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Q - I have been reading your newsletter for over a year and I'm big fan. My intention was to create a online store and information source for the health and fitness industry. My hope was to appeal to individuals who enjoy exercise.

Why? What is it about my site that is preventing people from wanting to buy? Please help! You're my last hope.

A - Thanks for reading my newsletter, but that in itself is not enough. If you had read my books, your site wouldn't look that way. Not at all. I have seen more fundamental marketing mistakes on your site, than any other I have visited in the past three months.

At first glance the site design is all wrong. If you are trying to sell vitamins, your site needs to look more organic, like something people will eat. It needs a softer more human touch.

Get rid of the icons - discussed below - and put up more pictures of people doing healthy things. Show people exercising, eating well, sharing each other's company. Include shots of healthy people holding and using the products. A few testimonials wouldn't hurt either.

On your home page there's 12 huge, slow loading, brightly colored icons. They take over the whole screen. Unless you are selling the clip art, get rid of it. ALL of them. Replace them with text links off to the side.

Your slogan is good, but the graphic that contains it is too big and square. You might consider making it wider and less tall. It's also too subtle in color, compared to those gaudy icons.

If we look at the text under the icons, its all about you. Your site says, here's all about me, next icon - more me, then there's me, don't forget me, how to contact me. Me, me, me...

Wrong. Your site should be about THEM, the reader. They should come to your web site and say, "Hey, here's a web site all about me."

Put your USP (unique selling proposition) front and center. It should say something like. "Your online source for high quality vitamins and food supplements. Delivered high speed right to your door. You make the goals and we'll help you keep them, every time."

See what I mean? Appeal immediately to the reader. Don't go on about your company, disclaimers, how long you've been in business, FAQs and the like. Get to the point. Tell visitors in the first paragraph, the benefit of shopping at your site.

Then right after the USP put in links to the products section. Get the person shopping immediately. If they want to find out more about your company, the companies you deal with, your privacy policy, they'll find the small text links off to the side.

The important thing is to run your site like a business. Get visitors in the door and to the merchandise as quickly as possible. Shopping links first, big, bold, front and center. Info links second, about us links third, smaller and off to the side or very bottom.

Ok. Now that we've got the home page out of the way, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

When I finally found the product section, not one of the "get more info" links worked. Most people will leave your web site right here. Broken links are a big blow to shopper confidence. Especially when it comes to something that they're going eat, to put INTO their bodies.

Your prices are posted in Canadian dollars when they should be posted in US$. You just lost 90% of your market. If you cannot get American merchant accounts, do the conversion after the order. State the CDN$ amount and conversion details in the thank you for ordering email confirmation.

The are no Verisign, shipping company or 3rd party logos (BBB, Public Eye) to boost consumer confidence. Adding them to your site will help build confidence.

You're using the Helvetica / Arial typeface on your web site. It was designed for signage back in the 1930's. It was never intended for use in long text passages and is hard to read. Use a font specifically designed for the monitor like Verdana or Georgia.

You ask people to subscribe to your newsletter with no benefit attached. If you want subscribers, give them something of value like a special report when they sign up. At least tell them HOW they'll benefit by signing up.

Consider using an affiliate sales force to help you drive traffic and get more customers to your site. My Dad always used to say, "You can never pay your salespeople enough." Remember, it's a numbers game. Even if you do everything I've said, you'll still need the traffic to make your business profitable.

You're using way too much JavaScript for no reason. All it does is change the color of text when the mouse goes over it. If it's doing nothing for sales or commerce, take it down. Remove all unnecessary JavaScript and your search engine positioning will go up because of it.

Speaking of positioning... Rule #1 in any optimization course. Your page titles must contain keywords. Yours have your company name. Unless you are a nationally known brand, don't put your company name in the page title. No one knows who you are, so they are not searching for you using your name.

People search using keywords. The most important place of all to put them, is in the page title. Don't waste it.

You also broke a cardinal rule. Never ever borrow money to set up an online business. Start in your spare time and prove you can do it first. Only once you have a positive cash flow, should you attempt to quit the day job set up a home business.

So there you have it. Everything I've just written here is covered in great detail in my ebooks. Like I said in the beginning, if you had read them, your site wouldn't look the way it does.

So instead of investing and losing thousands of dollars, you could have been making thousands of dollars by now. Do yourself a favor, invest 76 bucks and a weekend of your time. Get and read both my books. You'll be glad you did. In fact, I guarantee it.

Nothing but 'Net - http://cdzn.com/nbn (VP - getting offline in 2003))

Clickin' it Rich - http://cdzn.com/cir

Q - I'm trying to decide whether to remove some/most/all of the menu links that don't make money. I'd also be interested in your reaction to the page-top text and having my text-link menu on the right. (The goal here was to push the site navigation down the page, into territory the spiders pay less attention to.) Will these tactics make much difference as far as the search engines go?

A - Your home page looks ok, except I'm not a fan of that hue of green. It's the first thing I noticed. Just FYI, that hue is often chosen as the least favorite color in color tests. You might want to test and track that for best results. Most info product sites are going with navy to sky blue these days.

I noticed you had a photo of yourself on your site. You might want to replace it with a professional photo instead. Spend the $300 for a photo shoot. A photo of the proprietor can really boost confidence and the warm fuzzies, but not when it's Polaroid snapshot quality. It actually has the adverse effect.

As for the text at the very top, it has some strange line breaks and formatting. Try making your browser window narrow or wider to simulate what people will see under different conditions. At certain widths, that text looks like a train wreck.

Take out the existing formatting and make it flush left. Then use a couple of block quote tags, to bring the text in from the edges and make it look pretty. You might also want to put the text in headline tags, so it is more important to the search engines.

Any time you have important keywords, try and put them in headline tags, not just bolding the regular font. Proper headlines direct the human eye, describe the paragraph content, pulling the reader into the story.

Headlines are also important to spidering search engines. They also look at headlines on your page. They often give keywords found in headlines more "weight" or brownie points for positioning.

Speaking of text, be careful of your formatting and make it consistent. Make sure you have the same amount of "wind" or space between paragraphs. We humans are very sensitive to text inconsistencies. It whittles away at reader confidence, the more of them we see.

As for removing links, I'm a big fan of removing pages, links or dud products that don't make any money. On the other hand, if it's a good entry page into the site and you have good search engine positioning for that page, leave it up. The trick is to funnel, guide, entice the visitor into some kind of action, like a sign up or sale, not just a free lunch.

I'm also a fan of using links on the bottom or right hand side. This allows the search engines to find meaningful, keyword rich text, right from the start. This will help in Hotbot, Inktomi engines and Lycos. It should improve your overall score in other engines as well.

The deep crawlers from Fast, Google and AV will find links wherever you put them on the page so it really doesn't matter to them, if your links are top, left or right. They spider every word on your site, but narrow it down to 14 or less possible words that your page can be known for. That's why its important to have keywords in headline text, near the top and in the first paragraph.

Q - In the July issue of the Planet Ocean Search Engine Newsletter, they suggested setting up multiple store fronts. That sounds like what you did for cellwest.com a year ago. What's up with that? Is it still a viable strategy?

A - Yes it is. But, what I recommended for cellwest.com is very different and on a much larger scale.

Planet Ocean suggested setting up several sites, with different designs, different ad copy, but have all the sites selling the same thing (I seem to recall it was push lawn mowers). The sites cross link to each other, feature just one best selling item, and mention a few other high demand products.

Good advice and a good mini site strategy, but I take it several steps further with a twist.

The strategy for cellwest was, to leave them with "evergreen" search engine positioning. Just like the trees that never lose their leaves, cellwest.com never loses its search engine positioning. Even two years later, at least one of their sites is always in the top 10 results for almost every popular keyword phrase.

It too involves setting up several sites, but each one looks the same. The content on each site however, is very different.

The logic was to set up one web site for each product category. The internal pages would feature the various manufacturers.

One site featuring lithium batteries, one site for leather cases, one site for chargers, one site for hands free kits, one site for phones, and so on. They ended up with about a dozen different sites.

For content, let's take the product category "lithium batteries" and its associated web site for example. It has a Motorola batteries page, a Nokia batteries page, an Ericson batteries page, a Nextel batteries page, all the popular brands. The whole site is focused on lithium batteries. Each internal page focuses on a different manufacturer.

The same process was repeated for each product category. The look and feel of the sites was to remain the same. The same logos, dividers, buttons, color harmony and navigation. The logic being, that shopper confidence had to remain high. They had to be sure they were still on a cellwest brand web site.

From the lithium batteries site and its main navigation page, not only are there are links to all internal "manufacturer" pages, there are also outbound links to all the other cellwest brand web sites. This is where the true power lies... in the cross linking.

The strategy was to create cellwest's own mininet for link popularity. The link leading to cell phones went to the phone site. The link leading to chargers went to the chargers site. The link leading to the leather cases went to the leather cases site, and so on. It was like a big ball of inter-linked sites creating its own community.

When someone was viewing a batteries page and clicked on the phones link, they didn't care - or notice - if they were suddenly transported to an entirely different URL (domain name). It didn't seem to matter, so long as it still said cellwest at the top and the graphic design looked exactly the same as the site they just came from.

Six months later, having created a unstoppable search engine monster, the final step was to cloak everything using the FoodScript. This kept the competition from stealing the html code and the concept in detail.

Now the search engines are fed an internal page from the site - which looks like an auto generated database page - and human viewers are taken to the main navigation page for the product category.

I call it an auto generated database page, because most people have pages like this in a database and call them up on the fly. Once you take all the pages out of the database, and create static stand alone pages, you suddenly have hundreds of new pages working for you and improving your findability in the search engines.

So in a nutshell, yes, create multiple sites, but with the exact same look and design. Sell related yet different product on each site. Link all the sites together. Make static pages for everything in the database. And finally, cloak everything up so the competition doesn't steal your ideas.

That was the strategy I left with cellwest nearly two years ago and it's still very effective to this day.

Find out more about Planet Ocean's Search Engine Optimization Book and Newsletter here:

http://1-internet-marketing.com/pob/

To find out more about the FoodScript Cloaking software visit:

http://1-internet-marketing.com/jhf/

The above answers have been reprinted with permission from Michael Campbell at Dynamic Media Corporation, Inc. and is copyright 2000-2003. Michael is a well-known Internet marketer and a leading search engine specialist who also publishes a free newsletter called Internet Marketing Secrets.

Campbell gives you FREE heavy hitting SEO information. To qualify, join to his superb newsletter. Once inside, send your questions to one of his email addresses and I guarantee a personal professional response within couple of hours.

Michael hits a home run with his latest search engine book, Revenge of the Mininet. Grab a copy of this step-by-step guide and discover how to create your own mininet empire. 52 meat pages including diagrams, explanations, drawings and a candid interview on 'how-to' information that will help you launch and build your online business. This is one of the most comprehensive book on building minisites I've ever seen. Highly recommended - http://www.revengeofthemininet.com/
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