We’re excited to announce that we have now released product reviews, and they are available and included in every Spiffy Stores plan at no additional cost!

We have been working away updating themes to include a way for your customers to add reviews, and for them to be displayed beautifully in your store… and most themes are finished! The last theme we’ll be updating (the Adelaide theme) should be available next week.

With the addition of the built-in mail after purchase email, you should be able to generate a ton of product reviews. These reviews are also indexed by Google and can be a great way for you to generate some buzz around your store and your products.

Reviews and the mail after purchase email function are included in all plans and it takes just a few minutes to set up.

To activate reviews in your store, you’ll need to firstly ensure you have updated your theme to the latest version. We have instructions on how to do that here.

If your store has a custom design, or updating your theme seems a bit difficult… it’s likely you’ll want us to do this for you for a small fee. Please email support@spiffystores.com.au requesting that we update your theme to include product reviews, and we’ll let you know when we can book you in.

Once your theme is up to date, you can then enable product reviews in the Products section of your store’s admin.

You can enable the mail after purchase function in the Preferences -> General Settings section of your store’s admin.

You can add a logo or edit the automated mail after purchase email in the Design & Assets -> Email Templates section of your store’s admin.

We’ve made product reviews available to all stores for many reasons… but the main one is that they can make a huge difference to your store’s performance. How? You may ask…

8 reasons why you need Product Reviews in your store now!

Reviews can help your store increase sales, and can help you to convince customers to leave more of them. Read on to get started.

1. Product reviews help create more informed customers

Product reviews can contain a lot of extra information that can’t be found anywhere else. Reviews can mention things like durability, colour, sizing, and so much more.

It’s personal insights such as “a little narrow for my wide feet” that help customers to be informed and find products that they will love.

2. Valuable insight helps you to improve

Reviews can also help you better understand your products. You can spend hours using a product, but chances are your customers are going to notice things you never would. That means your customers can give you ideas for improvements, or even excellent ideas on how to market your products.

3. Increased transparency

It can be scary allowing customers to openly review you, but showcasing feedback – good or bad, shows you have nothing to hide, and value your customers opinion. The ability to reply to a review also allows you to acknowledge that you’re not perfect, or your products may not be perfect for everyone. Replying to a review can also show that you have faith in your product range.

And you needn’t worry about those odd negative product reviews – 68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see both bad and good review scores.

4. Increased trust

The immediate benefit of reviews is that they can make your future customers feel that much more confident. The more reviews you have, the more convinced a shopper will be that they’re making the right decision.

5. Social proof your products

We all want one everyone else has, right? That’s how trends work.

Product reviews can make every one of the items you sell super desirable. Instead of seeing every positive product review as a great piece of feedback, see it as a vote in a popularity contest.

Additionally, if customers share products they’ve reviewed across their social networks, it’s more exposure for those products and your brand.

6. SEO benefits

User-generated content provides Google with the thing it loves most: content, and lots more of it than mast store owners can generate themselves. Product reviews are usually full of really relevant, rich keywords, to help further build context around your eCommerce store. This can dramatically improve your Google rankings.

Plus… not sure if you’ve ever seen them, but you will see stars displayed under product listings in organic search results. These result in an increase in click-through rates. This is also one of Google’s ranking factors, so – yes… this will also help you reach the top spots in search ranking.

7. Increased Visibility in Google Shopping

Google Shopping is extremely competitive, and the addition of stars to your product listings can make all the difference when it comes to attracting the attention of potential customers.

8. More conversions and bigger baskets

As a result of your customers being more informed, more confident, and more trusting they’ll be more likely to convert. Not only that, but they’ll probably also buy more. We’re talking more, bigger sales.

According to statistics, reviews produce an average of 18% uplift in sales, and customers who visit a site and interact with reviews spend 11% longer on the site than those who don’t.

Trying to compete online without product reviews can be an uphill battle. Customers are beginning to expect reviews as standard. So take advantage of our new feature, and you’ll see a whole host of amazing benefits that will help you continuously adapt and improve.

There are many ways to collect reviews, and we’ll have another article or two on collecting product reviews in the weeks to come.

We’ve all had those uninvited emails.

The ones kindly telling you that you’re not ranking well on search engines like Google, and their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services will bring you lots of web traffic and a position on the first page of Google results.

Tempted? Take a deep breath and think again.

“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

 How do I know? Cause that quote is taken directly from Google’s support website.

A brief history of SEO

Search engines like Google want to be able to show you the most valuable and relevant web pages for your search query. To be able to do that, they first crawl web pages and use very complicated algorithms to rank them in an index.

Very early on, people started gaming the system using tricks known as ‘black hat’ techniques to try to outwit the algorithms and jump up the rankings.

These tactics included:

• Stuffing the keyword phrase into the page (both visibly and invisibly) as many times as possible
• Buying and swapping links, or listing on poor quality web directories, to get as many backlinks as possible
• Spamming the comments section on blogs and forums just to get a backlink
• Spinning low quality versions of an article onto lots of different sites
• Technical trickery like doorway pages, cloaking and redirects

As a result, Google began to update its algorithms to reward top quality content and filter out pages that used dubious methods to try and win their attention.

And it’s got very good at it.

Play nice or face the consequences

Many dodgy SEO tactics are still being used by unscrupulous companies, even though the Google algorithms have been updated numerous times to recognise and penalise these tactics.

These methods are useless at best and downright dangerous at worst. And who gets penalized for these actions? The website owner. That’s you.

So if you want to steer clear of a Google penalty that bombs your search rankings, you need to make sure any SEO activities for your website are best practice.

What is good SEO?

Good SEO is about giving Google what it wants. Which is all about giving the user what they want…

> top quality, helpful content (web pages, video, pdfs etc)

> relevant to the search query

> on an easy-to-use website (technically sound)

> that other people recommend (through quality, earned backlinks)

So what are your options?

Firstly, do yourself a red hot favour and learn some SEO basics.

>>> Start with this article, or this one, by yours truly, written as a simple intro to SEO for people with little or no prior knowledge.

>>> Read up about SEO. There are a huge amount of free resources online like this SEO guide from Google itself.

>>> Take an introductory online SEO course like the one run by my pal Kate Toon called “The Recipe for SEO Success”.

When you’re up to speed (it doesn’t take much to learn the basics!), you’ll have a choice to either pay an SEO specialist to do the work for you, or do it yourself.

Use your smarts when you pick an SEO supplier

If you’re going to employ a specialist, please don’t randomly pick one (or reply to one of those unsolicited emails). Speak to other business people to find out who they use and recommend, and search online for good reviews.

A legitimate SEO company should be able to

• explain the SEO techniques it uses
• show you examples of their work
• put you in touch with happy customers
• provide detailed reporting of their work and the results it’s getting

Their services should include

• keyword research for your specific niche
• an SEO audit of your current website with advice on what to fix to make it more SEO friendly
• a strategy and support to build quality backlinks
• help with content development

With a good understanding of SEO at your disposal, you should be able to weed out any dodgy dealers.

The takeaway?

Don’t waste your time and precious cash trying to outwit Google. Understand how to work with them, not against them.

Whether you choose to hire an SEO specialist or DIY, maintain a good quality website and you’ll enjoy a stream of visitors who want to be there.

Inbound links (backlinks) are important to the success of your ecommerce site for two reasons:

1. They bring visitors to your site from all over the web, and

2. They help push you up search engine rankings

Search engines love links

Google has always considered backlinks when assessing web pages for search engine results. In their eyes, it’s a vote for your content; so it’s got to mean it’s pretty good and deserves to be promoted, right?

But over the years, link building has been abused and search engines have made it tougher to get the kind of links you need.

Gone, thankfully, are the days of buying masses of irrelevant links to get better search rankings (if you’re approached by a company saying they can get you lots of cheap links, run!). That just annoyed everyone.

Now, the quality and relevance of backlinks are more important than quantity. The ones you want should come from good quality, reputable websites.

Here are 9 ways you can get these precious links.

Earn them with your awesomeness

The preferred method.

1. Create interesting and useful pages on your website, packed full of information and images.
A frequently updated blog is great way to provide this kind of content. Read our post explaining how to write good quality posts. Make sure each blog post havs social media share buttons so it’s easily spread around.

2. Establish and build your social media presence.
Social media is one of the best ways to promote your awesome content (see above point) to attract more traffic and natural links.

As well as maintaining a profile on the obvious networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube – explore others like StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Delicious and SlideShare and see how you can get involved with those audiences.

3. Reach out to popular bloggers in your niche.
Earning a mention on a popular blog can bring you instant results. If you have a unique product or piece of content you think their audience would like to hear about, offer to send it to the blogger to consider reviewing or promoting.

Search online for popular blogs whose audience may be interested in your products (use Alltop or google “xxx blogs”). Then send the blogger a short, friendly email introducing yourself and explaining why they’d be interested in featuring it (what’s in it for them). Don’t be salesy, be tempting and compelling!

4. Try guest blogging.
Writing unique content that’s published on other blogs is known as guest blogging. It takes more effort than blogger outreach, but can open more doors if your content’s really useful. Again, when you look for popular blogs to approach, ensure your ideas will be relevant to their audience.

Create them

Use with caution and remember the golden rule – quality and relevance. And don’t buy them. Ever.

5. Email your suppliers and business partners and ask if they’d be happy to mention you on their website and link back to your store.

6. List your store in relevant and reputable online directories
As I mentioned above, search engines got smart to the hundreds of poor quality backlinks coming from free directories and will downgrade or exclude sites that use this tactic. Only list in a handful of authority directories. Start with True local (AU), Yellow pages, Dmoz.org, Hotfrog and Yahoo! Directory Listings.

7. Look for opportunities to add your business to professional association websites.
They may have a member directory, for example.

8. Check backlinks to your competitors’ sites and see if they could work for you too.
It’s handy to know where your competitors are getting link love. There could be some goodies there you can go after. Type the website address you want to check in link checking tools like open site explorer. It can be an eye opener!

9. Sign up for alerts from online PR sites.
Journalists looking for sources for their stories often use sites like Sourcebottle to find them. Sign up for email alerts and keep an eye out for opportunities to promote your goods or your expertise.

OK. I think that’s given you enough to think about for now.

Building backlinks to increase traffic and impress search engine takes time but it’s worthwhile in the long run. Keep chipping away at it!

The answer is already in your hands. And it’s free.

Tucked neatly into every Spiffy Store is a simple promotional tool that can make a big difference to your business.

What am I talking about? Your store blog.

7 ways a blog can improve the success of your store

If you’re already up and blogging away, good for you! You can skim through the rest of this post if you like. For the rest of you, pay attention.

Contrary to what you might think, a blog’s not just for foodies and cat lovers. It’s a powerful marketing machine that can be working away 24/7 to support your store by:

• Helping your website to rank higher in search engine results
• Attracting more traffic from search engines
• Growing awareness of your store
• Building your credibility
• Developing your unique business personality
• Building relationships with browsers and customers
• Building your email list (as people to subscribe to your blog)

To show you how that translates in real terms, I pulled out some online research.

US Marketing company Hubspot regularly surveys businesses around the world about their marketing habits. They found that web sites with a blog received 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound links than those without.

Not only that, they discovered that 57% of companies with a blog had acquired a new customer from it.

How does something as simple as a blog do all that?

The answer lies in the potent mix of quality content and search engine optimization that a regularly-updated blog provides.

Your blog is the information hub of your online store. It’s the place to share interesting news, opinion, advice and even entertainment with your audience. As you add to it, your online presence and authority grows.

And it’s a search engine magnet.

Search engines like Google look at specific elements when indexing web content and deciding how it will rank. Some of the most important factors are the amount of relevant information it contains, how many quality links are present and the number of social signals it generates (likes and shares etc.) One of the simplest and cheapest ways you can do all this is with a blog.

Now, are you ready for action?

Don’t put it off any longer because you think it’s hard and scary, and you don’t have the time. I’m here to get you up to speed.

Don’t ignore it because you have a Facebook page. You should be driving traffic to your own website, not Mr. Zuckerberg’s.

Over the weekend, grab a cuppa, sit down and invest a little time reading other blogs for inspiration. Blog directories like technorati and blogarama are a good place to start looking.

I’ll be back next week to guide you through the basics. Get ready!

What are you selling through your online store? Stationery? Clothing? Art?

Think again. In your customers’ eyes, you’re providing a solution to fill a need, and to feed an emotion.

You’re not selling sweaters, you’re providing warmth and comfort, style, and protection from the cold.

You’re not selling quality wallpaper, you’re bringing beauty to a boring wall, allowing someone to express themselves and helping them create a home.

The key to creating compelling and engaging copy is to understand the problems your product solves and to tap into the emotional connections to it.

When you develop your brand and write content for your online store, don’t think in terms of selling goods. Think about solutions to problems, that’s what you’re really selling.

Want to learn more? My next post is all about nailing those fiddly product descriptions.

Related articles

• How to write a press release
• How to improve the success of your marketing emails
• A guide to email marketing for online stores

In part one, we covered the first two subjects in our online retailer’s guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), using your keywords effectively and producing regular, quality content.

In part two, we will cover two other important aspects of SEO, social media participation and link building, and how to tackle them with confidence.

Dive into social media, and keep swimming.

One of the most recent Google updates increased the amount that social media activity counts in search engine rankings. Now, your engagement in social media will enhance your SEO efforts as well as increase your reach and popularity.

Put your best business hat on and go forth and participate in social networks such as twitter, facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. Set up accounts under your brand name and share images and stories, ask for opinions and comment on other people’s posts. Retweets, shares and comments on your social media content are taken into account in search rankings.

Link, and link again!

Linking is the last and possibly most important SEO element we will cover. Search engines use links to not only find your online content but also to judge its relevance, importance and how trustworthy it may be. So linking should not be overlooked.

Create links from one page to another within your online store and include the keywords for the page you’re linking to (not from) in the text for that link. For example, a link worded “our new red wrapping paper” would link to the page for which the keywords were “red wrapping paper”.

The hardest links to get, and therefore the most valuable, are those pointing into your web pages from other popular, trusted and relevant sites. There is no easy way round this, it takes a bit of time and effort but it will be worth it.

First up, check your competitors’ website backlinks. A great tool for doing this is www.opensiteexplorer.org . This will provide a list of web pages linking back to their store, which is a good way to discover where you might also get links back to your own content.

Try emailing your partners and suppliers directly to request a link from their website and send a request to other relevant sites such as retail/lifestyle blogs (giving your reasons why they should link to you).

Investigate listing your site on relevant online directories. http://www.seomoz.org/directories is a good place to start looking for directories relevant to online retailers like yourselves.

We should add a word of caution here… don’t be tempted to pay for “hundreds of links” from “SEO specialists” who may email you. Such links are usually poor quality and you will be penalised by search engines. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

So there you have the basics. There are plenty of free resources on the web if you’d like to learn more technical SEO techniques. We recommend the SEOmoz guide http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo (NB: we have no affiliation with them, they are just a great resource!)

Good luck, keep at it and it will make a difference.

Related articles

• Tips for online retailers: How to optimise your store for search engines (part one)
• Tips for online retailers: How to choose the right keywords for your online store
• 25 Tips for improving conversion rates in your online store

Like most people setting up an online store, you probably know you should be optimising for search engines to get more qualified traffic. The trouble is, you may not know where or how to start.

Never fear! we’ve put together this two-part blog post to get you up to speed in no time.

Let’s kick off with a quick refresher on why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important.

SEO is not paid search marketing such as Google AdWords. We will look at that in a separate post. SEO is a bunch of techniques that you can apply to your web presence to help you get into Google search results without paying for advertising. It’s commonly called ‘organic’ search.

Search engines send out ‘robots’ to find your web content and index it so they can refer to it quickly during search queries. Once your content is indexed, the search engine can then list it in the organic search results for the relevant search query. The whole process is very complex and highly automated – it relies 100% on the information the robots can find.

Therefore the ‘trick’ to good SEO is for your content to be easy for the robots to find and highly relevant to the keywords your target audience will use to search.

Luckily for you, your Spiffy Store is already brilliantly formatted and coded to be search engine friendly, but you will still need to use your keywords in the right places, create interesting content, embrace social media and build links to your site to improve your search engine ranking.

We’ve broken four basic SEO principles down into manageable techniques that you can do yourself. In this post we will cover using keywords correctly and creating quality content. Using all four elements will make a real difference to your search engine rankings, pushing your pages further up the results listing towards that coveted first page position.

Use your keywords in the right places.

If you’ve read the last blog post, you’ll know how important keywords are and how to choose the right ones for your online store. Now here’s how to put them to work on your site.

You will have different keywords for different pages of your site. For ecommerce stores, it’s usually the product name. Spiffy Stores will automatically use the product title or collection title you enter in the url and the product page’s title meta tag, but you should also repeat it 2-3 times in the page copy (especially in the first paragraph and last sentence of the page). Ideally, use variations of the keyword term to keep a natural flow for reading.

Keywords should also be used in the file name of an image on a page and its ‘alt’ tag text (the text that will display if the image doesn’t download). Again, clever Spiffy Stores will do this for your product images from the product titles you input, but you can also edit the alt tags of any product images after they’ve been uploaded.  You should also add relevant alt tags to pictures you use on other pages like your blog posts.

Meta tags of your product pages are also automatically added for you, but you can override this and add your own custom keywords and text to the title, keyword and description meta tags (the description meta tag is sometimes the snippet of text people will see on Google search results) of all of the pages on your store. You can edit the meta description of any page, product, or collection by clicking the “Edit Search Engine Data” link when editing your content. If you do write your own meta description, keep the copy under 160 characters as anything longer than this will not show up in search engine results and vital information may be lost.

And lastly, use keywords in the text of links coming into that page.

Create quality content. Lots of it. Regularly.

Google has placed much emphasis on fresh and frequent content in its search algorithms, so be prepared to keep generating new content if you want to be found online.

Make use of the blog built into your Spiffy Store and update it every week with a new article. Stuck for ideas? You could write about a new product, a popular trend, company news or respond to a frequently asked customer question. Don’t forget to add an image too, like we have done here.

Try to put out a press release about once a month. You might have hit a new sales record, launched a new product, hired some cool people or perhaps you are attending a local event. All of this can be used in a press release that you can easily distribute through online services like www.prweb.com or www.newsmaker.com.au  If you’re new to online PR, stay tuned for our upcoming blog post on how to create a professional press release, coming soon.

You could also write an information page that your customers would find useful. For example, if you sell fine china, you might like to explain how best to look after fine china.

In general, aim for your articles to be 300 – 500 words in length and remember to use your keywords when writing as we’ve described.

And whatever you do, don’t duplicate substantial amounts of copy from other places on the web – including your own site! Google will penalise you for it, and the ranking of your site will likely suffer as a result.

I think that’s a good place to pause and let you catch your breath! Our next post will look at two other techniques – social media and linking – to help drive traffic to your fabulous online store.

Related articles

• Tips for online retailers: How to choose the right keywords for your online store
• 25 Tips for improving conversion rates in your online store
• Marketing your new online store

Here’s a small but useful enhancement that has just been released for your Spiffy Store.

We all know how important it is to add tags to your product, as they help your customers find the right product and add extra information about your product that search engines can use to help you get a better ranking for your online store.

Well, we’ve just made it easier to add more descriptive tags to your products. From today, you can create multi-word tags which means that your tags can more accurately reflect the terms that your customers will be searching for.

When you create or edit your tags, they will now be separated by commas, which means that you can include multiple words in a single tag.

Now you can create a tag for ‘spiffy stores online store software’, rather than being restricted to the single words, ‘spiffy’, ‘stores’, ‘online’, ‘store’ and ‘software’.

Don’t forget that product tags are also used in the keyword meta tags for your site, and whilst these are going out of style, they are still very important to use.

If you’ve already set up your own online store, or you’re just starting an online business, there are many things you’ll need to do to ensure the success of your new online business.

This article is the second in a series of articles designed to help you get the most out of your online store. In my last post, I covered ways to increase traffic to your online store.  If you follow our tips to increase your traffic, then more orders should start coming in.

If you follow the tips below to increase your conversion rate, then you could effectively reduce your advertising costs, whilst converting more of your visitors to buyers.

In e-commerce marketing, a conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors to your online store who actually buy something.

Generally, if your store is laid out well, and you have good product descriptions and images and your products are reasonably priced, you should achieve at least a 1% to 2% conversion rate.

That can be easily increased to 3% if you follow the tips below.  If you go further than what we suggest, you can increase your conversion rate even further.

1. Make sure you attract qualified traffic. e.g. – if you sell Windows software, don’t advertise that you sell Mac software just to get more traffic. This will drive more visitors with no intent to purchase and decrease your conversion rate.

2. Get a toll-free number, and make sure the placement of that number in your store is prominent and consistent.

3. Subscribe to a service like VeriSign, Thawte or ScanAlert. Prominently place these logos in your store to reassure your customer that you care about the security of their information.

4. Have a clearly defined privacy policy with a link to it in your footer menu.

5. Include your physical address on your store somewhere.

6. Define your returns policy, and also include a prominent link to it in your menu and on your cart page.

7. Add a page with real customer testimonials, with real customer photos…no stock photography!

8. Make sure you include an “About Us” page in your store. The majority of customers visit this page before making a purchase.

9. Get good reviews from shopping authority sites (shopping.com, epinions.com, bizrate.com, etc)

10. Identify your USP (unique selling proposition) and exploit it. If you are the only seller of medium-sized green widgets in Australia…state it and be proud of it.

11.  Put your best selling products front and centre on your store’s home page.  Don’t fill your home page with crap and useless information not related to your products… people just don’t read it, and it gets in the way of your real purpose…. to sell stuff online!

12. Write clear and descriptive text to describe your products.  Don’t just focus on the features of your product, but also focus on the benefits those features provide to your customers. Don’t just say “Folding green widgets”, say “Our folding green widgets will save you valuable space in your garage”.

13. Provide clear photos of your products.  Make sure that you have at least 2 photos of your product from different angles and 1 close-up photo of your product.

14. Develop a good succinct list of FAQs from the inquiries you get. No matter how hard you try, customers will be puzzled about certain things. Cover those things in your FAQs. Keep the FAQs short or no one will read them.

15. Read your copy. Make sure its compelling, yet not exaggerated… and do a spell check on your site! There aren’t many things more unprofessional than spelling errErs!

16. Use the built-in tags feature in Spiffy Stores to tag your products.  Tags improve your online store’s search functionality and make sure it returns products that are relevant to a search. This not only allows users to find what they want, it will give you insight as to what they are shopping for and what terminology they are using, so you can tailor your copy as necessary.

17.  Create a shipping page that lists shipping providers in your online store, approximate costs, and where / what countries you ship to.

18. Consider making shipping free.  If you do, make a BIG deal about it.

19. If an item isn’t selling, reduce it’s price to get rid of it because it’s not selling and is wasting real estate.  You can then add more products similar to those that ARE selling.

20. Accept a variety of payment methods and clearly display what those methods are.  Accepting credit cards directly in your online store (rather than using PayPal) is more professional and gives you much more credibility.

21. Don’t make important information look like ads. There really is such a thing as “ad blindness” and people will automatically skip over this compelling information.

22. Consider making every link the last part of the statement “I want to”. In other words, don’t just have a link that says “privacy policy”, but rather “read the privacy policy”. Do you get it?….I want to “Read the Privacy Policy”.

23. Don’t make the user specify a choice when there is only 1 “choice”. If it only comes on blue, don’t make them select the “blue” radio button or choose “blue” from the drop down.

24. Provide a “sale” or “clearance” section to attract the budget-conscious shoppers.

25. My golden rule… keep your site clean and organised.  This portrays trust and credibility and instils confidence within the shopper to make a purchase.  All of the ecommerce templates built into Spiffy Stores were designed with this in mind.  Adding lot’s of junk just confuses people!

This may come as a shock to people starting a new online store, but the days of “If you build it, they will come” are well and truly over.  Just creating an online store doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly going to become an overnight Amazon.com

To be successful selling online, you will need to market your online store. If you don’t… you’re really wasting your time.  Seriously.

Over the next couple of weeks starting today, I’ll be publishing tips on how to increase traffic to your online store, how to improve conversion rates in your online store, and going into further detail about our proven methods for doing so.

At the end of the day, you can take our recommendations with a grain of salt, but be warned… if you don’t do any of the things that we recommend, your store just isn’t going to succeed!

So here’s the first instalment for you…  20 sure-fire ways to increase traffic to your online store.

20 Sure-fire ways to increase traffic to your online store.

To get the ball rolling, here are 20 sure-fire ways to increase web traffic and site visitors to your online store. Use some or all of them, and let us know which ones worked best for you!

1. Optimise your text for search engines (SEO). The days of 1 sentence product descriptions are over people! To rank well in the search engines when people search for keyword phrases related to your products or services, you have to write good, keyword rich product descriptions, and use your store’s in-built blog!

2. Get your online store listed in directories. Submit your online store to all the major web directories. This will generate traffic directly from the directories themselves and will also help to improve your link popularity. This helps you rank in search engines in a major way!

3.  Get your online store listed in search engines. Submit your online store to all the major search engines.

4.  Get links to your online store. Get people with complimentary sites to link to your store. Let’s say you sell . Ask the local restaurant owners to link to you, and offer to link to them. Ask the local tour guides, the real estate agents, the night clubs, and everyone else. Links lead to clicks onto your website and help to improve your search engine rankings.

5.  Buy links to your store. Buy text links on other relevant websites. That means more spiders stopping by, more people clicking through, and better search engine rankings.

6.  Buy banner ads. Buy banner ads on other websites. It helps to build brand recognition.

7.  Participate in a WebRing. Connect your store with other sites in your niche.

8.  Pay for clicks to your store. Pay for clicks or inclusion on the search engines so that people will see your site in the sponsored links section of the search results when they search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.

9.  Set up an affiliate marketing program. With affiliate marketing, you can either pay per click, pay per lead generated, pay per sale, or pay per customer acquired.

10.  Use smart public relations (PR). Get news coverage of your business and your online store. Approach online and traditional media. This will often lead to others placing links pointing to your store, which leads to more clicks and also to improved search engine rankings.

11.  Use E-mail marketing to promote your online store. Blast out your special offers, but be nice about it!  Add a sign-up form to your store, and use a service like Campaign Monitor or MailChimp

12.  Use off-line marketing. Promote your store everywhere you can! Put your URL (store web address) on all your number plates. Paint it on your car. Buy newspaper and yellow pages ads with your URL. Put up flyers and stickers. Sponsor your local football team. Do anything and everything to spread the word about your store around your city or suburb.

13.  Run regular promotions. Stage regular give-aways and spread the word about it.

14.  Get published. Write articles for publication on other websites. The author profile will link to your site. The article will show that you’re an expert.

15.  Publish yourself. Write articles for the blog that’s built-in to your online store regularly. This will help you to rank on the search engines and gives your visitors a reason to come back over and over.

16.  Ask for reviews. Ask for reviews of your self-published articles on other websites. Ask for reviews of your store, your products, your software, and your service. These will usually include links to your store.

17.  Create a newsletter. Ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, and encourage them to send it along to people they know. Send a newsletter regularly with teasers or lead-ins to your in-depth new articles or with special offers and the latest products.

18.  Post in chat rooms. Become active in bulletin boards and chat rooms focusing on your industry. Leave insightful comments, and people will click on your profile, then visit your store.

19.  Give away free stuff. Offer something people want on your online store. Give them a reason to come back and get more. Give them a reason to blog about your, or mention you in a forum.  Offer free stuff and update it regularly. Offer coupons or discounts. Content content content!

20.  Write articles about other excellent sites in your niche. This builds more links back to your site and establishes you as a credible reviewer, an expert in your space.  It also encourages them to link back to you!

So there we have 20 tips to increase traffic!
But wait…. I’ve got 3 more for you…

21.  Run a contest and promote it. Photo contests, essay contests, goofy contests, random drawings, anything.

22.  Join your local business organisations. Chambers of Commerce and other organisations will often add your site to their member directory. That’s an added advantage over the obvious business-building and networking opportunities.

23.  Be a good Internet citizen.  Provide useful information in your store, provide plenty of information about your products, your ideology, and your interests so that people feel thankful that you put in the time and effort. Help every person who ever calls you on the telephone or emails you a question. When they ask “How can I ever thank you?” just say, “If you like my store and think it’s useful, tell your friends about it!”

So you have your online store but just can’t seem to get good ranking in Google’s search results. Well, if you’re a DIY search engine optimiser then what’s best way to fix this?  To most people, why sites rank well on google is a mystery,  so here are basic some tips on just what it is you need to do….

1. Spotlight your search terms.

Think about what people are going to type in to try and find you, and put this text into pages in your store.   We have a customer who sells trendy dog collars, who complained that his site couldn’t be found easily using Google search.  When I investigated, I found that the words “Dog collars” weren’t on his home page or collection pages at all!   You have to make sure your keywords are on many pages.  It’s  also best to let people know immediately what your business is, at the top of your page.

2. Fill in your “tags.”

Keyword rich titles and descriptions are very important, but product tags tags are crucial, because they are shown in search results most often, and are used in the meta tags for your store.

3. Get other sites to “link” back to you.

Google ranks sites based on popularity. Google looks at more than 100 pieces of data to determine a site’s ranking.

4. Use your blog and post often.

Blogging is a great way to add links and start a conversation with customers and friends. With a blog, you can link back to products in your site and offer links to others. It’s also a great way to start building content.

5. Register for free tools.

Google’s google.com/webmaster offers freebies to help get your site found.

Google’s Local Business center (google.com/local/add) is the place for business owners to submit a site so it shows up in local searches, with a map attached.

The final word…

Don’t overdo it. In other words, don’t cram your pages full of keywords. This is called “keyword stuffing” and it’s a big no-no from Google who will have your site removed from the index if it is practiced.

So there you have it, 5 vital SEO tips!  As I mentioned these are just some of the basic SEO techniques that you can use to better your ranking. However, if you want to get really serious about getting visitors to your site as soon as possible, you should look into paid search engine advertising, such as Google Adwords.

It never fails to amaze me how many people are creating stores and populating them with 1 line product descriptions. I’m stunned by this, as stores set up like this are bound to fail despite our best efforts to make them search engine friendly.

Whoever said “a picture is worth a thousand words” probably never managed to get a website ranked highly in the search engines! As far as Google, Yahoo or Altavista are concerned, a picture is not worth anything.

The reason is simple: search engines can read, but they can’t see! When potential customers perform searches, they do so using words and phrases. A professionally-shot photograph on your site looks nice, and will certainly help sell your product IF someone actually ends up on your store…. but unless it accompanies a detailed product description—containing key terms one might use when looking for the product or service online—it may never be found.

A carefully written product description makes the beauty, utility or novelty of your product legible! Not only will this help you in search engines, but it is likely to increase your sales as well.

This is not to say that obtaining high search engine rankings is the only good reason for writing product descriptions. No matter how potential customers find your site, an eloquent description of the product or service you provide can greatly enhance the confidence, intrigue, or amusement he or she will experience when browsing your selection. Each of these factors contributes to the overall enjoyment your site will provide and, consequently, increases the likelihood of generating a sale or lead.

Consider this example. Suppose you are shopping online for an engagement ring. Two sites offer virtually the same ring, but two dramatically different descriptions accompany them. One site reads:

“Diamond in prong setting, gold band.”

Now read the description offered on the second site:

“As simple, classic and honest as your proposal—this diamond engagement ring is the timeless expression of an enduring commitment. The carefully cut stone sparkles from its prong setting, rested fittingly upon a gold band. The unbroken continuity of the gold ring provides a stable contrast to the light rays which erupt unendingly from the diamond’s crown.”

Clearly the second example holds more appeal for the average consumer. One must consider the fact that, unlike a brick-and-mortar storefront, an online store does not have the benefit of persuasive sales representatives, nor the tangibility of “real life” products that a potential buyer can hold in his or her hand before making a decision.

In the absence of such sales tools, a few good photographs and a well-written product description become your most valued allies.