BANS Secrets | Learn Search Engine Optimization

Today we finally arrive at Lesson Learned 4. I believe this will be the most important post I have written so far and taking on board what I have to say today will either make or break you. I don’t mean to over egg this (I do really) but SEO will determine your success or failure with Build a Niche Store. When you first launch a store it seems to get a mini boost from Google for the first 30 days. You can expect some sales but once the 30 days has past the site seems to lose momentum. Without SEO that momentum will probably be lost forever. Witness my Coach store which was my top performer in April but made no sales in May! Sales from my other early stores have also fallen off.

I hadn’t really appreciated this fully when I bought the script and indeed one of the reasons there has been so much time between this and my last post is that I decided I had to understand more about SEO before building any new niche stores. I am changing my store building strategy as a result but I’ll save that for a later post.

Buying BANS means that to succeed on a, lets say, huge scale a full understanding and commitment to SEO is required. It might take an hour to put up a store but you can multiply that by 100 (over the course of a year) to properly take care of the SEO (unless you can afford to outsource that is).

Now one thing I’m not is an SEO expert but I’ve been learning fast. I’ve been tracking down great resources and I’m delighted to provide links to some really quality in this post. The web grapevine suggests the best source of SEO material can be found at SEObook. There are some great tools and freebies but Aaron no longer sells his famed e-book having switched to a monthly subscription model ($100 per month – ouch).

Next in line comes Dan Theis at SEO Fast Start who produces an awesome free e-book that will give you all the info you need to get started. Diving into this will be the BANS eye opener as the reality dawns that putting up a store is the easy bit. It was for me at least and I now have 27 stores to get back to and optimize properly (I thought I’d done an ok job as well). Actually I’m being a bit harsh on myself as I had done an ok job but not a great job. How do I know?

Well a great complementary resource which I came across courtesy of Soggy is Instant Position which will evaluate and grade site SEO on a page by page basis. You can use a limited function of this site for free but sign up for the one day trial to see the additional info that is provided and then decide if it’s worth paying extra for. My feeling is it’s definitely worth 6 months membership. Once you’ve assessed your sites 100 times you’ll pretty much have down what you need to do!

And what about those early stores? Well my off page SEO continues and I expect them to make a come back over the next 2-6 months as a result of my link building activities.

Now that may be a short post but I believe it is the most important post I’ve written to date. To succeed at BANS on a huge scale (as in I want to quit my day job) you need to become a highly competent SEO professional. And the good news is it’s not as hard as you might think. I hope you enjoy the resources.

Lesson Learned 3 – Record Keeping

Filed under: BANS Secrets

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