Traffic Building Information

How to Get Customers for Free


There's no shortage of ways to spend money promoting your online shop - and certainly no shortage of people willing to take your money! However, search engines can be sending you qualified customers all day every day. How do you get a piece of this traffic? It's estimated that 70% of people stop at the first 10 results in most search engines and over 90% don't go beyond the first 30. If your shop isn't in the top of the search results, you're missing out. We'll go through the five steps to getting you higher in the search engine rankings.

Choose the right keywords
You need to decide which search term(s) you want to be top for. This might not be as obvious as you think. Firstly, you need to know what people are (and aren't) searching for. Being the number 1 result for a search term no one uses is no good. The Overture keyword selector tool can show you what people are searching for. Take some guesses as to what people are looking for, try them out and see what the tool says - you might be surprised! Do a Google search for a possible keyword. If, for example, you see 5,000,000 results returned you have to consider: can you beat 4,999,990 of them? You might be better off getting a number 1 position for a lesser keyword than a number 200 for a big one. Be careful not to be too ambitious - that keyword with the most traffic might be highly competitive in the search engines. If you are competing against a multi-million dollar online shop you're unlikely to win.

Make sure your site is search engine friendly
The goal here is to make sure the search engines like your shopping cart site. You might need some help from your techies with this.

  • Create a sitemap pointing to all your pages, or all your key pages. This helps the search engines find all your pages.
  • Include your keywords in your HTML title tags in all your key shopping cart pages.
  • Include your keywords in a h1 tag.
  • If your shopping cart or CMS uses session IDs in the URL, turn this off, or change to a different tool. You can usually tell if you have this turned on if you URL looks like http://www.widgets.com/products/page.php?product=2329&session=29dha9198yfka8129fnv0. The big long session number is the dangerous part.
  • Make your HTML code clean & validated - most search engines prefer this.
  • Make sure your keywords are included in the copy on your site.

Some shopping carts such as Erol or osCommerce (with an add on module) provide excellent search engine optimization tools.

Get links
It's no secret - most search engines love sites that have lots of links pointing at them. Get your customers & suppliers to link to you. This is the single most important thing you can do. There are companies that specialize in helping you get links - look them up if it's important to you.

Watch your traffic
If your web host provides you with web statistics, then check them closely. Probably the most popular web statistics software is AWStats. This provides information on what people are searching for when they arrive at your site. This data is gold. Find out what people are looking for, and make sure that they can get it - easily!

Content, content and more content
Search engines love content - the more content the better. Detailed product descriptions, articles relevant to your product line, whatever, the search engines love it. So start writing, it's not as hard as it looks!

Lastly, be patient. Search engines operate in their own time and results can take months to show. If this is an important area for you, consider enlisting a professional which can save you a lot of time. However, there is a lot of helpful resources and if you want to do the work yourself, roll up your sleeves, work hard and watch the customers pour in every day.

Mark Baartse is the founder of Shopping Cart Reviews, the webs most comprehensive Shopping Cart information site.


MORE RESOURCES:

Mendota Heights City Council Agenda and Goal-Setting Agenda for Feb. 8-9
Patch.com
The goal-setting session includes discussion of potential objectives for various departments of the city, including planning for the 25th Anniversary Parks Celebration, a review of the city's infrastructure management plan, a social host ordinance and ...



Quality Magazine (blog)

Shifting the Paradigm: Enterprise-Process Goal Setting
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The implication of Nelson's statement is that simple goal setting alone will not yield an improved output. For an enhanced process response, organizations need to give due diligence to bettering the process. Focus needs to be given to the creation of ...



Make Life Meaningful Monday: Goal Setting
Crookston Daily Times (blog)
I think I've taken goal setting to the level of art-form. I make spiritual growth goals, homemaking goals, parenting goals, exercise goals…you name it! And I don't just set giant goals, like vacationing in Europe next year or running a marathon.



The Bay City Times - MLive.com

Public welcome at Bay City goal-setting session Saturday morning
The Bay City Times - MLive.com
9 goal-setting session, the Bay City Commission agreed to create a list of what residents want to see. That exercise turned into a list of 34 items that attendees at Monday night's Town Hall meeting were asked to help prioritize.
Trenton Robinson complaint investigation complete, Bay City police chief saysMLive.com

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New York Post

Giants win NFC Championship on OT field goal, setting up Super Bowl rematch vs ...
New York Post
By PAUL SCHWARTZ SAN FRANCISCO — On the road. In the NFC Championship. In overtime. The Patriots, already in, awaiting the winner. Harsh weather affecting every move. A draining, physical battle. A field goal to win it. “Everything that happened is ...

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Petoskey News-Review

Boyne City goal-setting still under way
Petoskey News-Review
12 city goal-setting session at St. Matthew parish hall in Boyne City. Last time around, the vast majority of participants in the exercise shared their two cents without attending the public meeting, either. "It's a more comprehensive review of things ...



New Goal-Setting Toolkit Available from Innovation Strategist Lea Strickland
NCTechNews (press release)
(Cary, NC) A new goal-setting toolkit for personal and professional success is now available at no charge from international strategic business consultant and noted expert on how to start and manage a profitable business, Lea Strickland, ...



Aspire Goals 1.0 for iOS - Set and Achieve Goals Through Visualization
prMac (press release)
Aspire Goals focuses on the 80%, combining detailed goal setting (with modules for: defining a Goal, Attributes, Reasons, Motivators, Images, and Soundtrack), with a sophisticated Goal Visualization tool that makes a real difference in turning goals ...

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Council Holds Goal Setting Session
KIMT
MASON CITY, IA- We told you last week about the Curbside Chat. That's when a representative from a Minnesota non-profit group stopped by Mason City. Their goal was to share ideas when it comes to running a town, and even changing perspectives if ...
Council sets goals for yearMason City Globe Gazette

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Dover council holds goal-setting session at fire station on Saturday
Foster's Daily Democrat
By LAURENNE RAMSDELL DOVER — The City Council will meet in a goal setting session Saturday morning held at the Liberty North End Fire Station. Beginning at 8:30 am and expected to last through mid afternoon, the city's newest council members will meet ...

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