I always say that SEO is like a High School Popularity Contest (think high school musical for a minute).  If everyone else says you are cool, you’re cool.  The football team’s quarterback is loved by all and even if you’ve been at the school a single day, because everyone else refers to Mike as the quarterback, you know Mike as the quarterback.  For websites, a fundamental rule of SEO is: what other people call you is what you will most likely rank for.  This is also where link building falls into play.

Blog posts about your product or service tell the search engines that people like your product (and your site).  Newspaper stories with a link to your product (on your site) tell the search engines that a trusted news source is describing your site a certain way.  Other sites linking to your site using words like “San Francisco Dentist” or “San Francisco Family Dental” (called anchor text) tells the search engines that you are a San Francisco Dentist.   Then search engines do their magic and when someone looks for a San Francisco dentist, they will look at what others are describing as a San Francisco dentist site, does that site have the content of a San Francisco Dentist site and how many other trusted sites recommend it as a San Francisco dentist site.  Now that we are all clear on “popularity” and how it relates to SEO, let’s talk Yahoo Site Explorer.

You know your competitors.  Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and insert their domain name (ie: www.jjcarlosdmd.com ranks #1 in Google for San Francisco Dentist) .  Click on the “inlinks” section (below):

click on the inlinks button

DOMAIN NAME: What is a domain name?  It’s what everyone else knows as your online business.  Catchy, easy to remember and contains words that customers would actually use to find your products are the key points to any good domain name.  I always buy from Moniker or GoDaddy because of price, features and trust.  I also always do a google search for “Moniker Discount Code” or “GoDaddy Discount Code” before purchasing any new domain to save myself a few bucks.  You should do the same!

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH: Grab a piece of paper and then go to Google.com and search for the product you plan on selling.  Write down who shows up and what they are offering.  Does everyone offer free shipping?  If so, your idea of making money on the shipping fee just got trumped by the competition.  Are they offering the product for less than you are paying to get it at “wholesale”?  If you answered yes you’ll want to find a new product.  What terms are they using to sell the product?  A great tool to figure this out is SpyFu.  Enjoy!

WEBSITE: Now one of my favorite things about the internet is the fact that you can easily find almost everything for free (it feels like everything sometimes).  Building a website is no different.  One big thing to remember for getting started selling on the internet is you always get what you pay for.  Now how can I say you can get it for free but you get what you pay for?  Simple, there are always strings attached to free.  It’s usually worth it to cut those strings IF you like what was free.

Here’s my example.  Weebly.com is a great site builder program.  It is easy to use, fun looking and you can create a site without even thinking.  The free version shows you everything and let’s you create a site BUT the footer (bottom of every page in your site) tells everyone you made a site for free.  If you pay, one of the features is you can customize the footer.   See what I mean?

Building a website, especially your first site, can be fun and can be frustrating.  Doing it is the first step and improving it is the rest of your internet life.  Some key things to remember about a successful website are:

Keep It Simple! Don’t make it so cutting edge that no one knows how to use it.
Set a Goal for EVERY Page! You want to sell right?  Make sure every page has a clear purpose.
Take Good Pictures! It’s worth it to take a nice picture and answer all the question you had about the product.  It makes the sale that much better.

So there you have it.  The first steps to getting started selling on the Internet aren’t super crazy but you’d be surprised how much you learn and few people have actually taken even the first step.  Go ahead and take a step.  The most you are out is $9.95/yr for a domain.