| Once you've got your store set up
the next step is getting people to find
it. Preparing your site for search
engines and directories is worth the
time and effort and pretty simple to do
with the templates. We've prepared a
very brief introduction and guide below
but you may want to visit a site like
Webmaster World for a deeper
understanding.
Title tag
If you look at your HTML code, you'll
find something like this near the top of
your page <TITLE>Untitled document</TITLE>.
It's crucial to have a good title,
around 10 words that clearly explain
what the page / site is about and
including words and phrases you think
people will search on, so if you're
selling widgets for example you might
have something like this
<TITLE>Online
sales of professional manual and
mechanical widgets. My Company</TITLE>
It's a good idea to use different
titles for different section/pages of
your site, so on a help page you might
have:
<TITLE>How to
install mechanical widgets</TITLE>
Meta tags
Far less important than the <TITLE> tag
but still useful for some search engines.
The description tag is particularly
handy for controlling how your link will
appear. Here you want to use 12 to 15
words that describe the content of your
page, preferably using the same
collection of words and phrases that can
be found in your main body of text. This
again could and should change from page
to page depending on content. For
example:
<META NAME="description"
content="Quality widgets and fidgets for
sale. Buy online at low prices at My
Store">
The other main meta tag is the
keywords. It seems their usefulness has
all but disappeared but they won't harm
your site so it's best to include a few.
Choose words and phrases that people
will search on, are relevant to your
site and appear in your main body of
text. For example:
<META NAME="keywords"
content="widgets,mechanical widgets,manual
widgets, widget sales">
So with this information the top of
your code should look something like
this:
<html>
<head>
<TITLE>Online sales of professional
manual and mechanical widgets. My
Company</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" content="Quality
widgets and fidgets for sale. Buy online
at low prices at My Store">
<META NAME="keywords" content="widgets,mechanical
widgets,manual widgets, widget sales">
Body text
Many of the major search engines will
pick up the text from your site and use
it, amongst other factors, as a test of
relevancy for the search. So having
keyword rich text is extremely important
for giving the search engine something
to pick up on. You shouldn't go
overboard here but certainly having your
keywords near the top of the page is
going to be an advantage. Don't try
fooling the search engines by hiding
text, or listing your keywords 50 times
to improve ranking.
Alt information
Each graphic on your site should have
accompanying alt information - that's
the text in a box you see when you pass
your cursor over a graphic. Apart from
aiding the disabled viewers, you can
also help with your search engine
optimization by using concise keyword
rich descriptions. For example:
<img border="0"
src="images/manual_widget.gif" width="140"
height="113" alt="Manual Widget">
Internal links
Help a search engine index your site,
and a person navigate, by having a clear
navigation structure, text link
alternatives to javascript and Flash,
and a text based site map.
Incoming links
It appears that particularly for Google,
the importance of quality links to your
site will improve your ranking. You may
want to spend some time asking to have
links placed on related sites,
preferably text and with your keyword(s)
incorporated. You can start off by
adding your store to our directory
here. Beware of "link farms" however.
If you want to find out what a quality
link would be in the eyes of Google,
download their toolbar
here and check the page rank -
anything above 5 is good.
Other considerations
A good domain name can help so you might
want to look for something like
manual-widgets.com or
mechanicalwidgets.com. Use your keywords
in your page names where possible and
without going over the top eg.
widget_help.htm
We have more information on our
search
engine friendly options and
submitting your site to
search engines. |
