Optimize your Main Niche Store Category Menu in 1 hour!

Hi All -

It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m bored while waiting for the playoff football games. Whats a person to do except try to help anyone who may be having a hard time optimizing the default Build a Niche Store category tree! I apologize if I skimmed over it all too quickly during the Build a Niche Store Process series and these next few posts will be very specifically focused on how to take your category tree from the most basic BANS setup into what you REALLY want for your niche store, a unique and relevant structure based on what people are looking for.

Read on…

In order to make this a real process for everyone, I am going to use an example store that has been active for several months but still lacks good indexing and menu optimization. There are two reasons I am choosing this site. #1 – It is about cars, specifically Cobra Mustangs. (I just traded my baby, a 1999 Cobra, for a 2007 427 horsepower Roush 427R stage 3… I love speed!)  AND #2 – The site belongs to my wife Kim and it is not doing too well. How better to help others and score good husband points at the time?!

Before we start the optimization, I am only going to use one metric for determining it needs to be done. Quite simply, it has been active for more than 2 months and has had zero sales! If it had shown a sale or two, I would go into the cpanel and look at the stats a bit closer before deciding which route to take… but.. not happening!

The store is live, the main category has been set and it has a total of 13 pages indexed in Google. MSN and Yahoo have both never made it to the site for indexing. 

Step 1 – The first thing I do when getting to this process is install the public sitemap MOD.

Why? It allows me to do two things. I can use one common page to see the status of my categories and also if they have had descriptions put in place or not. In this case, I can see that the site has about 8-10 main categories, none of which have a description, and consist mostly of the default eBay structure and terms. This gives me a perfect baseline for niche store optimization!

Step 2 – I run off to another site and immediately get an inbound link to the new sitemap page. I did this on my www.getaracecar.com site for several reasons.

• 1. It is already indexed and I know the search spiders will be back again very soon.
• 2. It is about cars, thus somewhat related to the cobra site.
• 3. It will provide a direct link to the site-map page, thus inviting spiders to a full menu of what the cobra site is about in one link.
• 4. It is mine and very quick and easy to do! :-)  http://www.getaracecar.com/racing-sites/

Step 3 – At this point, I have to determine the top level categories for the site. I know the niche site is about Cobra Mustangs, so I will head over to word tracker , click on the keyword researcher link and search for my first word… cobra. This will return a list of searches that have included this word. What I learned from looking at the list of returned searches is that there are many years of cobras that people search for as well as many types of cobras. I have not looked at the actual efficiency (KEI) of the terms yet since I am focusing only on the MAIN categories the site will have. I have determined the following 10 main categories are needed at minimum:

• Cobra Mustangs for Sale
• Cobra Body Kits
• Cobra Mustang Parts
• Cobra Engine Parts
• Cobra Wheels & Rims
• Cobra Body Parts
• Cobra Shifters
• Cobra Interior Parts
• Cobra Exhaust Systems
• Cobra Suspension Kits

Aside from these 10 main categories, there will likely be several more before this process is 100% completed. These are however, a good starting point. At this time, I will NOT delete ANY of the existing pages that are already indexed. Eventually, I will just use them with different names… why delete them if they are already indexed?

Step 4 – Add these main categories to the store pages section of the site. As I add the pages, I will also complete the title, keyword, description and content sections of the store page creation process.

Since the MAIN store category is currently set as Mustangs, I will use it as the parent for the entire site. Match the appropriate functions with the new setup. The first three entries on the store pages correspond with the all-important meta tags interpreted by browsers. (The first public store category is the top level store page with a delete link to the right of it)

Title: (= meta-title) Cobra Mustangs for Sale
Keywords: (= meta-keywords) Cobra Mustangs For Sale,cobra,mustangs,for,sale
Description: (= meta-description) This section lists cobra mustangs for sale as well as various parts and accessories for your ford cobra mustang.

Next, we add a small bit of content that will actually appear directly above the listings.

Content: (upper page content) This section lists Cobra Mustangs for sale as well as various parts and accessories for your Ford Cobra Mustang.

Note: Whenever you add content to this section you MUST first paste your page title and assign it an h1 tag (highlite text and choose HEADING1 from the format tab). If you leave this content section blank, which you CAN do, the BANS application will automatically use your page title as an h1.

As you can see, I just replicated the meta description for this section. It allows very quick posting and the only change I made was the capitalization and BOLD styling of the target terms. 

Parent Category: I used the main store category, which in this case is the eBay motors, ford mustang category.
Search Query: cobra

Page Name: Cobra Mustangs for Sale . The page name section is actually what appears in your left side menu. It should be named ”Anchor Text” and you want to pay special attention to make it targeted to your key word/phrases. It is one of the MOST important sections!
File Name: cobra-mustangs-for-sale .Does anyone notice a trend developing here? :-) I have used my target phrase in almost EVERY section on this page! I did notice that Kim had originally named the “file name” section “Cobra Mustangs”, which is both good and bad at the same time. Good because it contains a target phrase… bad because it contains a space between the two words! Instead of a space, I used a dash or hyphen between the words… search engines decipher this as separate words and consider this file-name as /cobra mustangs for sale/. When you have a space… it is interpreted as: /Cobra%20Mustang/

Note to all: DO NOT LEAVE SPACES in your file name section! Use the – to separate words.

Now when you go back to the mustang cobra sitemap page, you can see the main category along with the meta description listed directly beneath it. Let me run through all new main categories real quickly and get them added to the site.

If you take some time and look through the meta of the 10 main categories I created, you will notice a few variances from what I wrote above. Several of the page titles are listed in a longer form than a simple form. In other words, instead of Cobra Suspension Parts, I may have used “Ford Cobra Mustang Suspension Kits and Accessories for Sale”. This gets the additional terms of ford, mustang, accessories listed more often which will ultimately end up helping our long term goals of targeted visitors for “Ford Cobra Mustang Parts and Accessories”.

All in all – I have about 45-60 minutes from the time I started the research until the time I have my main categories listed and optimized. In less than 1 hour, I have made this site completely different that every other BANS store using the same category.

In the next post, I will be creating several product pages, or subcategories, beneath each of the main categories that currently exist on the site. I will do this the EXACT way I did for the main tree.. in other words, I will go back to word-tracker and start finding the higher KEI terms for the 10 main categories. Those terms will make up the product pages.

It may be a day or two before I get the next post completed… please don’t hesitate to ask any questions in the meantime. Also, don’t forget to revisit the Niche Site Directory and make sure your term is secured. There are still many that suggested the word but did not wait for the full paypal page to load before closing it down. Thus, I did not get complete information. If yours was one of the terms that is not clicking to your site, please click on the term then click the purchase button. Do not close your browser window until Paypal asks you to login.

Thanks everyone… have a great weekend!

Mark

Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:

• Niche Store Menu Optimization – Hour 2
• How do you Optimize a Build a Niche Store Website?
• Build a Niche Store Empire – Determining your Main Categories

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