Our next example site is an online store that sells shortwave radios and accessories -- a category we'd consider to be only moderately competitive. This classification reflects, perhaps, a more middle-of-the-road analysis that would be typically applicable to the average retail store doing business online.

Keyword: shortwave
Site: The Shortwave Store - http://www.shortwavestore.com

Let's look at the site's top 10 rankings for the keyword, shortwave.

#6 and #7 in AltaVista
#7 in Google
#2 in About.com Sprinks
#1 in AOL Web Sites
#2 in Netscape

For this article, I interviewed Keith Carcasole, owner of The Shortwave Store.

Question: Do you do anything special to boost your site's link popularity?

Keith: I used to ask for reciprocal links. However, there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day for that any more.

Now I carefully choose popular non-commercial sites where I can inexpensively advertise via a small text link. It is rumored that some search engines take the quality and popularity of the sites linking to you into consideration when determining the ranking of your site.
Recently I purchased a popular domain (http://www.worldtimezones.com) and paid to have the Web site designed. It is dedicated to time zones of the world. This handy site is great for travelers, business people and those interested in world politics.

These are the same people who might be interested in purchasing a shortwave radio to pick up world news and to listen to free speech stations! Not only do I get to advertise there for free, but I get a quality link that will help increase the popularity of my shortwave site. In some ways, this is actually better than a doorway page because people are visiting the site for another reason. This exposes my site to customers who may not visit otherwise.
I highly recommend this technique to anyone who has time to develop a popular site that offers a service that may be of interest to potential customers but at the same time has nothing to do with the subject matter of your main site.

Question: How much business do you get from your Web site?

Keith: It has been extremely difficult for us to gauge how much business we get from the net because we still have customers who refuse to do business online. This is especially true around Christmas time when people want reassurance that the item that they are about to order is not out of stock and will arrive in time for Christmas. If forced to venture a guess, I would estimate that 80% of our total business from our shortwave
division comes from the net, either by phone order or by secure online order. It appears that the remainder comes from radio ads and referrals from friends
.
Question: Do you purchase keywords from the pay engines like Overture? If so, approximately how much do you spend each month on Overture advertising?

Keith: We buy keywords on a number of pay-per-click engines. We are currently paying about $125 per month to Overture. The sum of the rest probably totals $25 per month.

Question: If you feel comfortable with this question, I'd like to know if you're using cloaking technology on the site.

Keith: None of our sites use cloaking at this time. I plan to use cloaking on one of our other sites in the very near future. We are not doing this to fool' the search engines. When we change technology on our site, we will lose many of our high-ranking positions. I plan to keep our old pages cloaked so that we do not lose traffic.

Question: How do you promote your Web site offline?

Keith: Business cards, print ads in magazines and newspapers, radio ads, and when customers call our store we often direct them to the site.

Question: Do you purchase banner ads?

Keith: Not really, however this does not mean that I don't have banner ads.

1. I do advertise via FREE banner ads on my own sites. If you own another high traffic site (related or not), there is no harm in advertising your products there. Even if you create a site just for your banner, the CPM will still be a fraction of what it would cost to buy impressions elsewhere.

2. I have purchased tile ads and convinced the webmaster to switch me to small text ads for the same price. I find that this yields a higher click-through ratio.

3. Some pay-per-click search engines give you free banner impressions for your top positions, I believe.

Question: Do you monitor your traffic?

Keith: I seldom look at our stats any more. If the orders were to suddenly stop, I would take a closer look. When I look at our stats my main focus is the referrers rather than the volume of traffic.

Question: Do you analyze your traffic and use that knowledge to strengthen your site?

Keith: I like watching where our traffic is coming from. Every few months I calculate how many visitors it takes to generate one sale just to make sure we are getting a reasonable return on our advertising dollars. I use this to adjust our advertising campaigns rather than to strengthen our site.
Continued in Part 5. Contact Robin Nobles at RobinN@acws.com for the complete article