Niche Store Student On Board Series Post #2

OK, this is the second post in the Niche Store Student On Board Series. As you can see, my student is still not ready to turn in his two weeks notice to his boss. He is a baby step closer. LOL. You can see his Ham Radio Supplies store by following the link. As you can see, he has buggered up the heading while making some changes. I know what he did and will go over it in the next post after he fixes it. I want him to learn how to correct his own mistakes if possible. It is a easy fix, he just left out some tags when he was editing some navigation tags. The student is starting to follow directions a bit better after a rough start of not following directions. I think I have taken a good chunk of enthusiasm out of him as well and he is starting to get a couple of "Oh" and "Ah" moments. Which is good. I joke about the enthusiasm part, he is just starting to understand though that he has a lot to learn.

What he has accomplished!

1. The new template is up and just needs to be fixed from his edit mistake. Overall looks great going forward. Blue builds trust.

2. He added 2 chunks of Google adsense and is tracking them on a separate channel as well. That way he knows that clicks are coming from that site. Also he has taylored the ads to draw atention to the right side of the screen. the blue pops out at you. I highly suggest if you use adsense to set up a separate channel for each site. Several of you might want to debate Adsense. I am not going to debate it, I use it and love it and earn great with it. If you have fears of it or do not trust it, use something else. I stand behind Adsense as a great earner on stores built the right way.

3. The site was missing a robots.txt , an updated sitemap.xml file and a privacy policy. He used the fix sonjay posted and I referenced in this post. His robots.txt is here. He also added a solid privacy policy as well.

4. He added a traffic stats counter from sitemeter at the bottom in the footer. This is mostly for my benefit as I can start to see referrers and check a few things at a glance instead of logging into his server stats. If you are playing along with this series it is up to you whether you want to add it or not in the footer. This is merely for me and will be removed once I am done with the training.

5. He settled on the keyword phrases below to target for the front page. These are used in the front page title tag. He has made a mistake and added them store wide, which he will need to change. These keyword phrases will be used for the front page.

Ham Radio Supplies | Ham Radio Sales | Used Ham Radio Equipment

These are keyword phrases we will attempt to target in our upcoming rewrite of content on the front page as well. Also we will use these key words in anchor text when acquiring backlinks to our site. See below.

Ham Radio Supplies
Ham Radio Sales
Used Ham Radio Equipment

6. Wrote a description meta tag and keyword meta tag for the homepage. He then used the free tool here to score is page for three phrases. He ran his keywords one at a time through the tool and scored very well.

In conclusion you can see that he has been cleaning up his own back yard right now. If this were a brand new store, he would still be ways away from releasing it to the public. This site still has a long ways to go.

What he is working on now!

1. Fixing the mistake he made in his header.

2. Going through each store page and keyword searching for 3 phrases to target for each and every store page. Each page should be targeting two to three keyword phrases that best fits that store page and what you are trying to sell. These will be used in each page title tag as well.

3. Writing good description meta tags for each page and filling in the seldom used keyword meta tags. Each page needs to be unique and targeted separately.

3. Fixing the anchor text in the store navigation to use target keyword phrases. Example of a change would be instead of Antennas, it would be Ham Radio Antennas in the store navigation. This helps your internal linking structure SEO wise as well.

In conclusion, the work he has ahead of him is where we separate the serious people. Going page by page getting keywords targeted and tested is boring work, but if done right will pay dividends later. Take the time and do it right. Filling in the meta tags properly is time consuming as well. I have a feeling this will keep him busy a while.

He has a blog going here and you can follow along with his post. He is improving daily on his blogging skills, but needs to lose that black background. i wonder if he will see this and change it. Hint Hint! We will update his progress on Monday or Tuesday so stay tuned.

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