Any of you SEO gurus help a little guy....

[WmStout]

Hello. I found this forum when looking for ways to increase traffic to my new ecommerce store. I have to admit, you guys know what you're talking about for the most part. I had a whole business plan set up for my store, working my full-time job, and spending some extra getting my store going.

Then everything went to hell. Lost my full-time job. No SEO campaign from the big-wigs, etc. So I've been managing to it on my own. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I have a few thousand items in my store, and I managed to get ranked in a whole bunch of them in off keywords (getting 3-4 hits a day from the keywords instead of the big 1000's a day keywords). But I'm getting better.

My question is this: If I am getting decent rankings on a long tail keyword (ie for me: wholesale bobby pins, come in 9th) If I were to do a blast of the single keyword 'wholesale', while I know it won't improve my standings much for the keyword 'wholesale', do you think it would have an effect in improving all my little long tails that include wholesale in them?

Thanks for any help in this....

Will

[Bruce Hearder]

Hi Will,

Leaving aside the issues regarding whether "blasting" is a good way to build links, I'd thought I concentrate on keyword selection for your link building..

There would be little value in creating links for a very generic keyword like "Wholesale".

It if far better to create links for targetted "long-tail" keywords that will get people interested in your website.

So keywords like

wholesale blue widgets
blue widgets cheap
buy blue widgets
blue widgets 10' x 10'

Hopefull you understand what I am tryu to get at.

The more specific, and the more "buying" related the keyword the better off you will be.

I don't know what sort of tools you have availoable, but I would suggest doing the following :

- Go to goolge, type in part of your main keyword (preferablly product related) and the haveg a look at the keywords Google shows in the drop down list

- Use the Free Google External keyword tool to find out what people are actually searching for.

This is a guide that I use and it has served me well..

- when people type in a 1 or 2 word phrase into google, they are generally not in a buying mode. They are in an information gathering mode
- The more keywords they type in for a search term, the closer they are to buying.

So for example :

hampster - No a buying word
hampster cage - better, but not good enough
wire hampster cage - much better
Acme wire hampster cage - a great buying phrase, they now know exactly what they are looking for and are just about to buy.

I hope this makes senss

Bruce

[iAmNameLess]

Maybe if you blasted out a certain amount of varied links such as, wholesale product 1, wholesale product name 2, wholesale product name 3... and you could boost your rankings with those keywords.

Just blasting links for "Wholesale" isn't going to do you much good. You will need to do a lot more than buying links for that keyword.

[WmStout]

Thank you for the feedback. Yeah, maybe 'blasting' was the wrong term...More focusing on...

I've been going through and focusing on terms like 'wholesale product x' to get as far as I have. I really don't have to many tools except for the Google keyword tools and such. With over 3000 products I was just trying to find a quicker way to raise my position in a bunch of different items at once. Guess I'll just keep heading down that road. Thanks!

Will