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Grill Auctions Update

October 27, 2007 | Author: Mark | Filed under: Build a Niche Store, Everything Else

Good Morning everyone! Since I have been a slacker recently, I decided to post a quick note about the Build a Niche Store contest for the Grill Auctions site, as well as a brief overview of what I am doing on the site today.

First - in regard to the contest, I don’t want to post the current standings until I can access my office PC and get the spreadsheet I have been using to track the contest! When I left my home earlier this week to come to Massachusetts, I left some of my working files on my office computer. Normally this is not a problem as I can just remote desktop in and do what I need, but for some reason (probably the rain) I cannot access the system today. On Monday, I will have my office manager check the router and correct the issue.

So.. On to the Grill Auction status.

This morning, I was going through the site logs to try and get a good understanding of where the site sits today in regard to indexing etc. One of the first things I discovered is that in the short 8 days since I posted a public inbound link to the site, it already has 28 pages indexed in the Google search engine! (View index)  Granted, there are only a few search engine referrals at this point for very site specific terms (build a niche store grill auctions, etc) but the thought that Google has already come in and indexed quite a few pages is promising! What to do next?

The first thing I will do now that my public sitemap page is up and running, is point a few links from other well indexed sites, right into the sitemap page! For this, I choose three sites that are actually BANS sites! If you look at the left-ads section of each of these pages, you will see a link titled: “Gas Grills for Sale“. That is all it takes for now folks… get your name out there, point them to a page that a full index of the site and watch the search spiders come crawling! The left menu of the websites below contain my links:

Did you notice how I didn’t just type the website address (www .mywebsites .com) into those links above? There was a reason for it… lets take apart a link so you know how to properly form your inbound site links.

There are many functions to a link, for now I am going to discuss 2 primary parts:

  • The URLex: http:// www. thiswebsite .com/ (Spaces left on purpose)
  • The Anchor Text ex: Click this Link

The Link Target URL
Obviously, the url is the page you are linking to! When you place links into your site, don’t make the mistake of linking to ONLY the main page! Your website is made up of many pages and your linking strategy should include ALL of them! Your pages were created to attract specific targeted terms… why not promote them individually and get them ranked quicker? Here is a good example:

The link above to QVC Closeouts is actually a fairly high competition phrase! There are many sites focusing on that traffic but Yahoo and MSN love me the most (its good to be loved by search engines), Google will come around over time but right now, we only rank 11th for the term. You can see that my link is not to the main page of the site, but instead it goes DIRECTLY to the QVC Closeouts page on the site! Makes sense huh?

The Anchor Text
Another thing you notice about all of my links is that they are not generic domain names. In other words, I don’t have the text of the link written as www.carolinacloseout.com . This would get me no love at all from the search engines…

The Anchor Text is the actual phrase that is read by both humans and search spiders! You MUST use descriptive text that is specific to your targeted search phrases in all your inbound links! This is not really an option, it is a MUST do thing and one of the most beneficial things you can do for your search marketing!

The best way to explain why is simple… Assume this page is completely blank, (I know… you wish I didn’t type so much huh?) there are only 2 bits of text on this page, which both happen to be links:

What do they tell you? The first, tells you nothing at all… it is just a link to a website! The second link however tells you WHAT the website or resulting page is about!!

I cannot stress this enough:

  • Link to INDIVIDUAL Pages of your site!
  • Use targeted Anchor Text in all your inbound links!

Have a great weekend - I am going to begin adding some custom content to the site tonight and tomorrow… OK really, I have 2 sons in College that just love to make $10-$20 for writing content! I will use and abuse them a little to write a few keyword rich articles about the Grill Auction site.

I will also go out and find an RSS feed or two that has to do with outdoor grilling, recipes, basically anything that will assist in providing content for the site in the easiest way!

Mark

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 and is filed under Build a Niche Store, Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.



Stumble it!

3 people have left comments

I may be asking this too early but how long do you leave the links on your other BANS stores when you first create a store?

Rochelle wrote on October 27, 2007 - 8:54 pm |

@ Rochelle

Never too early - Good question!

I usually leave links up on other sites until I see from my own logfiles that all major search bots have come crawling!

Slurp (Yahoo spider) Googlebot (Google) and MSNbot (MSN or MS Live) are the three big ones I look for.

Once I see they are actively scanning on a daily basis, It is safe to remove the referral links.

Mark wrote on October 28, 2007 - 11:30 am |

[…] all the details here […]

domainhg » Blog Archive » Grill Auctions Update wrote on October 28, 2007 - 8:16 pm |
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