May 6, 2008
May 2008 Featured BANS Site Review for the Cactus Products for Sale website.
Site: http://www.CactusJax.com/
Target Niche: Cactus, Cacti and Succulents
Date Reviewed: 05/02/2008
By: Mark Hansen
Overall Score: 3.2 out of 10 (10 being the best)
In addition to the measures above, the site has a total of 23 inbound links to the domain. While this factor is important, it is not measured in the overall score of the site.
Lets get into the review and reasons for the scoring of the Cactus Plant Store.
Domain Age: 1 Month
The domain name cactusjax. com has only been registered since April 4, 2008 and is a brand new domain. The age of the domain will have a short term effect (3-6 Months) on the ranking of the site as search engines work on the full indexing of the site. The good news is that once the indexing and application of the recommendations below are in place, the site should do very well in this very unique niche market!
Niche Specific Website
You have done VERY well in finding a non-saturated niche market for this site! While I did find a few stores in the same market, many of the page 1 search results are directory listings back to your own site! In addition, the way you have made the menu very specific to the various types of Cacti is very unique and will not be confused with other plant type sites. Well Done!
Site Indexing and Spider Activity
In this portion of the review, I can only talk about the number of pages you already have indexed on the site, as well as the number of backlinks you have already established in such a short time. I can safely assume that GoogleBot is coming daily! When I first checked this site 4 days ago, there were less than 15 pages indexed in Google, today, there are 18 indexed pages. That alone tells me Googlebot is happily finding its way through your site. The other large engines, MSN and Yahoo each have your home page indexed as well.
The most relevant activity I see around your site is in regard to your backlinks! In only 1 month, you have more than 20 backlinks to your site listed in Google alone! Yahoo site explorer shows just as many as Google, which means you have done very well in your efforts to get backlinks!! These early links will almost guarantee spider activity and deep indexing of your site! As you progress and get more backlinks, start deep-linking to the various categories of your store as well as your sitemap page!
Now that we know the spiders are coming and your niche will deliver the targeted visitors you want, lets take a look at the most important factors of the site.
Use of Unique Meta-Titles, Meta-Keywords and Meta-Descriptions
While there are many good aspects to this unique BANS site - the meta section of this review is where we start to find the widest areas for improvement. It looks like you did some work to make the main page of your Cactus Plant Store meta information unique versus sticking with the BANS default, however you will benefit greatly by spending more time on your keyphrase research. One of the most common things seen on BANS sites is the use of your domain name, or meaning of your domain name, as the main page title. In this case, you have used “Cactus Jax” as your entry page meta title. While doing my research for your site, I immediately spotted the phrase “Cactus Plant Store” as having a 40-50 daily search value and a kei of 135.20. While the volume is not that great for a main page, when combined with some of the higher volume terms, it will immediately help with targeted traffic!
Current Main Page Meta information
Meta-Title - Cactus Jax
Meta-Description- Cactus Jax - Cactus and Succulents Info and Shopping for Cactus Plants
Meta-Keywords - cactus and succulents, cactus plants, cacti, cactus seeds, flowering cactus, succulents
Recommended Main Page Meta information
Meta-Title - Cactus Plant Store to Buy Cactus Succulents and Cacti Plants
Meta-Description- Cactus Plant Store, Succulents Info and Shopping for Cacti Plants. Our Cactus Store displays all types of Cactus and Cacti for sale in their own categories. Shop for Christmas Cactus, Thornless Cactus and Many types of cacti in our online Cactus Plant Store.
Meta-Keywords- cactus plant store,cactus,plant,store,cacti,succulents,cactus plants,cactus seeds,flowering cactus,christmas cactus,thornless cactus,cactus care,cactus identification
The meta-keywords section can actually carry on a bit longer based on the categories of the store. Once you complete the main page of the site, I would recommend 5 minutes on each of your store categories, doing the same exact thing. Go through each category and make the title, keywords and description, very unique to each page. The time spent making your site unique is the most important time you can spend n a BANS site!
Use of Public and XML Sitemaps
The xml sitemap on this site is perfect! Adam and Kelvin did their homework on the newest version of BANS and the xml sitemap is exactly what the engines need! Looking at your page menu, or public sitemap however, shows exactly where you will benefit by spending more time on meta descriptions. When you look at the sitemap on this site (randomly chosen) you can see where the store owner has begun optimizing the categories with unique meta-descriptions. This is seen in the text descriptions that appear beneath each of the store categories on the top half of the sitemap page. When you compare this to your own cactus store sitemap page, all you see are the link titles with no descriptions… This tells me that you are using the sitewide descriptions and keywords provided by BANS. While it will not hurt to leave them the way they are, you will not realize the power of BANS until you go through each store category/subcategory and write unique titles, keywords and descriptions for each page, based on your keyword/phrase research.
Use of Targeted Articles and Information
Currently, there are no articles on the site. I assume this is due to the site still being very new and in the development process. Reviewing the keyword research again, I can tell that there is actually quite a bit of demand for cactus knowledge! Choosing the least competitive and higher volume phrases, provides immediate topics for your article building. I would start with articles on the topics below and link keyphrases from the articles back over to the store categories where you talk about the types of cacti.
In the second article listed, how to identify a cactus, it is the perfect time to bring the technical category names you have chosen on the site and explain the more common names for the cactus species listed in those categories.
Default Build a Niche Store Menu Optimization
Overall, the way you have broken each species of cactus into its own category is brilliant! No other BANS cactus site I found has done this and it immediately sets your site apart from the few I found. The biggest concern I have with the species names is the lack of demand. For instance, while some like agave do show strong search volume in the hundreds, others like Aztekium have little to none. You should develop some of your categories based on popular names or common names for cactus like: Christmas Cactus, Cactus Houseplants, Saguaro Cactus etc. This will help to balance the unpopular species names with the higher demand common names.
In addition, I would add a link in the top content page section, that brings visitors right over to the wikipedia page on Cactus. This will not only help your visitors learn more but also tell the search engines the type of site you have by linking to one of the highest authority sites on the web. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus)
Overall Recommendations for the Success of this Build a Niche Store site
Time is the only true measure of this or any sites success. Since it still very new, I have to encourage you to stick with it and continue working to make it unique every month. It may be a few months before you start seeing the buying activity you expect, but since you have already taken the steps to make your category names unique, you will get targeted traffic!
Mark
Popularity: 14% [?]
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14 Responses to “Build a Niche Store Review - www.CactusJax.com”
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Mark, question about yahoo site explorer. When I check the BuyPrimitives site there are 50 inlinks for
http://buyprimitives.com
and 57 inlinks for
http://www.buyprimitives.com
is this good, bad, wrong, right ? : )
thanks!
Hi Jeff -
I get the same issue quite a bit. In all likelyhood, you have a link to your site WITH the http://www. and another link somewhere without the http://www.
GoogleGuy Matt Cutts actually wrote about it at: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Either way - having 50-57 inlinks is always good!
Mark
Okay, another newbie question: Can you please explain the difference between the two sitemaps referenced here? - “Use of Public and XML Sitemaps. The xml sitemap on this site is perfect! Adam and Kelvin did their homework on the newest version of BANS and the xml sitemap is exactly what the engines need! Looking at your page menu, or public sitemap however, shows exactly where you will benefit by spending more time on meta descriptions. ”
After reading your post about sitemaps, I have worked on getting mine optimized. I actually submitted it to Google Webmasters for three sites and there were errors listed on two of the sites but I don’t know understand why.
My question about the above remark though is I see the public sitemap but what is the xml sitemap and how can I check to see if mine is “perfect”? :-)
As you can see, I am very green… but determined and doing my best!
Thanks,
Sarah
Where do you see that there are 23 inbound links? I can never figure out how to tell accurately what the links are. One tool shows none or few, another tool shows a lot. What are you using?
About linking to Wikipedia, shouldn’t that link open a new browser window instead of taking the viewer off the site completely? If they’re like me, they’ll get swallowed up in Wiki and forget all about the Cactus site!!
Alice,
You can search google with this phrase:
links:http://yoursitename.com
and it will tell you how many pages are indexed with links to your site.
Or if using Firefox you can use the SeoQuake Extension to see the number of links in the big SEs as well as other important info.
Chuck
Chuck,
I do use SEOQuake, and when I looked at the cactus site it told me that there were 3 external links, not 23. And when I looked at it on Yahoo site analyzer it told me a different number (can’t remember what that was).
I’ve used the method you describe with Google on my own sites, and results are all over the lot. All of these tools miss A LOT of external links - I know, because I’ve see my links on a lot of sites that never show up on my external links checks.
It’s frustrating that there isn’t one good tool that actually gives you accurate info on your account!
Alice
@ Sarah -
The xml sitemap is used primarily by Google and some other search engines for indexing of your site pages. It can be seen at http://www.yourdomain .com/sitemap.xml (lower case “s”)
Once you have it in front of you, just do a search in Google for a sitemap validator and paste the full address into any one of the hundreds out there and it will assure you the markup is valid.
The xml sitemap is the one to use in Google webmaster tools. You can also use both… no harm no foul.
@ Alice -
When you run searches for inbound links, dont forget to check both http://www.mydomain .com AND mydomain .com, you will end up with 2 different sets of results. Eventually, the search engines will decide which to present to users, or you can force it to resolve to just one.
Mark
Do you get any ACRU signups? After 100 winning bids, Im still gettin ZERO acru signups…something is not right here.
hello Mark,
First of all, thanks a lot for your great job.
Secondly, I was just wondering how to create back links direct to my sitemap page ? Can you please let me know how to do this?
Cheers,
Marcelo
@ Marcelo -
Thanks for the kudos!
Instead of getting a link to your main site, which is most common, just change the link URL to your public (not xml) sitemap page.
http://www.mydomain .com/Sitemap
Mark
Hello Mark,
Thanks for your quick reply. I am sorry to disturb you again, but actually I was trying to figure out how to create a backlink like for example to wikipedia as you mentioned above. Is that hard?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Marcelo
@ Marcelo -
The outbound link (not a backlink) to Wikipedia is something I have been trying, to help the search engines determine the category, or type of store created.
Most of the time, you can link to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/yournichehere and wikipedia will have content on your niche. If not, you can search wiki and find your specific niche and link to it.
Mark
Marcelo,
It is not hard to do what Mark has done. If you want to add a link on your site, such as to Wikipedia, you can follow instructions found at http://www.nichestorestrategies.com/how-to-add-external-links-alphabetically-to-your-sites-sidebar/
Rochelle
Thanks Rochelle,
I have followed the link that you’ve provided and have got a lot of great informations!!
Cheers,
Marcelo