Search engine optimize your online store (Part 2 of 3)

Now that you have chosen some keywords for your online store, let’s discuss some of the tools Shopster provides to help you in your search engine optimization efforts. It’s important to remember that SEO is a combination of picking the right keywords, good content, placing your content in the right areas, and links from the right sites. These tools will help you on your way but they are just a piece of the SEO puzzle. Let’s get started.

I’m sure many of you have heard the term meta tags before. Meta tags have been around for a very long time, and they are used to help search engines determine what keywords to look out for. Even though they do not have the authority they used to, you should use unique meta tags whenever possible in your pages.

If you are optimizing your Shopster store, you should start by adding meta content on your store pages. Each page you create has the option for you to enter your own unique meta content, which includes both meta keywords and a meta description. To see how to add meta content on a store page, follow this example:

1. Click the “Store” tab
2. Click the “Store Pages” link
3. Click on the “Edit Homepage” link
4. Click the “Customizations” tab which appears in the body of the page
5. Click the “Customize this setting” box under the Meta Tags header on this page

Once the grey boxes appear white you will be able to add your meta content. For keywords you will need to separate each phrase with a comma, where as the description should be a paragraph of content.

A powerful feature of Shopster is that unique meta tags can be set for every page of your online store. I recommend that you start by targeting the top level pages and then working your way down to each individual product page. Here’s where you can go to customize meta content on category and product pages:

Category pages:

1. Click on the “Inventory” tab
2. Click on “Categories”
3. Add or edit a category
4. Click the “Customizations” tab

Product pages:

1. Click on the “Inventory” tab
2. Click on “Manage” link
3. Click on the name of the product to edit
4. Click on the far right tab labeled “Customizations”

Within each page where you add meta content, you’ll notice an area below it to add a “Title”. This is where you can customize the title for each page of your site. Strategically include SEO keywords into the title of each page, this will help with your rankings on search results. If you’re unsure of where the title is displayed on your webpage, it is what appears on the top of the browser. For example if you use Internet Explorer you will see the title on the top blue bar. Give it a try.

Changing the “URL Name” is the final step in this week’s post. The url name is the url that a page is hosted on, and much like the page title and meta content, by including keywords into your url it can help with your search engine rankings.

When you are creating a url name there are a couple things to keep in mind, the first is to keep it relatively short, and the second is to not change your url too often. The reason you want to keep the url relatively static is in the case where a page is getting traffic from a search engine and you suddenly change the url. Anyone clicking on that link will be driven to a non-existent webpage and you instantly lose all that traffic until the search engine re-crawls your website. My recommendation is to change your urls early in the process of optimizing your site, but once you have changed them do your best to avoid changing them again.

Changing your url names can be done in the same general area as where you would add your meta content. The only difference is that you will need to switch out of the “customizations” tab to the “general” tab. You should see an area labeled “URL Name”.

Happy selling!