Can you help me out with a favor?

A shameless plea for help!
 
Since you all know about my being out of work, I've been busy doing side jobs until I can find "real" full-time employment.  Well, one of those side jobs might just develop into something big.
 
I've been creating a full inventory and supply system for a friend's new auto body supply shop.  From that I branched out into creating brochures and other marketing media for him until we started working on the obvious conclusion:  An online store.  It's come a long way in the last three weeks and I've got a lot more items to add (plus other improvements), but we could use a little help getting it pushed up the search results.
 
If you have a few seconds, can you bring up the website (the URL is below) and buy at least 50 items? just click on a link or two?  No need to critique unless you want to (I'm open to hear all opinions).  Just visiting the Home page will help!
 
If this thing can take off (and we've already seen some evidence that it will), then managing this and fulfilling orders could be my new full-time employment (and finally allow me to afford to upgrade to X2!).
 
Thanks for your help I really appreciate it! 
 
Here's the address to click on:  www.nwclips.com
 
Feel free to have a virtual beer on me.
 

 
(My apologies in advance if I'm breaking some rule or another!)

done.  lookin' good Craig (ITYRN!)

I like how clean the site seems.


Navigation on the left right margin seems like a fresh approach.



May I ask, how does clicking on internal links help your Google rank?

Just curious to learn.



best regards,
mike





might a been my worse spelling mistake ever

Nice website.  Easy to navigate.

Done..   What's good about it, is you are selling parts for imports.  Those can be difficult to find..  Not a bad niche imho

Done

Done.

Thanks a lot everyone!

@quantumeffect - Those are the owner's comments so I've forwarded your suggestion on to him (with others I'm getting or finding).  I think he'll wish he thought of it first - heh.

@Mike - I'm not on Fackbook so this is the only way I can get people to Like me.  Ok, to be honest, the rules of what counts are not published by Google or others, but getting lots of unique visitors is one component to showing up higher on a search result.  We're not going to have a Links page or a lot of other sites linking to us, so we have to use other means.  There's a TON of stuff going on behind the scenes (which I can mention in a PM, but not on an open forum - heh...).

I will mention one "hidden" thing though.  I've buried misspelling of hot search terms for our industry into the page content and one of them worked just today (er, late yesterday I mean, I've been working straight since noon yesterday!).  We got an contact email around 5:30pm sent by the website from a visitor who not only turned out to have found our website by typing in the word "fastner" (instead of "fastener") as part of his phrase, but is someone who represents a local dealership wanting a local supplier!  You can imagine how much positive energy that gave me to keep working at this all night.  Excited at the potential?  You bet!!!

Thanks again for donations Misters.  Is there some other song you'd like to hear?

Looks far too sensible, easy on the eyes and easy to navigate. What you want is a patchwork quilt of garish colors and animated GIFs that makes people's eyeballs explode  Like Ling's Cars. http://www.lingscars.com/  

I thought we were over the antiquated idea that websites should actually be helpful to the person using them!

Seriously though, it might be worth getting a good book on search engine optimization (SEO) because there are lots of tips and tricks you may not have thought of, and the people whose job it is to specialize in this kind of thing have figured out a lot about Google's page ranking algorithm. 

To be honest I'm not sure the unique visitor count has a lot to do with it. The reason? Google has no way of knowing that number for sites unless it has their analytic code embedded in it, and I don't think they'd get very far as a search engine if they openly favored sites that contain their javascript. 

My site ranks on the first page of Google for the most popular keyword search for my kind of business, so I've come to learn a thing or two about SEO - although I'm certainly anything but an expert. One or two tips I can give you though:

• Links to your website are important. However, some links are worth more to Google than others. The relevance of the page the link is on to the keywords you're trying to optimize for is very important. For example, if you're trying to optimize your site for the keywords "auto parts" then a link to your site on a cat website isn't going to score many points (likewise, a link on a music related forum isn't going to be worth much). When evaluating the weight of a link for a particular keyword, Google will take into account the page ranking of the page containing the link. So for example, if you managed to get a link to your site on the site that is ranked #1 for "auto parts," that's a BIG bonus. 
• Links are far more valuable when they consist of keyword phrases, rather then the URL itself. You probably know that there are two kinds of link, those which consist of a URL, e.g. "www.mysite.com," and those which are text like "My site" -- the latter is what Google is looking for in page ranking, and you should make sure the text consists of the keywords you are optimizing for. For example, the link you've included in your original post consists of the URL. You'll get more points for that link if it's in the form of relevant keyword text, like "Portland Auto Parts." And if this was a forum related to cars, even better. One thing some people do is to participate in a forum related to their site, and include a keyword link in their signature (although I'm not sure how highly Google ranks forum links, given the potential for abuse these days). 
• Decide exactly which keywords you want Google to rank you for. And be realistic. You're never going to rank highly for just "auto parts" because the competition is too great, but you have a good chance of ranking highly for "Portland Auto Parts" or something similar. Use a keyword tool (Google has one) to research the popularity of certain keywords and find out what search phrases people are using when they're looking for sites like yours. This is probably the most important part of SEO. Once you've learned a thing or two about what people are searching for, you can optimize your site for that. 
• Now that you have an idea of what keywords people are using, you can set about optimizing your site's content for that. The most important thing is to give your page a title using those keywords (don't know what you used to make your site but there should be a place where you can set the title, or if you're just using HTML then it's whatever's in the "title" tags. The title of your page should be the keywords you're optimizing for. If you have settled on "Portland Auto Parts" then make that your title. Next, optimize your page's headings. In HTML, these are the text between the tags H1, H2, H3 etc. The H1 tag is the most important, Google awards the most rank points for that, followed by the lesser heading tags H2 and H3. The H1 tag is the largest heading, at the top of your page. H2 and H3 etc are the sub-headings and sub-sub-headings and so on. 
  
  Your top heading in this case would be "NW Clips - From Ace Body Shop Supply" -- however, looking at the page source I see this is not wrapped in an H1 tag. Consider wrapping this text with the H1 tag, and perhaps replacing it to something more search friendly (according to the keywords you've researched as above). For example, if those keywords are "Portland Auto Parts" then you could have something like "NW Clips - Portland Auto Parts." I know it makes less sense than what you have now, but sometimes you have to sacrifice the copy you think makes sense, in order to please Google. 
• The trick now is to include the keywords you're optimizing for in the content of your page,  without making it look like you're being spammy. Google will give more search weight to keywords that are underlined, in bold or italics (not that much, but it all adds up). Consider using this kind of formatting for your keywords, while trying to make it look natural. 

To be honest that's just scratching the surface....there are many other hints and tips, like making sure that all of your pages have links to each other, making sure all of your images have "alt" tags with keywords in them etc. And it's also seriously worth considering changing the URL of the site to incorporate keywords, since Google ranks URL keywords very highly. There are some excellent SEO books out there written by people in the SEO business, also well worth browsing SEO forums for tips and advice. Good luck!

I'm in.

Good luck with it mate

 

got-r-done.

Done, good luck with this Craig.
 
btw I might need a new bolt to go through my neck to replace the old one but I couldn't find anything the right length just yet.
 
I'll keep checking though.

OK, I'm ready to buy all 50 items.

Anyone want to give me their CC and PIN?

C'mon guys, I'm tryin' to hep out a friend.