August 7, 2007

Promoting our Texas Arts, Crafts & Gifts Store!

Posted in Uncategorized at 1:28 pm by Martin

I have recently started to venture into the very organic world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! This concept is something I knew I had to practice even before our small business even created a website, I just never knew the key phrase “SEO” existed.

I stumbled across a site called www.iwebtool.com and found a whole community of webmasters sharing their ideas and techniques for optimizing their un-paid and paid search engine listings, methods for creating adverts, methods for using adverts to monetize a site, etc.

I must confess that I am now an SEO addict and reading the iWebTool discussion forums has become a daily ritual.

This blog was in-fact created so that I could have something to update on a daily basis that would point back to our store website. The process of updating our www.daylilycottage.com website requires the use of an FTP tool and careful thought about content and presentation etc. The blogging community provides a much more fluid atmosphere for expression which doesn’t always, and rarely does, relate directly to a companies business.

So how does a BLOG relate to SEO??

Well getting a business website listed in directories can be easy but there is always alot of competition. For example, our site is essentially an art gallery, giftshop and gift basket store all rolled into one, but there are millions of giftshops online all “paying” for great SEO and adverts. The blogging community on the other hand has many of its own directories which are relatively quick to get listed in and show up in top search engines (Google / Yahoo / MSN) fairly quickly.

I have already noticed that my blog appears in Google for some of my sites keyword phrases higher than my actual site!

The tricky part is that to really make a blog work, you have to treat it like a diary and provide a rich diversity of posts. If someone reads your blog and it is stagnated with business referrals they will leave fairly quickly!

Anyway, this has been my daily outpouring, some would say this post was a confession, but I promise to blog from the heart and hopefully people will soon start reading and commenting! (And maybe clicking on my business site <- shameless plug!)

Texas Arts, Crafts & Gifts