More Reader Questions

Received more questions from readers today, so thought I’d answer those here for the benefit of all our readers.

Jacki of Hearthside Collection wanted to know how important internal site links are, and whether button links or text links are better on a website.

It is VERY important to have internal links on your site; these are the most important kind to have. And they should be text links whenever possible. The search engine spiders that crawl your site cannot “read” the text on images, and even though they can read image file names, they are not as good for your site with regard to search engine optimization as text links are. Text links provide you with an excellent opportunity to repeat your meta keywords, which are very important to repeat throughout the content of your site’s pages. So if, for example, you are using button links instead of text links for your categories, you are eliminating the use of those keywords by doing so, because your category links should always contain your keywords anyway.

With regard to how your site looks to customers, and specifically how the button links look, are they more aesthetically pleasing? Maybe. But ask yourself two questions: 1) Would you NOT shop at a site just because it didn’t have button links? 2) How many button links do you see on top website shopping sites like Amazon, Wal Mart, Buy.com, and others? Of course you want your site to look visually pleasing to your human visitors, but this should never be at the expense of the spiders and bots that crawl your site and index its pages in the SE’s–which is where the bulk of your web traffic should be coming from. I encourage everyone to eliminate the use of button links on their website in any instance where keywords should be present. If you want to use buttons for things like an Email link or a Guestbook, or something like that, that’s fine. And by all means have a creative logo and webtopper to give your site visual appeal. But always use text links instead of button links when keywords can be used to your advantage.

Sheila of Faded But Desired Treasures asked what is the most important thing an online business owner should do on a daily or weekly business.

In my opinion, the most important things you should do weekly include the following items:

Monitor your traffic (I highly recommend Google Analytics for this purpose). See where your traffic is coming from, what keywords were used to bring that traffic, what pages they viewed, how long they stayed, etc. GA can tell you all of this and more. Pay special attention to traffic that is being generated by your paid advertisements; if the ads are not generating decent traffic, then don’t renew those ads when they expire!

Check your site for broken links, errors, and omissions. We all overlook little errors here and there, but if we stay on top of them and check often, we should be able to keep these to a minimum.

Seek out new methods of marketing and promotion. It really does pay to advertise, and many online retailers (newbies especially) overlook or underestimate the importance of this task. Marketing should always be of utmost concern! And always be sure that you are advertising on relevant sites. See the Online Business Junction Link Building Page for more info on this topic.

And as an additional note, on a monthly basis, I recommend the following:

Add at least one new product to your site. I add at least one every single month on my retail site, and all new products appear on my What’s New page at Pip Berry Place, and I have all new products set to display for 30 days. This ensures that each month if/when return customers visit, there is always something new for them to see on the site. And having them all on one page makes it very easy for customers to find all the latest additions, without having to hunt for them.

Add new content to your home page and elsewhere on the site whenever possible. When the search engines crawl your site, they are in looking for many things, including new content. So it’s always a good idea to add new products, articles, perhaps a freebie here and there, etc so that you always have new content on your site.