SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is a whole science on its own but here are a few tips to help get you started. Good SEO means to be easily searchable through sites like Google and Yahoo and such, so if you have a high page rank, you will be more likely to be listed favorably, so when someone searches for “graphic t-shirts shop” or something like that, it is more that someone will click on your store’s link.
Have descriptive titles.
Often times sites like Google will index your website based on your websites title. So if someone is searching for NW Custom Apparel, our website nwcustomapparel.com is much more likely to show up if the title is “Northwest Custom Apparel” rather than something vague like “Homepage.”
Make your site easy to navigate
So basically what all these search websites do is use these little virtual robots that go through all the websites over the net and crawl through all your pages. If your navigation is clear and goes where they need to go, you won’t really have a problem.
One thing to note is that the robots cannot crawl through flash-based navigations (yet?), so try to steer clear of that. If your pages cannot be crawled, your pages will not be indexed.
Have a lot of updating content.
The search engine robots will keep returning to your website if you have a lot of updated content. That’s why blogs are so fantastic. If you have a lot of well-written relevant content, the search engines will love you. Ultimately, search engine’s really just want to display good content, so don’t worry too much about keywords and update your site with good relavant content.
Have good links.
So when it comes to your search engine ranking, having good links to your site are really important. For example, if my blog was linked by a very popular and important t-shirt website, my page rank would go up.
Don’t freak out over metadata.
There’s been some debate over this, but most professionals say that your meta keywords and meta descriptions don’t really affect too much in terms of page rank.
It never hurts to add them just in case though. Some professionals also say that other search engines, with the exception of Google, do use the keywords, so you might bring in traffic from other search engines that you’ve never even heard of!
So after you’ve optimized your website, don’t forget to actually submit your websites to the actual search engines. There are plenty of free services out there, but I don’t really want to name names. Just look up “free search engine submission” on Google or something. Just keep in mind that a lot of these search engine submissions will send you a lot of spam and stuff, so be wary of that.
