Published on January 11, 2008 Where to start in getting your site noticed by search engines?
Whatever you want to sell online, if you want the best return on your shopping cart investment, you will need to get noticed by the search engines. So how do you go about promoting your ecommerce website?
Firstly, make sure you have chosen a shopping cart provider that allows you to set the title and search engine ‘meta tags’ for your website’s home page. The best title and meta description for you will depend on your industry, what your customers search for and what your competitors do.
If changing the title and “meta tags” can’t be done by you in the admin section of your website, make sure (before you buy your shopping cart) that their support team can do it for you. Having a website title that includes the keywords your customers will be searching for can play a critical part in getting noticed by the search engines.
What are Meta Tags, Titles and Search Engine Keywords?
You may have read the last paragraph and be wondering what all the jargon means – words like ‘meta tags’, ‘primary keywords’, ‘title’. It may help to have a quick overview of how search engines index websites (skip to the next section if you are already familiar with what these terms mean).
When someone puts a search term into a search engine like Google, the search engine attempts to return the most relevant results to the person searching. It looks in its own pre-created indexes to find the pages that have the best fit for that search term as well as the overall popularity of that page or site (usually measured by the number of quality links to that website).
The title of the page is what appears in the top bar of Internet Explorer or Firefox and is something that search engines weight heavily in returning results to customers – after all, a page’s title describes the main content of that page.
Meta tags and meta descriptions are content hidden into the top part of each web page. They tell the search engines what content is on the page which helps them compile an accurate index. Some shopping carts like Ozcart allow you to set separate title, meta tags and meta descriptions for each product as well as each category in your store. Search engines like Google often display the meta descriptions when they return results to people who search for a particular term (or keyword).
Getting noticed by search engines
With well defined meta tags, descriptions and titles for each of your pages, a nice tidy (‘Search Engine Friendly’) urls in the address bar of your browser can also be useful for indexing of your pages and making them memorable to your customers. For example, both search engines and people will find it easier to use a url like http://www.yourshop.com.au/jewellery compared to http://www.yourshop.com.au/index.php?category_options=all&sort=3&category_id=820119.
Once your title, meta tags and urls are under control, look at the text you have one each page. Does it use the search engine terms (keywords) your customers will be using to look for the products you sell? If not, edit your product descriptions appropriately. If your shopping cart allows you to have category descriptions then use them too.
You will also need to gather lots of useful links. Think about ways you can get credible, useful websites with good integrity to ‘vote’ for you by linking to you. One place to start is with directories, but link exchanges, ‘social bookmarks’ (links from places like digg or facebook) are also useful options for you.
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