Promoting Your E-Store

High Quality Content

The content that you use has to be relevant to what you are selling. Relevance is all-important for search engines. On your Home Page, make sure you focus on your core business and key products. The Home Page is the first page to be crawled and after Google finds you it will start indexing and crawling your other web pages if they can be found. If your website is set up in such a way as to block the search engines then you will have problems. So make sure your website developer and hosting company have used the correct redirection for your domain name and home page URL.

If you have used frames on your Home Page it is likely that you will not be found or ranked by Google. The Home Page title, meta description and meta keywords are also very important and need to match your content. If your brand name is unknown and you are selling on the web then the title is best not to focus on the brand. So, as an example, if you had a store www.ggo.com.au (fictitious) selling garden gnomes then the title might be ‘Garden Gnomes Online – Garden Ornaments | Friends in the Garden | GGO Australia’.

There are many people who will do a search on their own brand name (i.e. ggo.com.au) and find it ranks well. However, the question you have to ask is, how many people know my brand name? That is where traditional marketing and e-marketing (email newsletters, online forums etc) can assist.

Use Relevant Keywords

These are the words that people will most frequently use when searching for the products that you sell. Sometimes they will be brand names (i.e. iPod Nano) and sometimes generic terms (i.e. MP3 player). So, you have to make sure that you use the right terms to get the right visitors to your site.

Again, for our GGO site these might be: ‘buy garden gnomes’, ‘gnomes’, ‘ornament’, ‘garden decoration’, ‘gardeners’, ‘figures’, ‘elves’, ‘fairy’ … and so on. You can use as many relevant keywords as you like (without going crazy) and make sure the main keywords also appear in your Home Page content.

Links to Other Sites

An important factor in search engine ranking is the number of relevant websites that link to your website. The first step is to lodge your website with directories such as True Local, Hotfrog, Cooee, Directories Australia, Again, Sensis and others. Most of these directories are free but some charge a small fee for inclusion.

To be successful, you also need links to and from other websites that operate in your line of business. These could be suppliers, partners or customers. For our GGO site, it might be garden designers, nurseries or customers’ websites.