I recently opened my site: www.e-gadgetarmor.com about 1 month ago. I would like some input on how to get my site into search engines and in general just to get noticed online. Added internet marketing expenses are an option as long as they are reasonable. So far the cheapest I found was $600/month. I am a noob when it comes to the whole internet sales arena, so I am open to any and all suggestions.

I promise I won't cry with your honest replies.

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried a sitemap? Submitted it to Google? Yahoo? MSN? Live?

How about getting links for sites, have you looked into that yet? DMOZ? Yahoo?

You don't necessarily need to spend $600/mo on getting your site into the search engines.

No & No. I seriously have no idea how to do either. Would you mind explaining how to do these?

Hi egadgetarmor-

It's comes down to 2 factors, time and budget. Obviously, we have a wide variety of services and tools that can get you where you need go. You just need to decide how much you want to take on by yourself, and how much of an investment in time and money you are willing to do. Some of our clients decide to do it on their own, some decide to let us handle their marketing completely, most fall somewhere in between.

The forums are definitely a good place is start, so is our Online Marketing Site.

You'll find a lot of information on the Web, a lot of it outdated or misleading. The good thing about our service and resources is that you are already a client of ours, so we already have vested interest in keeping your online business successful.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Thanks

Brian

My advice would be to do what you can on your own. If you have the funds to pay NetSOL pay them. But the last time I checked, NetSOL did not provide any services that dealed with created a sitemap or submitting your sitemap, signing up for DMOZ or Yahoo directories.

If you use Google, google stuff, if not use your favorite search engine and search for how do i type questions in regards to marketing your site. I.E. "How do I create a Google Sitemap and Submit it?" or "Why should I make a sitemap"

Brian is right to, read the tips in these forums on marketing.

I still don't know what to do myself, and I have been reading the internet for 2-3 years nearly every day about marketing our site. It does change, but the basics are still the same.

Thanks for the help. I got a little lazy. I will search the forums a little more thoroughly. I did check the NS online marketing tools and will check those out in greater detail as well.

Aside from that, anyone have an input on my site design or anything regarding my site in general?

Submit your site to the major search engines
work on your title tags, meta and keywords
submit a site map
get backlinks

If you need help pm me.

With the NS e-commerce pro package this is not really necessary. The major search engines will find you. If you build your site correctly, have concise meta tags for each page, validate your pages and links, you should start showing up in 4-6weeks.


Your site uses the same catch-all group of keywords for every page. This will not help at all! If you have a page that shows "purple parts" than the keywords should pertain only to "purple parts". Keep it simple, but make the keywords match what is on the page. That includes headers, titles, content, alt text, anchors and page names!

The NS platform does not make this easy for the beginner, however there is a lot of free information out there to help. You will also see a lot of entries within this forum regarding this issue.


If you have your site listed on legitimate web pages this is very good for rankings. Google will punish those who use "link farms" that charge for adding your page link for each keyword term you are willing to pay for. We do not use them and we rank very well for our keywords.

To get started the best thing you might want to do is to do a search for the keywords you think are the best ones for each product you sell. Start general than reduce it to more specific terms. Go to the sites of the top 5 - 10 sites for each search term. Look at their source code, see which keywords generate the most hits (some could be in the millions). You want to find keywords that are not the most popular but are similar or even specific to what you sell.

This is true if there are links out there to your site but it is good SEO practice to submit. Especially in your case where your not being found.



When your selling products always optimize each product page.



Site Maps are very important and you can direct and inform google of new pages at the click of a button and increase crawl rates.

Also find a good analyzer to run on your pages they can be very helpful especially when you’re beginning or not sure of what you are doing. Many good ones out there.. You can be penalized for doing things incorrectly so follow rules..

I ran an analyzer on http://www.newexamtable.com/ and found the following errors:

Status: Warning! This Tag contains too many characters for what we would consider a "robot friendly" Web page. Consider using our free META Tag Builder to correct this. The maximum number of characters we recommend for this Tag is 60.

Keyword Warning! THIS TAG MAY BE DISQUALIFIED!

REASON: We found the following keywords were repeated more than 5 times in the META Keywords Tag: The word lamps was repeated 8 times

Notice! The following unexpected content was found in the robots.txt file located at http://www.newexamtable.com which does not comply with the current "Robots Exclusion Standard". If directed to a specific User-Agent (robot) that accepts the following then you can ignore this message. Otherwise it is suggested this be removed. Please verify the robots.txt file before submitting to search engines: http://www.newexamtable.com/sitemap.aspx

OFTEN YOU WILL FIND MANY DIFFERENT VIEWS OF WHAT IS IMPORTANT AND WHAT IS NOT IN SEO. YOUR BEST BET IS READ THROUGH GOOGLE AND YAHOO TO FIND WHAT THEY (RECOMMEND) AND USE A GOOD ANALYZER TO CHECK..

OFTEN IN ONE VIEW VERSUS ANOTHER THERE IS NOT A WRONG ONE IT'S JUST THAT SOME WORK BETTER THAN OTHERS. TRIAL AND ERROR

i am also a noob and i am up each night to 1am working on my site my first site arcadeshowroom.com witch needs alot of work and i have leared much from it. now i am starting my new site xtremegameroom.com.

question if we have the ns pro do we still have to submit a site map to all the major search eng.?

i have ordered the Search Engine Visibility from ns do they do that for me or submiting my site map still needs to be done?

thx for the help
fred

For all of us out here who are new to managing our websites by ourselves, providing our own SEO, PPC, getting noticed and trying to get traffic to our sites, you need to visit hubspot.com and browse around. Look under their blog heading for topics on just what you and everyone else are looking for. Also try the free website grader tab at the top to see how your site is viewed by the search engines.

This is one of the best moves I made since opening my webstore. They teach you how to do it yourself. Paying for a professional to optimize your site also is a great idea, but most start up budgets don't allow for it.

I joined up which isn't cheap by any means, but 6 months later I'm glad I did. They are one of many invaluable tools that you need to succeed.

Best of luck!
Rich

Hey egadgetarmor - before spending money on promises, spend some time learning what you are shopping for.

I checked your site and noticed that many of your title tags are, "Network solutions e-commerce web site" - that isnt good. Title metas are a basic basic and not understanding this stuff means you could easily be taken for a $600 monthly ride by an "SEO guru."

Investing in some solid SEO is well worth it if you dont have the time or inclination, but my opinion is that you should take a couple of weeks and invest in learning about some of the basics so you understand what you are shopping for.

I would recommend reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/Get-Top-Google-Techn...4459&sr=8-1

...dont be fooled by the title - its not a magic bullet, but will give you some foundation in some best practice SEO - if you choose to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

Good SEO work also involves a great deal of market/industry/competition research...and a great deal of measurement through analytics as you make changes.

At the end of the day, effective SEO involves following a list of best practices, measuring the impact and adjusting. The other factors involve time, market saturation and unfortunately - a little sprinkle of luck.

Best of luck with it