Part 3: Online Store SEO Tutorial

1. Froogle & PPC

Froogle is Google's search engine just for products. If you have an online store, having your products listed in Froogle can be a great source of sales. Learn more about it and "Google Base" here.

You can enter your products in one at a time (probably a good option if you have only a handful of products), or you can bulk enter your inventory. Most modern shopping carts come with a 'Froogle Export' feature.

If you use pay-per-click (PPC) as part of your search engine marketing strategy, you should consider creating a custom PPC ad for every product. Some modern shopping carts will do this for you.

2. Optimizing Product Pages

When optimizing product detail pages, make sure that every <title> tag has the product name first, then your company's name second. The product name should also be in the page's main headline, and repeated one to three times in the product's description. Most shopping carts should do this by default, and if they don't, it's generally easy for someone with HTML and basic scripting knowledge to make them do so.

If your shopping cart is not editable like this, consider upgrading it so that it is, or change shopping carts. The initial expense may be worth it in the long run.

3. Usability

All the PPC ad budget in the world won't make a difference if your store is hard to use. So test it repeatedly, and make sure the store is easy to use. Ask your friends. Ask your relatives. Ask anyone you can to buy a product and see what problems they encounter.

Another problem sometimes encountered with online stores are slow stores. If your shopping cart is 'resource intensive' (x-cart is notoriously so), and/or if your website is on a shared server, your website may sometimes slow down to a crawl, especially during peak times. If this is happening to you, you need to consider 'virtual private' or dedicated hosting.

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