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…

How much time you actually spend will depend largely on what keywords & search terms you want your website to show up for in the organic (FREE) search results.

The more specific the search (“your city” + “jewelers”) the easier it is to get results.

If your goal is nationwide sales then you’ll want to SEO for broad terms like “engagement rings” & “diamonds” & you’ll need to expend more effort freshening your page content & generating links. You’ll also need to be patient since it can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to get any kind of decent ranking & you may never get first page results for extremely popular keywords (there’s a lot of people ahead of you…)

Set a short term goal of achieving specific local keyword search results & a long term goal of nationwide results. Your local results will improve quickly while it may take years to get decent ranking for the more broad search terms.

If you start showing up well for broad search terms then it’s time to consider expanding your platform capabilities like adding a shopping cart to take advantage of your new market position. Shopping carts are an unnecessary site complication for local marketing campaigns. You can find more information about shopping carts on our other pages.

A good set of keywords & phrases to include in your pages for local search are

• “jewelers” + “your city/state”
• “your city/state” + “jewelry”
• “designer/manufacturer” + “your city/state”
• “diamonds” + “your city/state”
• “your store name”
• “jewelers reviews” + “your city/state”

This list is by no means exhaustive. There are a lot of sites which will help you analyze your own site & anyone else’s for good keyword ideas. I like SEO Digger & SpyFu (both FREE!)

Make sure your site includes complete sentences with all of your chosen keywords & phrases & don’t forget to add any online articles you or your publicist may have written.

SEO & Site Management

You need a Google Webmaster Tools account (it’s FREE.) If you’re unsure of how to get started I’ll set up accounts for JEF Excessories customers (no charge) & show you how to use the features.

You’ll also need 2 software tools. One to help you generate site maps & another to transfer files (FTP) from your computer to your web host & vice versa. I recommend GSiteCrawler for site map generation & FileZilla for FTP. Both programs are FREE & have good online documentation to help you use them. Each one also has a huge community of users who are ready to answer your questions on their forums. Visit the “FREE Tools” page on this Blog for more information on how to obtain, set up & use both of these programs or just ask & I’ll send you a disk including both programs & then walk you through the process of installing & using them.

From now on I’ll assume you have a Webmaster Tools account & the necessary software.

Let’s say you decide Mondays are going to be SEO days.

Spend 10-15 minutes searching Google & Yahoo for the keywords & terms you are optimizing your site for & note what page numbers you are listed on. This will help you to gauge what effect your efforts are having & you’ll also find a lot of potential link swap partners.

Deal with New Content (15-20 minutes)

Teaching you how to actually author new pages is beyond the scope of this website. Editing content on existing pages is relatively easy with most sites unless the designers used Flash graphics or other complicated scripting. Speaking of which; Flash looks great but search engines don’t like it. Your Flash site should always be accompanied by search engine friendly (HTML) pages. Learning how to make small changes to your site can save you a ton of money! Don’t try to change anything if your not sure of what you’re doing!!!

Upload new or changed pages to your web host with FileZilla or another FTP program & be sure to also generate & upload a new site map with GSiteCrawler if you are adding new pages so the search engines will find & index them as quickly as possible. For details on how to use FileZilla & GSiteCrawler visit the FREE Tools” pages on this Blog.

Log in to Webmaster Tools (15-20 minutes)

Now it’s time to log in to your Webmaster Tools account where you’ll be taken to your accounts dashboard which will show a list of websites (you can set up more than 1 website) & you’ll click on the website you want to work with.

The next page gives a site overview & allows you to choose from a menu of options.

If you’ve added new pages to your site & uploaded a new site map to your server with FileZilla then go to the “sitemaps” link & check the box next to your site map (probably sitemap.xml) then click “resubmit” to get the Google bots to look at the new content & add it to their index.

For the next task you’ll choose “links” from the left menu & when the next page appears click “pages with external links” to see who has linked to your webpages. A list will appear with each of your site’s pages that someone has linked to (there will hopefully be more than one link for each page.) As you click on each one you’ll be presented with another list of all the individual webpages with links to your site. You may recognize some of these pages & you may not. If you’re curious then click a link to see the exact webpage linked to your site. Use this information to contact the owner of the page & see if there are any opportunities for business development between the two of you.

Articles discussing the use of Google Webmaster Tools will be posted on this Blog soon. Call 850.206.2251 or email your questions if you can’t wait.

Check Your Website’s Performance (10 to 15 minutes)

From here on it is assumed that you have access to site statistics provided by either your web host or Google Analytics. Information on how to set up your analytics account can be found on Google Analytics help page or call 850.206.2251 & I’ll help you set up your site so it will send information to your Google Analytics account.

Check your site statistics for

• unique visitors
• traffic sources
• most popular pages
• common exit points

These are all important in determining how your SEO program is working.

Visitor Information

Google Analytics will report your site’s total number of visitors & then break this figure down into new & returning visitors. The reports will also show you the cities & states your visitors are browsing from. This can help you determine if an existing billboard, radio or print ad is working. This information can also be used to decide where to place new non-internet advertising to reinforce your web presence.

Content

Google Analytics will tell you which pages get the most visits & how long people spend on each one. The reports also show you which page your visitors exit your site from most often. This can be useful in evaluating changes you’ve made to your site.

Traffic Sources

This part of the reports will show where your traffic is coming from. It lets you know how many visitors typed your domain name (website name) directly into their browser (maybe in response to a print ad) & how many found you through a search engine (and which search engines & keywords they used.) The report also lists other website referral traffic some of which may be the same links you saw in your Webmaster Tools links report. The difference between the two reports is that analytics only shows referring sites that are generating traffic for the time period you set to report. If a site has a link to your pages but it’s not getting hits then it won’t show in “traffic sources.” A discussion of the finer points of webstat analysis can be found on the Google Analytics help page.

An hour or so a week can improve your ability to get in front of customers more often!

Feel free to leave comments on this article…

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…

You should pay for search engine optimization if you don’t have the time or the inclination to learn & perform SEO tasks.

To get your site to show up for broad search terms like “diamonds” or “engagement rings” (as opposed to “your city + jewelers”) requires a little know how & a lot of work.

Getting found in local search result is like falling off a log.

If your home page contains the words “jewelers” & “jewelry” along with the name of your store, your address including the city & state (state should be offered in abbreviated form & spelled out completely somewhere on the page) then it can be optimized to show up for local search terms like “your city + jewelers” with minimal effort.

Submit your site using Google site submit (do it now!)

Then submit your business to Google local add (do it now!)

Check the results & resubmit every 4 to 6 weeks if your not at the top of the list. Submitting more often than that is not recommended as it will annoy Google & cause them to downgrade your rankings.

Read the SEO page if you feel like working harder & getting more results.

Feel free to make comments on this & other articles…

A good SEO provider will do more than just submit your site to search engines.

If you’re paying more than $30 per month you should be getting

• Keyword content recommendations
• Original topical online articles with links to your website
• Updated content for your webpages every month
• Assistance in finding link swap partners

The quality of each of these items should be directly proportional to your spend.

Online Articles & Keyword Content

A good SEO provider will not only recommend keywords & phrases to use in your sites pages; they’ll write original articles & submit them to various online magazines (ezines) & blogs. These monthly articles should contain keywords & information relevant to your business & one link to your website.

It’s important that the keywords are relevant & the articles are original & not plagiarized from other authors as Google will discount the importance of duplicated articles it finds & identifies.

Your articles should also be included on one of your webpages in order to establish you as the content provider. This also satisfies the search engines desire for fresh content & improves your sites importance to them. If Google visits your website month after month & finds nothing new they will deem it unimportant & rank it accordingly.

Articles with more than 1 link to your website may appear “spammy” to search engines.

Google & other search engines hate the practice of stuffing keywords & links. Some webmasters will actually “stuff” keywords on pages & use the same font & background colors to hide the “stuffing” from visitors. This is a “black hat” method of getting search engines to notice your site & give higher rankings. Modern search engines are very smart & you can get delisted (black holed) if they think you’re using certain “black hat” techniques to get noticed.

Your articles should be submitted to highly ranked ezines & blogs. If they’re highly ranked sites which are related to the jewelry industry & shopping in general you will get better results. Posting articles also helps you to find link swap partners. There are lots of venues to post articles for FREE! You can get dramatic improvements in search engine rankings with ezinearticles.com & Wikipedia.org & eBay Reviews & Guides all of which let you post for FREE!

As Google finds links on a website; it follows them & determines if the 2 sites are relevant to each other. If they are; then both get a thumbs up from Google!

When search engines regularly find fresh content on your website they’ll visit more often & the results will show up when people use the various keywords included on your site’s pages.

For more information on keyword selection & SEO look at our Search Engine Optimization page.

Do your own SEO & save a bundle (it only takes an hour a week!)

Feel free to hit the “comment” button below & put in your own 2 cents!

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…

Microsites are web destinations that are separate from a company’s primary site. They have their own distinct domain name and consist of content focused on a particular product or service.

You can host a microsite using your existing hosting account. Your hosting account provides you with a lot more storage space than you are actually using. In fact a lot of people use their online hosting account to backup files from their computer.

Microsites use a narrower focus & can be used as hubs for a specific marketing campaign. They’re more easily optimized for search engines & if their content is good enough, can drive word-of-mouth or viral marketing traffic to your main website.

Philips USA makes consumer electronics ranging from TVs and medical equipment to coffee makers and electric toothbrushes. Their main site reflects that diversity, with links to relevant content and to an e-commerce store. It works as a central destination for the company as a whole but using the site to market specific product lines proved to be complicated and inefficient.

When Philips chose to use the Web to market a special electric razor designed for grooming men’s “personal areas” they mounted a microsite dedicated only to that product.

Using the URL www.ShaveEverywhere.com the site shows video of a guy using amusingly appropriate fruits and vegetables to show how the razor can help the consumer. A link also shows users where they can purchase the razor.

Another microsite www.WhenItFeelsRight.com promotes a Greek white wine called Boutari Moschofilero. The site picked up on the Greek theme by promoting women as goddesses and offering premiums such as a night out with 10 friends & an interactive “Boutari Dating Guide” built entirely around an encounter with Mr. Wrong!

One big virtue of microsites is that they can be adjusted quickly and on the fly to suit your needs without affecting the carefully constructed content on your main website.

Microsites are much easier to optimize for a specific keyword or phrase.

Focusing on the keywords & phrases in the URL, title tags, headlines, body text and file names.

You can benefit from microsites as long as your content is good. The site doesn’t necessarily have to be funny but it should be entertaining & have focused content with clear marketing objectives.

A good microsite can be your most passionate sales rep, working 24 hours a day!

Get in touch with me for a brainstorming session to develop a microsite for your business.

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…

Instead you’ll see Blue Nile, MySolitaire.com & BarskyDiamonds.com along with a host of others. I’ve done this in every town I ever visited & the results are almost identical. These sites are extremely well optimized so they consistently show up in organic (FREE) & paid search results. The only way a local jeweler will show up is by using paid search results.

It’s a fact that the vast majority of online shoppers who are considering a large purchase will want to actually see live goods. Seeing your name in paid search results will increase your chances of getting them in your store.

Of course the online shopper will probably type in “your city + jewelers” to decide who to visit. If you’re highly ranked for this search term it will reinforce the paid results they’ve been seeing when they use the more broad search terms.

Blue Nile is a publicly traded company & their annual report is chock full of information about how they do what they do & who they do it with.

They state that the average consumer on their site takes 90 days to make a purchase & that gives you plenty of time to get them in the store & close the deal! They’ll be eager to show you how much they know about diamonds & will more than likely load both your barrels with plenty of ammo to close the sale.

Blue Nile makes an average of 20% on their diamonds & key to triple on their mountings.

Your competitive advantages

• Customer sees the product
• More mounting choices
• Possible designer lines
• Service after the sale

Pay Per Click Ad Cost

When your PPC ad shows up in a search it’s called an “impression” & you are not charged anything. You’re only charged when someone clicks on your ad. You can get 1000’s of impressions for 5 or 10 clicks.

You decide the maximum you’ll pay for clicks on each keyword & you can set your budget for a maximum daily & monthly spend. You will not be charged for more than your budget or the balance of your AdWords account.

If another advertiser is bidding higher than you for a particular keyword & their budget for the day, week or month gets shot then your ads will move up in the rankings.

You can learn about the effectiveness of your ads by tracking impressions, placement position & clicks in your AdWords reports. If an ad is getting a ton of impressions & no clicks you may need to change the ad so that it’s more compelling. This is something you can’t do in mid-stream with a billboard or print ad!

Ads & Landing Pages

When a shopper clicks one of your ads they should be directed to a landing page specifically tailored to that ad. Visitors to your landing page should be presented with the same theme & navigational links (menus) as those on your main site so they can visit all the other pages in a seamless presentation. However if your landing page offers to match online diamond prices the landing page should not be accessible from any of your main site’s pages. Simply don’t include any links to the landing page in your website’s main menus. This will ensure that visitors who haven’t seen your ad aren’t encouraged to price shop online.

If your ad is targeted to shoppers searching for diamonds then they should be directed to a landing page which states you are competitive with the online retailers & you offer the additional advantage of a greater selection of mountings (designer lines if you carry them) & service after the sale in addition to any other benefits you provide over the online retailers. The price of the diamond is probably going to be the clincher. If it comes down to it sell them a mounting they can’t find online (Blue Nile only carries plain vanilla mountings) & send them on their way!

Call 850.206.2251 for assistance in organizing an online ad campaign.

Feel free to comment on this & any article you see here…