The Watering Hole

A shameless plea for help!

Since you all know about my being out of work, I've been busy doing side jobs until I can find "real" full-time employment.  Well, one of those side jobs might just develop into something big.

I've been creating a full inventory and supply system for a friend's new auto body supply shop.  From that I branched out into creating brochures and other marketing media for him until we started working on the obvious conclusion:  An online store.  It's come a long way in the last three weeks and I've got a lot more items to add (plus other improvements), but we could use a little help getting it pushed up the search results.

If you have a few seconds, can you bring up the website (the URL is below) and buy at least 50 items? just click on a link or two?  No need to critique unless you want to (I'm open to hear all opinions).  Just visiting the Home page will help!

If this thing can take off (and we've already seen some evidence that it will), then managing this and fulfilling orders could be my new full-time employment.

Thanks for your help!  :)

Here's the address to click on:  www.nwclips.com

Feel free to have a virtual beer on me.

Craig,

Here's a really useful tool for getting your site "known" on all the major and quite a number of the minor search engines too.  I use it for all of my web sites and web shops and it really does work and the optimization tools are worth a look at too.

http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Jon


edit:  I would say your description metatag needs a bit of analysis and rewriting. Currently you have  "NWClips NW Clips Ace Body Shop Supply Company Home Page Fasteners Bolts Screws Rivets UNuts"    

"Company Home Page" is a bit of a waste in the description metatag, you really want a concise description of what you sell in this metatag.  It makes a big difference.

edit2: Plus, ensure you have a very good description metatag for each page.  You current have "Best Sellers from NW Clips"  for you best sellers page, add some more meat to that to properly describe more stuff in your site.

Thanks for the feedback Jon!

I know this will sound a bit weird, but those two pages are probably the least important (though I'll talk with the my friend about what else we could put there).  Most people will actually find one of the product pages directly by doing a parts search.

I spent hours upon hours working on all the Meta Tag information as well as, more importantly, the content since many search engines really don't look at the meta tag stuff much any more.  I've got all of the most searched for words for the industry as well as all the most common misspellings of each buried in there (you can see me being tricky if you highlight the area after the "No China parts" comment on every product page - there's huge hidden content on each brand category as well).

In fact, we found out just today (less than 12 hours ago) that my hidden text with the misspellings works when a guy found our site after misspelling the word "fasteners" (he left out the middle "e" - the most common misspelling).  The best part?  He represents a local car dealership and would like us to supply them their clips!  That alone made the effort of making the website worthwhile.  :)

So far, I'm on my fifth day in a row of 15-17+ hour days trying to get the main parts up and correct.  The bulk of the time was all behind the scenes manipulating images and raw information, researching tons of (also hidden) cross-references to competitor's products (where they sell the same item with a different product number) and researching all that SEO crap.  I've got everything in spreadsheets (as usual - LOL!) and formulas generating the bulk of the various fields.  Then it's a LOT of boring cutting and pasting using one of those bloody annoying online tools provided by the hosting company (Go Daddy).  I didn't get a choice on that part...

Thanks for the extra tool as well!  I've got a few like that, but getting a site known and getting it pushed up the rankings are two things.  Since we probably won't have a Links page or many other sites linking to us, getting lots of unique visitors and accurate search terms will have to do.  Soon we'll add some SEM to the mix and that will help drive business there as well.

Fortunately, we DO have the hardest part already licked.  We have a product people want.  We have a few items on Amazon to test the waters and they're selling very well without us doing much of anything (13 sales yesterday with only 20 items up).  We'll be putting website information into the shipping packages so all repeat business will be directly with us (i.e., no 15% cut for Amazon).  We just need people to find us - thanks to very low overhead and excellent bulk costs, we can pretty much beat anyone's price on real clips (the quality ones - not the cheap pieces of crap coming out of China - hence our little comment on every page).

Do I sound a little excited about the prospects?  You betcha!  ;)

Sounds good. It's exciting when businesses like this start to grow and everything starts to happen, it makes all the long hours fun when you start seeing the orders dropping in.  I get a real kick out of this stuff, even just to hear of other peoples success, I just love the entrepreneurial spirit of it all.  Best of Luck !


The formula for success,  Effort in = Money Out !

I don't know shit about web design but it looked cool to me, and I clicked on links they all worked (the ones that I clicked on)

Good work (from a not a web designer)

Is that a Budwizer?  

DreamTheaterRules — Dec 19, 2012Is that a Budwizer?  

No, it's a real beer!   ;)

And my favorite too - a Drop Top microbrew from Widmer Brewing.  I still have an account with them, maybe I'll be able to afford to get another tap if the work things takes off.  8-)

I just bought $40,000 worth of Subaru dash fasteners. Hope that helps.  

I may need some help explaining this to Amy since we don't own a Subaru.  

Done. I'll actually keep you in mind if I ever need something. I'm a do it myself if possible car dude.  :)

Thanks guys.  I don't think I've ever been in the position of having something people actually want and just needing to make sure they can find out we have the stuff!  Kind of cool if you ask me.  :)

@Howie: Since you don't really have a Subaru, I've worked out a deal with the owner where we'll send you a lot of packing peanuts in return for some PRS guitars and amps.  ;)  :D

Come on Craig, the pics, the pics. Thats all we want.  ;D

Hookbender — Dec 20, 2012Come on Craig, the pics, the pics. Thats all we want.  ;D

And what pics are these that you want?

One of available girls in your area that want YOU?  ;)  :D



(Howie he say he already knows three of them, but he wouldn't say which three.  ;D )

Well, did some more researching and found Google won't stand for hidden text even if it's for the benefit of the customer so, it will need to become slightly visible.  That only adds about 3-4 hours of more busy work to my plate...  *Sigh*  :(

Well, I'm FINALLY DONE (for the moment anyway - lol).  I've got all of my enhancements and have incorporated all the great feedback I've gotten from others.  Then I did an SEO scan to see how much I had improved things (the tools is from Go Daddy but the number comes from Google):

First scan:



After fixing about 40 minor issues that the first scan found (the rest are pretty much unfixable by me with the Quick Shopping Cart tool), here's scan #2!



Needless to say, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Thanks for all that provided feedback!  :)

CraigBert — Dec 20, 2012

(Howie he say he already knows three of them, but he wouldn't say which three.  ;D )

Yeeeowza!  Each one of them makes about 4 of my woman!  And not in the good way.   ;D

Safe sex though - just find a wrinkle and push!  ;) :D

I feel nauseous ...    ;D

my only suggestion would be to link the NW Clips part at the top of the page to the home page. I know you have a home link on the right hand side, but when I wanted to go back to the home page, the top of the page was where I  clicked first.

DreamTheaterRules — Dec 20, 2012I feel nauseous ...    ;D

The chick in the black..... how is she facing her ass? :-/

Or is that 2 vaginas and just an asshole in the front? :-/

Hookbender — Dec 21, 2012The chick in the black..... how is she facing her ass? :-/

Or is that 2 vaginas and just an asshole in the front? :-/

I thought I heard a motorboat!