The following articles are designed to help you with basic search engine optimization and marketing concetps and tactics that you can apply to your websites to achieve high search engine rankings.

What is SEO?

Basic Search Engine Optimization Tips

What is Google Sandbox Effect?

Google Ranking rules

Title and Meta Tags?

Major search engines and directories

What is Google Dance?

Is there an Over Optimization Penalty (OOP)?

What is PPC?

How to place a PPC advertisement?

How to develop an effective PPC Advertisement?

Link building basics for search engine optimization (SEO)

Secret of Getting Your Site Indexed by Google and Yahoo In No Time

SEO in Web Site Design

Introduction

BounceHouse.biz is an ecommerce website designed in Zen Cart, which sells inflatable bounce houses, water slides and obstacle combo units. Bounce House officially launched it's website in July 2009 with very limited contents. As the company already sells the inflatable products through Kiddie Toys, and actively markets products through comparison shopping websites such as Google Base, Nextag, Shopping, Pronto, Smarter and PriceGrabber; bouncehouse.biz is strictly designed to utilize search engine optimization.

SEO Efforts & Conversion

Updated on 8/31/2009:

The initial website (launched in 07/2009) contained 75 products with unedited product description provided by the suppliers and manufacturers. In August 2009, Bounce House added a part-time resource to write articles about bounce houses and water slides; and added about 45 articles relating to bounce houses and water slides which lasted 1 man's 3 weeks effort. The company submitted the products to Google Base, and used no paid advertisements.

Updated on 1/31/2010:

BounceHouse.biz's targetted keywords included "Bounce House", "Moonwalk", "Water Slide", and "Inflatable Bouncer" among other things. After 3 months of updated contents, the site ranked 8th on 1st page of Yahoo when "bounce house" is used as a keyword. For the same keyword, no visible ranking was obtained on Google and Bing. The site was hovering around 9 through 11th rank (1st or 2nd page) on Google for "commercial bounce house" keyword. On average, there were anywhere from 10 to 40 unique visitors per day each viewing 3-4 pages averaging 700 pageviews per month.

With bounce house season starting in late March, the company has initiated writing more articles and building inbound links to its webste in late January. The company also researched it's biggest competitors and learned characteristics found on Alexa. Many high ranking websites published their articles on 3rd party sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages and article banks all linking into their websites.