BANS From Scratch: Part 2

A couple days late, but here is the second part to my BANS From Scratch Series.

Now that we have done a little bit of niche and keyword research, we (and by “we” I mean “I”) have a good idea of what we’re going to do for this brand spanky new BANS site. If you don’t feel like reading the last post, basically we used pulse.ebay.com in combination with freekeywords.wordtracker.com to find both our target niche and our target keyword. I made the word “keyword” bold, because I want to point that I am taking an approach known as “Keyword Sniping” to get this campaign ranked #1 for “Project cars for sale” (look at that, link building already!), it should prove to be interesting.

Playing the Domain Name Game

Ok, I admit it, I got really lucky with this domain name. www.project-cars-for-sale.com was as available as a fat kid on prom night, so I scooped it up. Chances are, your not going to find a domain name with your exact keyword available, so what do you do? Get as close as possible of course, just make sure you don’t make the mistake I did and register something generic like www.online-dating-blogger.com. You are going to want a laser targeted domain name if you are going to rank #1 in Google for your keyword. If your niche was “Tuxedos for fat kids”, dont register the domain name www.prom-tuxedos.com and use a subdomain or subfolder named “fat-kids”, just try and get the real deal.

Your domain name is going to play a huge role here, and could even mean the difference between success and failure with your store, so spend some time on this and try as many variations of your keyword as possible, like www.projectcarsforsale.com, or www.project-cars-forsale.com, or www.p-r-o-j-e-c…..ok, maybe thats a little overkill, but you get the idea.

Getting your BANS store setup

I am not going to take you through the installation of BANS itself, because that would be way outside the scope of this article, and there are plenty of resources available with the information already nicely written up with screen shots and such. What I am going to do, however, is take you through my thought process on setting up things like navigation, colors, SEO, etc.

Navigation

Before you even think about playing with things like colors and images, your first priority when you setup your BANS store should be to figure out what kind of navigation setup you want to have. If you think throwing up a BANS store with a high level ebay category and auto generated sub categories is going to bring you success, you might as well throw in the towel now. The whole idea behind BANS is to “Build a Niche Store”, and that means drilling down as tight as you can (within reason). Let’s take a look at the two different ways I could setup my Project Cars BANS site:

1. I could enter in category “6001″(thats the “cars and trucks for sale” category) as my high level category and let the BANS software generate about 14,978 sub categories for every freaking make and model of car ever produced on the face of the earth. Tell BANS to use “Project” as a keyword, and be on with my life.
2. I could build a custom store by still specifying category “6001″, but instead of having 14,978 sub categories, I could create my own 5-10 targeted categories. I could also specify a search filter that reads something like “(project,restore,needs work) truck” in order to get a “project trucks for sale” page.

I think I’ll go with option number 2, what do you think?

But how do I narrow all those ebay categories down into 5-10? Well lets just go through a real quick brainstorming session here. Aside from cars, people like to work on other kinds of automotive projects. There is a big difference between a restoration project car, a drag racing (or any kind of racing) project car, an import project car, a project truck, or even a project motorcycle. This is where building a store around something you are passionate about really comes in handy. Because I’ve been so involved in “project cars” myself, I really have a feel for what people might be looking for when they enter “project cars for sale” into Google.

Ok, I got the idea, how do I do that?

If there was a difficult part to setting up a BANS store, this would probably be it. Getting your store pages to display exactly the items you want is almost an art, and is an ever changing process. As not to drag this post out to long, I’ll take you through the process of how I set up my “Project Trucks for Sale” page. If you want to do something like this, I would highly recommend you brush up on your advanced ebay query knowledge. This can REALLY help you out with BANS.

The first thing you will want to do aside from the normal setup options, is to tell BANS you are building a “Custom store”. You can do this from the BANS admin panel, under the “setup” link by entering in the number “2″ into the category # box. Scroll down to the bottom and click “setup store” to save your changes.(click to enlarge)

If you wanted to let BANS generate a crap load of sub categories autotragicly, you could click on the link that says “build a custom store” and enter in as many ebay category numbers as you want, but we’re not going to do that.

Create your store pages

Now that we have that out of the way, its time to setup our actual store page. Like I said previously, I’m going to show you how I setup my “project trucks for sale” page. In the BANS admin panel, click on “store pages”, and this will bring you to a list of all the store pages you have created thus far.

You are going to want to click the link that says “create store page”, which I have so conveniently circled in a glorious lime green color in the image above. This is where all the magic happens. Your going to want to get your SEO cap on and start thinking about title tags, meta, description, and content. Here is where you enter your dreaded content into BANS, but we’re going to cover that in a subsequent entry, not today. What I do want to direct your attention to, however, is that you need to make sure your target keyword is in the HTML title tags on every page of your BANS store. It doesn’t have to be the only word/phrase in the title, but it should be there none-the-less. The text boxes you see in the following screen shot directly coincide with the HTML tags that will be on this store page.

When you scroll down to the bottom of that same page, you will see a few option boxes that are going to be of interest to you. The first box you see is the category number. For this particular store page I am going to use the “cars and trucks for sale” category, which is #6001. Next is the “search query” box, and this is where you can fine tune the ebay listings that are shown on your page by using advanced ebay search queries. The example you see below is VERY simple, but its just for demonstration purposes. The search queries on my Honda Parts Store has about 20 negative keywords, “ands”, “ors” and all kinds of other search gold, which gives me a lot of control over what shows up on my store pages.

I usually just leave the “parent category” as the default, but you can play around with that later on. What you want to pay attention to right now is the box labeled “Page name”. Whatever you enter here is going to to be the anchor text used in your navigation sidebar for this partular page, so think SEO, and choose wisely.

Finally, you can set the file name of the page to anything you want. This is whats going to show up in the address bar, so again, think SEO here. I would suggest not using spaces, because this might add those ugly “%20″ characters into your URL. Use things like hyphens instead.

I think thats about it for that, you can see the final product by clicking on my niche keyword rich link here: “Project Trucks For Sale”

More tomorrow…or the day after

This post actually went way longer than I had planned, and I didn’t even get to half of what I wanted to talk about, so I’ll leave it for the next entry. Ill talk about things like images, colors, and other template related stuff.

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Tags: BANS, Build a Niche Store