The Internet is not not just limited to websites any more. In fact, the everyday normal website is slowly being replaced by social sites and various online services.
A few years ago, if you wanted to put all your jewelry store information online you would have to figure out how to do it all, or hire a company that could do it all.
Do you have videos on your website? Previously, you needed to manage video content on your own and have a hosting account capable of handling that huge video bandwidth. Now that process is much easier with YouTube.
Do you have testimonials on your website? Previously, you needed to ask people to write testimonials and mail them to you. Now you can ask people to write online reviews on Google Places or Yep. You can even capture tweets about your site and post them on your website.
Facebook allows you to interact with your customer on a personal level the likes of which didn't exist just a few years ago.
If you want to sell online, you are no longer limited to putting your products on your website only. Instead, you have many opportunities to load your inventory into other product websites.
Websites like Picasa, Flickr and DailyBooth allow people to post photos every day. You could be using these systems to post random photos of your store and products.
With all these new methods of information publishing, the search engines needed to figure out how to return search results. Each of the systems above represents a new type of advertising medium and a new level of complexity that needs to be analyzed.
In late 2009, Google started transforming their search results page into something that would return as many diverse results as possible. They called it Universal Search.
For the jewelry industry, best example we can tell you is to search for the phrase "engagement ring."
The SERP for this phrase should return a map, list of local stores, latest news, product images, brands, websites and sometimes even videos. This is a "Universal Search Results Page."
If you then search for "diamond engagement rings" you will see far fewer diverse examples, perhaps only including website and products.
As you move forward with your online marketing, you need to consider getting involved with various photo, video and social media systems. The more you are involved with, the more chances your website will attract organic traffic.
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
