Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Today is Halloween.  It is the last day of October.  This means that we are now in the Holiday Push mode.  This is when all retailers start to prepare for holiday shipping.  And if you are a retailer of items that have any sort of production lead time, you need to get the word out.  You need to remind folks that if they can shop early, they will get their purchases on time.

So today will be the last day we have our automatic 5% coupon code up on our left side navigation.  Tomorrow we start marketing to early holiday shoppers.  And I may send out coupon code emails to everyone who has signed up on our coupon list.  I’m starting to see improved keyword positions on Yahoo and Google, and I’m still avidly trading links.

The problem with links however, is that sometimes it can take weeks for Google to reindex the pages where your links are posted.  That, in other words, translates to a slow benefit gain of the links that you’re getting.  But, if I do a little work each day, we should start seeing the link benefits coming.  It will be nice when it starts to pay off. 

I have to say that changing my Title tags a few weeks ago, was a huge benefit.  Here’s a tip, make sure your keywords are sprinkled into your title tags.  Test it over a few weeks to see what works best.

I’ve implemented my experiment with my 2 Bean Bag splash pages to see if new content and an optimized page does better than the over optimized page.  I’ll probably have to wait about 2 weeks for these pages to be reindexed and to see if the changes helped or hurt.

I’m still waited for our newest product, the Cocoon Sleeper foam chair to be indexed.  I can’t believe how long this is taking.  Actually, each day a few pages get reindexed and updated from Google.  But, I would like to go faster and I’m not sure how.

Since I’ve been on a new kick to increase our incoming links, I’ve decided to restructure the way our links pages work. I used to have a main links page which was accessed by the Links link available on every page in the footer.  Once you got to the first links page which was related to bedroom furniture, you were shown a link directory which would lead you to every other category links page.  And on every page, there would also be a links directory. 

What’s wrong with this is two-fold.  First, any time I decide to make a change to the link directory categories, I would have to do it on 8-10 pages.  That’s cumbersome work.  The second problem is that it diluted the link juice passed on to other sites because there are 8-10 extra links on that page that just lead to other pages on our site.  So, I decided to make it easier for me and better for all the links on the page by creating a link directory page that leads to all of the other links pages.  Now, I only have to change or add link categories on one page, and I’ve removed a ton of unnecessary links from those pages which benefits those listed there.

Here is the new My Pillow Place Link Directory Hub page.

I am proposing an experiment on our site.  I believe that our bean bag pages may have tripped a Google over-optimization filter which has caused my bean bag splash page to drop several hundred spots in Google for the keywords that I am targeting.  Since I have 2 bean bag splash pages and both seem to be listed in less than desireable places, I figured I would do a split test and see what happens. One page will get an optimized set of new content that uses embedded links and will have some links pointing to it.  The other page will be de-optimized and will be very simple. 

Both will be geared towards informing the visitor of they products.  In other words, both will be user friendly.  I am hoping that one of these pages sees positive results and gives me a pattern I can follow to improve other pages on our site that have poor listings.  This is all part of the new restructuring to help us get more traffic and more sales.  It may take a few weeks to get these experimental pages re-indexed after the changes, but I’ll be reporting on the results when they happen.

We’ve done a few new things to our site over the past week.  I finally have gone to a fully realized free shipping model for our products.  When we first went online, we had shipping charged based on the amount in your shopping cart.  It was determined by a range which capped itself at $16.95 shipping for any amount.  But this was a problematic method of determining shipping. 

Then we started giving Free Shipping on our most popular items to help increase popularity.  Our Square Floor Cushions are perfect example of a popular product that actually increased in popularity.  But, that meant that some of our other products still had a shipping component in them.  I thought that this was confusing.  Some products ship for free, some don’t.  Which is which???  As much as you try to be clear, sometimes its not.

We finally went free shipping on everything as an overall www.my-pillow-place.com Unique Selling Proposition to help people understand the benefit.  We’ve put it at the top of every page and I hope people see that and that its very clear.  In addition to that, we’re offering a special Halloween deal to give an instant 5% off your entire order by entering the coupon code listed at the top of our left side navigation.  I haven’t decided how long we’ll run this coupon code, but most likely it will end on, or just after Halloween.

Now, I’ve updated, modified or corrected almost every page on our site within the last month.  It is not uncommon for some of our pages to go ignored for long periods of time.  As, I do this, I’m waiting for Google to reindex all of these pages to gain the benefits of my updates and optimization.  I’ve been waiting for 2 weeks to get our small variety of Dog Beds and Pillows reindexed.  This is a competitive market, but with some work, I may be able to find myself right in the mix of the first page of Google.  I’ve also been relentlessly trading links and tracking how many links the 3 major search engines say that I have.  As we get into our next holiday shopping season, all of this work is critical to have our best sales month ever.