by: Jacob Schlottke
I have added some links in the past, some stuff I found useful, and things that I thought would help newbies. Forgive me if the article doesn't outline everything, but I am going to give you new guys a little head start I wish I would have had.
Starting out, the two biggest keys to success in the search engines (Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc.) are content and incoming links. People argue about which plays the largest role, but I just suggest doing your best at both.
Content
You should focus on having articles, tips, and other suggestions about your products.
Ask your customers for testimonials (a quick, easy way to get testimonials is to offer a discount on their next order from your company... This may seem unprofessional, however, someone who doesn't like your company won't write a testimonial, no matter what you offer them)
Indepthly describe your products- using keywords that will help maximize your page rank. (Digitalpoint has some excellent tools, one includes a search term finder: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
You should try to create a couple other related websites that offer information on your products. (If you are selling baseball equipment, create a site that talks about proper baseball techniques; batting, pitching, youth baseball, etc. and create another site that discusses how to choose your gear, what prices are right.
Bring your competition into some articles. Discuss why your price is better, why you offer better service than them, and how you plan on creating a better buying experience for them.
Linking
Now you have content, your site looks great... But...Where is the traffic? I suggest holding off on submitting your site to the search engines until you have atleast 4-5 really good incoming links. Sites that have a pagerank http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords (click the backlinks tab once you've signed up for a free account) This will show you the sites that are currently linking, your sites page rank, and other useful things.
Add your URL to signature files in; your emails, your forum posts, anything else you use a signature file for!
Go to google.com and yahoo.com and run a search for related words to you product. (i.e. "baseball equipment" + "add url") this will find websites that allow you to submit your link to them.. They are generally free submission directories that can help increase your PR.
Don't join linking farms... You'll find they are more harm than good.
If you can give a percentage of your profit to an affiliate, I suggest running a program. You create incoming links that can increase your PR significantly as google is fine-tuning its PR algorithm to allow for ref codes to be incorperated into the PR of an index.php
Create a sitemap, make all of your main pages interlink. This allows spiders to search with greater ease.
Visit SEO-Guy.com's website to use their tool for finding the page rank of websites for search terms. http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/google-pr.php
For example a search for baseball equipment yeilded the following first page results:
Pos Url Rank
These results make it easier for you to pick websites you will want to exchange likes with. I've found them more than reliable.
Useful SEO Tools:
Useful Article Forums:
Useful SEO Websites: