The formula for producing sales and making your website prosper consists of 3 parts. Of coarse the first one is getting people {visitors} to your website {traffic}. The second is getting your visitors to go deeper into your website from the page they entered it on by making a good first impression, arousing their curiously and hopefully good enough to make them want to revisit your website. The third and the hardest part is, to get your visitors to actually click on the buy or purchase button becoming a customer.

This article will help you make money from your own website selling merchandise on the Internet {WWW}!

Hello, my name is Johnny W Morlan, owner and sole webmaster of J W Morlan's Unique Wood Gifts business website. I have had my business website on the web for over 10 years, I am a woodworking artist {designer}. Believe me, selling any type of art or kind of wood objects is extremely difficult because there are so much of them out there.

My website did not make money the first year. It has for the last 9 years, especially the last 6. It took me 4 years to learn the information in this article and implement all of it. If I had known all the information that this article features, my website would of made more money the first 4 years!

You can save one heck of a lot of money by designing and building your own website. It will cost you at least $100.00 per page {that is a bargain} to have your website designed and built. Limitation on webpage length is usually what will print out on 2 - 8 1/2" x 11" letter size pages. This article page alone, prints out on 16 pages. My website is approximately 190 webpages and print out pages only god knows. It would cost at least $19,000.00 to build my website and that is a chuck of change!

You ask, what qualifications that I would have for writing this article? I have featured them along with some of my website statistics in part 3.

Choose merchandise that you personally like, have confidence in, are proud of and make you feel good to sell.

It does not necessarily take a multitude of visitors for a website to make money! You only need to know your {target market} the type or kind of people that would be most interested in buying your product and in some cases are affluent enough to!

The average website receives less than 5 visitors per day. 90% of websites do not make a profit or if so very little. Of the 10 out of a 100 that do, most either have something to do with pornography or have well known names such as Wal-Mart, Target, Zales, Best Buy, J C Penny, Dillard's, Bloomingdale's, Old Navy, Circuit City, Macy's etceteras.

More traffic does not necessarily mean more sales! For instance, I have had 400 - 500 visitors in one day {24 hours} and not one sale. Then I have had days that I only had 50 or 60 visitors and had 3 or 4 sales. My record is 8 sales in one day, actually in 10 hours and I only had a total of 83 visitors that whole day.

The results we are trying to obtain, are to come up in the top 50 results of a keyword or phrase search that are typed in on the search engines and that are relevant to your website and to advertise, market and promote your website without spending a wheelbarrow full of money. In my experience from looking at my website statistics, the majority of web surfers don't look past the top 50 results.

1 Choose a domain name with your first two or three keys words in it, which should be what type of products you are selling. Try to keep less than 30 characters long.

2 One cold hard cruel fact is some keywords are just typed in by web surfers more than others and they look for certain products or services more. For instance, weight loss is typed in 1000's of times more per day than wood gifts. This will affect how many visitors your website receives.

Make sure each and everyone of the keywords you use are absolutely relevant to your website! The search engines will penalize your website by placing it further down in the rankings.

Choose 50 - 100 key words or phrases for the key word meta tag. The first 6 are the most crucial, the ones you what people to find your site the most with. Do not put commas between the key words or phrases. Do not use a keyword more than 3 times {spamming}. You can use different variations of a word, such as art, artist, artistry, just not in a row, spread them out with 10 - 12 words in between them otherwise it is spamming.

3 Use your first 6 - 10 keywords in the title meta tag of your homepage. Make it 75 - 90 characters long including commas, periods and spaces. Google and some other search engines will cut it off at 75 characters so make sure the first 6 keywords will fit in 75 characters. Google is the most important search engine.

4 Use your first two keywords in the body of the text of your homepage, for 5% - 10% of the total wording {keyword density}. If your homepage has 500 words use them 25 - 50 times each. Here is a website that will count the most frequently used words in any body of text, Word Counter. Here is website that will count the total number of characters or words in a body of text, Cut & Paste Character & Word Counter.

5 Make sure the name {title} of your company {business} is at the top of the homepage and all other pages. Then name each page with what is on it and put it right under your title or business name. Do not use a keyword meta tag or a description meta tag on any page except the homepage. Only use a title meta tag. The search engines will pick up the title meta tag and any relevant words in the body text and index them as such. Not all visitors are going to enter your website through the homepage. Only about 30% enter my site from the homepage.

6 Include your first 6 keywords in your description in the description meta tag of your homepage, preferably in the first 10 words. Make it 150 - 225 characters long including commas, periods and spaces. Again, google and some other search engines will cut it of at 150 characters so make sure the most important part of the description and what you want people to read will fit in 150 characters. Again, Google is the most important search engine. The last sentence in your description should make people curious enough to what to click on the link and check your website out.

7 Make sure if you are using HTML that it is correct with no mistakes on all your pages, especially the homepage. I know someone that inadvertently made just one mistake and his website went from #6 to #572 on google.com. Here is a website that will check your HTML and tell you the mistakes, CSE HTML Validator.

8 Put a navigation area using text links at the bottom of the homepage and all other pages thus linking all the websites pages together so when search engines crawl your website they will index each and every page.

9 Create a separate page on your website as a website map and name it Website Map. Using text links, list all the pages to your website on it. This gives your visitors, yet another way to navigate your site, a general summary of your site and like the navigation area text links at the bottom of each of your website pages, connects all the pages of your website together.

10 Actually, you only need to submit to the top 15 English Language search engines. Always manually submit to them one at a time. They are listed in alphabetically order,
All The Web
Alta Vista
AOL
Ask Jeeves {Ask}
Dogpile
Gigablast
Google
Lycos
MSN
My Way
My Web Search
Netscape
Teoma
Wise Nut
Yahoo

99% of all searches are done on the top 5 search engines. They are listed in order of the number of searches done on them.
Google
Yahoo
MSN
AOL
Ask Jeeves {Ask}
Make sure you submit to {ODP}, Open Directory Project, it is a search directory.

Do not submit too much, it clutters up the search engines with your redundant website. They will penalize you by placing it further down in the rankings. I only submit once every 6 months. If your site is new, it will take a minimum of 3 months for most search engines to index and place your website in the results. Google.com is taking 8 months. You must have patience!

11 Keep your website fresh by changing the content frequently. It only has to be a small change, add a few words here and there, rephrase sentences or add a page or product. If the search engines go to a site a few times and nothing has changed they will start crawling your site with less and less frequency. It also gives visitors a reason to keep coming back to your website {repeat visitors}.

12 They are 3 types of links, reciprocal, one way {outbound} from your web site to another website that does not have a link coming back yours, one way {inbound} from another website that has a link going to your website but you do not have a link going back to there website. The best is the latter, but it is impossible to control. There are a lot of small websites that use the category contents on, {ODP}, Open Directory Project.

I have approximately 240 total outgoing links on all my link pages combined, the majority are reciprocal but Worldwide I have at least 12,000 websites that have a link going to my website and probably 50% of those are websites using the ODP, Shopping: Home and Garden Accessories Wooden category contents.

Google Page Rank {PR}, in a nutshell is one of the deciding factors that google determines how high up a websites particular webpage will appear in the results of a keyword or phrase search. Webpages are ranked from 0 - 10, the higher the number the more inbound links {webpages} the page has connected to it and thus the more important it is.

My website has approximately 190 pages, the homepage has a a high 4, 4.8 or 4.9. I know this because for the last 9 months it has been teetering back & forth from 4 to 5. The other 189 pages have a PR of 2. That is not a bad rank for internal webpages of a website taking in consideration that a high number of websites link to the homepage of a website. Here is a Google Page Rank Checker , that you can type the URL of any webpage and it will give you its PR. It will also predict a pages future pagerank. Here is a website Anchor Text Backlink Checker, that will list some of a websites backlinks. Here is a website Link Popularity Checker, that will show the number of websites linking to a website from the search engines listed. As a rule, you can times the number it shows by 4 to get a rough idea of the total number of websites linking to a website from the entire WWW.

Inbound links to your website webpages cannot hurt {penalize} their PR because they cannot be controlled. Outbound links from your website webpages can hurt {penalize} their PR because they can be controlled 100%. As a rule, the higher a websites traffic ranking {homepage} the higher their PR will be. You should not link to a websites homepage if its PR is 0.

Reciprocal links are good. Just be very careful and make sure the other website is not in direct competition with your website but compliments your website and is relevant in some way. Try to exchange links with websites that have a traffic ranking of 1 million or below and 6 or so with a traffic rank of 100,000 or below. One website ranked 100,000 or below is worth 100 ranked 100,000 - 1,000,000 and one ranked below 10,000 is worth 1000. The lower the number the more traffic they receive. Here is a website that will tell you a websites traffic ranking, Quantcast. It is pretty accurate. Do not join link farms! Most major search engines do not count the links a website has from known link farms.

Have different categories for your links and only put 1 category per page. Do not list anymore than 25 links per page. It is wise to not only use a text link with a description, but an image link also. Name the image the business, company individual it represents. Place the text link with the description above the image link. My statistics show that I get more referrals from the sites that have an image link going to my site than the ones having a text link to it. You know what they say; an image is worth a thousand words.

13 Another way to get visitors to your website and your business name out there, is to do contest drawings or give aways. From experience the best prize to give away are merchandise gift certificates. More people enter because they can pick from all the products on your website and get what they want.

Make a separate page for the drawing contest and entry form. Make it an advertising page by placing 10 or 12 products at the top of the page, telling a little something about you and your business and if you have testimonials display some of them on the page also.

Submit it to the top 4 sweepstakes and contest websites. They re,
Online-Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes Advantage
Contestgirl
CashNet Sweepstakes

Of coarse you will need to put each of their banner links on your drawing, contest, and entry form page.

If you do this type of advertising, you need to make the prize value at least $500.00 otherwise people are going to think you are a cheap tight waded skinflint and not enter. It will get you exposure by getting your business name out there, visitors to your website and that is the name of the game.

14 I will put my 2 cents worth in about pay per click search engine advertising. Be very careful! Keep a very close eye on your key word and phrases click to sales ratio! For instance a keyword phrase may cost $2.00 or more on google.com Lets say you stop it at $20.00 per day {10 clicks per day to your site}, which is $600.00 per month. If you are marking your products up 100%, from the amount you paid for them, you are going to have to sell $1200.00 worth of products to cover the advertising expense.

15 Educate your visitors. One way is to write articles and feature them on a separate page of your website. If you sell security equipment for residential homes, you could write an article on how to safeguard your home from burglary. If you sell cosmetics, you could write an article about the different types of facial cremes that are available and which works best on the different skin types.

Exquisite taste. Beautiful craftsmanship. A continual quest for excellence. These three elements combine to make J.W. Morlan's Unique Wood Gifts (www.morlanwoodgifts.com) one of the finest purveyors of individually-made solid wood items in the world. As a young boy helping his father with carpentry jobs, Johnny Morlan could never guess that one day his gorgeous wood pieces would adorn not only the finest American and European homes, but would even be presented to the President and First Lady of the United States. By the time he was a teen, the artistry that would later make him such a success was already apparent.

I Was A Celebrity Gift Bag Participate, For The 16Th Annual American Century Celebrity Golf Championship, July 12 - 17, 2005 At The Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course, Lake Tahoe, Nevada. 100 Gift Bags Were Given To Current & Former Professional Athletes & Entertainers.