Starting your second BANS store

By now many of you that read this blog probably have your first build a niche store under your belt by now. You probably have figured out a few things that you need to different as well. You are not alone. It was not until my 4th store when I finally got a great grasp of how to attack things. Your domain name does not need to be mylongkeywordphrase.com! Get it somewhere in the neighborhood if it makes you feel better, but joeslaptopstore.com will serve you just as well if you are selling a certain type of laptop. Each page title, description and unique content is what makes and breaks stores.

Another thing that news store owners tend to do is fall in the trap of early success. Yes, I am talking to you, you had a great first month and then sales went in the toilet. did you really think you were going to retire off of one store? You need to see the big picture. More stores equals more outlets. Stop checking those stats every minute and stop looking for the magical traffic builder on the Digital Point forums. Build, build and build. Optimize those pages get the initial traffic push out there with directories, social bookmarking and articles. Do about 10 link trades with like sites and move to your next site. Check those stats daily, but be looking for the phrases used to find your site organically and optimize those pages. This is a business and you should treat it as such.

Lastly I am going to pimp the SEO Book by Aaron Wall. I suggest you buy this and read it 3 times. He puts out an updated version every couple of months and his blog is updated daily. You will learn more here than anywhere on the net as far as search engine and link building goes. This will be the best investment you have made in your BANS store.

Contact Form for your BANS store

Today we will cover adding a simple contact form to your Build A Niche Store. After you create a new contact page in your BANS admin panel, simple copy and paste the code here into the html of the page.

You can play around with the fonts and background colors to match your site.

Next you want to copy and paste this php code here into a notepad file and save it as contact.php. Make sure to change yourmailaddress@anywhere.com to your email address.

Next upload the contact.php file to your server in the root domain section. this is the same location where your index.php file is.

You should be good to go. Make sure to test your form.

Old fashion link trading

Believe it or not, good old fashion link trading is back in vogue. The little green Google page rank bar does not mean much to webmasters as it once did. Google wants relative back links preferable from like sites in your niche. I have been preaching this for years.

1. You should research your niche and key phrase and build a list of like sites you think might be relative to link to as well as good candidates to link back. Also try to find a contact email for each site owner. I suggest a good 10 sites to start with. It should take you all of 45 minutes to research this.

2. You should have a resources page set up on your BANS store. Add the links with good anchor text of the site name you are linking to.

3. Compose a fairly generic email that you will be sending to each webmaster. I keep these real simply, like...

I really enjoy your site. You should be commended on your dedication to your niche. If at all possible I would like trade links with you. I have added your
site on my resources page at:
http://www.yoursitedomainhere.com/resources

If at all possible would you mind adding me to your links page?

Thanks,

Your name here

You can word it however fits your style.

4. Send this to the 10 site owners and you might be surprised what you hear back. Give them 2 weeks to respond and add your link. If after 2 weeks you do not get response, simply remove the bad trades from your page and tackle a few more. It works and you will pick up some great back links in the process.

Directories and you!

Everyone always clamors to submitting to directories for back links. What a lot of people do not understand is they do not hold much weight anymore with Google. I would limit to only submitting to PR5 or higher free directories and in no way would I submit to a directory that requires a back link from me. The only sites you should be linking to are sites in your niche. You are much better off paying Yahoo and getting into their directory, as it holds more weight. sometimes it can have an effect of 50 back links as it is a highly trusted directory in Googles eyes.




You will notice in the pictures above how trusted directories show up in Google searches. Back links from these type of directories hold great weight. Yes, most are paid submissions, but if you are serious about your BANS store I suggest paying the price!

Back up you niche store database

Let's face it, computers and servers go down or get hacked. You need to protect yourself in case you have some sort of failure with your hosting account. This procedure is assuming you host with a company that offers CPanel.

1. Log in to your hosting account.

2. Locate your hosting site's "Backup" option.



3. Choose a database from the list under:
Download a MySQL Database Backup

4. Save the file to you hard drive.

You are now done. I suggest doing a back up weekly or anytime you make a great deal of changes to your site. I highly suggest using Hostgator. They are very reliable and their customer support is fantastic.

Original content and article submissions

I see a ton of people who take their original content and post it up to their site along with posting it to every free article site on the planet. This is a no-no in my opinion. I suggest changing up the content for each place you submit it to as to not trip any duplicate content issues and cheapen the source link, being yours. If you can at the least, have 2 versions, the best keyword driven one for your site and one other version for your favorite article submission site. You want your original to stick out above the crowd, so why cheapen it up by putting copies all over the web?

Per Matt Cutts

My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

Fire your canonical

Today we are going to discuss canonicalization and 301 Permanent Redirects. Google is cracking down on redirects so you will want to make sure this gets done properly. I have found a great article on the subject and instead of reinventing the wheel, I thought I would link you to the post itself. I suggest setting your canonical to www as well. I do this to all of my BANS stores first thing. Make sure it is on your checklist when starting a new niche store as well. Make sure you verify that everything is working properly and conduct a header check to verify a 301 is returned for the incorrect version.