Bangle Bangle Blog

There are many different browsers that people can use to visit your site. And as an online retailer it is important that your site looks the same and functions correctly on all of them. Otherwise you may find that some users may not want to or be able to complete their purchase.

One way to test that your site is coded correctly is to install the most popular browsers on your own machine and use them to visit your site.

But this method will not let you see what your site looks like on all of the browsers that your customers might be using. Some browsers will only let you have one version on any computer at any one time. This means you can’t test on the other versions that you don’t have installed. Also some users may be using different operating systems that you do not have access to like Mac OS or Linux.

One way to check that your site displays correctly on all of the main browsers and operating systems is to use the free service offered on http://browsershots.org/. Simply go to their site and input your own sites url and they will generate screen shots of your site on 49 different browsers across 4 different operating systems.

It is very important for an online bangle businesses to have a professional store front at all times. A big part of this is attention to detail like correct spelling and not having any broken links.

Once a site has been going a while the number of links can really add up. A quick way to check that all of your links are coded correctly is to use a link checker site like the W3C link checker http://validator.w3.org/checklink.

What are backlinks?

Simply put backlinks or “back links” are links from other websites that point to your site.

Why are backlinks important for a bangle site?

The number of backlinks is a good indication of the popularity or importance of your website. Backlinks are important for SEO because search engines will give more credit to websites that have a higher number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

How to get backlinks

Common ways to get backlinks include exchanging links with other sites (reciprocal links) and by placing articles you write in article directories and on other sites. Google is getting very good at spotting “link exchanges for the sake of link exchanging” so they are not as useful as they used to be.

Perhaps the most effective way of all is to create a site that sells the best bangles in the whole world so that other people voluntarily link to yours

How to find how many backlinks you have on Google

You can simply type link:banglebangle.co.uk into the search box.

OR banglebangle.co.uk -site:www.banglebangle.co.uk -site:banglebangle.co.uk

Doing this shows you pages that link to your site, minus the links on pages on your own site.

The only problem with Google is that it does NOT show all of the backlinks that Google knows about!

How to find more backlinks using Yahoo!

link:http://banglebangle.co.uk -site:www.banglebangle.co.uk

This search excludes internal links.

OR linkdomain:www.banglebangle.co.uk -site:www.banglebangle.co.uk -site:banglebangle.co.uk

The above search includes links to ALL pages on your site, not just the main page.

In general Yahoo will shows more backlinks than Google. At the time of writing Yahoo showed 1,844 backlinks to banglebangle.

We use Google Analytics on banglebangle to keep track of how the site is performing. Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.

Google Analytics helps us keep track of a lot of data and watch trends over time. It also helps with other useful information like where the visitors are from and how they found our site.

When we started out we had so learn some technical terms.

Visits: The number of visitors that have come to banglebangle

Unique visits: The number of unique visitors that have looked at banglebangle.

Page views: Page Views is the total number of pages viewed on your site and gives a general measure of how much your site is used.

Average page views: The average number of page views that each new visitor makes on the banglebangle. The higher this number the better.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).

Conversions: The amount of people who click on a special page or link that such as the checkout link or visit the contact us page.

To get started all you need to do is add a small piece of JavaScript that Google give you to the bottom of each web page. It’s that simple.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

We have added one of our most popular bangles to a popular arts and crafts trading site called Esty which is like the Ebay of arts and crafts. Esty describe themselves as …

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade.

Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.

… which is kind of what banglebangle do.

The www.banglebangle.co.uk shop page can be seen at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5578526

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

As mentioned previously one of the most important thing any new ecommerce venture is to get the search engines to take notice of your site. Something that search engines love is content. Lots and lots of keyword rich content. As a site that sells bangles there isn’t a huge amount to write about so it can be difficult to generate enough content for the search engines to crawl. So to help the search engines take us seriously we decided to write a blog about our experiences starting a new ecommerce site to sell bangles on the internet. I hope the blog will be useful to other people starting out in ecommerce and hopefully it will help us rank well for searches for bangles and bangle.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

These first results are the same search as last time:

www.google.co.uk (search narrowed for UK results)
On a search for “bangle” = 37th up from 497st result
On a search for “bangles” = 47th up from 566st result

And this is a new search on www.google.co.uk without narrowing the results to show only UK results.

www.google.co.uk
On a search for “bangle” = 46th result
On a search for “bangles” = 66th result
So the bangle business is ranking remarkably better on Google.co.uk. The keyword bangle still ranks better than bangles and we rank better if the search is narrowed for UK only results.

This is great news but there is much room for improvement. Especially considering that most searches for bangles are done using the keyword bangles and not bangle.

On a more comical note we are the fifth website to be returned for a search for “bangle tiger”.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

Since I built the site just over a month ago I have had 21 visitors who have found www.banglebangle.co.uk on Google by searching for “bangle tiger”.

It’s a pity we sell bangles and not bengal tigers then.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

As mentioned in the previous bangle bangle blog entry web sites live on traffic and free traffic is the best kind of traffic. One of the best ways to get your website to rank well on Google and other popular search engines so that potential customers can find your site. Ideally we would like to be on the first page when customers search for the keywords bangle or bangles.

The way to do this is to actually quite simple:

1. Code your site well with good use of the key search terms bangle or bangles
2. Get other popular web pages to link to your site

The only problem with this method is that it is a bit of an open secret and everyone knows it so there is a bit of a crush to get on the first page while everyone loads their pages up with keywords and getting lots of other sites to link to them.

One month into business www.banglebangle.co.uk has the following organic results:

www.yahoo.co.uk
On a search for “bangle” = 4th result
On a search for “bangles” = 331st result

www.yahoo.co.uk (search narrowed for UK results)
On a search for “bangle” = 1st result
On a search for “bangles” = 217st result

www.google.co.uk (search narrowed for UK results)
On a search for “bangle” = 497st result and last week it wasn’t even in the top 900
On a search for “bangles” = 566st result and last week it wasn’t even in the top 900

So all in all not a bad start. But since 57% of all searches are made on Google (Yahoo 23.7%, MSN 10.3%, Ask 4.3%, these are American figures) we need to do a lot better with them before we will be able to give up our day jobs and move to the South of France.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.

Where ever possible we have tried to promote www.banglebangle.co.uk via free online marketplaces. The following post outlines the ones we are using so far. If you know of any others that we should be using please feel free to drop us a line.

http://www.sellmefree.co.nz/

This site is based in New Zealand but you can list up to 24 items free of charge. As they say in the promotional material:

• FREE to join.
• FREE to list an item.
• FREE to add photos - as many as 20 if you want to!
• FREE to add a movie - try it, it’s brilliant.
• FREE to add your logo.
• FREE to include a link to your website.
• FREE to add a Skype or MSN address.
• FREE to get help from our Call Centre.

The downside is the site is in New Zealand so postage is a little bit more than posting domestically in the UK. The other major downside is the New Zealand market is completely dominated by www.trademe.co.nz. Sellmefree sas generated little or no traffic except one very obvious attempt to get me to send my bank details to Nigeria.

http://banglebangle.bttradespace.com/

This site is very buggy and looks like it was rushed to the market. They are free to use and they support Paypal transactions though so that is a good thing. Not much in the way of traffic from them in the first month but the bangle ads don’t expire so I hope things pick up for them and therefore me.
Another downside is that you can only list five items before they start charging.

http://www.facebook.com/marketplace/

Great interface, easy to use, free to upload, the ads don’t expire and millions of potential customers. What else could you ask for? Should be a great source of traffic in the long run. And if/when it is I expect they will start charging.

http://www.Loot.com

A very popular free ad paper in the UK. Their website also offers free ads with free image uploads as long as you don’t want any bells and whistles.
The downside is the free adds are deleted after 7 days so you have to keep reposting.
Also the site doesn’t work properly unless you are using IE6. Disappointing.

http://uk.freeads.net/

Freeads looks like the name makes it sound. Cheap and loaded with dodgy offers for gaming sites.
Easy to register and easy to upload though so we will have to wait to see if any traffic comes from it.

http://base.google.co.uk/

The good news is that there is no limit to the number of products you can put up and there is a free tool that lets you upload a spreadsheet with all of your products once a month which is excellent.
The bad news is that even though it is a Google product it is quite buggy and it doesn’t generate much of traffic. I hope that this situation will improve.

http://www.gumtree.com/

Gumtree is a hugely successful bulletin board site that was started in London in 2000 to serve the antipodean community. Since then it has expanded to 60 other cities in 6 countries and gets over a million visitors each month. Ebay have bought it and Gumtree is now part of the wider Kijiji family of bulletin board sites.

The downside is you have to keep posting your ad every few days and the interface is easy to use but labour intensive. So posting more than one bangle at a time can be time consuming.

http://www.kijiji.com/

A global network of free ad bulletin boards owned by Ebay. Great for finding the market leader in different countries and selling bangles.

Click on this image for more information about buying this bangle.