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I'm building an affiliate site around the idea of 'gifts for men'.
The home page is optimized for 'gifts for men', 'gift for a man' and 'gift ideas for men', then all the sections are optimized for whatever they actually are, like 'kitchen gadgets'.
This is the first time I've done something like this so hoped some of the more experienced ecommerce types here might share their opinions on the home page optimization.
Do you think I'm on the right track?
Many thanks...
Nick
I'm in a similar market - womens gifts more particularly.
All I can really tell you is that 'gifts' is a SOD of a keyword... everyone and their dog wants to be No 1 for it... and every customer and their dog has vastly different idea of what they consider a suitable gift. For those two reasons, although 90% of my product is given as gifts, I don't stress about the word too much.
That said, it sounds as if we've tackled it a similar way. The home page is by far the loosest focus of the pages, but then I don't rely on it to be my strongest entry page.... the rest of the site is organised into 'galleries' that allow me to intensify for the actual item's name, eg, kitchen stuff, bathroom stuff, lingerie stuff, (not my real categories) etc.
The gallery pages draw three times the entry traffic EACH that the index page does.
What kind of PR do the gallery pages get, and what amount of visitors are you getting?
If those questions are too personal, don't worry, your comments were very helpful ;)
Nick
How much PR is necessary to get decent rankings for a particular term depends on how competitive it is and how well optimized other sites are. In some categories it can depend on how much cross-linking other sites have done to get where they are. Sometimes it's a LOT. Some of the gifts categories are killer competitive, even though they may not look it at first glance.
One of the keys with any site selling items that are potentially given as gifts is to make sure you dig in and do a lot of very specific keyword research. With some you can pull for several phrases on the same page, even with low PR, and for certain types of articles people will drill down 5 or 6 pages until they find exactly what they're looking for.
I know I'm targetting something pretty competitive, but thats the point, if it wasn't competitive there'd be no money in it ;)
Thanks for the pointers....
Nick
Marcia's hit the nails right on the head with her comments. In my case the galleries (1st page of each at least) are linked across every page on site and have the same PR as the home page.
Ain't tellin ya visitor numbers :) It's a newish site (just on three months) and is just picking up... or rather will pick up some more when I get my butt out of WMW and start applying some more of this new know-how.
It is a very tough market as it is heavily reliant on individual tastes.
Think for a moment about someone searching for a scarf... let's narrow it down and say a silk scarf... even narrower and say an oblong silk scarf... bear in mind that they are visualising this perfect oblong silk scarf... then think for a moment how many possible pattern variations they could be envisaging, how many color combinations/shadings, how many fabric weights and weaves, how many sizes, etc... and what the odds are that you are going to have all those criteria met in your selection
... as opposed to the person who is searching for, say, a garden spade.
(I'd have used widgets, but I just couldn't get the analogy to work.. sorry)
The more you can target your keywords in this market, the better.
The other thing I find a challenge is product spread. In searching for similar products, I note that most of my direct competition on specific items are specialty shops. THey only sell widgets or woggles.... where I sell widgets, woggles, toggles and bobbles, among other things. I'm quite sure that their ability to target their whole site towards a very defined keyword/phrase helps their ranking far more than PR.
My main attack against this is to simply not stock 'orphan' items at this stage. If I go into a new product range, I must have enough to fill a gallery page (with a page going off the gallery for each product). This can be rather limiting as the items are handmade artsy items... it might be a lovely woggle, but if the artist only makes it in one size and two colors then there's no point me putting it up at the moment.
In time I'll stock more orphan items, but within theme galleries - 'woggles under $50'... 'Father's Day woggles' etc.
hmmm.. I've completely lost track of where I was going with this. Probably something to do with the clock having ticked midnight a while ago. :)
This very thing came up in a discussion in the Advertising/Affiliate forum - whether to have one broad site or individual, more closely defined smaller sites.
Some of the external factors that come into play with the issues other than PR can be affected, if only because of directory listings, link text and to some extent the theme of the linking pages/sites, which I'm starting to take a closer look at. Then it's a matter of cross-linking, which some do when they have separate sites, sometimes to their detriment and in other cases very effectively.
Gifts for men is limited in scope compared to gifts altogether, but still covers a lot of ground, like men's jewelry, golf gifts, men's clothing and so on, all of which could have separate sites if someone went that far. Of course, that can get into the creative use of third-level domains.
So Nick, for an area like this you have to think creatively with keywords, looking at all possibilities. One site of this scope is more than likely limited enough, but here's where it might pay to give a lot of thought to the site structure beforehand, and keyword list in hand, plan out the directory structure and navigation, even down to the filenames for pages and minute details like naming graphics.
This is the advantage of doing a site for yourself from the ground up, where you can plan the interface around a keyword-based navigation structure.
I didn't even start thinking about navigation and file names/structure untill I'd thoroughly (cant speel) researched my chosen categories.
I'm concentrating on 'gadgets etc', no clothes, jewelry just knives, spy gear digital cameras etc...
All very competitive in their own right but I think I can pull it off, and besides, with no stock investment it's cost me a domain name, hosting and my time... if It starts to work well I'll enter the PPC jungle ;)
Thanks for all your input guys,
PS: Don't you go to bed ever Marcia?
Nick
