Ok stand back rant on the way!

As a new company, with maybe not so new owners, we decided the best way we could push our products was via the h'internet. Or interweb as my Mother calls it. Ok, lets set up a site. Done. Lets get payment sorted on it. Done. Lets get the products on there. Done. And still doing but thats just us expanding. Finished? Not even close!

The Internet may seem like the King Solomon's Mines of money making but that's only if you have been online with a shop for the last 10 years, which is the bronze age in internet terms. For those of us who are starting out, we have to get our heads around, not just setting up a site, that's relatively easy, you can either spend a kings ransom and get a bespoke job done for you, or go open source and get a pretty nifty site up and running for nought.

Once your site is up, you have to start getting visitors to you site. That should be ok cause there cant be that many people doing the same thing as me online. Ok, lets go to Google and search - type type type (that's the sound of me typing by the way, or btw as all the kids are saying now) - Toy Shop - and click search....cant be too many results....ok...there are millions. After the cold sweat had dried and my heart had crawled back out of my stomach, we had to come to the cold reality that to sell Ride on Toys on the internet, we were going to have to get found. So that's when we started searching...and came across a beautiful land with a wonderful still lake surrounded by lush green fields and trees, horse galloping across the hills and maidens frolicking at play. This land was good, this land was what we were searching for. This land was called Search Engine Optimization. Or SEO to the locals. And the Seonians (inhabitants of SEO) were numerous and wise, but oh so guarded with their secrets and knowledge. Truly it would take some convincing to befriend these skittish folk. Either that or a big stick.

There are several options available to the new start Internet business. Ok first of all you need to think about things and identify essentially what search phrases you want to be found under. In our case we opted for only a few "long tail searches" (searches phrases with more than 1 or 2 words in them). We went for Electric Ride on Toys , Battery Ride on Cars and Electric Ride on Cars. Ideally if we could get found under other things like jeeps , quads , trikes , bikes , anything for that matter all the better. Now, this is where the work begins. After our exhaustive reading and researching into SEO we have come up one absolute and unswerving conclusion and it is this;

No-one knows what will definitely get you to the top of Google, they all have conflicting advice. And those that might know, definitely will not be telling you. Unless you are willing to pay. Lots.

However, we did kind of distil it all down to 2 simple things, and everything branches from there. Ok, lets call them guidelines, not rules, because we are an Toy Shop selling Electric Ride on Toys not a Dictator selling authoritarian rule.

Guideline 1 - Content is Queen. You need relevent, up to date, non duplicated, constantly updated, authoritative content on your website about your industry, service, products, whatever you are trying to promote.

Guideline 2 - Linkage is King. You site needs quality, relevant, contextual, (perhaps even geographically relevant), links running to your website. The days of link farming are long dead and Google has become smart in the ways of the Force, so if you wanna get to the top, you better start researching and get Link Building. But, not just any old links, they have to be good links, from quality sites that are relevant to what you and your site are about. Its no good having links to your UK based Online Toy Shop from a 23 year old Alaskan mans site who doesn't appear in Google, only gets 8 unique visitors a month, and these are members of his own family who like to look at the pictures of the nice animals he photographs. Got it? Good!

And that is where we are at the moment. We are trying to sort out our wonderful content and also begin the process of getting our links into decent Shopping Directories or other Toy Shops. Wish us luck! Oh, we will also explain some of our other revelations during our time in the Land Of SEO.

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