First steps to getting found by search engines

Morning all, it’s been a little while since I last wrote, been mega busy with a few projects and one could say neglectful of my blogging duties. 
I’m just going to share with you a quickie today that will ensure that you jump on the “google ladder” a lot quicker and liberate yourself from internet obscurity.
The scenario: you’ve just spent $5000 or £5000 or €5000 to build you new state of the art e-commerce store. The only problem is you seem to be on the equivalent of an ‘online desert island’ all by yourself with no one to share your great products with…

SOS Number 1:

Submit your site to the search engines and let them know of you’re alive.

1. You need to head over to google webmaster central and submit your site to google.
2. Second, head over to yahoo site explorer and likewise submit your site to the yahoo search engine 
3. Third, head over to bing’s webmaster center and once again submit your site to the search engine. 

• KEYNOTE: You will want to ensure that you have included a sitemap.xml document with your submission. Fail to do this and it will take the spiders (search bots) a little longer to index and crawl your site.

SOS Number 2:

Submit your product range to the google merchant center.

Google is the master of all things searchable (including images.) I cannot speak for stores built on platforms other than bigCommerce as this is an easy peasey process through it’s fantastic marketing tab… 

1. The image below in a nutshell is the google base (google merchant center process.) The ‘how to set it up’ will just take too long for me to explain and you’re better off dropping me an email instead (if in dire need!) 
2. visit the google merchant center and set up an account.
3. Extract your product xml feed from your site, (consult your developer to do this)
4. Go over to your google merchant center account and click on ‘Data Feeds’ 
5. Select ‘new data feed’ and provide the necessary details
6. Once created, under upload schedule select ‘manual upload’ 
7. Upload and process the xml data file with your products
8. Job done!

Things to remember

• All images must have ‘alt text’ uniquely relating to that specific product. 
• filenames are very very important and ensure all filenames are 100% unique and ideally specific to that image e.g. ‘spalding-basketball-brown.jpg’ 

Google base will now work it’s magic and index all of your images into google product search. Now when people search google for products yours will now be featured in the index…the more traffic the better!

SOS Number 3:

Google Adwords - “I never look in the right hand column though…” you may not but people do!

Google adwords in short is paying your way to the top of google searches for specific keywords and phrases entered into the search engine. Every client I see often say to me “But Ren…I never look at the right hand column” - well, true, but many do and many use it to make £millions. There is a science to google adwords and a blueprint and it really does work.  

• Set up an account with google adwords
• be sure to google ‘free adwords on sign up’ as you may be able to get yourself a nice $75 adword credit to kick start you.
• your most important tool bar none is the ‘keyword tool’ which you can find under the ‘reporting and tools’ tab.
• Use the keyword tool to establish what search terms are highly searched for, and based on this build your respective ads.

Once again, there is a science that I could write pages and pages about feature diagrams and plenty of step by step instruction for conquering and making money from google ads. But unfortunately, you will have to contact me for more info (yes I will have my newsletter set up shortly, I’m getting there.) Alternatively be sure to comment on this post for requests and help. 

Conclusion

Ladies and Gentlemen jumping onto the search engine or ‘google’ ladder is much easier than many think. The key is to set the foundation so you can be ‘found’ the above is generally enough to get your site picked up and indexed. YES…there are certain variables involved such as the way your site has been built and whether it conforms to the structure required to allow search engines to easily index it, but…you as a good business owner I’m sure will have researched well and invested in a quality developer who understands the importance of coding your store/ site correctly! If you’re looking hire me or if you need a diagnoses on your site structure, contact me