Google offers powerful and useful searches that help customers find online stores, like yours. But did you know that Google offers a “Product Search” that is specifically designed to help customers find your products? To see this great tool in action, simply go to Google’s website and click the “Shopping” link at the top of the page.
Google Product Search allows your customers to search for their favorite products and see a list of merchants offering them, along with prices and seller ratings. Many customers find this tool an essential part of their online shopping.
Not all products and online merchants are listed in this search, though. Only products that have been specifically uploaded to “Google Base,” Google’s special database of products and other information, are included in these product-specific search results.
There are many advantages to having your online store’s products listed in this database. Customers don’t have to sift through as many irrelevant search results because this special search is specific to products they are looking for. This makes it easier to see your online product. Additionally, customers will get more information about your product using Product Search than they would using the regular Google search because special data fields are included in the product uploads. These searchable fields include the following: Product Name, Category (Product Type), Manufacturer, Condition, Long Description and Price. Webplus Shop automatically includes most of these fields without you having to specifically set them.
To upload your products to Google Product Search, you need a “Google Account.” If you use Gmail as your email provider, you can use your Gmail login as your Google Account. If you’re not sure if you have a Google Account, you can ask Google to check for you. Additionally, all products uploaded to Google Product Search must meet the Google Base Program Policies, Editorial Guidelines and Content Policies, or Google will remove the products from its database.
It is easy to include your online store products in the Google Product Search using Webplus Shop. The easiest way is to simply click on the “Inventory” tab and then click on “Google Product Search Feed.” This page will tell you how many products are marked to be included in the feed and which products are not. By default, each product is marked for inclusion.
Click twice on the Play/pause button to start the video.
To maximize the power of this marketing technique, make sure that your product descriptions accurately describes the product, using keywords that your customers might use to find your product.
Another important field is the Google Category (Product Type). Although you can use anything in your Google Product Type (Category) field, Google recommends using it’s product type taxonomy for best results.
Google Product Search is a powerful tool to get the products in your online store in front of your customers. It is growing in popularity and many online merchants say it has significantly increased the number of visitors to their online store and sales. Webplus Shop makes submitting and updating your products very easy and we highly suggest you take advantage of it.
What makes these techniques work, though, is to choose the right keywords that will bring in customers who buy. The term “keyword” is a bit misleading. Normally, effective keywords are not single words, but are normally 2 – 4 word phrases. Here are some tips for deciding which to use:
Use short phrases instead of single words. 1-word keywords are too broad and competitive. For example, if you sell jewelry and choose “jewelry” as your keyword, you are competing against 261,000,000 other web sites that are returned by Google when someone searches for “jewelry.” If you use “men’s jewelry”, only 3,100,000 pages are returned. That is a reduction of nearly 99% in competition.
Choose phrases that are specific, but not too specific. The goal is to have keywords targeted that will land you on the top pages of search engine results and are actually used by real people. To continue the above jewelry example, choosing “jewelry” returned 261,000,000 results in Google. Modifying that to “men’s gold bracelets” returns 674,000, which is reasonable since not too many websites are returned and people might reasonably search for that. However, if you targeted “men’s gold and ruby bracelets in minneapolis minnesota”, you would have a great chance to be on the first page, since only 4,940 websites are returned, but extremely few (if any) people would reasonably search using that phrase. The value to your online store is the same if you’re #1 on for a keyword phrase nobody uses as it is if you’re #4,000 for a broad keyword that everyone targets. Exactly $0.
Use your search engine log as a guide. One of the best ways to know which keywords to target is to see what people have already used to find you. If your use Webplus Shop for your shopping cart software, a short search engine log is shown on your Merchant Dashboard page at the bottom, showing you the top 15 keyword phrases used in the last 60 days, along with the number of times that phrase is used. To use this report most effectively, you should do searches yourself using those top 15 keywords in various search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live Search. Write down which position your online business comes up in the results for each keyword phrase. You will probably find that you are not on the top page. If that’s the case, you should use the optimization techniques listed at the beginning of this article to increase your ranking with those words.
Research your competitors’ keywords. Going to competing websites and looking at their meta-tags can give you some good ideas for keywords. To see their meta-tags, right-click on their web page and choose “View Source.” Then press CTRL-F to bring up a mini-search box. Enter “<meta” (without the quotes) to have it highlight the meta tags. Also note the keywords your competitors use in their title bar (shown in the <title> tag in the “View Source” window).
Analyze your keywords using keyword tools. A couple of the most popular keyword tools include Keyword Discovery and WordTracker, both of which are not free. Popular free tools include Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Trends. These tools will show you how often keywords are searched, indicating how popular they are.
Optimizing your store to target effective keywords is by far the best free method of increasing the number of customers visiting and buying. It costs you nothing except some time and the payoff can start within a week and will last for years. Every week or two, you should re-evaluate your search engine rankings and they keywords you targeted, along with your traffic and sales. This will help maintain and increase your SEO marketing efforts and your sales.
Have you always wondered how many people a day visit your online store? Do you want to see what keywords are bringing those visitors? Do you want to keep track of how promotions, referrals and ads are working for you? There is an easy way to find out that information by using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics makes it easy to improve and track your results in bringing people to your online store. It allows you to write better ads and strengthen your marketing efforts. Best of all, Google Analytics is free to to use. You can use Google Analytics to track all kinds of visits to your online store. For a tour of Google Analytics, you can go here for their slideshow and here to sign up.
Webplus Shop makes it easy for you integrate Google Analytics into your store to track visits to your website. Once you sign up for a Google Analytics account, take the code they provide and then log into your store. Navigate to the Marketing->Advanced and then simply insert the code into the Analytics Tracking Code box and you are ready to start tracking visitors! ( Click on the Image to make it bigger). It will take around 24 hours before Google will show anything in the Analytics Dashboard.
From there you just need to log into your Google Analytics home page and watch how people are coming to your online store. This will allow you to better tailor your search engine optimization and marketing efforts to draw people to your online store!
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and signals the opening of the Christmas shopping season. Usually there are lines of people waiting for the stores to open so they can get great deals on products. These stores create the desire for these products by using “door buster” promotions of loss-leader items. You can use these same kinds of promotions and ideas to draw people to your online store.
Ways to attract people on Black Friday
The first way a store can draw people in is by having a Door Buster event. Products offered as part of a door buster are typically extemely low-priced, low-supply items that create a high demand among consumers.
Create a door buster promotion for your webstore by creating Black Friday Door Buster coupons. Make sure you know how to create and distribute your coupons well in advance of Black Friday. This way you can carefully plan your Door Buster event.
Loss Leaders can, and should be used in conjunction with Door Buster sales to help draw customers in. A loss leader is product that is sold at or below cost to help stimulate other, more profitable sales. Set the price of a product so that you either make no profit or a small loss on an item. Market this item via Google Product Search. If somebody using Google Product Search filters by lowest price for your type of item, your product will be at the top of the list!
Cyber Monday Cyber Monday is the term for the Monday that immediately follows Black Friday and signifies the start of online Christmas Shopping. Here is some more info on Cyber Monday.You can use the brick and mortar promotions for your online store to bring in customers this holiday season!
Using Webplus Shop’s hosted ecommerce solution to sell products has always been the focus, but now you can promote your store and inform your customers like never before. Learn how to take advantage of Webplus Shop’s latest feature – Custom Web Pages.
Custom Web Pages allow you to publish web content for your online store like an “About Us” page, customer testimonials, privacy policy, sizing charts, event calendar/schedule, shipping policy, or almost anything else that you would like to provide for your customers. Once you’re logged in, simply go to Appearance > Custom Web Pages and click the Add New Custom Page button to get started.
1. Page Filename - Set your page filename to whatever you want. Use something easy to read and understand like “about-us” or “holiday-specials”.
2. Links to Page - Tell your store where to put links to your Custom Page. The label is the clickable text that your customer uses as a link. Link placement is discussed later.
3. HTML Content - Insert your own or use the easy HTML Editor to build your page. Customers will view your Custom Page like your other store pages that have the header, navigation links, category lists, and footer.
4. SEO Tags - To help search visitors find your site, fill out these fields that help search engines identify your Custom Page content.
1. Navigation Menu Button - These links appear in your Navigation Menu between the Home button and My Account button. Save these for important site pages, like your About Us page or an Event Calendar.
2. Category List Link: Beginning/Top - These links appear above or at the beginning of your store’s Category List links. Put your “must-see” product related info here like special promotions or limited-availability info.
3. Category List Link: End/Bottom - These links appear below or at the end of your store’s Category List links. Use this out-of-the-way location for your shipping/privacy policies or sizing charts.
4. Use the Page Web Address - Use the Page Web Address to insert a link to your Custom Page from anywhere. You can put links in your store’s HTML areas like your Homepage Store Intro, Featured Products Heading, Product Long Description, or your Store Footer. You can also link from outside your store in your web advertising and marketing on blogs, forums, and message boards.
The opportunity to make a discounted purchase is a strong attraction for a potential customer. With Webplus Shop, your online business can utilize coupons as marketing tools just like the paper coupons that arrive in your mailbox and newspapers. By distributing online coupons to specific places on the web, your coupon based marketing will cost very little, yet still have the potential to reach more people than a typical mass mailing campaign.
Creating a coupon in Webplus Shop takes two steps.
Create a promotion in the Marketing > Promotions area by clicking the Add New Promotion button. Enter the settings for your new promotion and make sure that you change the Require the Customer to Enter a Coupon Code setting to “Yes” and save your changes. (If this is your first promotion, click the Help button in the upper-right of the Promotions screen to learn more about how promotions work.)
Create a Coupon Code in the Marketing > Coupons area by clicking the Add New Coupon button. The customer will need to enter the Coupon Code to redeem the offer, so make it easy-to-use; one word and all uppercase (no spaces!). Set the Coupon Reusability to “Indefinately” so that many customers can use the same coupon. Set the Promotion to the one you just created in step one and save your changes. That’s it! You’re done!
Now that you have a Coupon Code that’s ready for customers to use, you need to let people know about it. Luckily there’s plenty of bargain hunters online and lots of coupon sharing websites that cater directly to them. Below you’ll find a few links to get you started. Simply fill out the form with your Coupon Code information to let people know about your store’s promotion.
There’s plenty of other coupon sharing websites available besides those listed above. Unfortunately, many of these are affiliate marketing sites that only offer coupons from select stores instead of using simple Submit Coupon forms. Fortunately though, many of these affiliate coupon sites have Message Boards or Forums that you can post your coupon to. Look around on their homepage for a Message Board or Fourm link/button, sign-up, and start posting your Coupon Code.
The first question many people ask when they are looking at opening an online store is “How do customers find my site?”This is a great question and an important aspect of running an online business.Webplus Shop offers many easy ways for you to enter keywords and meta tags about your products which will greatly help your products to be found by search engines.While these tools are crucial for helping your online business get recognized, there are many other ways you can promote your store without using your computer at all.
The first suggestion is using business cards.There are many places that will print up 100’s to 1000’s of business cards for you at a reasonable price.These cards can be used to hand out to your friends and co-workers or to complete strangers at trade shows or just on the street.Having your cards at a business, at the mall, or wherever there are many potential shoppers is a great way to get your business name out there.
Flyers are an effective way for you to get some information about your site out to people as they are reading something to pass the time.Passing out or placing flyers in doctors’ offices, airports, bus stations, street corners, and shopping malls will not only introduce people to your store, they can also have coupons or descriptions of what your online store is all about.
Don’t be afraid to do something out of the ordinary.From painting your domain on your car to putting it on a big sign in front of your house, any publicity is usually good publicity.Create T-shirts, buttons, stickers, hats or whatever fits your budget and pass them out for people to wear at concerts, fairs, amusement parks, etc.A simple shirt with just your domain on it will increase curiosity and may lead them to your site by just wanting to know what that hat or shirt was referring to.
Checking out the price of running a small ad in newspapers, talking to radio stations about mentioning your site on the air, or printing calendars and pens that have your business name on them are also effective strategies.Donating prizes, gift certificates, or coupons to fund-raisers, golf tournaments, or contests also can help promote your store and even if they are not redeemed, it could be some free publicity.
Most offline promotion techniques are fairly inexpensive if not free.If you are really serious about having a successful online business, please utilize all the features Webplus Shop has to offer as you are setting up your store, but remember that there are many other ways to promote your business without being online at all. Above are just a few of the many methods of offline promotion that we recommend, so please take some time and find a way to promote your store offline that works best for you.
Aberdeen, SD(PRnine – August 27, 2008) – Webplus, Inc. (www.WebplusShop.com), the leader in affordable ecommerce web hosting, announced today the launch of a new affiliate program for webmasters and others who would like to refer individuals and businesses to www.WebplusShop.com for ecommerce web hosting services. The program is free to participate in and pays a whopping 75% of sale directly back to the affiliate who referred the sale. There is no limit to the number of people you may refer and no limit on affiliate earnings! A variety of banners and text links are provided for easy posting on websites, blogs, etc. For further details, please see: http://www.shareasale.com/shareasale.cfm?merchantID=18397.
Webplus Shop is easy, affordable ecommerce web hosting. With Webplus Shop, individuals and businesses can build an online store fast and sell almost anything worldwide in their very own online store website. Ecommerce hosting packages start at just $14.95 per month with no “percent of sale” fees like many online auction sites. All ecommerce web hosting packages are ad-free and come with a domain name so people can find the store fast. Video tutorials make learning how to use the online store very easy and no programming knowledge is required. Webplus Shop support staff is just a phone call away if there is ever an issue. Need to start selling online fast? Webplus Shop staff can set up your ecommerce website and have it online and selling in just few hours.
“We are very excited to launch our new web hosting affiliate program,” said Jacob Lakhany, CEO, Webplus, Inc. “We feel that our ecommerce web hosting packages are some of the best out there. They are easy to use and affordable which makes them perfect for the online sales needs of most small businesses. We are excited to make our ecommerce hosting available through new affiliate partners and look forward to the new relationships it will bring.”
For more information on Webplus Shop, please visit www.WebplusShop.com or email sales@webplusshop.com.
About Webplus Shop
Webplus Shop is the easy way for small businesses and individuals to open an online store and to sell almost anything online 24×7. Webplus Shop displays your products, processes orders and keeps track of inventory on the back end and may be added to an existing website or may act as a stand-alone business website. The Webplus Shop shopping cart software has been in continuous development by Webplus, Inc. since 1996 with a focus on ease of use and affordability. No programming knowledge is required to set up an online store or to make routine changes; we realize that most small businesses don’t have a computer programmer on staff and your time is better spent running your business than figuring out software. Webplus Shop is also very affordable with packages starting under $15 per month including the software, secure, US-based hosting with 99.9% uptime and your very own domain name. Webplus doesn’t take any percent of your sales to cut into the bottom line of your online business. Webplus also does not outsource any portion of our services and our customer support is unbeatable. Yes, you can actually call and speak with a human when there is an issue. Call today or visit www.WebplusShop.com to get started. You can’t afford NOT to sell online!
You’ve optimized your online store pages and your category pages in your online business. Now it’s time to optimize your product pages with SEO (search engine optimization) techniques that work.
Optimizing your store’s product pages will increase the number of customers who find your products and, ultimately, purchase them. For example, if someone is searching for “handmade bracelet,” you want to make sure that your handmade bracelets appear as high as possible on their search result list. If your bracelet product page is on the first few pages of the search results, there is a high probability that the customer will go directly to that page, where it is very easy for them to add the product to their cart and complete the sale.
Optimization is done by adding strategic keywords to the product page SEO tags and in the product descriptions. These SEO tags include the <title> and <meta> tags, which search engines use to determine what your online store page is about and how relevant it is to the customer’s search.
The <title> tag sets the text that appears in the browser’s window title bar, at the very top of your browser window (above the toolbar buttons). This field is very important to search engines and is one of the places they look for keywords the most.
By default, Webplus Shop sets this text to the name of your product. For better sales, though, you should change it to have more good keywords that your online store’s customers will use to find this product. Make sure the text in the <title> tag for each product is specific to that product. Setting it the same for all products will significantly reduce its effectiveness.
The <meta> tags consist of the “meta-keywords” and “meta-description” tags, which contain important keywords and descriptions relevant to the product, but do not actually appear on the web page to the customer. Some search engines use these tags to help them catalog what the page is about so they know when to include the page in search engine results.
If you use Webplus Shop as your online store shopping cart software, setting the title and meta tags is very easy. On the Edit Product screen, where you enter your product’s information, click on the “Featured Product and Marketing” section. Scroll to the bottom, and enter your <title> and <meta> tag keywords in the “<title> Tag Contents,” “Description Meta-Tag Contents” and “Keyword Meta-Tag Contents” fields.
Equally important to putting great keywords in the SEO tags is making sure that your descriptions, like your “Long Description,” have enough information in them. Most search engines catalog the words used in your descriptions, so the more information you put in your descriptions the better. Your customers also rely heavily on the long description to make their purchasing decision, so the more information you provide, the more comfortable they will feel buying from your online store. To super-charge your descriptions, make sure to include effective keywords in the text in such a way that it appears natural.
Remember to not repeat keywords too many times or search engines will penalize your online store, possibly removing it completely from their listings.
Using these techniques to maximize your online business’s exposure to customers via search engines will significantly increase your store’s traffic and sales.
Your category pages are some of the most important pages in your online store. After the home page, the category and product pages drive sales the most. Optimizing them for search engines will significantly increase your sales and add a boost to all of your other promotional efforts.
Like the other pages you optimized by setting <title> and <meta> tags, you can do this on your category pages. By default, the <title> tags are set to match the name of the product or category displayed. This will help your store somewhat, but adding additional relevant keywords to the product and category name will give your customers a better chance to find you.
Here is a simple method for setting the <title> and <meta> tags for your category pages:
Login to the merchant interface of your webstore (link opens in a new browser window).
Click on the “Inventory” tab.
Click on “Categories” option that appeared.
Select the category you wish to optimize by clicking on it’s name.
Click on the “Marketing and SEO” section to expand it.
Enter your desired <title> and <meta> tag keywords. Keep in mind that the most relevant and important keywords should be first. Also remember to refrain from repeating keywords too much, or your business website may be considered spam and be rejected by search engines.
Repeat this for each of your categories to customize the keywords for each specific category.
Customizing the SEO information for each category will drive more customers who are looking specifically for the products you sell in that category. This will help them find your online store and place an order with greater ease.
You’ve 