How to get customers for free by Mark Baartse

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 friendlyThe 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