Customizing & Search Optimization of Your Niche Site

October 26, 2007

Hi Everyone - So today, I decided I would combine the next sections… I did this for no other reason than to help myself save time! :-) I know, that’s just wrong isn’t it? Actually, I know the customization of your Niche Store is a section that could literally take me a week or two to cover and I don’t want to do it any injustice by trying to rush through it!

For now - I am going to tell you what I changed from the default template and how the look was done. I will also get into the explanation of why certain things are in different areas and their impact or effect on search results.

You ready? I’m ready… let’s go!

If you have not already done so - take a look at the newly designed Grills for Sale website. In this design, I incorporated the following:

• Custom header background image that stretches across the whole page. (1 pixel wide, 400 pixels tall)
• Custom link bar at the top of the page that can be used to focus on 4-5 specific, popular, categories.
• Added the Page Title MOD to display page-specific dynamic page titles within an H1 tag.
• Changed the logo.jpg to a smaller sized file, positioned to the right of the header. This allows the page to load faster.
• Added an  AD Banner into the header section (Google Adwords Banner).
• Reduced the size of the search box and embedded it into header section.
• Added a custom JOIN EBAY logo above left side navigation.
• Added the BANS Sitemap MOD to give both public visitors and search engine spiders one single page with almost all site content listed.
• Eliminated the alternating Gray and White rows for product display, and separated with a single border.

Some of the above changes were done simply due to my own layout preferences, others were done to enhance the search engine positioning and indexing capabilities of the site. The changes for SEO are what I am going to spend time explaining now… You can also view the short video clip showing the sections I am about to discuss, and how the admin section plays a role in what is seen or unseen on the pages.

Navbar at the top left of page
So, why add a small navigation bar that shows what you already have listed a little farther down? Simple… make it as easy as possible for the user to find what they came for. We already know the terms listed in the top navigation bar are going to be hard to rank for as a standalone site, why not place a link bar at the very top, where a visitor (and search spider) can find the way to the most popular areas?

Dynamic Page Titles
The standard install of BANS will show dynamic H1 tags on your site! These can be seen just above your product listings in the main center of the page. I add the same dynamic version as high as possible on each page! If we are telling a search engine spider that this page is about Stainless Charcoal Grills, it is in our benefit to make sure some of the first words on the page are “Stainless Charcoal Grills”!

You want to try and get your targeted terms as close to the top of the page as possible in the form of text (not an image) that can be indexed by a search spider. If you can place it between <h1> tags, all the better!

Niche Store Public Sitemap
I believe the public sitemap MOD is one of the best things ANYONE can do for their Build a Niche Store site! Not only does it allow one single page with all links and short page descriptions, but it gives us a place to go and see what needs to be done next with one single click! This does NOT replace a google xml sitemap, but in my opinion it is much better as it has a functional use for visitors!

Search engines LOVE sitemaps, so do People! As an example… I have www.getaracecar.comwith the sitemap, and www.racecars-forsale.com without. They were both made public on the same day as part of an experiment of my own. Get a Race Car has 69 pages indexed in Google, race cars for sale, only 6pages! The sitemap page is by far one of the most common landing pages on the site.

End of page Permalink
Anyone who has followed my writing knows how I like to reward both visitors and search spiders with a link at the bottom of the page. I simply reuse the title tag from the top section, add in a little <current-page> code, and there have a nice little permalink, which happens to be the last thing a search engine spider sees when it is done with the page! The premise is this:

• Spider enters page on site
• Reads the <meta-title> tag in the code
• Reads the first piece of visible text (Matches meta-title tag) and sees the title is relevant.
• Reads the first H1 tag - again, relevance.
• Scans the page to find relevant information in association with our previous information
• When leaving the page, it departs with a permalink, containing the same anchor text as the meta-title, first words on page, h1, and relevant content. 

Simple huh?

Going back to the short video I linked to above, you can see where all the pieces of SEO come together! We have developed our category and product pages, named specifically after the terms we know people are looking for from our research.

In the admin, we only need to spend a few minutes on each category and subcategory (product pages) to make sure our keywords and descriptions are in place for the search engines! By using your newly installed sitemap page, you can see that your Main categories are listed in BOLD RED. The subcategories are a gray bold…

Start with your main cats and go through each one adding your title tag, keywords tag (contents of the main cat and subcategories), and short descriptions of the category. I also copy the description tag right into thecontent box so it displays above the item listings! It takes about 5 minutes per category and once you have the main cats completed, you can revisit the subcategories once a week until they are done!

I hope to have my mains populated before this email is dispersed tonight… wish me luck!

Mark

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