Link Building

To increase your site’s popularity ranking with the search engines a reasonable tactic would be to participate in online forums and mention your site;  also link to it in your signature if possible.  Google will generally not show any benefit from automated link sharing services.

Sitemaps

Included with the shopping cart is an automatic sitemap.xml file generation for all shop categories and items. This sitemap is found at  /shop/sitemap/sitemap.xml  This is one of the sitemaps that you should definitely list in your robots.txt file; for example your-store.biz/robots.txt  Also submit this sitemap and your main sitemap to Google and Bing from within your Google Webmaster You should have an account with Google so that you can use their webmaster tools. You can sign up at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Google recommends: “.. initially submitting your Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. This will ensure that your Sitemap details are readily viewable on the first tab of the Sitemaps page in Webmaster Tools.

The shopping cart will automatically regenerate the sitemap at least once per week to reflect any new items or categories you create.  If you are using WordPress, install an SEO plugin and enable sitemaps.

From your shopping cart control panel under the Import / Export menu, export
your items in the “Google Product Search” format.

Google Product Search Feed

A great way to increase visibility on the Google search engine is to set up a Google Product Search data feed. It’s a free service from Google.
The steps to set it up are:

1. On your item pages, fill in the Brand, Condition, and Product Type fields for your Products. For more information on specifying your “Product Type” click here http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160081

2. In the shopping cart, on the “Google Product Search” export page, make sure all your categories are selected, then click the “Export & Save to Site” button. That will create a product listing within your shop.

3. From the google page click the “Start A Data Feed” button. (You will not need to start a new data feed each time). The google help is at https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7439058?hl=en

4. On that New Data Feed page type in your data feed name ( We suggest googleproductfeed.txt ), and then click the Save Changes button.

5. Now you will be at their “Data feeds” page which will list your feed(s). Under the “Upload schedule” column click the “Create” link (This is easier than the manual upload or FTP methods). That will pop up a small window where you can specify the frequency and url of your feed. We suggest a weekly frequency. In the url field paste in the following url:
To save the information you just input click the “Schedule” button.

Other Tips

– Sign up for adwords on  adwords.Google.com and target keywords that are likely to lead to a high conversion rate on your site. Link to the specific page for the item / page you are offering with each ad.

– Select the keywords you will optimize your site for; come up with your own list, ask your customers, and look at competitors sites for ideas you may have missed. Make sure that you optimize your site for searches that are attainable, and yet popular. Click here to check using the AHREFS or SemRush tools.

– Design and optimize your site for those keywords. If you are using WordPress a plugin like RankMath, All in one SEO, or Yoast SEO will help.

– Submit it to the Google and Bing using your webmaster accounts.