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Working with ShopSite
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ShopSite Search Engine FAQs
Here is a list of questions and answers about using Internet search engines to market your store.
Most search engines will eventually find your store, but you want to do everything you can to speed up that process. There are several companies on the Web that will submit your site to the major search engines, usually for a fee. However, if you have a little time (it doesn’t take much), you can save your money by submitting your site yourself. Most of the search engines have a page where you can submit sites to be indexed (though there is no guarantee as to when that will actually happen). For example, the page for submitting sites to Google is www.google.com/addurl.html, and the page to start the submittal process to Yahoo! is http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/.
Improving your store’s ranking in search engine results is a tricky issue, and not all search engines work the same. Here are some points to consider, though:
- Yahoo! is not a search engine, but is actually an Internet directory. Sites are not added automatically, but are visited, reviewed, and listed by a someone from a team of site reviewers. Make sure that your store pages -- especially the first page -- clearly communicate what the purpose of your store is and what products you sell. The site reviewer isn’t going to spend a lot of time looking at your site, so your ranking will be partially determined by how clearly your site communicates its purpose and how impressed the reviewer is with your site layout and design.
- Google uses a complex algorithm to determine search rankings, but much of it has to do with how many other sites point to your site, and how well-ranked those sites are. In other words, if a lot of important sites point to your site, then your site will be ranked higher than if no other sites have links to your site. Try to exchange links with other sites related to what you sell. For example, if your store sells soccer equipment, try to exchange links with sites that provide soccer information.
- Many search engines index and rank your site based on the words that appear in your pages. Be sure to use all the words you can think of that people might use when searching for your products.
- Search engines also look at special HTML "meta" fields in your pages for lists of keywords and descriptions. If you have ShopSite Pro or ShopSite Manager, be sure to fill in the Meta Keywords and Meta Description fields for each page in your store.
