Build Successful Jewelry Websites

In the past couple of days Google once again modified their algorithms - the factors they use to determine where a website will place in a Google Search - calling their new update "Penguin". (The last update was called "Panda" - maybe I should check Google Maps to see if their home office is somewhere near a zoo.)

If you have a website that doesn't comply with Google's standards, your ranking may be severely penalized....dropping you from a first page result to a listing in the stratosphere.

Google's very specific Guidelines make good common sense and if followed, can produce top rankings in the search results.

The primary guidelines are simple and easy to understand, even for a non-techy:

1. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

2. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

3. Don't "webspam" with multiple instances of keywords.

There are other guidelines, of course, but if you and your web developer keep Google's business plan in mind, namely serving up quality sites to their customers, people searching for information, Google's frequent algorithmn changes should have no impact on your placement.

This entry was posted on May 2, 2012 at 2:13 PM and has received 17 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

The homepage of your jewelry business website is often the landing page and is critical to the success of your online business. When potential customers land on this page, you have just a few seconds to capture their interest. This page will be a giant factor in your conversion rate which is the ratio of visitors that respond to your goal action. This goal action can be subscribing to your newsletter, ordering your products or simply calling you to discuss a product or service.

To be successful your homepage needs to contain certain elements...and all are important for that mix of esthetic beauty, marketing success, search engine rankings, and ultimately achieve your goals.

Here are 3 things to consider today (more to come)

1. Color The color you choose for your jewelry website can have a big effect on your visitors. The type of site you have should be a factor in the colors you choose. There are essentially two types of colors - cool and warm. A lot of research has been done on the psychology of color. For example, warm colors like yellows, reds and organ bring out feelings of excitement, energy and happiness. Cool colors like browns, blues and greens can make you feel relaxed, calm and assured. Take some time to research whether your chosen colors will help achieve the appropriate feeling (confidence? trust? excitement?) for your jewelry web site. Here's a start: Color Psychology

2. Clutter

Think how you feel when you walk into a store that's messy and cluttered - it doesn't exactly make you feel confident, does it? Your website is the same - you don't want it look like a cluttered, junk-filled mess. Keep it clean, simple, consistent and easy to follow.

3. Header

When a visitor hits your page (through your well executed search engine optimization) you have just a few seconds to "capture" your visitor's attention and make him want to know more about you and your products/services. The header should outline in a few words the benefits for the visitor to stay longer.

Your success in the step can be assessed through your web site analytics. (You do analyze your site's activity, don't you?) Take a look at the page's "bounce rate". If visitors are visiting a page and immediately leaving without looking further into what you have to offer - they have "bounced" off the page to find what they're looking for somewhere else.

This entry was posted on September 24, 2011 at 4:34 PM and has received 156 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Google's recent Panda 2.2 update - completed about June 20th, may have adversely affected your website's ranking in the search results.

Searchengineland.com reports "Panda is a filter that Google has designed to spot what it believes are low-quality pages. Have too many low-quality pages, and Panda effectively flags your entire site. Being Pandified, Pandification -- whatever clever name you want to call it -- doesn't mean that your entire site is out of Google. But it does mean that pages within your site carry a penalty designed to help ensure only the better ones make it into Google's top results."

You can't blame Google - they know that to stay on top of the Search Engine game they have a responsibility to serve up the best quality web pages to their customers, internet surfers searching for information.

Learn more about how Google's frequent updates can penalize websites with low quality content or non-original content. Copying content from other websites or redundant, shallow, or poorly edited content can seriously drop your website's rankings.

At JWD we believe in providing quality, original content and have a renown professional jewelry writer on staff writing unique keyword-rich (but not keyword stuffed) content to ensure that visitors will find valuable information on jewelry, gemstones and various aspects of the jewelry trade.

If your site was hit by the last Panda update, take at look at this article: Hit By Panda Update? Google Has 23 Questions To Ask Yourself To Improve

This entry was posted on July 21, 2011 at 9:47 PM and has received 251 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Meta descriptions (the text snippets of the webpage you see in search results) used to be an important ranking factor. Until not too long ago both Google and Yahoo! officially announced they no longer used Meta-descriptions in their search algorithms. But recent changes in Google's search algorithms bring Meta description back to life as a ranking factor and your page meta descriptions can now significantly affect your rankings.

Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History which in turn helps put your site into their personalized search results.

Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results. Since everyone now gets personalized results, the impact your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can become enormous. That's another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Many websites have exactly the same meta description for every page - this often occurs when a site is built using a template or site builder program which doesn't permit unique descriptions for each page. To see how your page descriptions are displayed in Google, go to the Google search box and type in - site:yourwebsitename.com (substitute your actual website name, of course).

Go and see how your website appears in the search results and find ways to improve it. With personalized search or without it, having a catchy compelling text in your search results snippet will get you more clicks, more traffic and more customers.

This entry was posted on July 11, 2011 at 4:33 PM and has received 144 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We've been specializing in websites for the Jewelry trade for some time now and I thought it would be good to sit back and try to define what makes a jewelry trade website different from the ordinary eCommerce website selling books or batteries or other household products.

First - Jewelers (and I'm talking about the people - not large jewelry companies that are basically resellers of other jewelry designer's pieces) are at heart, I believe, artists. They love beautiful things but most of all beautiful jewelry.

So while jewelry websites must be functional from an eCommerce standpoint, they must also be beautiful to satisfy the website owner's hunger for beauty above-all. That's why so many unsuccessful websites are developed using "Flash" technology which offers the ability to create a beautiful site that may not drive traffic from Search Engines.

So the challenge to the jewelry website developer is to create a jewelry trade web site that is not only esthetically beautiful but functional, constructed in such a way to achieve search engine ranking success but focused on generating sales not just web visitors who stop by and leave.

This entry was posted on July 10, 2011 at 3:05 PM and has received 246 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.