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Site Optimization - Overview
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>Professional
manual and mechanical widgets from My Company</TITLE>
It's important 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
Much 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 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.
Be careful of using manufacturer supplied product information
as your page content should
not be identical
to
others
on the web selling the same product line. This can lead to duplicate
content issues and lack of ranking. Be sure your content is unique!
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 most importantly 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.
Also consider how you are going to treat deleted products. Once
you have deleted a product, the product detail page will be lost
from your site but the URL still may be available in the search
engines, causing people to find broken links and go elsewhere.
One solution would be to set up Custom 404 pages (your host can
help with that), another would be to mark the product as out of
stock rather than completely deleting it from your store.
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.
We have more information on our search
engine friendly options
and submitting your site to search
engines.
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