I’m an auction seller, but primarily a webmaster, so heres a few tips to help you get free search engine traffic.
Decide on what keywords you want to target, using Overture, you want to target terms that have a high search volume, but not so much competition. Once you’ve found a few words that suite your niche, search for them in Google and have a look at the first few sites. You want be specifically looking at their title (the words in the blue bar up the top), and their page rank.
Ignore the millions of other pages Google found, you can easily beat them, its the top ones you have to worry about.
If their title is exactly the same as the keywords you want to target, they’ll be your direct competition. If their PR is any higher then 5 your going to struggle, the lower the better. PR is indirectly responsible for Google positioning. It is a measure of the quantity and quality (as measured by PR), of the links that point to that site.
Use Yahoo and type linkdomain:www.theirsite.com -site:www.theirsite.com to find all the sites linking to them. If you think you can beat this then you have a good chance of ranking above them.
Link building is hard and time consuming, some strategies can be found here, but above all a quality site will naturally get incoming links.
Onpage optimization: Create your homepage title to match your keywords, if your targeting more then one phrase use the | key (shift + key above enter), so it will look like this; keyword phrase1 | keyword phrase2 | keyword phrase3. I wouldn’t recommend going after any more then 3.
Within your text on your page you want to make sure you’ve got your keywords - a ‘density’ of about 5% of the words of your page should be your keywords.
You can repeat these step for every page on your site, though its easiest to get links to the homepage. The age of your site is also a factor so you may have to wait up to 9 months to see your site in Google, though MSN and Yahoo are more forgiving.
