The MTS guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and other Free Traffic Strategies Compiled by Matt Edmonds, with contributions from Deco Network and Kevin Green Beta Test version 1 October 2014
Introduction My Tee Store (MTS) is a free online printed fashion apparel and phone cover store which you can access at www.myteestore.net. This guide shows you how to generate free sales in your store, without any advertising expenditure. We have members who are following these techniques, who within 3 weeks of setting up their store are making $700+ per week, with zero investment, no advertising budget, and no additional work required once set up, just by following these simple steps! Kevin Green I started my MTS site just over 3 weeks ago and am now making over $700 profit a week, where can you start a business with no set up fees and start making money that quick This guide combines tips from: Our resident top free traffic seller Kevin Green Published guidance from Deco Network on SEO; and My own research into the topic over the past few years What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to maximising the chance that a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing will rank your web page high enough, that potential customers will find your products, driving free traffic to your site, so that they can purchase from it. Ideally you want to appear on page 1 of the indexed results for your key search terms. What are the key steps at a high level? 1. It s a numbers game
Create a large number of shirts that people will want to purchase. Keep in mind that SEO will always be a numbers game. The more shirts you have, the greater the chance that your site will be found and make more money. Also the more pages of content that you have that is regularly updated, the better your site will rank. You may want to consider the types of shirts that you are creating, to quickly mass produce them in a way that is scalable, but also have a design that is sellable. This is what we have seen as the most effective method to attract decent numbers of sales quickly. If you already have a large number of shirts on another site like Teespring or Sunfrog, adding them to your MTS site will actually give you a passive revenue stream from them. Instead of $1.05 per sale on Sunfrog, you will get $10+ per sale at standard retail pricing!! Unlike Teespring, you will get paid for every sale, not need at least 10 or 15 sales to get paid at all and they are available for sale at all times, not just when a campaign is running. Adding a large number of shirts may seem like a daunting task. You can hire a virtual assistant (VA), to assist you from a site like http://www.onlinejobs.ph where the cost to have someone do this for you fulltime, will typically be $200-$300 per month! The returns from doing this will by far exceed this cost. Which of these options would provide a better return on investment? a) $300 in Facebook ads in a one off campaign; or b) Spend $300 on a VA to add hundreds of designs to your own branded website with free advertising through SEO, that pays off with multiple sales every month for years as an evergreen income stream? It is easy to understand that option b) is a far better way to invest your money.
2. Long tailed keywords Long tailed keywords refer to having a group of words that, when someone searches some or all of the combined set of words you have used, you are likely to rank higher than other listings for that exact search term. Instead of using 1945 for the title of your tshirt, instead use the full title Made in Scotland since 1945 tshirt. The fact that this set of words is very specific can mean that there is low competition and make it easier to rank highly. There are tools that you can use to find how many people are likely to be searching for certain long tailed keywords and how hard it can be to rank highly for it. One example of this that I have used personally, is Long Tail Pro which you can get a free 10 day trial of by clicking here. This kind of research can assist you to discover what people are actually searching for and how hard or easy it is likely to be to rank for a long tailed keyword, compared to your competitors. There may not be massive volumes searching for that term, but again think of it as a numbers game. If you post 300 tshirts on your site and they attract an average of just 50 visitors a month each, you will be getting 500 visitors a day to your site for free. If only 2% of them purchased, you would be making over $700 per week. Most tshirt sellers are familiar with the right way to sell on Facebook. (a) Start with an audience that can be targeted; then (b) Create a tshirt for them that will sell. Think of SEO in the same way. Find a decent sized, targetable audience, with low competition, using Long Tail Pro, then create a tshirt or a range of designs to target them. It is essentially the same way you would target on Facebook, but you need to think of the process they are going to find you through, in a different way, that will work correctly to beat the competition on google.
I won t go into detail on using Long Tail Pro, as they provide very good training in how to use it when you take a trial of the product. Note that while ideal, Kevin Green has been doing very well making SEO sales without any keyword research. 3. Keywords and Metadata You can set up generic keywords and metadata across all of your listings by going to Website Settings, SEO Tools, Keywords and Meta Data. Keywords This assists the search engines to identify what your site has to offer. You should separate each keyword by a comma. Ideal keywords should identify products that are being sold across the site, Tshirts, Hoodies, Tank Tops, iphone covers, Samsung phone covers, etc. If it is a niche based site, it should include words related to that niche. Metadata The text entered here influences the site description displayed by search engines and Facebook. When these have been changed, they will appear as the default across all of your product listings. When creating products, you will want to add details which are specific to your designs and products. I would suggest pasting in the title of the product at the start. 4. Names, Titles and Descriptions The key with Names, Descriptions and Titles is to have consistency. If your tshirt is Proudly made in Scotland since 1945, you want your Name, Description and Title to be either an exact match, or very close to an exact match with each other. Google places a higher ranking value on a page that has consistency in each of these key elements. Name Enter the name of the tshirt. If it is a text based tshirt, you may want to use the exact text that is used on the shirt. To make it stand out,
use CAPITAL LETTERS. Consider using long tailed keywords that are likely to be easy to rank and get traffic. Tick the box to add the product to the name. Description Copy and paste the name, exactly the same as the title. You can use BB code to adjust the size of the text here. For best results use [Size=+0] Copy and paste title here [size/] Title The tshirt name automatically becomes the page title 5. Google likes content!! If you have a niche website for tshirts for mountain bikers, add further content to your site, like keyword rich articles, video links to youtube for crazy mountain bikers going fast downhill. If you only have your shirts and nothing else, you are less likely to be ranked highly. Also be careful not to do keyword stuffing. This is where you use your keywords everywhere, all over the page. These days google penalizes you for doing this. Your target keywords should be no more than about 5% of your content and you want to be writing around 300+ words in your articles. You can check the keyword density at by entering your text at http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density Include images with alt text. Link to an authority site in your niche, which helps google to identify relevance. You can easily add pages where you can create further content on your MTS site. 6. Add 301 redirection to your primary domain. In DecoNetwork you can add 301 redirection to your primary domain, so the Google ranking will not get split between the multiple domains which points to your site. This can be done in Manage Fulfillment > Websites > Manage > Domain Settings
On the next page select an option Redirect to Primary Domain 7. List your site with Google Analytics You should list your MTS site with google analytics. Just create a Google Analytics account by following the steps in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyrku-yb05c Once you have done this, go to Marketing and Promotions / SEO and Google Analytics. Use the tracking code and place it in the Google Analytics Code box. 8. List your site with Google Webmaster Tools
An important part of ensuring a search engine like Google knows the contents of your website, is to submit your sitemap to the search engine. What is a sitemap? First let s explain how a search engine finds pages. Search engines find pages through links. It looks at a page and identifies all links on the page. Then it travels to that link which takes it to a new page. It then looks for links on the new page and once again travels down those links. This goes on and on and all the links are added to search engines directory. Sometimes you may not link to all pages from your site so if a link to this page does not exist then a search engine like Google may not find it. This is where a sitemap is handy! A sitemap is a list of links or pages you have on your website. A search engine reads this sitemap and adds this URLs to their search directory. In the case of DecoNetwork we provide an XML sitemap and you access this by adding /sitemap.xml at the end of your wesbite. i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml Adding your sitemap to Google 1. Log into Google webmaster tools: www.google.com/webmasters/tools. If you don t have a Google account then make one it s free! Don t forget your gmail account is a Googleaccount also. 2. Log in to access your Webmaster Tools dashboard. 3. Click the red ADD A SITE. 4. Enter your websites URL such as http://www.yoursite.com Google will require you to verify your account. Select the Alternate methods to validate your account and select HTML tag 5. Copy the <meta name /> tag.
6. Log into your DecoNetwork website and browse to Websites and select Manage for the site s sitemap you wish to add to Google. Select Appearance and then Customize Template HTML. 7. Select the Custom layout option from the left menu and then check Override default layout. 8. You should past the <meta name /> tag you copied above between the <head> and </head> tags in your website. 9. Click Save when done. 10. Return to Google Webmaster Tools and click the Verify button. If the tag was saved correctly your site should now be verified. 11. Now you need to add your DecoNetwork sitemap. In Google Webmaster Tools browse to the left menu Optimization and select Sitemaps 12. Select ADD/TEST SITEMAP. 13. enter sitemap.xml at the end of your Add/Test Sitemap field and click Submit Sitemap. 14. The sitemap may take a short while to submit and will remain in the Pending status until it is submitted. Once submitted it will give you a report of how many URLs (pages) were submitted and how URLs (pages) Google has indexed to its search engine. Overtime you should see your indexed pages start to reach closer to you submitted pages as Google adds more of your pages to its search index. Microsoft Bing Go to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx Type in the characters you see in the box (identify you as a person) and type your URL, click on the Submit URL button. Yahoo http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/au/free/submit You can submit your website/webpage and site feed
DMOZ http://www.dmoz.org/add.html If your site is not listed, then select the best category for your site, go directly to that category on dmoz.org and then click suggest URL FREE Web Submission http://www.freewebsubmission.com/ Contain a list of the top 50 search engines. A good online resource for those getting started. Off-site SEO Off-site SEO refers to external links back to your website. A few links that come from sites which google ranks as being high authority, are far more valuable than spamming lots of links from low quality sites. There are a few different options to get back links, which we will discuss here. (Note that Kevin Green is having success, without any backlinking strategy). Use topical forums to backlink Topical forums will often allow you to have a signature. This can be an ideal place to add your link back to your site, with keywords included for your niche. The very fact that there are people interested in that topic can generate direct traffic outside of SEO as well, from customers who are likely to buy. A few tips on forum etiquette. Don t spam links or make your first post an advertisement. Get involved in the forum, offer your thoughts on discussions, be useful and helpful to those that are trying to understand the topic. If you are seen as a valued member of a community, in most forums, you will be allowed to include a link to your website in the signature. The more posts that you have on a regular basis, the more likely people are to find you. Google places high value on links that come from educational (.edu) and government (.gov) websites. If you can figure out a way to get your back links on these sites, they will assist greatly. Blogs and Guest blogging
You could create your own niche based blog and have links back to your site. If there are really popular blogs in your niche, they may be open to you doing a guest blog, including a link back to your site. Press releases Another way to promote your business online is by creating press releases. Write it - In general, it should be something interesting and no more than 500 words Distribute it - Find the place online to distribute it such as asprweb.com, prbuzz.com, ereleases.com, emailwire.com, prleap, vocus.com Make sure to include keywords and links in your article - You can add keywords and links which are referring to your site in the submitted article Some tips on how to create links for all online backlinks Be careful not to over-optimize by using exact match keywords in your anchor text everywhere. Anchor text is where you use the exact match keywords in a link back to your page, i.e. Click here to set up a Tshirt Store It can be very powerful, but if over-used it is likely to be penalized by google. Ideally you want some back links to be just plain text with a direct link. For example If you want to set up a Tshirt Store go to www.myteestore.net, where the keywords that you want to appear are close to the link, but are not anchor text Another variation will be If you want to set up a Tshirt Store click here By varying the types of links, it appears to be more natural to google, and less like you are trying to directly influence the rankings for the long tailed keyword. Penalties and PBNs Google has introduced programs like Penguin and Panda that penalize people who try to game the system. There are complex systems that people have created to try to work around this, especially in the last couple of years, called
Private Blog Networks or PBNs. The theory is that you create your own network of sites that are topical and link back to a money site, which is where you sell items. Google has recently become better at finding sites that are using PBNs to boost their rankings and has started deindexing them. We would suggest not using black hat methods that could lead to your site being deindexed. Here is a good discussion of what has happened with this. http://www.nichepursuits.com/alright-google-you-win-ill-never-use-privateblog-networks-again/#comment-77816 Kevin Green is managing to get a good consistent income without using any PBNs. If you do decide to do anything at all Black or Grey Hat, please set up your own domain, and do not leverage off any of the domains that we have created for people to use. Not following this rule will be the fastest way to have your site deleted from MTS. Pinterest, social media and other free traffic sources MTS has Pinterest post buttons on the sales pages, so you can easily add your products to your Pinterest account. You don t need to worry about any affiliate links being removed, as they are not required in our model. You receive the full commission, regardless of how people end up at your store. SEO will favour sites which have social proof. By sending some traffic from Facebook, and them interacting with the site, this will improve your ranking. We are in the process of adding full API integration into other free and pay per sale, (NOT pay per click or CPM), traffic sources through Storenvy and Bonanza. Anticipated launch of beta test is in November, just in time for Christmas. The integration will allow you to add hundreds of products to these searchable traffic generation sites, and the customer can purchase directly through the checkout at each. Storenvy Storenvy is integrated into a number of other platforms including Tumblr, Wanelo, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook. You can use these links to be able to get
great exposure across a range of social media, all linking back to your Storenvy site. Bonanza Bonanza has built in traffic sources which allow you to advertise on a range of other sites including Google Shopping, Ebay, Bing Ads, The Find and Next Tag. You will only be charged when a sale is made, and to a maximum of 15% of the sales value (excluding shipping). This makes it a risk free way to drive traffic to your MTS products which will sit on Bonanza and allow your customers to purchase using their checkout system, without leaving the site.
In addition, MTS is being integrated with Shopify, which is known to be good for SEO optimization, so is another channel that you can drive traffic through and allow customers to purchase directly in your shopify store. This will also add a great range of options including limited time campaigns, coupons and you could run your own affiliate program for your MTS products to be sold by others on a commission basis. This would be ideal for setting up partnerships with Facebook fan page owners or forum owners, which guarantees that they get their cut at an agreed amount. Teespring as a free traffic source This one may surprise you, but Teespring is a good free traffic source, especially now that they have added a search feature. Here is a scenario that you may have had for a number of campaigns. You either didn t tip, or the campaign tipped but wasn t really profitable. You don t expect to ever launch the shirt as a campaign at Teespring again and don t really care if anyone else sees it, as it has no real commercial value to you. We have had people using their MTS accounts to make individual sales from their Teespring page, on tshirts that they would never have made sales on otherwise, due to the minimum order runs. They simply follow 3 steps: 1. If the campaign was hidden from search, unhide it. Let s get the Teespring traffic search working for us for free traffic. Instead of it costing us sales, after we have paid to drive traffic to Teespring, let s use the search feature in our favour for free traffic and instant sales. Add lots of text so you are more likely to appear for a wide range of search terms. 2. Add instructions that you can buy it instantly at your other site, with a link back to your MTS store, where they can purchase from. 3. Contact previous purchasers or those that had intended to purchase but it didn t tip. Send them a message that they can order directly from
you now, for themselves, or for friends and family. You are now able to make money through Teespring search for what would otherwise have given you no profit at all. It also provides niche specific backlinks that assist your SEO. We have people who have implemented this strategy successfully and are getting a few sales consistently each week with no ad spend. You even get their contact details as a customer for life, not just a one off purchase. Summary MTS is deliberately positioning the brand as a great place to build a real business across multiple sales channels, most of which require no ad spend in advance of a sale being made. It is our genuine intention to allow the average person to be able to make $100k+ per year, just by putting in the work to build up a range of products for sale at MTS and taking advantage of the multiple integration options that we are providing. They will be simple to use, with hundreds of products able to be uploaded to multiple other front end platforms at once with just a few clicks. This provides a unique opportunity that other providers do not offer, as a low risk, high value strategy for store owners.