I don't want to do more harm than good...

[nettidings]

I have a S-I-L who is really struggling with an brick & mortar apparel business after her husband died unexpectedly a couple years ago. She has a static website for her store that has been neglected due to her lack of web knowledge and lack of extra funds to pay someone to work on it.

To help her out I would like to make some mini sites that each concentrate on specific types (ie - golf shirts) or themes (ie - dog lovers shirts) of apparel. The mini sites would have large thumbnails of her products that when clicked on would go to the appropriate full size product page on her website. (She has a proper checkout setup with SSL, accepts credit cards etc.) I don't need any affiliate type tracking features as this would be solely to help her get more traffic and hopefully business.

Do I need to do anything special in order to make Google or Yahoo happy with the minisites that lead to her product pages? Her domain contact info and hosting info is totally different from mine. I'm new to this and need advice about how to go about it and keep the search engines happy. I don't want to do anything that would get her website penalized in any way!

 

[dan_Vt]

It's a bit risky, but if it's just a couple of sites you're probably fine. I wouldn't build dozens. The value of these links isn't going to be great anyway since these sites would be new and (presumably) wouldn't have many links leading to them.

It may be better to put more work into her site first. Build up internal pages for each product type with good text and pictures, throw up a video if you can. Come up with some ideas for content that will make people want to link to the site. Put up a blog for her.

Is she just targeting local phrases? It may not be too difficult to rank well with on-site SEO if the domain is well aged (which it sounds like it is) and the region isn't that competitive.

 

[Keral_Patel]

First of all make the site nice one. Because I have some sales site and I know conversion are bad at the times when the site is not laid out properly.

Then make a list of the products that are going to be on that site.

Use http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and search for all those words and copy the result keywords in another notepad.

Now target 2 or 3 main keywords and put them in title, meta tags and in onpage content with the relevant keywords that you found while searching, in the content of the page itself.

Now get going for the backlinks. Best and easy one as of now is directory submissions and social bookmarkings and article submissions.

I think this will keep you busy for sometime and then checkout results.

 

[nettidings]

It may be better to put more work into her site first. Build up internal pages for each product type with good text and pictures, throw up a video if you can. Come up with some ideas for content that will make people want to link to the site. Put up a blog for her.

Is she just targeting local phrases? It may not be too difficult to rank well with on-site SEO if the domain is well aged (which it sounds like it is) and the region isn't that competitive.

Thank you for the responses. Her website IS aged - it was started back in the latter 90s - but it hasn't progressed with the times at all. Neither her husband (who had other pressing concerns the last few years of his life) or she have done any online SEO at all. They always relied on off line types of advertising and never "plugged into" online SEO thinking. I kid you not when I say there is NO seo - no links, no backlinks, nothing! (the site is "just-ducky" (com) - look at it and be amazed - this is a site that's been online since around 96) The website is frozen in time, with the only changes being when new products are added.

It breaks my heart that she is missing such a great opportunity to increase her sales. She personally designs all her shirts and tailor makes each one to order (in every possible size) - they're gorgeous - and she sells at a very extremely reasonable prices. Her products would take off like wildfire if I could get her to let me do some SEO (although I'm not that knowledgeable myself I at least know the basics) and she started getting some online traffic.

But the problems are 1) she is overwhelmed with other things, very time pinched and doesn't understand SEO at all - she thinks it would be crazy to put links to other competitors on her site; 2) Because we have helped her so much in other ways she is 100% adamant about not letting me do any free work on her site. Every time I try to convince her how important SEO is she just says something like - "I'll think about it later, I don't have any extra in the budget right now to have the website worked on"

Right now she is working her fingers to the bone because she primarily sells wholesale to boutiques and other small apparel shops so her profit margin is low. If she could sell more retail through her website she could triple her profit margins.

Sorry for the long reply - anyway that is the history of my idea of trying to make some small sites (that have SEO) that profile her products and lead to her product pages. I probably wouldn't tell her I was doing it as she would strongly object to "free" help . BUT I don't want to do anything that would do more harm than good with the search engines.

Nick, thank you much for the information - I tried to rep you but apparently I've repped you not long ago and the system wouldn't let me!

dan_Vt, in my ramblings I forgot to say thank you! Your reply is appreciated and Rep was given.

 

[dan_Vt]

I'd recommend getting her an easy to update CMS, use wordpress or drupal (I like those, have tested others like Joomla and think they are too complicated for non-web-savvy people).

I wouldn't link to her competitors though

A handful of quality local links will do her well. With a nice aged domain like that she could dominate (I'm assuming the site is at least indexed so the engines know it's age).

rep was appreciated, thanks.

 

[redwizardstudios]

keep the mini sites on a seperate c-class IP(if you can) and build up the links slowly(maybe 1 a week).
Have the likes of google index the mini site.
Build inbound links to your mini sites slowly(around 5 a day) and let the search engine find these links.
Make sure any content on the mini sites are not duplicate content of the main site as one of the sites will get penalised for duplicate content.


Example - i'm currently working on a uk based prom dress site(for fun as a friend was interested in starting one up and i wanted to see how hard it was to rank well). So far with well written content, relevant alt tags on images, relevant title, keywords, description and H1 tag and posting to a single forum like this one i've managed to rank on page 1 for half a dozen long tail urls inside 2 weeks. If you follow this kind of plan AND link build into your mini sites i dont see a problem. The sites will be informative, have unique content, wont be paid links and wont spam the end users so you should be fine.

Good luck and let me know how it goes.

regards

Darren

 

[nettidings]

Dan and Darren thank you!

So sorry for the slow reply - I wasn't near a computer yesterday. Dan_Vt and Darren thank you for the suggestions - I'll try them all. I really appreciate the time you took to give such detailed replies! Darren I will update after a few months - I'm going to go about this very slowly and carefully. Appreciative Rep coming. :tu:

 

[coast]

I would make sure that whatever new pages you make have the same filenames as the old pages to avoid 404's and to preserve whatever links she has.

Also, I would go with wordpress as it is really easy to update, and then maybe a link on her site to an ebay store. I don't know all the rules on that and I hear it is a bit expensive, but it's a good start for people who are not having much luck with their own websites.

I did a search for wordpress store plugins and found this site with some good writeups:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/monetizing-wordpress-plugins/

There are others, I'll pm you if I find more.