Analyzing Real-Life Examples of Top Ranking Sites, Part 4

Analyzing Real-Life Examples
of Top Ranking Sites, Part 4

By Robin Nobles

(Continued from Part 3 -- interview with a representative from
The Shortwave Store.)

Our next example site is an online store that sells shortwave
radios and accessories -- a category we'd consider to be only
moderately competitive. This classification reflects, perhaps, a
more middle-of-the-road analysis that would be typically
applicable to the average retail store doing business online.

Keyword: shortwave
Site: The Shortwave Store - http://www.shortwavestore.com

Let's look at the site's top 10 rankings for the keyword,
shortwave.

* #6 and #7 in AltaVista
* #7 in Google
* #2 in About.com Sprinks
* #1 in AOL Web Sites
* #2 in Netscape

For this article, I interviewed Keith Carcasole, owner of The
Shortwave Store.

Question: Do you do anything special to boost your site's link
popularity?

Keith: I used to ask for reciprocal links. However, there doesn't
seem to be enough time in the day for that any more.

Now I carefully choose popular non-commercial sites where I can
inexpensively advertise via a small text link. It is rumored that
some search engines take the quality and popularity of the sites
linking to you into consideration when determining the ranking of
your site.

Recently I purchased a popular domain
(http://www.worldtimezones.com) and paid to have the Web site
designed. It is dedicated to time zones of the world. This handy
site is great for travelers, business people and those interested
in world politics. These are the same people who might be
interested in purchasing a shortwave radio to pick up world news
and to listen to free speech stations! Not only do I get to
advertise there for free, but I get a quality link that will help
increase the popularity of my shortwave site. In some ways, this
is actually better than a doorway page because people are
visiting the site for another reason. This exposes my site to
customers who may not visit otherwise.

I highly recommend this technique to anyone who has time to
develop a popular site that offers a service that may be of
interest to potential customers but at the same time has nothing
to do with the subject matter of your main site.

Question: How much business do you get from your Web site?

Keith: It has been extremely difficult for us to gauge how much
business we get from the net because we still have customers who
refuse to do business online. This is especially true around
Christmas time when people want reassurance that the item that
they are about to order is not out of stock and will arrive in
time for Christmas. If forced to venture a guess, I would
estimate that 80% of our total business from our shortwave
division comes from the net, either by phone order or by secure
online order. It appears that the remainder comes from radio ads
and referrals from friends.

Question: Do you purchase keywords from the pay engines like
Overture? If so, approximately how much do you spend each month
on Overture advertising?

Keith: We buy keywords on a number of pay-per-click engines. We
are currently paying about $125 per month to Overture. The sum of
the rest probably totals $25 per month.

Question: If you feel comfortable with this question, I'd like to
know if you're using cloaking technology on the site.

Keith: None of our sites use cloaking at this time. I plan to use
cloaking on one of our other sites in the very near future. We
are not doing this to Ifool' the search engines. When we change
technology on our site, we will lose many of our high-ranking
positions. I plan to keep our old pages cloaked so that we do not
lose traffic.

Question: How do you promote your Web site offline?

Keith: Business cards, print ads in magazines and newspapers,
radio ads, and when customers call our store we often direct them
to the site.

Question: Do you purchase banner ads?

Keith: Not really, however this does not mean that I don't have
banner ads.

1. I do advertise via FREE banner ads on my own sites. If you own
another high traffic site (related or not), there is no harm in
advertising your products there. Even if you create a site just
for your banner, the CPM will still be a fraction of what it
would cost to buy impressions elsewhere.

2. I have purchased tile ads and convinced the webmaster to
switch me to small text ads for the same price. I find that this
yields a higher click-through ratio.

3. Some pay-per-click search engines give you free banner
impressions for your top positions, I believe.

Question: Do you monitor your traffic?

Keith: I seldom look at our stats any more. If the orders were to
suddenly stop, I would take a closer look. When I look at our
stats my main focus is the referrers rather than the volume of
traffic.

Question: Do you analyze your traffic and use that knowledge to
strengthen your site?

Keith: I like watching where our traffic is coming from. Every
few months I calculate how many visitors it takes to generate one
sale just to make sure we are getting a reasonable return on our
advertising dollars. I use this to adjust our advertising
campaigns rather than to strengthen our site.

(Continued in Part 5. Contact Robin Nobles at RobinN@... for
the complete article.)

Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists,
(http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several
thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content provider
for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-
optimizer.com). She also teaches 3-day hands on search engine
marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search
Engine Workshops(http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).

Copyright 2002 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.