This is a good place to start: http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-g...e-optimization

The title tag is one of the most important factors in SEO. What you wrote is accurate for description however.

The <title></title> tag is very important, but the meta title tag is not that important; in fact you can skip it completely and still do fine.

Back in the day the meta tags were a huge influence on your results. It didn't take long for Google and the other larger search engines to see the problems with this. Now they are used for just that, meta data.

The most important things are backlinks. On page optimization is also very important, but backlinks are the driving force behind high rankings.

Has anyone operated an ecommerce store? It seems like a ton of work, but I found a niche I'm somewhat interested in (with very weak competition).

Should be easy, lots of canned software these days. I used to run this site from their retail store: http://www.*************/

There were over 3000 different products and I had to photograph them and put their details into a database. I had written a custom shopping cart based on the book "CGI for Commerce", but the back end was not well developed and there was much that only I knew how to do. So when I left, I transitioned them to Miva Merchant.

Thanks for the book recommendation. Any tips for processing orders/shipping/keeping stock?

I am working on a website that is in development (that you can figure out if you look closely enough).

I don't buy or sell anything (at least not yet).

LOL don't use that book, at 13 years old it's practically an archaeologist finding. Back then people were charging tens of thousands of dollars for shopping cart solutions.

Now canned programs like Miva, which are included with most web hosting, do all that stuff, or have third party plugs-ins that do.

Theres a reason why google makes such a big deal about paid links.

A friend and I just started (went live a couple days ago) an Electronic Cigarette company, www.greendragoncigs.com It's a Yahoo store and needs a lot more content and work but it's been a lot of fun so far. This is our first website/business so any site or SEO suggestions are welcomed.

I would pick a less saturated market. You need lots of content on the site to have a chance against other pages. You need lots and lots of backlinks (gradually, don't immediately start getting tons or it looks fishy). Your layout looks really ****ty. I also would have picked a domain like cheapecigarettes.com or something more specific to what you want to rank for.

Good luck with it.

Just my opinion, but I would change the search text to white or something other than black. Hard to see on the green. Also think it is a little weird with the top menu (above your logo) and the same nav menu at the bottom. If you want to have both maybe move the top menu on the same line as the search bar?

I mistyped - I meant HTML5. But if I were doing a website today, I would find a template similar to what I wanted to do, get the source code, and just edit it at the HTML, PHP, whatever, level. Only if what I did was legal use.

After spending a few weeks reading through white hat sits, black hat sites, and Ultimate Profit Potential Earn Ten Million While Jacking Off ebooks, I can safely say that ninety eight percent of the info out there is bull**** or wishful thinking. It's even worse than new-age "The Secret" type BS.

I honestly have no idea how individuals that just want to plop out butt-ugly spam microniche sites with links to amazon can possibly compete with the chain smoking Russian and Chinese teenage hackers that can use a botnet or link farm to totally manipulate search engine results.

That being said, I am still interested in trading in a bunch of the bankroll for some medium term investments that provide a small but stable income that is reasonably passive.

I have been coding websites since the mid nineties, so know HTML and CSS and am certainly familiar with all the major CMS and help maintain a number of Drupal sites as a volunteer, but I'm not much of a programmer. I have about ten micro-nichey sites right now that I am playing with, not expecting to earn much money, but just seeing what works so i at least know what I am looking at when I look at sites on Flippa, etc.

Flippa seems to be a seller's market [brand new sites with no traffic or revenue going for a few hundred bucks????] - digitalpoint seems like it might be more of a buyer's market if you can wade through all the crap.

Anyone have any advice on decent forums to hang around that aren't all populated by twenty year olds that think they have found a way to retire by the time they are 22? Every internet marketing forum seems to be populated by BBV and the people that prey on those dreams to sell seminars, like an infomercial come to life.

You are right. There are a lot of wastes of money out there. If you can manage to sift through some of that there are good deals out there.

latefordinner,

That link is worth checking out.

An easy way to do this is Joomla + VirtueMart, imo. I just created a site using this method.

Very cool thread. I own 3 domains right now. One is a Wordpress blog on a small niche which doesn't earn much but earns consistently all year round with very few posts. Another is a joomla site for my web design/hosting/services part-time business. And lastly, I have a domain which does a straight 301 redirect to a CPA offer page. The last website has not really earned anything nor did I ever really have the motivation to even work on it. So I'm letting it expire once it runs out.

I'm a member on all the big forums whether it's white or black hat. Feel free to message me if you want to bounce ideas or join up on a project or anything.

I have a E-commerce store for a couple of years now. It has started to do pretty well over time. I have thought about doing a thread similar to this one but not sure how much interest there would be in it.

What do you sell? What is the average item price/average cart price?

I sell pet and vet products. The avg order size is about $80.00.

I have a question. I recently started a community forum/blog site since my area doesn't really have one and it has been hardly any investment at all so far. I just found out that a friend of mine actually recently started an events/nightlife site for the same community. Instead of running his own forum he wants to link all his site traffic to mine. What kind of financial deal should I be inclined to accept? A share based on how much traffic he brings me or something? Sorry, new to this stuff.

So he will still have his site, but his forum link will go to your forum? It sounds like a good situation for you. Or are you thinking about charging him for giving you traffic? Or does he want to charge you?

Yes he will have his site but his forum link will go to my forum. We were drunk talking about it and he said 20% of my revenue and I lol'd and said maybe 20% of the revenue generated on traffic from his site. Then I said I wanted to inquire a bit and talk about it when we weren't already half drunk.