Now that I’ve showed you how to configure the Search-2-Post widget, you should have a complete EPN affiliate site. Thate means it’s time to focus on content building, optimization and link building. In the coming weeks I will be covering all these things in detail, so stay tuned.
For now, if you feel like there’s anything I’ve missed up to this point in the series, please let me know. You can email me but I prefer if you post a comment right here. If it’s a quick thing I will explain in the comments, and if it’s a complex solution I’ll create a new tutorial.
This series should have showed you all the basics so far, but there are a lot of nuiances in customizing your site, so please feel free to ask questions and I’ll be happy to elaborate on certain things.
Tags: Ebay Partner Network, EPN, epn blog, News, Wordpress Tutorials
Sam, a few questions:
1) Is there a setting somewhere I’m overlooking where I can suppress pages being listed in the horizontal nav bar at the top? For example, the “placeholder” page I created just so my URLs wouldn’t all have “/home/” in them…it shows at the top, but of course, it has no real “content” in and of itself so would prefer to suppress it (I suppose I could add content to it, but it would pretty much be a redundant “Home” page).
2) Do you think it’s worth our going into Nvu or similar and creating a “pretty” homepage with category pics, etc or have you found that it’s more trouble than it’s worth?
3) If you happen to be using the WP-Stats plugin, can you tell us how to add our new site to our main Wordpress.com blog dashboard? I added two sites awhile back, but don’t recall how I did it. I verified the Askimet key, but I still get a message to go to my main Wordpress.com Dashboard and hover over the blog’s “Day” stats to get that blog’s ID #. But I can’t seem to locate any “add blog” button to even get my new site listed there.
Also, would love to see a tutorial on how best to configure the Robots-Meta plugin for our stores. So far, I’ve been kind of guessing which options to check off in it based on SEO tips I’ve picked up here and there, but would love to know for sure which ones to select–there’s quite a few!
Hey Dan,
I did a post quite a while back about dictating which page appear in your nav bar, you can check it out here: http://www.wpcontempo.com/how-to-dicatate-which-pages-are-displayed-in-the-navigation-bar-on-your-wordpress-theme/
Depending on your niche, it can definitely be worthwhile to dress up your home page. I’ve done this on quite a few sites with great success, however it isn’t always necessary either. I definitely may go into detail on this, and also if we can get some readers to showcase their sites I would love to do like a top 10 list, or at least just a post showing off some really well done sites.
For stats I only use Google analytics, so I really don’t have much experience with WP Stats. I might check it out if I have time, but I’ve already got plans to reveal how to set up Google analytics and also how to analyze your stats to get ideas for improving your site.
I don’t use Robots Meta plugin either. As far as I know, there isn’t a real need to spend a lot of time on a robots.txt file. The All in One SEO Pack plugin should cover all of your bases. I will check it out though.
Hey Sam,
Thanks for all the input and the link to the post about the navbar. Exactly what I needed.
Yeah, I’m still considering the homepage design from both a visitor’s point-of-view as well as pleasing G. Right now, my homepages just have some introductory text and will link through to some major categories. But may dress it up with some pics after I get the rest of the sites built out with some original content. While I’d prefer to include listings on the homepage as I feel they bring more click-thrus overall, I still wonder if having front-page listings had anything to do with some of my former sites being deindexed.
I’ve also been wondering about the best way to encourage “local search” on sites where the items are so large that many might only be looking to buy in their local or state areas so they can pick it up rather than have it shipped. Do you think just adding above the search box an example using a location is enough, such as: “Example: Motorcycle Los Angeles”? Or, perhaps make more of a mention of this somewhere on the page as well? Or, provide a separate location-specific search function that somehow ties-in the location settings in phpbay into a “Search In Your Local Area” search function? Would the search results returned be any different from using the Search2Post search with the location example given above? If not, I guess no point in “reinventing the wheel”.
I’ve really not done a lot with local ebay affiliate stuff. Personally if I was going to tackle it, I would probably go all in and create an entire site focusing on a local area, for example Used Motorcycles Cleveland, or something like that. The advantage is you can probably find some terms that are much easier to rank for, but you will definitely have to do a lot heavier niche research up front to find these local area keywords that are bringing sufficient traffic, and then also to make sure there are enough products listed on ebay in that niche to support your site.
Sam, I’m having trouble with dictating the pages to display on the navbar. When I make the change to the code as instructed, either none of my pages show in the top navbar or only 1 shows on some sites. And here’s what’s really odd…as an example on one site, the only page I get showing in the navbar is the “Home” page which I numbered 1 yet when I view the source, I see it being referenced like this:
Does that mean it is being counted as “page 4″? I keep playing around with numbers trying to see what might make the other pages I want to be there show up, but no luck yet.
Ooops…I see the code I typed doesn’t display but the page 1 is referenced as:
page-item-4
I think I’ve got it worked out now. For some reason, to get it to display the pages I want, I’m having to “pad the numbers” a bit. That is, even though in WP I’m numbering the pages I want as 1,2, I have to dictate those as 4,5 in the header edit.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the ordering you specify when you create the post. The numbers in the code need to be equal to the Page ID for each page. This is assigned automatically to posts and pages when they are created in Wordpress and cannot be changed.
I believe the best way to determine what the page id of a page is is to go to Edit Pages in the Wordpress admin. You should see a list of all your pages. When you mouse over a page, the URL to edit the page should appear in the bottom left corner of your browser. The end of that URL where it says &post= should tell you the number for that page.
Sam, what’s the best way to automatically create some internal linking between new posts that are created via a feed and our relevant store pages? I read GoCodes is one option so I installed it but it doesn’t seem to really do what I have in mind. I think it is just for linking out to affiliate programs based on relevant keywords.
What I’m looking for is either a script or plugin that can determine the main keyword(s) in an article (perhaps from the author-created tags) and then it automatically creates a hypertext link using said keyword(s) as anchor text to a relevant store page. Any suggestions? Seems I once ran across someone mentioning such a plugin, but don’t recall the name of it.
Dan – there is a great way to do this and I am going to write a detailed post on what plugin to use and how to use it within the next couple days.
Looking forward to it, Sam!
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