DAY 6: Mapping Your Site Structure

If you haven’t completed day 5 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty before starting this post.

“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”

- Fred Brooks -

This is where you make your site SEO friendly

Before we go anywhere else in this course, I want to remind you that all the lessons we just went through represent all the homework you are supposed to do BEFORE you go and see your web designer, and not after!

Today, we are going to take all the keywords we have selected, evaluated, grouped and analyzed, and organized them to start mapping our site structure and optimization strategy.

3 Tiers Structure

If you are not familiar with site structure or web design, I invite you to read my post “Improve Your Crawling Rate”.

Search engines spiders on your site are like a man in a shopping mall.

As long as you have a main alley, shops on the left, shops on the right it’s cool to go around that, but if I have to start to go through one small door, and another one, and another one, I quickly become confused of what is where, and more importantly, I lose interest in finding out.

The same concept applies with search engines spiders, if your navigation is too complex or too deep, the crawler loses interest to visit or index your pages.

Keep it clear and keep it simple, it works both with the search engines and your human visitors too!

That being said, the site structure we are interested in is the one called the 3 Tiers Structure.

In this type of structure, no page in your site is further than 2 clicks away.

This is not only good for the search engines, but also good for your visitors, which is very important.

Here’s the summary of such site structure:

• Tier 1: Index page
• Tier 2: Category pages
• Tier 3: Content/Products pages

By now, you may have already noticed that this is looking strangely familiar with the exercise I gave in Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords…
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Building A Successful Ecommerce Business: Your Future – Part 5

Over the last four posts we have been exploring the pillars of building a successful ecommerce business. If you have not read these posts, please visit them below as it will lay the foundation for this post:

Part 1: Find A niche
Part 2: Creating Content
Part 3: How To Write Quality Content
Part 4: Where To Market Your Website?

If you want to get more technical information about building an ecommerce website, please read: Moving Your Business Online.

We have discovered how important it is to research and find a niche market, and to build your ecommerce business from what the market demands rather than what you want. Then we discussed about creating unique content to attract the consumers to your ecommerce business and then learning how to write quality content using a step by step method. The second last phase was to market your website’s content and how to promote it virally to spread the information quickly on the web. Our final post is how an ecommerce business will impact your life and what will be the future of ecommerce.

The Impact Of Ecommerce On Your Life

Running a successful ecommerce business can be very rewarding and no doubt will provide you with financial stability, time freedom and the ability to pursue other interests. In my ecommerce business within the niche market of Dragonboating, I have been very able to dominate the industry by providing excellent customer service and meeting their needs. It has given me time to focus on other ventures that I am interested in and also the ability to purse my hobbies in my free time. To get it to this stage, I did apply the steps and systems I have discussed about in this series. If you take the time to follow through and apply everything that I have discussed about you will be on your way to running a successful ecommerce business. Whatever market you decide to purse, remember to take time out and balance your life with exercise, spirituality, personal hobbies and long term relationships with family and friends.

The Future Of Ecommerce

As we move forward in 2009 with a slowing economy there are greater opportunities that are beginning to appear. There will be businesses that fall away and disappear and the competition within those markets will start to shrink. Particular brick and mortar businesses who have higher overhead costs and staffing costs will feel the pinch even more. This is why there is a strong trend for entrepreneurs to start ecommerce businesses and to capture a greater market share. There is no doubt consumers will continue to spend, it is a matter of how well you can market your products and services and to provide them with excellent customer service. This is where I see the future of ecommerce and I have a very optimistic view that opportunities are everywhere.

Tyrone Shum
Optimistic About The Future Of Ecommerce

Top 10 Tips To Increase Your Blogging Productivity

I have been working from home for just over three months now, in the beginning I found it hard to focus and my productivity dropped, especially in the summer months when the sun was shining and beckoning me to go out. Today I’m going to share a few tips that I have put in to practise…

1. Write down special goals – If you work from home, you have to do this – There are just too many distractions and no boss watching over your back every minute of the day. On my table I have a small card that I write down 2 mission critical tasks for the day. That way I focus on the most important tasks and outsource the rest.
2. Wake up at the same time everyday – Set a time to get up each day and stick to it. I get up at 7.30am to exercise, then have my breakfast and start work around 10am. I stick to 4 hours of work a day.
3. Turn off phone and instant email notifications – Having constant interrupts makes it harder to stay focus. I make sure there are no interruptions when I am writing a blog post because my readers want the best from me. Don’t you?
4. Exercise – I find doing exercise in the morning gives me so much more energy and motivation for the day, if you don’t regularly do exercise, try it for one week and see how you feel. Your mind will be clearer for the day and you might shed a few kilos along the way!
5. Tidy office – Keep your office clean by filing away piles of paper. If you have notes written down, transfer them to your computer and put a reminder to complete them. That way you will have less clutter and paper lying around.
6. Music – Not for everyone but I find music really helps me work during the day. Put something light and soothing on in the background.
7. Daily schedule – Even though you are working from home and don’t have to follow the usual office rules, try and set out a daily plan for yourself – start at the same time, have lunch at a set time etc – I find it helps to have a daily routine.
8. Just do it – If you are like me you have certain jobs that you try and put off because they’re dull or take ages, make sure it gets done first thing in the morning when you are fresh and motivated.
9. Outsource – Even though you can do a job doesn’t always mean you should do it – why not outsource that boring coding job which will leave you free to concentrate on more important jobs or jobs that you enjoy doing more.
10. Close your door – If there are distractions at home, like people calling round or noisy kids, make it a rule to not be disturbed when your door is shut.

All of these are pretty obvious things to do but if you don’t do any of them, give it a go and see if your productivity improves.

Tyrone Shum
Increasing Blogging Productivity

How I Made $8,425.00 In 1 Day From My Niche Internet Business

I didn’t write this post to brag about the figure I made from my niche business. I write this to inspire you and let  you know that it’s possible to make $8,425.00 in one day just from an Internet business with the right tools and strategies in place.

Selling Online Full Time Whilst Working 10 Hours A Week
If you have ever emailed me via on my contacts page you will get an automatic response that says:

Greetings,

Due to high workload, we are currently checking and responding to email once on Tuesday and Thursday at 4.00pm A.E.S.T.

Please read our F.A.Q section, it will answer your questions faster: http://www.dbv.com.au/index.php?main_page=faq

If you require urgent assistance (please ensure it is urgent) that cannot wait until either at 4.00pm on Tuesday or Thursday, please contact us via phone on (02) 8004 3567.

Thank you for your understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps us accomplish more to serve you better.

As you can see I have a system in place to let people know that I only check my email on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which is also the time I devote to that business. This is a deliberate choice I make because I want to spend my time doing many different things, some work related (business building), some health related (exercise) and some for fun (seeing friends, family, eating out, etc).

If you want to achieve figures like this or higher in a day, you need to set realistic expectations and then match your activities to meet those expectations. Then hopefully, like I have managed to do, you can create a fantastic lifestyle built around an Internet business.

How To Achieve These Goals?
The most important concept I have learnt about running a successful Internet business is to set up the right systems. When I first started out I did everything in the business, from deliveries to ordering and dispatching of products. I realised how hard I was working and not working smart, since we think the Internet is suppose to give us the fantastic lifestyle compared to the 9 to 5 work. So I made a hard decision and looked at what activities I did that brought in the most revenue and outsourced the rest.

It wasn’t easy at first because I had got so used to the routine that I still had the itch to be involved in running the business rather than let the business run itself.

So how did I change?
It wasn’t until I found out that I had to go overseas for a two and a half weeks for my partner’s relatives wedding. It was a turning point for me because I had to set up the systems for the business to run automatically whether I was there or not. Some simple things I implemented before I went away:

1. I hired a virtual assistant to handle all sales enquires and manage orders for me
2. I set up automatic debit payments from my credit cards to pay suppliers and bills.
3. Set up an automatic email responder training customers to read the FAQ instead of waiting for a reply. 90% of the questions are similar in one way or another and can be answered in an FAQ.

Before I knew it, I came back from an overseas trip with more money in my account than I had before the trip. What a surprise it was for me! I can say that I am a true testimony that it’s possible to earn a full time income from part-time work having the right systems implemented.

Tyrone Shum
Niche Internet Marketer