Grow Your Business Online with Webplus Shop!

You’ve opened a new online store and set it up. How do you attract customers to come and shop? It’s not like a traditional store. You don’t just put a “Grand Opening” sign in the window and an ad in the local newspaper.

There are many ways you can successfully promote your webstore. One of the most powerful and free ways is by making effective use of “SEO,” or search engine optimization. Search engines are similar to really big phone books. Just like a traditional phone book, you might be listed, but that doesn’t mean anyone will find your tiny entry among the thousands of others. Also, like a traditional phone book, you can purchase advertising in search engines to attract people to your webstore. Though effective, this can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, which might not be feasible when your online store is just opening.

The free way to leverage your listing in the search engine “phone book” is to optimize your site to help your listing appear higher in the list when potential customers search for things you sell. Search engines work hard to give people the most relevant websites to them first, based on the keywords they entered. There are many things you can do to your online store that will help search engines see how relevant and important it is to your potential customers.

One quick method to make your webstore more search engine optimized is to setup your “Search Engine Meta-Tags.” These include your <title> tag and your <meta> tags in all pages of your online store. Here is how to do this using Webplus Shop.

1. Login to the merchant interface of your webstore (link opens in a new browser window).
2. Click on the “Marketing” tab.
3. Click on the “SEO” option that appeared.
4. Change the “Page Title” for each page to include keywords that you think your customers would use to find your store. Make the title no longer than 20 words. Search engines consider words in the <title> tag to be very important, so they pay close attention to those words when they decide how high to show your listing in the search results. Include the most important and relevant keywords toward the beginning of your Page Title. Don’t repeat keywords too much or the search engines will regard them as spam and may reject your website completely.
5. Enter other keywords that you think your customers would use to find your site in the “Keywords” text field for each page. You may repeat keywords used in your Page Title if you wish, but you should have a lot more in this field. Again, don’t repeat keywords too much or the search engines will regard them as spam and may reject your website completely.
6. Enter a description for each page in the “Description” fields. This description should also use a number of keywords, but should be written as regular English, since some search engines may show this description to potential customers to help them evaluate whether they want to visit your page.
7. The checkboxes in the Search Engine Meta-Tags table should all be checked for nearly all webstores, as they give search engines permission to collect and use as much information as possible when cataloging your website.
8. If you wish to include some text at the beginning or end of the “Page Title” (<title> tag) of all web pages, enter that in the “Store-wide Title Tag Prepend” or “Store-wide Title Tag Append” fields. One such use would be to include the name of your store in the Page Title of all pages. If you do this, it is highly recommended to put your online store name in the “Store-wide Title Tag Append” field. The keywords you entered in the “Page Title” field are more important to search engines than the name of your store, since the keywords are what your customers will use to find you.

Entering the basic settings of search engine optimization in your online store will help to increase your website’s exposure to potential customers. It may take a few days for search engines to pick up your changes, so it’s important to do this as soon as possible.

In a future article, I will go into more free and powerful search engine optimization techniques you can do with your online store using Webplus Shop.