Any ideas about generating more sales ?

[jehoshua]

Hi,

Someone has asked me how they can generate more sales from the following website:

http://arts-biz.com

I think the prices are reasonable, but the web stats are showing that the site definitely needs more visitors, which of course may be the major reason.

Some things to consider about this site.

1. There is actually plenty of content.

2. No meta tags are used, and all the 'page titles' are the same.

3. When doing a web speed test from http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ , the total size,etc was shown to be a little bit excessive. Is this a minor factor, for example, if the page size is too large, visitors on dialup may not want to wait for the large images to load (we can consider thumbnailing the images on the individual products page).

4. When trying "site:arts-biz.com" on Yahoo, MSN & Google, the results were 13, 406 and 690 respectively, but this doesn't really mean much does it, because a few page rank tests returned a zero value ? Notice the page titles in some of the searches were all the same, is that regarded as duplicate content ? Surely the site would be better off with page titles that reflected the product name,etc.

5. No doubt spiders parse through each page content in the same order as the source code is generated, and the left hand column info box 'headings', such as "Categories. Artists" seem to be giving duplicate content, as shown in the Yahoo search on the site. Is it better to re-arrange page layout, so the _real_ content appears first ?

6. Will adding the site to Dmoz help ? What about submitting the site to other search engines, presently these are the ones that crawl the website:

* MSNBot
* Inktomi Slurp
* Alexa (IA Archiver)
* Googlebot
* WISENutbot
* AskJeeves
* Walhello appie

7. There aren't many links on the site; how much will adding extra links help ?

8. The site was originally going to have content in other languages, like:

* German
* Spanish
* French

will adding the above language content help more people 'find' the site.

9. No doubt the site itself, selling oil paintings is something very 'common', and that in itself, would make it difficult to get a high PR, etc., in effect more competition, because 'art' and 'paintings' return millions of hits from search engines.

Any other tips or advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Peter

[worchyld]

Put the "New Products For May" above the welcome bit, or reduce welcome to a paragraph and put the rest of it on a "about us" page -- reduce the number of times you use the word 'we'.

Increase the size of "New Products For May", and put something about what credit cards you accept and a little bit about the type of security and delivery costs.

Include Testimonials - from people who have previousily bought art

Encourage more reviews or print reviews on same page as the product rather than clicking off elsewhere.

Push what's new above the product categories. For some reason I think the product categories give the impression they are content. Perhaps get rid of (">") signs?

I hope that helps.

[jehoshua]

Hi,

Put the "New Products For May" above the welcome bit, or reduce welcome to a paragraph and put the rest of it on a "about us" page -- reduce the number of times you use the word 'we'.

Okay, we will look into re-arranging things, as you suggested.

Increase the size of "New Products For May", and put something about what credit cards you accept and a little bit about the type of security and delivery costs.

I guess more of a description about the new products would help the content on the main page, and yes, the types of credit cards accepted would help.

Include Testimonials - from people who have previousily bought art.

Encourage more reviews or print reviews on same page as the product rather than clicking off elsewhere.

There is an osCommerce contribution for customer reviews, so that could be helpful.

Push what's new above the product categories. For some reason I think the product categories give the impression they are content. Perhaps get rid of (">") signs ?

Moving "what's new" is easy, just a PHP include. The ">" signs only appear where there are sub-categories, like:

http://arts-biz.com/index.php?cPath=3

but can be (fairly easily) removed. Also the 'product count' can be turned off via admin, so that:

Floral (2)

becomes .......

Floral

possibly that might look better.

Thanks for your help,

Peter