Getting your jewellery website ranked by the search engines

Once you have a website to start selling your handcrafted jewellery online, you will need to be ranked by search engines so that you show up in the results for your chosen keywords (see articles about choosing keywords and choosing domain names). This is much easier said than done. But there certain techniques that you can use to help you gain and advantage.

There are billions of websites online and each one is competing to be returned when relevant keywords are typed into the search box. The best way to get traffic is to select what is known as a long tail keyword and build your site around that concept. So if you specialise in “black beaded hair bands,” and you know people are searching for “black beaded hair bands” because you have done your research, then you should optimise your site for this phrase.

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Optimising a website is hard work, but if you choose a long tail keyword then you have a much better chance of your hard work paying off. Websites do not get returned for search terms by accident, they are returned if your website contains specific phrases and keywords that are relevant to the search term that is entered by the prospective customer, and if other websites that specialise in your market link to your website. This link popularity demonstrates to the search engines that your website is relevant to your keywords and chosen topic. So it is vitally important that you make sure relevant keywords appear on your website (we will deal with link popularity at a later date, because first it is important to have relevant content).

If we take the black beaded hair bands phrase as an example of a keyword phrase (this is a made up phrase for illustration use only, you should of course do your own keyword phrase research as indicated in our previous article on selecting keywords), then as well as offering your black beaded hair bands for sale, you should ensure that you write several paragraphs about your products. In the past people tended to write a lot of nonsense on websites just to get their relevant keywords to appear over and over again. However, the search engines eventually became wise to this and have developed sophisticated techniques to spot “key word stuffing.”

It is much better if you develop real content based on your experience where you can write an article based on your expertise in your chosen field and offer something of real value. There are two reasons for doing this; the first is that your article will flow more naturally and be easier to write, the second is that if you offer something of real value, other website owners may come across your article and link to you giving you an all important backline.

So on your website you should create page and write something relevant to your keyword phrase. If we take the “black beaded hair band” phrase as  our example then perhaps you could write about why black beaded hair bands are so popular or occasions where you can wear a black beaded hair band or some other such article.

When you write your article make sure it is about 500 words long. Give the article a title and ensure that it contains your keyword phrase, such as “Why wearing a black beaded hair band creates a sophisticated look at parties.” Make sure that you first sentence contains your keyword phrase, make sure that it is included in every paragraph where possible. If you can’t do this then that is fine, the trick is to include the phrase to make the article look as natural as possible. You do not want to over use it and you do not want to include it just a couple of times so that the article appears irrelevant to your keyword phrase.

When you have done this then write about it on your blog and share the information with others if you participate in social networking sites. The more people you let know about your information the more chance you have of getting others to link back to you.

If you are stuck for ideas for keyword phrases and you cannot get to grips with the Google keyword tool, then take the free trial at wordtracker.com. Here they will give you examples of what to look  for. Using wordtracker will help you find  keyword phrases that you can use to optimise your site.

This keyword optimisation strategy is part of what is known as SEO. This stands for “search engine optimisation.” There are many search engine optimisation companies out in the market place, but they are often very expensive to employ and if you target a niche market and you are willing to put in the time, you can often do the work yourself.

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