the search engines will be able to find the HTML pages & you won’t have people abandoning your site in the middle of a long wait to get pages served to them!

Flash sites are also a lot more expensive to produce since they take a lot more time & expertise to design. There is a trend towards minimalistic site design & if you use a designer who is fluent in XHTML & CSS then you can wind up with an attractive site that you can easily learn how to make small changes to yourself.

All that being said – I love flash sites!

They present your customers with unique designs which say “we got fancy stuff in our store…”

I hope this article was helpful.

Feel free to leave comments…

Most designers offer a “find a retailer” link on their sites.

The customer already knows you carry the line so don’t help them find it in another store!

Instead; simply add a nice set of product photos or designer logos.

This will get the message across without giving a road map for people to go around town price shopping you on the lines you carry (they’ve already price shopped diamonds & that’s enough.)

Let me know if you think this is a good idea by leaving a comment…