Creating Your Website

Before you begin creating content for your online content site, you should take some time to figure out how to organize your store categories for best effect.

Note: You can save yourself a lot of time, effort, and energy in the long run by spending the time to do this step right.

Category ideas should be based upon your store

Whether you sell a large mix of items or a couple of specific types of items, your categories should be a reflection of the things which you offer, or at least a subset of them.

Most stores fall into three types, as far as categories are concerned:

• Structured Stores
  These are stores where very specific groups of related items are sold. For such stores, categories will be quite obvious and easy to come up with.
• Flea Markets
  These are stores that carry a wide array of items with no obvious or easily related categories. For such stores, categories can be obvious, but often disparate.
• Mixed Stores
  These are stores with at least a few groups of fairly specific groups of related items, but which also have a decent amount of random items or groups of items which have no logical relation to other groups of items. As with flea market type stores, categories can be obvious, but are often disparate.

Related items are important

If you can logically group the items in your store into groups which have some relation to each other, then you can build a site around those related groups which will be easier to rank in search engines than a site which is built to showcase unrelated groups of items.

When picking out categories for your site, please carefully consider what kind of store you run. See the referenced resources at the end of this section if you could use some help.

Keyword Research for Store Category Names

Once you have your categories decided upon, you should then do some keyword research for each category to decide how to name your categories on your traffic site.

Many people jump right in and use the same category names they used to build their stores…but if you did not do keyword research for your store category names, you might well be making the process of ranking your site in search engines much harder than it needs to be.

At this point, you should have a list of the categories you are going to place on your store traffic site as well as the names that you are going to use for them and the major keywords that you want to target for each category.

Important: Keep that list handy. It will be very useful once you start marketing your site.

Resources:

Choosing your categories:

• Categories for structured stores
• Categories for flea market stores
• Categories for mixed stores

Keyword Research Help:

• Basic Keyword Research for Targeted Marketing
• Keyword Research for Store Category Creation

Using the category list that you created in step 1, it is time to setup post categories.

Posts, in WordPress, are basically blog entries or short articles that you add to your site.

Post Categories are used for various things on a WordPress site, the most important of which are:

• Navigating between different or similar kinds of posts
• Displaying related posts

For most stores, I recommend creating post categories as follows:

• News and Updates
  This category will be used for general informational posts which are not specifically related to your products such as:
  • Information about updates to your site
  • News related generally to what you sell
  • Anything else that doesn’t fit into another category and does not warrant a new category of its own
• Products
  This category will be primarily used for posts of product showcases and information directly related to products you carry. It should contain subcategories named for the categories you have decided upon in step 1 above.
  If everything you sell fits into a single large category, you might want to use the name of that category rather than Products.

You may want to add other categories, but the two above (plus category names as subcategories as the Products category) are the main post categories I recommend to start with.

Resources:

• How to create post categories in WordPress

In WordPress, tags are extra pieces of data that you can attach to posts which users can use to navigate between topics containing the same tags even if they are not in the same category.

This is nice, because if you sell different types of items which have something in common ( perhaps a manufacturer, an artist, an author, a character, a time period, etc. ), people who are interested in things related to that commonality can easily find other such things.

To start with, you may not have a large list of tags (or any tags for that matter!), but I recommend keeping a sheet of paper for noting tags on which you can reference when creating new posts to be sure that you don’t create similar but different tags. While this is helped some by tag suggestions as you type them in, I find it saves time to have a quick reference of tags handy.

Resources:

• How to setup post tags for online traffic

Before you start creating pages, posts, and such, if you are not too familiar with html, stylesheets, or what goes into creating a nice looking post, you should consider taking the time to learn the basics where these three things are concerned.

While not critical, if you know a bit about html, css, and page layout you can make much nicer looking pages.

Resources:

• Basic HTML Tags for WordPress users
• Basic CSS usage for WordPress users
• Fundamentals of creating clean, readable web pages
• How to create boxes on your web pages with html and css

To make ranking well as easy as possible, your site should have the following static pages on it:

• An About Us page
  To tell people a bit about your operation.
• A Contact Us page
  To give people a way to contact you.
• A Privacy Policy page
  To tell people what you do with information you collect on your site.

You may also want to take the time to create the following pages:

• A Shipping Information page
  To tell people about your shipping policies.
• A Terms of Service page
  Legal disclaimers and whatnot.
• A customized 404 error page
  To display when they try to access a page that does not exist.

Resources:

Creating Common Static Pages:

• About us page setup
• Contact Us page setup
• Privacy Policy page setup
• Shipping Information page setup
• Terms of Service page setup
• Custom 404:
  This information will be available shortly.

For your store traffic website, I recommend creating category showcase pages to provide a variety of information about closely related items you sell such as:

• Products that you sell in that category
• Informational articles which relate to the types of items in that category
• Any special information about buying such items from you
• Supplemental products you don’t sell yourself, but which potential customers might be interested in
• Anything else you think might be of interest to people looking for things in a particular category

Before you start creating showcases you might want to decide upon a few major categories to create showcases for and place the rest of your categories in a directory page to start with…especially if you have a large number of categories.

I recommend picking around five of your best selling and/or most viewed categories to start with and building showcases for them while buiding a category directory for any other categories you have. Over time, you can add showcases for the categories you initially list in a directory.

Resources:

• How to create category showcases for your store
• How to create category directories for your store

Once you have your category showcases and directories created, I recommend building product showcase posts for at least one, if not two, products in each of your showcased categories.

Product showcases should be designed to:

• Provide extra information about particular products to potential customers
• Provide information on specials or incentives for getting a particular product from you
• Showcase similar products which customers might be interested in
• Offer related products which you sell either directly or via affiliate sales
• Direct potential customers to the product in question on your store.

Resources:

• How to create a product showcase for your store traffic site

Once you have your main category showcases and a product showcase or two for each one setup, it is time to create a customized home page.

A customized homepage should be setup to do the following:

• Provide a link to your store
• Give people some information about your store and tell them where to get more information
• Give people quick, prominent links to your category showcases
• Tell people about any specials, incentives, and/or reasons they should buy from you instead of someone else
• Give people quick access to anything special about how you ship items
• Display your most recent posts, whether they be news items or product showcases

Resources:

• How to create a customized homepage for your store traffic site.

Depending on the theme you are using, you might want to do various different things before you make your site available for search engines to scan.

For most WordPress themes, you might consider:

Making changes to your sites colors.

Typically this involves using cascading stylesheets (css).

See the resources box below for help.

Creating a favicon for your site

This is the little icon that shows up next to your site URL and on tabs in some browsers.

If you are using the Atahualpa theme:

• Setup your kickers, bylines, and footers

Resources:

Altering colors and the way your site looks:

• Basic HTML for WordPress Users
• Basic CSS for WordPress users

Extra info for Atahualpa Theme Users:

• Select "Appearance" → "Atahualpa Theme Options" from the wordpress admin menus and alter various aspects of your site.
• Setup your page and post Kickers, Bylines, and Footers

Creating a Favicon

• DeGraeve.com Favicon Generator

Once you have everything the way you want it, you should make your site available to search robots and do a few extra things to help your site rank better.

Enable Search Engine Robots

If you told search engines not to index your site before you started working on it, you should now tell them to go ahead and index it.

Setup Google Analytics for your WordPress site

Google analytics will keep track of how many visitors you get, where they are coming from, how long they are staying, and a variety of other good information about your sites traffic

Create an XML Site Map

An XML site map is a great tool to let search engines quickly and efficiently index your entire site.

Resources:

• How to enable search engine indexing on WordPress
• How to setup Google Analytics for your WordPress site
• how to setup a XML site map for your WordPress site

Now that you have finished the initial creation of your web site, you have a couple of options:

Rest on your laurels and hope that people stumble upon your site

Good luck with getting fast results that way…

Continue adding content to your site, hoping that people will find it

If you have good content, products, and prices, this can work but will typically take some time…

Get your site ranked up in search engines

The better you rank in search engines for your chosen keywords, the more traffic you will get.

While sitting about and telling others you created a website could provide a slight ego boost, for best results, I recommend focusing on getting your site ranked up while continuing to add more content to your site.

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