Jewelry Website Optimization Tips

© by Rena Klingenberg; all rights reserved

Website optimization involves designing the pages of your site to be as search-engine friendly as possible. Most people use search engines to locate websites that offer the information or products they’re looking for, so being listed within the first 20 to 30 search results for at least a few of your pages is something you should strive for.

Having a website that’s found in search engine queries can bring you a lot of targeted traffic that’s looking for exactly what you offer. Website optimization is almost a science, but some of the basic elements are:

Keywords are the words people enter to search for information or products on the web. Each of your website’s pages should be optimized for one main keyphrase and one or two secondary keyphrases.

Use the free trial version of WordTracker, an excellent online keyword research tool, to find out what keywords people really use when they search.

After doing this keyword research for a particular page, decide which of those keyphrases your customers might use to look for what you have on that page.

Try to think like your customers, remembering that they probably don’t know as much about jewelry and your business as you do.

Then choose one main keyword and one or two secondary keywords to concentrate on for that page. Your keyword density (how often a keyword appears on the page compared to the page's other content) is something you need to work on without overloading the page with it. If your keyword density is too low, your page won't receive any benefit; if your density is too high, search engines will ignore your page for keyword spamming. So use your keywords, but keep your page "real".

Here's a free keyword density checker you can use.

TIP: You'll have the best chance of succeeding in the search engines for your keywords when you choose specific multi-word keyphrases that represent what's on your page. For example, "shark tooth necklace" or "medical alert necklace" instead of just "necklace".

Good keywords are one of the major elements of website optimization!

Each page of your site should have a title that makes it very clear what visitors will find on that page. The title is like a headline that should grab the viewer’s attention. Get as narrow as you can with your page titles, because the more specific your title is, the easier it is for visitors and search engines to tell whether that page is of interest to them.

For good website optimization, the title of each page should contain that page's primary keyphrase as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

Also, make sure the title of your website's home page is NOT “index” or “home page” (which some website building programs insert by default). Your company name is a great home page title.

Take the time to write a compelling page description for each of your website's pages. This one- or two-sentence description shows up in the search engine results. You probably know from your own experience with search engines that the description of a page can really make or break your decision to enter a website or scroll down to see what other sites came up for your search results!

For website optimization in the description, use the primary and secondary keyphrases you chose for that page, and make every word count; don’t waste any space with fluffy filler words. Make the description interesting and informative. Study the article teasers on magazine covers to learn how a good description makes you want to visit the page.

Don't forget to proofread your page descriptions carefully. You don't want to accidently make a poor impression on your potential visitors with typographical errors.

Make sure each page of your site provides the best content possible. Your pages should load fairly quickly, and any text should be well written and contain an optimum density of the keywords you’ve chosen for that page.

The titles and text that accompany your jewelry photos should be clear and descriptive, including your keywords when it's reasonable to do so.

Strive for good, clear photos of your jewelry - see Tips for Photographing Jewelry for help. Be sure each photo is a small enough file that it doesn't slow down your page-loading speed.

You can also make good use of "Alt" text for each of your jewelry images. "Alt" text is the "alternative attribute" used in an image tag; its intended purpose is to provide descriptive text in place of the image whenever visitors can't view the image for some reason. However, using descriptive keyphrases in your images' alt text can contribute significantly to your overall website optimization efforts. At the end of each image's tag In the HTML code of your page, you can add

Each page of your website has a “head” section that contains coded information that affects your site's appearance, although this code isn’t visible when people view your web page. You can see the head section in the HTML view of your web page.

The "head" section is where you place your meta tags that supply information about the content of your page. Because meta tags are easy for webmasters to manipulate, most search engine experts feel that meta tags are not as important to search engine optimization as they used to be. However, they do contain information that search engines use in your listing when your page turns up in someone's search results.

Inside the meta tags in your HTML view, you can put your web page title, the page description you’ve written, the keywords you’ve chosen, and a few other things for the search engines to find.

Site Report Card is a free online tool that analyzes your page for all kinds of optimization structural issues.

This is just a very brief overview of website optimization. There’s an excellent e-book on this topic, Make Your Site Sell, with a helpful section on search engine optimization. It teaches you how to make your product and your website work for you to bring you a lot of online sales, and it has a great section on getting a high volume of targeted traffic to your site. I refer to this book often, and I pick up new pointers every time.

Related article:

Jewelry Website Optimization - A Jewelry Artist's Experience
After a bad web designer got Catherine D'Arcy's jewelry site blacklisted from Google, Catherine started over - this time optimizing her jewelry website properly.

Okay, let's look at the other steps in building your successful jewelry business website:

Jewelry Business Website Tips for Success

Jewelry Website Resources
My top picks for jewelry business website resources, including web hosts, online credit card processing, other forms of online payments, and traffic building. For jewelry business websites, I think these services are the best of the best.

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