Small business new to SEO

[lavishpuppy]

Hi everyone,

I've recently started a website that sells pet supplies/carriers/accessories/clothing but my marketing strategies suck. I understand that SEO is what will change my page ranking on serach engines but that's about the most I know about it. Does anyone know how to register with a search engine (ex: google, yahoo) so I can register my site with key words or phrases? I guess that would be the first step on doign SEO. I'm sure that everyone is pretty advanced in this but i would really appreciate it if someone can help me out and give me a few pointers.

Thanks :)

[Marcia]

Welcome to the forums!

how to register with a search engine (ex: google, yahoo) so I can register my site with key words or phrases? I guess that would be the first step on doign SEO. No, that SEM/PPC - where you pay for placement for keywords.

With SEO you work on your site to optimize it for the keywords. You make sure the navigation and architecture is friendly to crawlers, that page content is relevant and accurate for what's on the pages, and get quality inbound links in addition.

pet suppliesVery good niche, there's a lot of demand for those products because people love their pets and they'll spend. I worked on a pet site for a while at one time doing some consulting and had a ball with it, it was really a fun site with fun people.

First thing for SEO is to do a LOT of keyword research; if you're just starting out it'll take a while to get the more competitive ones, so make a LONG list and start out by going after the very specific, targeted ones at first to get some sales starting to roll in.

[jamesH]

Your iether a real expert yanking a few chains here or you really don't know what your doing and have stumbled across this site.

To give you the benefit of the doubt here's a few pointers.

Finding the right keywords is all important but its also very time consuming. The first thing to do is look at your main competitors, ie put in a key word and check out the first legitimate company that you see.

Go into the source code and check the title and description and pull out all the key words, then do the same thing for another 3 or 4 sites, until you have a decent number of key words to work from.

Then go to overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

and check how many searches each one is receiving. Overture will also give you some other relevant key words based on the ones you've put in.
Pick the best ones and set youself up a couple of PPC accounts on Google and Overture.

Make sure that your sending people to a relevant page that also has good data capture. Remember - hundreds of visitors is just vanity if you don't sell anything. So you should set out to at least gather some email addresses so that you can do some email marketing later.

try www.constantcontact.com

Get a good analytics package so that you track how your key words are doing for conversion, and when you've finally settled on the most effective key words then start finding out how to proporly optimise your site.

Good luck!!