Anybody have any experience with a retail website?

[Larry Ashcraft]

I'm in the process of launching a website for my business.  I'm in retail trophies and awards and have been for the last 35 years.  Business has been down drastically for the last three or so years so I decided to take the plunge.

The website should be up in the next few days.  The company hosting the site is my credit card processing company.  It will cost me about $40 per month.  They use a marketing company for leads.  I don't have the URLs here at home but can provide them in the morning.

What can I expect?  I figure I have to do $200 per month off the site to break even.  Is this doable?  I know there is a lot of variables here but maybe I can fill in details tomorrow.

Standing Wolf, I know you do business on the web.  Any tips?  Can you tell me if your main source of business comes off your website and if so, how do you get people to go to it?

Oh, my website will be www.thetrophyshop.net but don't go there yet, there isn't anything there yet.  I just secured the domain today.

[Larry Ashcraft]

I should have mentioned:  My main focus here will be youth sports trophies, $5.00-10.00 range.  I do a lot of custom stuff, but the main focus will be where the money is, little trophies for kids.

My cost, if it matters, on a $5 trophy is about $1.25.

I need to sell a bunch of those.

[Monkeyleg]

Larry, here's a link to one of many discussions about conversion rates on ecommerce sites:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/3207.htm

To get the traffic, though, you're going to have to get ranked highly in the search engines. To do that, you'll either have to pay a search engine optimization (SEO) outfit a good chunk of change, or pay for sponsored listings.

I'm doing some freelance SEO work for an internet hosting company. One of their clients is paying as much as $2.50 per click on Google Adwords for the term "metal grate flooring."

The company is also spending money with two other companies to promote their site, to the tune of over $9000 a month.

Too bad that $9000 a month is only bringing in 1200+ visitors a month.

The click-through-rate (CTR) for paid advertising is far less than that for organic search results.

The flip side is that an SEO outfit that will get you into the top results on the search engines will cost you anywhere from $1000 a month to $5000 a month or more.

It took me almost a year to get my site on the first page of every major search engine for the keywords I wanted. Now, though, my site is getting anywhere from 180,000 to 250,000 visitors a month.

I'm very close to closing a deal with a well-known gun magazine to have them run banner ads on my site. Unless my numbers are very wrong, I should be able to send them 20,000 to 30,000 or more visitors each month. But it's going to cost them, and I'm going to make some good money from the ads.

I'm not trying to convince you one way or the other as to what you should do. Just trying to throw out some ideas for you to consider.

I wish you luck on your new venture.

[Standing Wolf]

I sell enough stuff from my site to pay for the site. That's about it.

I've been involved in the marketing and advertising of another enterprise over the internet. The E-commerce end of things has been the province of another volunteer, but I think he's resigned. I don't understand the software involved, so I can't pick up where he's (apparently) left off. I do all the messaging, photography, copywriting, HTML stuff, and revisions, revisions, revisions, revisions, and more revisions. The site is essential, and seems to be doing a reasonably good job, but it's also an enormous time eater.

Larry, I think we should probably chat about all this kind of stuff, possibly when I drive over to contemplate a Woodsman. I suspect a great many people in your neck of the woods have no idea they need trophies.

[TarpleyG]

You can optimize your own web site to a degree.  Just do some research on it.  Keywords in your HTML code and registering with the big search engines will do a lot plus the more hits through a search engine you get the better so make sure your friends and family visit often.

Greg

[Larry Ashcraft]

Most of this is Greek to me.  So the more hits my site gets, the higher ranked I am on the search engines?

My assumption is, the company hosting my site is not after the $40 per month, but rather they are after the increased credit card traffic.  If that's true, its to their benefit to market my company aggressively.  There is no contract, so I can drop the website at any time, so to keep my business, they have to make it beneficial to me.

Here is the company hosting the site: http://goemerchant.evsholdingco.com

And this is the company they hire to market their clients: http://www.submitnet.net

A little background on the business.  Most trophy shops are mom and pop outfits.  In talking to my suppliers and fellow retailers, the whole industry seems to be in a severe slump.  Most of the older people in the business are blaming the internet.  There are a few large companies in the trade, notably; Dinn Bros out of Chicago, Crown Trophy (a franchising outfit), and a large retailer out of Del City OK whose name I forget.  Presumably, these large outfits jumped on the internet bandwagon early and are now dominating the mail order business.

My idea, to start anyway, is to keep my product line fairly simple.  Just sell the small sports trophies that kids get.  That seems to be where the money is anyway.  I can add laser engraved plaques and such later after I get a feel for the market.

[BrokenPaw]

Larry,

If you're looking into using a search engine optimizer, read this first.  

In general, getting a large number of hits on your site will not, in and of itself, cause you to rate higher on a search engine, because unless a user clicked through the search engine to reach you in the first place, there's no way for an engine to know who has been to your site at all, much less how many times.

The key thing is links to your site.  Search engines use crawler programs called "spiders" or "robots" to index sites, and they accomplish it by following links that they find on sites they already have indexed.  So if a lot of sites link to your site, a lot of spiders will find it.  If a lot of spiders from the same search engine find it, it'll rank higher for a given keyword than if ony a few spiders find it.

Google's spider, googlebot, is quite busy; my Grove website (http://www.shadowgrove.com/) doesn't have very many links to it out there (I can think of about 5, total, including the one I just put in this post), but googlebot crawls my site about 6 times a day.  By comparison, Websense, MSN and Yahoo's spiders only crawl it about once a day or so.

I'd suggest focusing more on getting people to link to your site (read the bit on Google's webmasters site about link exchanges, though).  rather than worrying about paying someone for search engine optimization.

Just my opinion; it's worth what you paid for it...

-BP

[TarpleyG]

so make sure your friends and family visit often

When I stated this earlier I should have clarified...make sure your friends and family do searches through all the big search engines for your site and click through.  Sorry for the confusion.

Greg

[Monkeyleg]

Larry, if you want to do the search engine optimization yourself, it's really very straightforward. It just takes time.

Here's Brett Tabke's outline for getting ranked on Google: http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm

There's a whole slew of factors involved in getting good ranking. Here's what I've found to work:

1. keyword(s) in the title tag
2. keyword density in the page text (2% to 20%)
3.

tags with the keyword(s) in them
4. keyword(s) in the first sentence of the first paragraph on the page
5. easy navigation, including a site map
6. inbound links, as BrokenPaw mentioned. You can get these from directories, Wiki's, press release sites, or just trading links with other sites. Be careful who you link to, though.
7. Fresh content. Add new pages often.
8. Put the link to your site in your signature on forums. It may seem like a little thing, but it helps.
9. Examine the code-to-content ratio. IOW, if you have a ton of code and just a little text, the search engines will have a harder time finding your keywords. Better to use server side includes (SSI's) if you have a lot of javascript
10. Meta tags aren't as important as they used to be, but they still factor in the equation. Make sure you also have a robots meta tag on each page you want the SE's to index. It should read Also create a robots.txt file.
11. Use alt tags for images
12. Diversify your keywords. Betting on getting ranked for one or two keywords or keyphrases is tough. For example, last month visitors found my site using 34,728 different keyphrases.

More hits on your site doesn't necessarily mean better rankings, as has been pointed out. However, there is very strong evidence that more hits on your link on a search engine will help. Google periodically follows clicks on the search results. Nobody knows what kind of data Google is mining, but it's suspected that they're following the visitor to see how long he/she stays on the site, etc.

If you really want to do the optimization yourself, I'd suggest you join www.webmasterworld.com and ask questions.

[Larry Ashcraft]

Thank you everybody!  This has been very helpful and I'm starting to understand some of the lingo.

Monkeyleg, thanks for the links, I will check those out thoroughly.  I'm a little hesitant to put a link to my site on Oleg's forums though.  Wouldn't that be spamming?

BrokenPaw, your info is invaluable.  Now I kind of understand how Google works.

SW, yes, let's do that.  Your experience will be a big help.  And Sandy will have lunch ready.

My site is in a very infantile state right now, but I may go live tomorrow anyway.  I need to find a bunch of photos (or take them) so people can see what they are ordering.  My suppliers will probably be a big help.  The USA's largest trophy parts manufacturer will allow me to link to their catalog, and they have provided me with jpegs of all their parts, although my customers don't want to see trophy parts.

I'll let you guys know when I go live.  My site currently has a grand total of ONE item that you can order.

Thanks, guys.

[Standing Wolf]

I'm a little hesitant to put a link to my site on Oleg's forums though.  Wouldn't that be spamming?

Nope. If you start umpty-fourteen posts about trophies, that's spamming. If you include the URL to your site in your signature, that's adding information that may well be of value to people.

Heck, Larry! The only way this old bullseye shooter is going to end up with any trophies on top of the gun safe is to buy them.

[Monkeyleg]

Standing Wolf, if you check the page code on THR and APS, you'll find that the meta tags say "no index, no follow."

Thus, using a link in a sig line is pretty much useless (although I've found some pages from THR that have been indexed).

Other forums, though (TFL, AR15.com, 1911forum.com) are spidered. So the links in the sig lines have some effect. What effect, I don't know.

The nice thing, though, is that everytime you change your signature, the search engines follow the links to the new pages you're linking to. Plus, if you have thousands of posts, the links get updated much more quickly.

The downside to links in sig lines on forums is that search engines give diminishing weight to links from a single site. So, let's say you have 3,000 posts on TFL with a link to your site in your sig line.

The search engines seem to give more weight to a single link from an "authoritative" site, as opposed to 50 or 5,000 links from the same site.

So, spending time submitting to multiple categories on one site is an exercise in diminishing returns.

Finding those "authoritative" sites is the most difficult part of the process. You may find a site that has a Google Page Rank of 5, but find that the page your link will be on has a PR of 0. If that's the case, you have to decide whether it's worth your time to email the site owner and go through negotiating reciprocal links. And, with some webmasters, they have ways of using the link on your site to their advantage, while using javascript or php to avoid "PR leak" from their site to yours. If you get that far on in the process, I'll explain more.

There are some other solid techniques. For example, you might want to consider submitting your site to Yahoo's directory. It's going to cost you $300 a year. Some webmasters don't think it's worth the money, but I do. The search engines search each other. Because I spent $300 two years ago, I show up on the first page of just about every search engine for the outrageously generic term "gun shops."

It helps. Much as I don't want to spend that $300 again this year, I will.

One very important thing you need to do is submit your site to the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com).  The ODP is human-edited, so it takes months to get admitted. Sometimes you need to email the editor in your category and --very politely--ask how your submission is going.

Once your site gets into the ODP, though, it's only a matter of weeks before your site is in Google's directory. Once you're there, though, you're golden. Being in Google's directory will boost your rankings, not just on Google but on pretty much any search engine.

All of the advice I've given above is what I've learned from members of www.webmasterworld.com. I don't have any financial or personal interest in that website, but I've learned a lot in the last five years.

Just as with TFL and THR  members, members of that forum are more than willing to give advice. When it comes to giving away business secrets, though, they tend to keep quiet.