Archive for June, 2009
Toyseller's Tough Times: Not Kid's Play
June 25th, 2009 | 
Author: Funny how the economy and its current challenges are changing how people run businesses. But why wait for tough times? Economies run in cycles. Maybe the boom/bust of recent years won’t be repeated, but there are always ups and downs. The lesson is don’t be lazy and think good times will last forever. There’s a reason those who grew up during the Depression earned the title ‘The Greatest Generation’.
An article in the July/August, 2009 print edition of Forbes Small Business magazine profiled toyseller www.ToyRocket.com. It described how ToyRocket cut costs after analyzing their Pay Per Click campaign, built a sitemap (after over a year in business), and focused on organic search. The results were impressive, to say the least. ToyRocket’s November/December, 2008 sales jumped 25% to about $400,000 while spending 30% less on PPC ads.
ToyRocket President James Bullock was quoted at the end of the article, “The grim economy forced me to do what I should have done sooner: Spend every dollar as if it were my last.” Nicely said, James.
In spite of the improvements, this 15 person company, with annual revenue of $2.5 million, still has a way to go on its SEO. Like www.thoseshirts.com, a website profiled with a #1 Google ranking and 30,000 unique monthly visistors, it, too, has ZERO keywords! As a picture-heavy site, it could benefit from ALT tags in its photos. Yet with dozens of photos, ZERO have ALT tags. With about 3,400 backlinks and over 10,000 indexed pages, it still ranks very well for organic search and its Alexa ranking is about 116,000.
The lesson of the power of backlinks is obvious here. With a domain age approaching 10 years, it’s definitely an ‘authority site’ in the eyes of the Search Engines.
Do you know any websites with excellent rankings who make money with ZERO keywords? Let us know. We’ll update this post on a regular basis.
